The Changing Face of America

On a recent trip to the Gold Coast of Long Island, that area made famous by the opulent rapacity of the Gilded Age robber barons, I was startled by the degree of penetration that Latino immigrants have made.

A long stroll through the streets brought the sounds and smells more common to my new home in Los Angeles than to the hard-nosed and straight-laced Yankee town I knew so well as a boy. There were now mercados, bodegas and botanicas, the smell of carnitas sizzling on a grill and the sound of mariachi and ranchera in the air. I even saw a Salvadoran flag hanging from the windowsill of a venerable red-brick building opposite the police station.

I wondered what brought them here, so far from home.

I walked to the old church where I had been baptized and was later schooled by no-nonsense nuns and priests. Slipping into the sanctuary to catch the last 10 minutes of Mass, I noticed the brown faces peppering the congregation: fathers holding wide-eyed children in callused hands, mothers in shawls lost in prayer, perhaps dreaming of their villages so far away.

Later, while sitting on a bench in the church garden, meditating on the nature of change, I struck up a conversation with the parish priest, himself of Latino heritage. I inquired how these latest arrivals sustained themselves in an area with one of the highest costs of living in the nation.

“The women clean houses and take care of children,” he said. “The men do construction and landscaping.”

“You mean mowing lawns,” I said, nodding toward an expanse of lawn next to the church. “I used to cut that as a kid,” I added, remembering afternoons awash in a blue haze of motor exhaust and humidity. Unimpressed, the padre shrugged his shoulders and said, “Americans don’t mow lawns anymore.”

The priest’s words reverberated in my head.

Although I cannot pretend to have had a life as hard and rugged as my father’s, I do, with hindsight, cherish those memories of hard work wherever hard work could be found for a teenager, be it mowing lawns, painting houses, shoveling snow or, for one particularly muscular summer, working at a lumber yard where, after quitting time, I would meet my friends with newfound blue-collar gusto.

It’s not that we ever expected to grow into blue-collar jobs; our parents’ hard work and determination to see us on to college and “comfortable” jobs precluded that choice, but we did gain an appreciation for physical work and for those within the community who did it for a living.

To think that such basic chores are now the livelihood of immigrant families makes me wonder how we, as Americans, got to this point. To hear it from those who remained in my hometown, the price of housing and depressed wages for tradesmen because of immigrant competition have compelled many to continue living with their parents or to move away, while the immigrants huddle together in converted garages to save money to wire back home.

However much I may sympathize with the plight of Salvadorans, Mexicans, Peruvians and, oh yes, the Somalis (of Maine) looking to improve their lot so far from home, I find myself more concerned with those Americans who have become refugees in their own country. Our “captains of industry” have embraced an economic model in which workers’ skills are exported, cheap labor is imported and communities are “churned” like some Wall Street commodity.

I am also concerned for the young people who have lost that connection to hard work and money well earned. They now see an emerging servant underclass living cheek by jowl with their masters in some strange symbiosis of mutual exploitation.

Maybe the old robber barons of the Gold Coast would understand what is happening, but for the rest of us, comfortable and complacent for the moment, there may be some reckoning ahead.

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Kevin C. Glynn is a teacher at Los Angeles High School.