I was the only white guy the year I worked in the bakery. Everyone else was a first generation immigrant from Mexico or Central America. I knew nothing about professional baking. My Spanish was extremely limited. I was not expected to stay long. But I stuck with it, stacking bins and sorting palettes of flour, trying to make up in effort what I lacked in skill. One day, some six months into my tenure, when I was scrubbing ash out of the deck ovens, the second in command of the bread department came over and interrupted my efforts.
“You work like a Mexican,” he said.
I felt honored, and remain so. The men and woman with whom I worked (both as a baker and later as a line cook) upheld the highest standards of the immigrant ideal. Industrious, sober, capable and family oriented. There is absolutely no question that without their labor, the city would fall apart. Moreover, without their existence the city would not be what it is, a glorious, contradictory amalgamation which I have been privileged to call my home for some eight years.
At the moment, LA feels like an occupied country. Foreigners have descended to arbitrarily remove members of the community, and to parade, weapons drawn, across our public spaces. The minor acts of nightly mayhem which we have suffered are due entirely to this provocation, and are an anticipated result of the weakening of the rule of law. As so often, I'm reminded of Rebecca West's judgment of the human species in her endlessly valuable Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
Curse Donald Trump and anyone who ever supported him. May the weight of your choices fall to you and you alone.