The Hypocrite

America, she no like Italians. She named for Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, but she forget. America take everything from Italians. When I come here in 1920, there was Italian senator named LaGuardia. Great man. The president, was Herbert Hoover, I can never forget, he tell this senator we are murderers and bootleggers. We should go back where we belong. Tell Mussolini to make us honest citizens. And this senator no born in Italy. He American, but not American. This the America I came to, in 1928. My name is Nichola Giangiacomo, and I am an enemy alien. I can no speak Italian. It is a crime. Mussolini’s language. I can no go to the park with my wife. Because I am Italian from Francavilla al Mare.

Some nights, down along the fence line that divides the United States from Mexico, one country from another because how else would you know, when the night swallows the day and the ocean swallows the sun, and the sky has disgorged the moon, and no wind rustles through your uniform, and the church bells of Tijuana slumber snug in their belfries, and time itself stands still, and you lay an ear close to the ground, you might, just maybe, hear a low rumble off in the distance, and if you stay still, crouched low enough to the desert soil, that rumble that you are hearing will grow louder until the car the Mexicans are chasing along the Tijuana airport road takes flight and sails like a magical metal bird over the border fence and into your goddamn lap. That’s the kind of place this is -where cars fly on the thaumaturgical power of desperation cross-bred with an interminable supply of good ol’ fashioned stupidity. This is the Mexican border.

Where California ends and Baja begins, but not like a smooth transition from one country to the next, from what is American to what is Mexican, from the English to the Spanish, from citizen to wetback, more like a collision of two Sumo wrestlers whose combined tonnage knocks the Earth a few degrees off her axis, just enough to disturb the oxygen level in the atmosphere, causing everyone, whether Mexican, American or Martian, to act with spectacular stupidity because that’s one thing we share in common. Idiocy. It would unite humanity, if we weren’t so goddamn dumb.

They call us greaseballs, wops. We love America, but she no love us. We dig her ditches and lay her bricks, but we still no American. You want to know why we no speak Italian in public? Because it was the language of Mussolini. But we still no American. Then came una storia segreta because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We the enemy again, but we send our sons to Iwo Jima. Then we give pizza to America, and she like. Then we give Joe DiMaggio and we win World Series. Now we Americans.

Since everything is a little askew down here, your senses can deceive you and you might speak the wrong language in the wrong country, all depending upon which patch of soil you’re standing on because the line between the United States and Mexico, the actual linea, is just a shifting fiction. We invented when we stole Mexico from the Mexicans, who haven’t forgotten, and now we treat Mexicans like livestock in the wrong pasture. The only difference between them and us is the luck of which birth canal you came down, because the Chief of the Border Patrol is Mexican, and so are seventy percent of its agents, so what the fuck? It doesn’t matter where you’re from. What matters is to what country do you belong, because that’s where I’m sending you back. Of what country are you a citizen? De que pais, pendejo, es usted ciudadano? Porque yo soy La Pinche Migra.

OVAL OFFICE OF THE WHITE HOUSE

December 23, 1929

“Mr. President, the Honorable Senator from New York to see you, sir.”

“Send in the wretch.”

The northeast door swung wide open, and in strode Senator Fiorello LaGuardia with the brusque impatience not normally accorded the president of the United States, but he detested this dull-witted Iowa corn boy.

“Bourbon, LaGuardia?” Oh, pardon me, your kind drinks wine, right? Isn’t that a woman’s drink?” President Hoover chided the esteemed congressman. Open contempt filled the room.

“Now look here LaGuardia, you should go back where you belong and advise Mussolini how to make good honest citizens in Italy. The Italians are preponderantly our murderers and bootleggers. Like a lot of other foreign spawn, you do not appreciate the country which supports and tolerates you.”

Senator LaGuardia turned on the heel of his imported Italian loafers, and without a hint of disgust, saw himself out the east door into the presidential Rose Garden, where he espied a rogue Madonna Lily, a foreign invader among the tea roses. The following day, a fire tore through Hoover’s West Wing.

I’ve been smuggling aliens across the border for two years now, in secret, of course. I flash my badge at the port, and they wave me right through. I might have eight or twelve Oaxacans stuffed inside the dashboard. I’m like the Nicholas Winton of Mexicans. I figure I’ve given free passage to about six or seven thousand Mexicans. Which means I have almost enough to quit the Border Patrol, and regain my soul. I know what it’s like to not belong, and I work for the very agency that put my grandpa Nichola Giangiacomo, in a camp for Italians. This is why I never tell anyone that “We speak English in America.”