This summer, just as my family and I were packing up and getting ready to move from Madison, Wisconsin, to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a year, a lot of Mexican immigrant workers in Wisconsin’s dairy industry were thinking about leaving, too.
The headline on a local news story produced by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism declared: “America’s Dairyland and Trump in the rearview mirror as workers return to Mexico.”
Reporter Alexandra Hall described watching the Hernandez family pack up a Honda pickup truck with all of their belongings before making the 2,300-mile drive from a dairy farm in Wisconsin back to Veracruz, Mexico.
“It looks like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath,” farm owner Doug Knoepke observed, as he watched his workers get ready to leave.
Donald Trump’s election, nasty rhetoric about Mexicans, and a raft of anti-immigrant bills and executive orders are spreading fear among immigrant families in Wisconsin and throughout the United States.
About 200 Latino immigrants—mothers, fathers, and little children—gathered on the steps of the state capitol in Madison in late June to protest legislation that would turn local law enforcement officers into immigration police.
Protesters held signs that said “Got Milk? Not Without Immigrants.” Speakers addressed the crowd in Spanish and English. After the speeches, dairy workers and their allies delivered milk bottles to state legislators’ offices. The labels on the bottles showed an immigrant worker and his child, and asked the legislators to vote against legislation that would split up families.
An estimated 80 percent of dairy workers in Wisconsin are undocumented immigrants.
“Without us, who’s going to work 365 days a year in the cold and the heat?” dairy worker Miguel Estrada asked.
“I worry about the future for my kids,” another dairy worker, Manuel Estrada, told me in Spanish after the demonstration. “One day my son came home from school and another little boy had told him, ‘I don’t want to play with you anymore—my father told me not to talk to Mexicans.’ He is so little. And he felt bad.”
Several workers said they know people who are considering going back to Mexico because of the ugly political climate in the United States.
Harsh anti-immigrant bills, based on model legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have been introduced across the country. In Wisconsin, one such bill was turned back this year through a massive organizing campaign. The Day Without Latinos general strike, organized by the Milwaukee-based immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera, got 40,000 people to the state capitol, and spread the movement around the country.
But the bills keep coming. From voter ID to driver’s license restrictions to ALEC’s “resolution against amnesty” to new requirements that local police collaborate with federal immigration authorities—the crackdown continues.
A few days before we took off for Mexico, I visited the Nelson family farm in postcard-pretty Wisconsin Dells.
I drove through a small town with American flags flying from all the houses and red, white, and blue bunting hanging from the light poles—left over, I figured, from a Fourth of July parade.
Nels Nelson passed me on the two-lane road leading to the farm, riding a red tractor and wearing overalls. He looked like a figure from a Norman Rockwell painting, against the backdrop of rolling green cornfields under a brilliant blue sky.
The farm has been in Nels’s family for three generations—since his Norwegian immigrant relatives arrived. He is married to my friend Sarah Lloyd, whose background is Swedish—a Wisconsin mixed marriage. She teases him about being “the last Norwegian bachelor farmer.”
Mexican workers are a crucial part of the Nelson farm. Six out of eight employees are from Mexico. Brothers and cousins have come to join their family members over the years, in a classic pattern of chain migration, Sarah told me.
We were standing in the milking parlor, where sixteen cows were being milked simultaneously. A farmworker named Alberto, from Puebla, brought the cows into the milking stalls, painted their udders with an iodine solution, then attached a vacuum suction machine, which milked for a few minutes and then automatically detached. When the milking was over, the bars that restrained the cows, holding them across their chests, released with a hiss, like the seat belts on a rollercoaster, and the cows walked out.
The Nelson farm is only a few miles away from the amusement parks and water rides that draw thousands of tourists to Wisconsin Dells each summer. As it happens, the labor at the Dells resorts is mostly immigrant labor, too—the Norwegians who worked the rides a generation ago were replaced by Russians and Eastern Europeans, who in turn are being replaced more recently by Brazilian workers. You don’t hear much fuss about that group of immigrant laborers, though. They come for a summer, live in cheap housing, operate the rides, and then fly home again to Eastern Europe and South America.
Lately, Mexican farmworkers like those on the Nelson farm have been terrorized by the raft of anti-immigrant measures coming out of the state legislature.
Back in 2007, the legislature blocked undocumented workers from being able to get driver’s licenses. Some farmers responded to that law, and to the increasing fear of deportation, by building barracks on their farms, so workers would never have to leave, Sarah tells me. Local businesses suffered because the workers no longer felt safe going to the store.
Immigrant-rights activists are asking friendly legislators to reintroduce a bill to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses.
Meanwhile, the general political climate is getting worse.
The day we left the United States for Mexico, violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a white supremacist rally. President Trump started making public comments that seemed designed to support bigotry. Two weeks later, Trump pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was facing jail time for his illegal harassment of Latino immigrants.
We took in the news from Mexico in short, disorienting bursts—mostly via internet radio at night.
During the day, we are getting used to life in our little town, with the Spanish colonial church and open-air market in the main square, buying hot tortillas and shopping for fruits and vegetables at the market stalls, learning to navigate the steep cobblestone streets, and getting to know our neighbors, whose chickens and burros greet us every morning as we walk to school.
The girls are having their own new-immigrant experience, feeling lost in school where everyone speaks Spanish. But their classmates and teachers have been incredibly welcoming, helping them and taking a keen interest in how they are doing. The teachers have told us the kids are really excited to have students from the United States in class.
In the first week of school, one of my daughter’s teachers suggested she write an essay about Charlottesville for her “news of the week” assignment. She was chagrined to be associated with the ugly news out of the United States.
For the most part, the Mexican people we’ve met have been too polite to inquire what we think about Trump. Or maybe they’re afraid to ask.
One teacher said that his students were so upset and sad the day after the U.S. presidential election, they decided as a group not to write anything about the news of the week, as a kind of silent protest. Some were in tears. “Why did he win?” they wanted to know. “Why does he want to build a wall?”
“We all felt the same way!” another ex-pat mom declared after the teacher told this story.
“You don’t like Trump either?” a Mexican parent asked. Then everyone wanted to know more about why our country elected Trump.
“You don’t like Trump either?” a Mexican parent asked. Then everyone wanted to know more about why our country elected Trump.
We felt ill-equipped to answer their questions. The virulently racist anti-Mexican sentiments in the United States seem, if anything, even more bewildering here, on the other side of the wall.
People back home are worried we will be targets of vengeful anger in Mexico because of Donald Trump. But the truth is worse: Despite all the hateful rhetoric emanating from the highest levels of government in the United States, the Mexicans we’ve met have been overwhelmingly kind to us. It makes the rude, ugly politics at home even more stark.
We’re grateful for the good-humored reactions to U.S. politics we hear.
One of my oldest daughter’s classmates told her, “Don’t worry. Our president is an idiot, too.”
Our witty, worldly friend, a former journalist from Mexico City, does a hilarious Trump imitation. One day, in her kitchen, she acted out Trump pushing aside the prime minister of Montenegro at a NATO photo op, puffing out her chest and putting on a ridiculously pompous expression. She also does a mean Enrique Peña Nieto—the Mexican president. She reenacted the North American summit meeting, where President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went for a stroll and stopped to laugh at a private joke, and Peña Nieto, whose lousy English is a national embarrassment, kept walking, then scuttled back to join the group and pretend to be in on the joke.
Humor is a great uniter. At least we citizens of different countries can share a laugh at our pompous and clueless leaders.
For now, we are enjoying our retreat from the nastiness and scariness of U.S. politics here in Mexico.
It’s also instructive to get a different perspective.
As race and class antagonisms burst out suddenly back home, like some terrible repressed memory, here in Mexico, you are reminded of the bloody, complicated history of the New World everywhere you look.
Visit the ruins of the ancient Zapotec temple at Mitla, and you’ll see a colonial church plopped right on top of this important religious site, built from the rubble of the temple after the Spanish destroyed it. Boot on neck.
Mexican culture, with all its crosscurrents and history so visible near the surface, is not at all like the culture of the anxious, fitful American Dream. In the United States, history, class, race, slavery, and genocide are generally buried. Everyone is supposed to be striving toward the same goals. We U.S. citizens are continually taken aback by the realities of racial and economic inequality that are a legacy of our history. Here, people are overtly conscious of class and race. Nor is poverty a shameful condition. Most people are poor.
The other thing you can’t help but notice in Mexico is how polite people are. People say buenos días and buenas tardes to one another, acknowledge strangers on the street, and begin conversations with pleasantries instead of launching into a list of demands, as in the curt, all-business conversations that are routine in the United States. When you thank a waiter or a shop owner for bringing you something, you will hear the reply para servirle—thanks for letting me serve you. The teenagers my kids have met shake their hands, pull out their chairs, and, at lunchtime in school, offer to share food. If an adult asks a question, they say “mande?”—literally, “your command?”—instead of a rude “what?”
My friend Chucho, a former seminarian who grew up in Mexico City, calls it “the courtesy of the oppressed.” Good manners are the legacy of a harsh, hierarchical society. But they also promote a general feeling of peace.
My friend, the writer and activist Kevin Alexander Gray, who grew up in segregated South Carolina, makes a similar observation about the American South. Southerners, both black and white, know how to mind their manners and to be extremely courteous in everyday social interactions, he says, “because otherwise they might kill each other.”
Courtesy: It seems like a wise practice in these uncertain times.
Ruth Conniff will be filing regular columns as editor-at-large for The Progressive in the coming year.