Opinion: My immigrant mother 'stole' American jobs

Dear America,

I have a confession to make, just like when I was a good Catholic boy at Santa Teresita Church in East Los Angeles. My late immigrant mother “stole” American jobs. Yes, my motherCarmen Mejía Huerta was a “criminal.” While she was never convicted of 34 felonies in New York, she was a “Mexican immigrant criminal,” nevertheless! 

As a U.S.-born citizen, I was in denial about my mother’s “thievery” for many years. It’s time that I come clean about how she “robbed” hard-working Americans of their precious jobs for several decades. Since “all” Americans aspire to engage in hard work, as part of the Protestant work ethic that the sociologist Max Weber wrote about over 100 years ago, it’s only “fair” that they reclaim these “immigrant jobs” from these “brown criminals.”  

When my extended Huerta clan migrated in the early 1960s from a small rancho, Zajo Grande—located in the beautiful state of Michoacán—to Tijuana, Baja California, they experienced abject poverty in this Mexican border city. It was in Tijuana that my mother first worked in el norte as a transborder domestic worker. Securing a U.S. visa, she worked in San Diego, California, for days or weeks at a time, cleaning the homes of affluent White Americans. She would then return to Tijuana for a few days and then repeat the brutal work schedule for several years.  

During one of her many work trips to el norte, when she was pregnant with me, she planned for me to be born in Sacramento, California. When I eventually joined my familia in Tijuana, as my mother continued her rigorous work schedule in el norte, my older sisters, who were in their teens, helped with childcare duties. That included working as minors in Mexico and the U.S.   

As my memory is fuzzy during my first four years in Tijuana, I sometimes wonder how my mother “stole” her first American home to clean. Did she break into their home in the middle of the night and start to clean when the middle-class, White family was asleep? Did she help feed little Brad and Jenny breakfast while their parents were enjoying their beauty sleep? Or did she enter the house through the chimney, like Santa Claus, and leave the house sparkling without a trace? While I hold a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in City and Regional Planning, I have yet to resolve this conundrum.  

Now that America will “miraculously” be “great again,” especially with expected draconian measures against immigrants, where millions of hard-working immigrants (like my late mother) will be targeted, I’m sure that countless of MAGA parents will raise their children to forgo college and reclaim these “immigrant jobs.” While there’s no shame in cleaning houses for a living or working as farmworkers, like my late father Salomón ChávezHuerta, I’m wondering how they will enjoy (or enter) the American Dream that “immigrant jobs” offer in terms of financial compensation, benefits (or lack thereof) and upward mobility opportunities?  

As for all the American-born workers who delusionally think they will replace and compete against workers with the “Mexican immigrant work ethic,” like we say in East Los Angeles, no te rajes / don’t quit!