To those who came before me,

I write to you from my helado stand in the Garment District. So far today I've made $20 -- not too bad for a weekday. When I return home, my daughter will tell me what she learned today at school in history, English, science, and math. She knows much more than I ever will; I never finished school.

This morning I read in the Times that Mexican residents in Arizona have to carry their papers around with them everywhere if they don't want to be deported. The police can stop anyone they want. I don't get bothered as much by the police here -- maybe because there are too many of us to bother. I thank God that I don't live in Arizona. I don't have papers.

Do you remember when you came to this city? Intellectuals and politicians wanted to make you more American. It makes me laugh. Today they tell us that we aren't American, that we don't belong here. Seems strange to me, when it was you who made this huge American city; it was you who once harvested its vast fields, and it was you who built its towers that took the place of its fields.

They tell me I am an alien here -- in a city that means "The Angels" in my native tongue. How many streets in this city and towns in this valley are named after places and people from my country? Too many to possibly list. And yet I am an alien. An alien amongst those who once tried to make us more American.

Like you, I came here to make a better life for me and my family. But we still don't belong. Even though I see far more faces that are brown like mine than white like them as I walk down the street, they still tell me I don't belong. Even though I could be brothers with the mayor himself, they still tell me I don't belong.

I cannot survive in the home country, but I have yet to feel at home here. You, my predecessors, know this feeling well. There are many who have made a home here, who have truly become Mexican-American. But for those like me who have only just made the treacherous journey across the border -- we wish to belong, but, after a century, they have made it so hard to do so.

Signed,
An illegal descendant

Questions:
1. How can we explain in terms of race and socioeconomic status the fact that in many ways, migrants from the Midwest to Los Angeles in the early 20th century were just as much immigrants as those from Mexico, and yet they not only flourished in the region, but also dominated both politically and culturally? Is today's Los Angeles still a manifestation of this phenomenon?
2. I was struck by Jacobson's example of the white students in a seminar on racism "explaining away their whiteness" and the instructor's reply of "Where are all the white people who were here just a minute ago?" Were the students wrong in wanting to circumvent their whiteness? What does this say about Caucasian self-consciousness?