I was born in Ladoga in the late nineties, around the time the state of North Carolina’s population ballooned from the injection of migrants, mostly from Mexico, into the state. There are a lot of theories as to why there was such a dramatic growth in the migrant population, but the one that I think makes the most sense is the one that blames the North American Free Trade Act or NAFTA for decimating jobs in rural Mexican state’s among the population that depended on farming for their livelihood. The one about increased homicides caused by drug cartels is another good reason, but the expansion and successful recruitment efforts of these organizations could be traced back to a lack of sustainable employment. But regardless the reason, the new population brought a whole host of new issues for the state, and the country as a whole, to contemplate. Nowadays, immigration has pretty much leveled off and there is relative normalcy with the reality of North Carolina’s diverse population. I’m not fluent in Spanish, but I know common words and phrases and I can find a way to be understood in Spanish speaking enclaves.
There are Latin Americans all around Ladoga and they are not just Mexican, though it seems to be true that there is a large Mexican American population in east Ladoga. There are Spanish speaking enclaves in both of Ladoga’s projects and in the communities that surround them. They are not really segregated, there is no Little Mexico or Mexicotown anywhere in Ladoga, but just like the black community, there are places that are known for the nearly homogenous community of one ethnic group or another.
I was at the park near the Northside Projects recently playing basketball; there are always basketball games to join in the park during the warm months. And just as common are soccer games that play out with as much enthusiasm that involve mostly Mexican Ladogans. After my basketball game, I wandered to the edge of the field to watch them. There were no goals, but they had set boundaries that each teams’ goalie defended on either side of the field. When the ball rolled in my direction, a man called to me, “Hey amigo, kick it back,” and before I could, he approached me. “I know you,” he said, and called back to one of his friends, “hey, we know him don’t we?” His friend came over and looked at me closely, “Yea, that’s Max. We went to high school together.” They had to introduce themselves, but after they told me their names I had a vague recollection of our time at Ladoga High. The first man was Moises and the second was Jorge, Moises’ younger brother. Moises and I had been in classes together and I can’t honestly say that I remember Jorge all that well. They invited me to join their game and I tried my best to keep up with them; I was already winded from the basketball games that I had played before. It was weird to realize that I was the only black guy among the sea of brown-skinned men, but it was easy to forget once things intensified. I can’t dribble a soccer ball, but I can run down someone else who can and it wasn’t long before I gained respect as a formidable defender. After about thirty minutes, though, I had to sit down, my legs had started to hurt. I rested on the metal bleachers near the basketball courts and watched them finish. Moises came over at one point and we talked about the things that old acquaintances talk about; he had kids, I had kids, he was married, I wasn’t, we both worked, wanted to have more money than we made, wanted a life that felt more unattainable every time our birthdays rolled around. But then he surprised me. “I’m glad I’m here. I just got back a couple weeks ago. They sent me back to Mexico, I was there for five years.” He told me that he had been in the US from the time that he was very young and he didn’t realize that he was here illegally until he was in middle school. “I don’t like to hate people, I’m not a racist, but I hated white people back then. They didn’t know I wasn’t a citizen but they assumed everybody that spoke Spanish didn’t belong here. Turns out I didn’t.” It must be hard to grow up in a place for all of the life that you can remember only to find out that it wasn’t really yours. Moises’ deportation was a stroke of bad luck; he was driving without a license, like he had been for years, on a street that he’d driven often, only to be caught at a checkpoint. He had even gotten tickets before for not having a license, but the officer who stopped him at the checkpoint arrested him and he was placed in ICE custody, then he was sent back in Jalisco, though for him it wasn’t really ‘back’ because he didn’t remember the time when he was there before. And as scared as he felt to be with relatives he didn’t know well in a place that he didn’t know at all, he knew that his daughter was more afraid than he was. “My wife used to call me everyday. My daughter made her. Izzie,” he told me her name and showed me a picture. “My wife told me that Izzie was scared to get in cars after I got deported. She didn’t want my wife to drive either. I was talking to her on the phone one day, she was about 6 or 7, and she was just crying. ‘Papi, tell Mami not to get in the car. Tell her not to do it.’ She was so scared something bad would happen. To this day she hates riding in cars and she gets sick. She threw up all over the car my dad gave me when I got back.” I guess some things are hard to get over and the last time her father got into a car, he disappeared for years.
I was happy to be reacquainted with Moises, and I knew him better that day than I ever had. He works in Charlotte at a Greek style restaurant near my job and now I go there for lunch pretty much everyday. I was there one afternoon and Moises came to sit and have lunch with me. He seemed frustrated and told me about the problems that he was having with the owner’s son, Jason, who had recently started working there. Jason was in his forties and had served in the army. He did tours in Iraq during the war on terrorism that the country waged while I was too young to comprehend or really care about it. Everyone talks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way they talked about the Vietnam war, only I was much more likely to meet someone who had protested the war in Vietnam than I was to meet someone who actively protested the war on terror. But they were very different times I guess.
The day Moises told me about his frustrations and we sat eating lunch, there was a sudden commotion from the kitchen and everyone in the restaurant got quiet and looked to the owner for an explanation. The owner usually operated the cash register and when he heard the noise he pushed a server behind the register and ran to the back. Soon after, there was yelling and everyone in the restaurant tried their best not to let it ruin their lunch. Most people who go there, do so loyally and over time they have come to know the owner as a warm grandfather. Most everyone knew Jason as well from the pictures of him in uniform the owner had on a wall. There was no doubt that he was proud of Jason, but episodes like the one in the restaurant that day were becoming more frequent.
“He’s gonna run us out of business, idiota. He was smashing shit last week.” I asked why and Moises shook his head, “Who knows? Sometimes he’s a good guy. I like him when he’s not acting stupid, but sometimes he just flips out.” I asked Moises if he thought the owner would talk to me about his son and he said, “Probably not. He’s protective. Before Jason started, he warned me that Jason hasn’t been able to hold a job because of his temper. He wasn’t the same after he got back from Iraq. Little things set him off. I was in the kitchen with him once and somebody knocked over some pans; he flipped out. I never seen anything like it before. Like a bomb had went off in the kitchen. He crawled under the counter and curled up like a little kid. I tried to calm him down, but he wasn’t listening to me. It took his dad like 20 minutes to get him from under that counter.” I asked if he thought Jason would talk to me, not necessarily about his time in the army, and Moises laughed, “I don’t even think it’s a good idea to ask. I don’t know much about Jason so I only talk to him when he talks to me. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. If you upset him, the boss sends you packing. That’s how I got my promotion. The old guy on the grill thought that him and Jason were closer than they were. They were smoking out back, to this day nobody really knows what they were talking about, but the old grill guy said Jason had a freak out and took a swing. He beat Jason up and that was the end of that. You gotta tiptoe around that man.”
By the time I said goodbye to Moises and headed back to work, the commotion in the kitchen had subsided and the owner had taken his regular seat behind the register after he made an apology to everyone in the restaurant. The old man looked tired and frustrated but he smiled at me as I left. “See you tomorrow?” He asked, and I told him that he would.
The next day, I ate with Moises again and he seemed much happier. “Boss said Jason’s taking some time off.” The old man sat behind his register smiling, but it was easy to tell that he was faking it. When he thought no one was looking, he took off his glasses and rubbed his temples with one hand like his mind was so full of worries that it hurt his head. “It’s for the best, man,” Moises said when he saw what I saw, “the boss worked too hard to let drama fuck up his restaurant. And this is how I feed my family.” I knew that he was right, I only hoped that Jason was finally getting help that he obviously needed and had not gotten in the past.
I asked Moises about his family and he smiled. “Wife is good. I didn’t tell you about Izzie, though, the other day she rode all the way to Waxhaw in the car without getting sick. And we didn’t catch hell trying to get her in the car either. You can tell she’s still scared, but she don’t want to be anymore. I’m proud of my hija. She’s young, but she’s smart. I told her what happened to Papi can’t ever happen again, I got my green card now.”
It’s difficult to be a parent. Your life isn’t your own anymore, and that’s not even the hardest part. It’s watching your child suffer through something, no matter how trivial it may seem to an outsider. When a good parent sees their child struggling with a hurt that can’t be easily erased, that parent suffers too, helpless on the sideline, waiting for the right moment to step in and make it better. One can only hope that the right moment arises.
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