NOLAFugees Faith-Based Correspondent and Latino Affairs chief David Dykes covers developments in the Crescent City with an eye to The Almighty.

Mr. Smith had taken it upon himself to teach Eduardo not to humiliate himself so, but though they practiced greeting one another over and over, it seemed that Eduardo was incapable of keeping his head up. Time after time he said that he would keep his eyes up, then reflexively flinched when he shook hands. While it might be true that he was not the sharpest tool in the shed, it suddenly seemed at 4:30 a.m. that keeping him from being abused by this city that wants its tools disposable was contingent on keeping his head up and his eyes fixed on the eyes of the contractors, politicians, and homeowners who were more than willing to use his labor, deny him basic human rights, then ask him, "How do (we) make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?"

The real answer to this problem is, of course, simple: hire Hondurans.*

By the time the sun was pinking the Industrial Canal and we were all headed to our homes, I’m pretty confident that Eduardo was conditioned to shake firmly, meet the eyes, and had reached complete political parity with all the other chocolates of the neighborhood, even the white chocolates who everyone knows don’t run things because they are white, but rather out of pure coincidence.

A couple nights later I met some Mexicans who were actually from Mexico; one from Guanajuato, the town next to the one where I lived from about 1985-95, the other from Chiapas, famed in the US for being home to Mexico’s rebellion of the last decade or so and living conditions so squalid that they make the humiliations and dehumanizing ordeal of life in the US seem preferable. They had not been informed about the acts of congress that officially changed the text of the Declaration from “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” to “All people are created equal…” around 1972, then further amended it to “All American citizens are created equal…” very late in 2001.

The Guanajuatense was a stoic middle-aged drinker, still square-jawed and lean in his early sixties and here to lift and grunt for Halliburton or the highest bidder. He mostly leaned on the bar and gave everyone the Clint Eastwood stare until a very tall very Black woman caught his eye and he toppled toward her. She was unamused and spoke no Spanish, so I intervened and engaged him in about thirty seconds of what he indicated through silence and glowering to be the worst conversation he had ever experienced.

I turned my attention to the Chiapan, a moist and slightly weepy drinker, who, it turns out, was a trained environmental scientist, having graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, There is little employment for environmental scientists in a zone of biodiversity as heavily-armed and insurgent-laden as Chiapas. Besides, even the parts of Mexico that do utilize Ecologists and such tend to rely on volunteers from the heavily subsidized and liberal thinking US university faction of the military-industrial complex, so why provide some schmuck from Chiapas with a salary from the impoverished coffers of the state treasury when Harvard and Tulane are fighting over the chance to send their people down on fellowships, federal grants, and private endowments for the greater glory of US science and the prestige of various biology departments in the much-respected First World?

Anyway, this Chiapan is now hanging drywall, quite possibly in your living room even as you read this. Offer him a nice cup of coffee or a refreshing Coca-Cola. Then tell him to get the fuck out of your country and quit sucking up our precious resources and manual labor jobs.

* Recent research at Wikipedia and other reputable sources has revealed that not all Spanish people are Mexican. It turns out that south of the US there are various "countries" such as Agentina, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. Further research claimed that these people are not actually Spanish; that Spanish people come a country called "Spain" and that many Mexicans from countries like Cuba and Nicaragua are neither Spanish nor Mexican. Also, that if you are going to refer to all Spanish speaking Latin Americans as if they were a single group of people (which might be considered rude by some), the proper nomenclature is Hispanic or Latino, the latter of which carries a certain sexist onus unless you say latino/a. It's all too complicated for busy people like ourselves to keep track of, so perhaps best if we call it all "political correctness" and refer to them all as "Mexicans." Your choice.

David Dykes changes lives and studies his Apocrypha in the 9th Ward.