All Mexicans and Latinos are welcome to the USA as long as they bring their Visa cards. The only restrictions they will find are aimed at those who cross the border illegally to work in the fields, sewing shops, hospitals, or collecting garbage and cleaning out the sewers. We prefer to save these jobs for our own citizens.
Our visitors from the south should not be worried about Americans speaking Spanish. We always understand such words as "hola," "wot's up, mon," "Vaya con Dios" and "Los Ángeles." In addition, most Americans can count up to ten: "uno," "dos," "cinco," "nuevo," "cuarto," etc. For their part, visitors should bone up on such key phrases as "Here's my credit card," "How much is that Mercedes in the window?" and "I've been mugged."
Visitors should be very careful of their language. A man who calls a woman a "chick" (gallina) or a "girl" (niņa) is required to do six months of sensitivity training and spend a year in alternative service as a Mexican nanny (cuidaniņo).
If you have legal work papers, there are many jobs for you in the United States. You can be a farm worker where you get to test pesticides directly in the field.You can be a construction worker and tear down the scenic older parts of our cities.
Sales are very attractive to some people. Many unskilled workers go into "telemarketing." This means they call people on the telephone during dinner or while they are performing brain surgery and try to sell them something.
Car salesmen sell you cars permitting you and your descendants to make payments until 2095 or so. Time-life salesmen take up your time, sometimes for life (toda la vida) selling you things you may not even need until the next life.
You can also work in a sweatshop, making sweat. The most popular sweat is used by businessmen being investigated by the IRS, or mothers with a dozen or so four-year olds at an all-day birthday party. High-test designer sweat (called "perspiration") is available to upper-class people as they tend their gardens, run on treadmills, or lie in the sun working on their melanoma. Finally, there is your industrial-strength sweat used by steel workers, roofers, field hands, or drivers stopped for a broken tail-light who at the moment are carrying illegal drugs under the seat.
The most popular sweatshops are located in the Bronx or southeast Los Angeles, in nondescript run-down industrial or apartment buildings. They can be recognized by storm fences topped with accordion wire, and pit-bulls who chase workers trying to get out on vacation.
There are some poor people (gente pobre) in this country. Most of them are unwed mothers who receive money from a Welfare Office where social workers talk mean to them and threaten to cut off their payments if they don't stop working or having babies without permission or living with men who are not their husbands. Poor people are also required to watch daytime TV because they can't afford to go shopping or go to the movies.
When poor people are not watching TV, having babies or pretending not to work (or being talked at by their social worker), they raise large black Norwegian rats in their apartments as a hobby.
Poor people's rooms are so small they often have to go outside to change their minds. For that reason, many of them prefer to live in the streets. Supermarkets loan them shopping carts so they can carry their clothes, bags, food stamps, bottles, husbands and children around with them.
America also has some rich people (gente decente). Rich people live in houses that have guards, high walls, barred gates and windows, alarm systems and machine-gun towers. They don't mind living like this because the guards let them out once or twice a week to visit their lawyers or have their hair done.
Rich people are also allowed out to go to country clubs where the men play golf and conduct "deals" and tell dirty stories while their wives stay inside the clubhouse and play bridge and drink sherry and talk about their poodles and nannies and the undocumented Mexicans sneaking into the country, living off welfare.
Our way of life may confuse some of our visitors. Most American families consist of a father who works, a mother who works, a boy who watches TV, and a girl who does her hair. There are sometimes one or two younger children who also watch TV, do their hair, and run the family computers.
American families believe that Mexican women make great nannies. In fact, several famous and important American women have given up their jobs in politics so they can be at home with their nannies to help raise their children.
Unlike Mexico, American families do not include grandparents, cousins, uncles or aunts. These relatives stay in their own homes, watching TV and doing their hair. When parents reach fifty-five years of age, their children send them off to places called Happy Acres where they can be with their own kind, playing shuffleboard and talking about their prostates (the men) or playing gin-rummy and talking about their ungrateful children (the women). Their favorite occupation is stealing Social Security from their children. When they do this too often, they are punished by their children who send them to nursing homes for the rest of their lives.
Note:
Gringolandia is available from
Mho & Mho Works