Reyna made it to the airport all right, but anyone could see she was one big faux pas. Purple jeans. Pumpkin colored jogging shoes. A peach polyester blouse with fluttery sleeves and a scalloped Emmett Kelly collar with a big dip in the back where her horizontal bra strap stuck out like a T-square. A border patrol agent tapped her on the shoulder just as she reached the escalator. “Your citizenship,” he said.
A few hours later Reyna had signed her voluntary deportation forms and was back in the Third World. Back to the two malnourished daughters, the toilet in the courtyard that you flush with a bucket, Lupita talking about how in Cuba there’s a law that all kids must drink milk every day, the rickety tin closet filled with plastic high heels and crepe-papery skirts.
Next day she poked through the dust and beggars downtown and joined hundreds of other applicants roaming around the flat, manicured industrial parks on the outskirts of Juarez. She filled out forms at AMPEX (headquarters, Redwood City, California); RCA Components (headquarters, Indianapolis); Convertors de Mexico (American Hospital Supply, Evanston); FAVESA (Ford Motor Company, Detroit). Should she spend all day winding tape cassettes? Assembling TV components? Sewing disposable surgical gloves? Wiring automotive harnesses?
To tell the truth, these tasks appeal neither to Reyna nor to many of the other 86,000 workers in Juarez’s mostly U.S. corporation-owned “twin plants.” That phrase is just one more entry in late capitalism’s newspeak lexicon, since El Paso’s “twin” is usually a small office peopled with a mere handful of American citizen paper-pushers, while south of the river, the real plant is filled with hundreds or thousands of Mexicans — mostly women — fastening together all manner of loose gizmos exported from the high wage U.S. Once these products are assembled, they’re shipped back to El Paso and points north, with duty paid only on the value added by the labors of people like Reyna.
On a nice day it seems all 86,000 of them are wandering from one plant to another changing jobs, while the personnel managers worry about the 10 percent a month turnover and mutter about moving the plants farther south where there’s plenty of fresh, unjaded labor and the minimum wage is even less. Meanwhile, each plant has its own perks to inspire Reyna’s loyalty. This one’s got a good volleyball team. That one, a subsidized cafeteria and an annual beauty contest. The one over there just built a dressing room with showers.
Who cares? One’s the same as another, Reyna figures. They all pay $3.30 a day plus a few bucks more at the end of the week if you’ve had perfect attendance. Which is hard to manage what with the hour’s commute each way in the crammed, rickety public vans, the compulsory overtime, the breakneck assembly line pace that usually drives Reyna to tranquilizers — she gets them over the counter, too 00 after a few weeks on the job.
Well, she would do it for awhile until Roberto sent his first paycheck from Albuquerque. Maybe she’d blown it, but ojalá! knock on wood! — he’s figured out the Look.
What, exactly, is it? The Look has little to do with tacky textiles and poor fit, even though it’s true that the glare of the desert sun is pitiless with people’s lumps, rendering both polyester and pastel cottons useless camouflage. But that’s not the point. Neither are entertaining sociological observations about how El Paso’s poor look Goodwill; its lower-middle class buys lots of shiny stuff from the Koreans; the middle-middles, like public school teachers, wear lots of cautious, loose-fitting slubby knits that scream “Cotton! I can afford cotton!” (with the chicanas still wearing theirs in brighter colors than the anglos); and the really ritzy Hispanic society ladies are indistinguishable from their friends in Hadassah.
El Paso is still small enough so that you can see all these types walking down the same downtown street at noon. There are even a few residential blocks where anglo lawyers and chicano garment operatives live side by side. The historical restoration buffs in these old neighborhoods are vocally proud of the peaceful ethnic, if not class, mix — what they’re quieter about is the embarrassing proximity of the Rio Grande.
In the Sunset Heights area, for instance, the city’s turn-of-the-century ruling classes used to watch the Mexican revolutionary armies skirmishing just down the hill. But today, intimate little fajitas cookouts are awkwardly framed against a backdrop of miles of cardboard and adobe shacks lying across the river just a few blocks away. It’s not uncommon at such parties for the hostess to answer a knock at the door and find an unequivocally polite young man asking in Spanish if she needs her yard done, as he stares, unequivocally starving, at the barbecue grill. The only unknown about such encounters is whether the young man is legal or illegal. How can you tell?
That question defines the nitty-gritty basics of the Look. Indeed, the true clothes horses of the border are mojados — the people who wet their own toes if they’re horribly poor, or other people’s if they’re just terribly so, to cross the Rio Grande. They know that to keep your $40-a-week job without being deported, to escape to Chicago and get paid almost like a real American human, they must learn that certain weaves of sombreros practically scream “alien.” Better to wear a baseball cap. But be sure the decal on it is a credible trucker motif. What about those books> Are the edges of the heels cut exactly perpendicular to the ground, like they make them in Texas? Because if they’re sliced on a slant, the wearer is from Chihuahua (or worse, even farther south). And how about that shiny black shirt with the purple zigzags? Take it off! Here, here’s a T-shirt that says UCLA. Much better. That’s the Look.
Not very exciting you say? But you’re not the judge. The final arbiter of fashion here is the border patrol, some 520 men and women in uniform who cruise about the El Paso area in bile green squad cars and Ram Charger vans with bars on the windows, checking out everyone on the streets, determining who has the good taste to be allowed to live and work here in peace, and who shall be spun through the endlessly revolving door of deportation, illegal reentry, deportation that keeps workers trapped in the sub-minimum wage and sub-minimum life sector of the U.S. economy.
