The Ones Coming Through The Tortilla Curtain...

How Boyle’s ‘Tortilla Curtain’ represents today’s social polarization on the border issue” 

The US are in great peril along the Southwestern border, due to a breaking point in immigration (1 | 2). More and more immigrants are asking for asylum in the US (3), thereby heating a de-bate that has been going on since the foundation of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the George W. Bush presidency (4). People were debating the issue of who to grant asylum and who not to grant asylum ever since; people feared to lose their freedom rights due to lacks of security, families were afraid of a rise in crime despite a decreasing trend in criminality (5). Oftentimes, it was mentioned that the discussion had been polarized between two frontiers, namely the left wing that promotes a more liberal immigration law that would permit more asylum for apprehended immigrants, and the right wing that demands a stronger immigration policy that would permit less asylum to apprehended immigrants.

Book that functions as the foundation of this text: «Boyle, T. C. The Tortilla Curtain. New York: Bloomsbury.»

Any other book that was mentioned in this text will be listed in the bottom, as well as academic journals that are not free to access on the internet without special permission. Even though they will not be accessible to many of those who might read this blog entry, they will be mentioned nonetheless in means of completion and exceptions. Free online articles from news sources and such will be embedded next to where they were included.

On the one hand, people highlight the tough situation in Central American countries such as Honduras or Nicaragua, two countries that have also been showplaces to US interventionist measurements (6). Corruption and civil wars have been present in these countries for years, beside a high rate of poverty and unemployment. The US have signed the UN human rights chart that mentions these reasons of escape as reasons to be granted asylum in an economically highly developed nation, as which the US is understood. On the other hand, there is the high financial burden beside challenges such as housing and the opioid crisis, although this crisis does not affect the same states that are affected by the migrant crisis: While Texas and California are affected by the migrant crisis (either as states that accommodate migrants, or provide facilities to assemble incoming migrants), states like Kentucky or Virginia barely cope with rising drug deaths through overdoses. As one can tell, there are many arguable points to view in this debate; it is a popular, yet depressing subject. Obviously, this topic has not been ignored in literature either – authors of fiction as well as non-fiction have broached the issue of immigration to the United States, either by writing stories about it from different points of view, or by analyzing certain failures inside the immigration system that is supposed to guarantee a flawless procedure directed to detainment or integration. Among all these books, written by US-Americans or Latinos, there is Thomas Coraghessan Boyle’s 1995 “Tortilla Curtain.” The novel tells the story of two couples, one living in suburban Los Angeles, one fleeing from Mexico to make it to the US to begin anew. Boyle usually switches the views from chapter to chapter to highlight each side of the border respectively. The reader experiences the ubiquitous struggle of two Mexican immigrants travelling through their homeland with nothing in their hands while a middle-class couple sees its perfect “liberal-humanist” lifestyle slowly fading away, firstly due to coyotes approaching their homes, secondly through an uprising isolationist movement in their neighborhood, which intends to build a wall to keep the coyotes out. Not only to the couple’s neighbors, but also to their own, the threat is nothing from far-fetched: Kira, wife to Delaney, lost her two dogs to coyotes who preyed upon them, one before and one after the wall, bordering their wall has been built, separating the pavement and their garden, what was once done by a simple fence (Boyle 1997, 37). In spite of the novel’s age, the idea of building a wall to keep out enemies from one’s property is all too familiar: Donald J. Trump, the infamous 45th president of the United States (POTUS), exclaimed multiple times during his campaign speeches that he would erect a wall along the 1,954 miles [3,145 kilometers] long border between the US and Mexico, and make the latter pay for it. During his entire presidency, he shall not have made any progress with this promise (7). In Boyle’s novel, the community contributed mutually to the erection of the wall, while Jack, one of Delaney’s neighbors and fiercest supporter of the isolationist attempt to build the wall. Jack Cherrystone’s son, Jack Jr., was told by his father to commence smear attacks to infuriate the community and spread angst in order to broaden support for the wall. He did so by, for example, spraying racist slurs onto already-existing parts of the wall, like “Beaners Must Die!” (Boyle 1997, p. 347) Beaners is a racist term to describe Mexicans, refer-ring to one ingredient of the Mexican cuisine. Whether there is an example of a similar attempt by fringe right Trump supports who committed crimes like this to raise a faux awareness in their respective communities about an ongoing threat through illegal immigrants, it’s hard to tell. So-called “hate crime hoaxes” are not separated in crime statistics by the FBI or local police departments, so that single crimes as such might be found through a profound investigation on newspaper records, but even those would hardly make up evidence on whether there was an exemplary rise in right-winged hate crimes during the Trump presidency. What we do find instead, and which perhaps can be related to Trump’s election as president of the United States, is the rise in hate crimes against ethnic minorities, disregarding their citizenship status (immigrant awaiting judicial decision on whether he or she becomes naturalized or detained). As the New York Times (8) was able to report in the past year (statistics by the FBI are commonly published in the fourth quarter, so during the writing of this text, the statistics for the Fiscal Year 2018 were not accessible yet), hate crimes experienced an increase for the third consecutive year. One might accuse Trump of having caused this spike, but there is one problem with this development: In 2018, Trump only ruled over the United States for two years, which means that the increase being during the last year of the Obama administration. Of course, racism would just be the argument again: Many white supremacists were angry on an African-American governing in the Oval Office, while the United States were supposed to be a white man’s nation, according to their views. During the Trump administration, their views finally received a valid representation, since Trump had a long history of sharing their ideology (9). 

Coming back to Boyle’s novel, we do not find any evidence of physical hate crimes in this book. Moreover, we do find the employment of Mexican day laborers in this novel. Cándido, the immigrant whom the reader follows in every second chapter, and who is married to his wife América, who follows him on his trail to a better life which she is promised by him, is such a day laborer – when they first “settled” in the United States, he went up to a parking lot in which many other illegal immigrants gathered to wait for employers to give them a temporary job to earn some money (Boyle, 1997, p. 80), after América herself, although pregnant in her fourth month, joined the others in this lot to find work, Cándido, who didn’t go looking for work due to his injured leg he suffered from when Delaney accidentally hit him with his car, did so only after a short time of regeneration, luckily finding a Latino employer who was looking for a new worker to replace his old one. (Boyle, 1997, p. 166). They are all aware of the illegality of their undertaking, but have no other chance to earn money in the United States unless they experienced the unlikely permission of naturalization which offered them the opportunity to apply legally for a job in this country. Even a green card, functioning as a work visa for working immigrants who planned to only stay for a period of time, would not help them anyhow, since these people originally planned to stay in this country permanently. Thus, working until they have earned enough money to rent an apartment is the only option that remains to those people.

Latinos of any origin are normally employed by companies that work in sectors in which many natural-born American citizens would not work due to the hard work that did not earn much money in return. This applies, for example, at construction companies, but also in the agricultural sector of growing fruits and vegetables in greenhouses. Or at least this is the common comprehension of where foreign-born workers, disregarding their legal status, would be found the most. Understandably, there are no official statistics compiling the amount of illegal labor workers employed in the US, either as full-time workers or part-time, with or without social insurance. When it comes to legal foreign-born workers in the US, working full-time, statistics can be found, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (10). The statistics from yesteryear show that more than 17.4 percent of the United States’ workforce consisted of foreign-born workers. Moreover, the statistics tell us that of these 17.4 percent, almost half of them consisted of Hispanics, immigrants from the Spanish-speaking Central American area, to which Mexico applies as well as Honduras or Nicaragua. Unsurprisingly, especially when talking about men and women who were likely to travel in the US and stay there illegally, either because of no chance to be naturalized or because of expired visas that were not extended afterwards, foreign-born workers were less likely to be promoted as managers or anything equally. This of course doesn’t need to be connoted negatively, since the blue-collar companies usually look for workforces to succeed retiring workers, due to aforementioned reasons. And to blue-collar jobs, construction working relates as much as working in a coal mine or a factory. 

Regarding Cándido’s employment in bricklaying (regarding his short description of daily task, we can assume that he works in this field (Boyle 1997, p. 167)), one may draw an ironic connection not only inside this novel but also to current politics: An immigrant who builds a wall that is supposed to keep his kinship outside from the white man’s world, although the actual function is to primarily defend them from feral coyotes. Trump’s earliest and most famous campaign promise that the country of Mexico would pay for the wall that would hinder, among other countries’ refugees, also hinder its own people from fleeing the poverty and drug wars of their nation is of a similar intention. US companies at best would construct the wall and Mexico would be handed over the bill of billions of dollars, without ever having given an agreement to finance the construction. In Boyle’s novel’s case, on the other hand, the immigrants were barely given back a return for their efforts, a starvation wage that did not even include a social insurance. But the immigrants knew what they were agreeing upon, they only did not have a choice to make – in their homeland, they would work under similarly poor conditions. The only difference given is the slight chance that in the United States, their fate may be different; that they may be lucky and overcome the grief of their fellow people back home. And for this belief, they are ready to endure suffering and exploitation by employers who take the risk to employ them illegally. 

To choose Los Angeles as the setting of this novel was not coincidental, one can tell with-out ever having read an interview with Boyle on his novel, or having dived into secondary literature on the novel. Los Angeles is known for its mainly “liberal-humanist” population, California in general is known for leaning extremely liberal. Extreme insofar as the Golden State votes outstandingly steady in favor of the Democratic Party, and so, it’s no surprise that the metropolitan areas, namely San Francisco (the city which Nancy Pelosi, the House Speak-er, represents) and Los Angeles would of course function as the place with the most extreme amplitude of liberalism.

(On a side note, it needs to be mentioned that despite the public appearance, empirical institutes were able to find out that the overall population of California might lean more Conservative than elections, either on a gubernatorial or general level, show. Source: “California’s Political Geography.” Public Policy Institute of California)

It of course was part of Boyle’s plan to satirically distort the cliché liberalism of common liberals in his country, showing how it might collapse for many of them when their humanist beliefs were held responsible in perilous situations. He shows to the read-er that far more of them were ready to usher to the right when danger was ahead. Proof can be found on page 188 and 189 of Boyle’s novel (Boyle 1997, p 188 ff.), when Jim Shirley appears in the scene. Delaney was conversing with Jack Jardine, who, later on in the novel, turns out to be a hardliner in isolationist policies as well. Jim suddenly joined their talk about Delaney’s work as a columnist when he introduced burglaries that took place in their neighborhood, indirectly alleging immigrants dressed up as gardeners to inwardly enter houses to subsequently ransack them. Whether Boyle intended to make an ironic joke when he named the mentioned street “Via Esperanza”, which would be translated as “way of hope,” signaling that there would be no hope anymore, since the criminals have already made their way into their neighborhood, no-one can exactly tell. He might as well just have chosen a typically Spanish-sounding street name to underline the influence of Hispanic people in Southern California, a district in the US that is well-known for its high rate of foreigners living there. 

Jim was immediately joined by Jack, who he was able to persuade about his idea that their community was not safe enough to beware of the threat of foreign criminals having an easy time robbing innocent people’s houses from the South side, so that this should be a hot topic during their next town hall. It could already be read that an advanced defense was in the planning when Delaney jokingly suggested that Jack wanted to “wall the whole place in like a medieval city or something–,” when he received thoughtful silence instead of amused laughter (Boyle 1997, p. 189). 

When the discussion on their community proceeded, another character entered their discussion, Bill Vogel. He claims that immigrants arriving in the US should be given less so that other probable refugees who might adjoin their kin in the future, would be less attracted to leaving their homeland for the United States. A crude argument, assuming that those who went northwards were all (or mainly) economic refugees. This doesn’t make up with the cur-rent situation in Mexico or any country in Central or South America, neither in the 1990s, nor in the 21st century. The major reasons people are fleeing the Southern continent are civil wars, corrupted governments and poverty. The latter one might hardly apply as an economical reason, but would be overwhelmed by the previously mentioned reasons, concluding the poverty of the people. Bill Vogel, nonetheless, mentioned one particular argument that could be debatable, namely high unemployment in the Golden State. He says that California suffered from unemployment peaking at ten percent. At least nowadays, in the 21st century, people can breathe a sigh of relief, the Californian employment scale surrounds along the national average of 4.2 percent (11), which is a positive outcome for developed Western nations. Singling out all other crises that might be atop of the state’s agenda, it would also allow the country to grant asylum to refugees seeking sanctuary. What also speaks in favor of a more liberal immigration policy is the steady growth of the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP), accumulated by an economy doing outstandingly well. On the other hand, Bill Vogel made a good point mentioning a poorly performing economy. To Californians, more job-seeking people would only put pressure upon the community, hurting it and therefore spreading further anti-immigration sentiment. Many people might counter this argument by claiming that a state could do both simultaneously, revive the gubernatorial economy and accommodate thousands of immigrants. The problem is that it would not work out because both required opposing measurements, namely the lowering of regulations and the state’s intervention to quickly erect centers to shelter refugees. Without getting too deep into this issue, let’s instead return to Bill Vogel and Delaney. It was ascertained that Bill Vogel was not wrong to mention the circumstances that argue his disliking of immigrants inadvertently hardening the situation in his community. Yet, what could be seen is that the situation was already stressed. The citizens were moderately leaning towards preferring to raise a wall instead of altering existing policies in such a way that their community would not be “overrun” by refugees who didn’t intend to do them wrong. 

The idea of a moderate leaning towards isolation, then, is highly surpassed by a stark contrast of when Delaney coincidentally meets Jack in a grocery store when buying ingredients for the Thanksgiving lunch: They immediately began to talk about the wall, which Jack pro-motes in the community to gather funds to finance it. Delaney recalls that “Ninety percent of the community were already walled in.” (Boyle 1997, p. 242). Since the wall would inevitably violate private property when being built without the proprietor’s permission. Thus, Delaney had to be asked about his d’accord for the wall. As it has been told before, Cándido would later on contribute to its construction, ironically. 

One might wonder how this relates to today’s United States, but there is a solution to it, a firm relation. Even though there are no entire communities which strongly support Trump’s border policy, especially his “Build the Wall!”-promise, the supporters in general do exist. Funnily, they become more, the further they are away from the border itself. Trump gathers his most supporters in blue-collar boroughs, among the working-class people who oftentimes work in dying sectors such as the coal mining sector. This also caused him to have supports among ethnic minorities, just because he promised them to protect their job from the ongoing progress towards renewable energies (12). The promise to build a wall is only a side note to them, one they might not even support, but as long as he promises them the pie in the sky, they are going to vote for him, since Democrats preferably close down coal mines to pave the way for renewable energy resources. 

Does this mean that, therefore, no-one supports the wall but only the blue-collar policies Trump defends in order to maintain his base? Not necessarily. As in Boyle’s “Tortilla Curtain,” there are fierce promoters of the isolationist stance who try to assemble more fellows among their favorite choice, either by force or by bare persuasion. In Boyle’s case, people were merely persuaded to support the wall by force; as it was mentioned before, Jack Cherrystone Jr. sprayed racist slurs on the wall, such as “Pinche Puta,” which could be translated as “Fucking Whore.” Jack Jr. was not the only one trying to promote the message the wall was supposed to send out to the immigrants who dared to make their way into the United States: Dominick Flood, another neighbor from Delaney’s community, who too is a supporter of the isolationist attempt to secure the community through medieval defense systems. He also was the man who would manipulate particular members of the community in order to usher them towards support, away from their skepticism about the benefits of a wall, and its disadvantages, or its dysfunctionality, combined with extraordinary costs. Evidence on this can be found in the later part of the book, for example (Boyle 1997, p. 294): Dominick Flood seemingly hid a small plastic box in the purse of Kit Menaker, Kyra’s mother; “[…] it was a black plastic box dangling from a neatly severed strap.” (ibid.) What it is, and what it is good for, is not being told. One could argue that it was a recipient to a signal sent from Flood’s house in Arroyo Blanco, as it was written in the lower part of the page. A signal that would somehow set off the fire next to them, so that they would be close to the fire, so that Kyra, a sensitive person with a stressful job who usually tries to calm down in order to not experience a nervous breakdown (e.g. Boyle 1997, p. 75; p. 161, showing especially how easily frightened she be-comes when it comes to her own safety, or her dogs’ safety; p. 222, showing how fragile Kyra’s psyche was, swinging between the extremes; p. 335, also exposing the “liberal-humanist” lifestyle she and Delaney were following by, abstaining alcohol, meat, and nicotine. They used to follow a strict lifestyle until everything seemed to break apart. Kyra stuck to it until the end, preferring to listen to smooth, calming sounds instead of lighting a cigarette which she did not have at hand at the moment). 

Beside this first incident, is there any evidence on Flood’s actions to move forward his and Jack Cherrystone’s agenda? As it derives from the book, Dominick Flood appears as a socialite, being responsible for social gatherings in the community, proven by his hosting of a cocktail party in relation to Thanksgiving (Boyle 1997, p. 262), drawing abundant attention. As one might hardly have recognized, Flood is on house arrest, about which jokes were made beforehand, when having talked about his four years of arrest in his own house, which would arguably be better than in prison (Boyle 1997, p. 190). His first appearance in the book also indicates his prior profession: He must have gained his wealth – and obviously, his demise – through investments in community services, he invested in the “Los Angeles Monitoring Services,” as it reads in the novel. His criminal record didn’t seem to negatively affect his reputation in the community, anyway, his Thanksgiving party was attended by several guests. A phenomenon we also have with Donald Trump too: Despite the matter-of-fact that he is a pathological liar and outspoken racist, many people disregard it and support him nevertheless. False promises, such as the middle-class tax cut that did not happen but instead favored the elites while pressuring them, are either ignored or claimed to be false, a scam created and fueled by the so-called “Mainstream-Media,” meaning renown news agencies, broadcasters and outlets in print and online, such as, regarding the US, “ABC News,” “CNN”, the “New York Times” or the “Washington Post.” It is unsurprising that especially more left-leaning stations and outlets usually become targets of such assails, regarding the fact that they are more likely to critically report about Donald Trump as a president and beyond. Right-leaning outlets and multimedia stations such as the “National Review,” “Fox News” or “Townhall” are more likely to either ignore Trump’s escapist encounters, or view them more calmly, not interpreting them respectively as attempts to divide society or move the US further into fringe right nationalism, as stations and outlets as those who were mentioned firstly are likely to do (On either side of the aisle, fringe left or right outlets such as the “Jacobin Magazine” (left) or “Red State” (right) were avoided due to a lack of credibility in their reports and an overly amount of biased commentary and op-eds instead of reporting (13)).

Trump is known to have committed crimes against the American people and the Constitution, but still, his most loyal sympathizers rejected to cease their support for him, instead accusing media organizations and even the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller III., a long-time Republican and Vietnam war veteran, of an anti-Trump bias and lack of patriotism, an allegation that, unlike in many other Western nations, indeed stands for a fierce allegation that comes close to betrayal against the nation, which it , regarding many “old-line” Republicans’ personal opinion, should bear the potential to be punished by law before the Supreme Court. To mention a famous saying that dates back as far as the McCarthyist era of the “Communist Craze” that experienced a renaissance during the Trump era; America is America – “Love it or leave it.”  This kind of argumentation, the binary choice to obey or be gone, reflects in the “Tortilla Curtain” as well. At no time did the community discuss how else to cope with the problem of coyotes approaching their homes, to approach humans and murdering their pet animals. They consciously settled down in their living space, without thinking about how they would corrupt the environment, displacing wild animals from their natural habitat. It is a typically human behavior that can be observed not only in the United States but also in other Western countries, even in Brazil, where newly elected president Jair Bolsonaro began to withdraw protections of the Amazon region that opens rain forests for the economy and for farmers, thereby displacing indigenous people to whom the rain forest was a home, which they protected and maintained for decades. 

Delaney moved to Los Angeles because he wanted to work as a columnist who promoted the untouched environment, the vastness of the region, while he ironically became one of the issues why such some regions have become a rarity: The human behavior to forcefully colonize new land, consciously, only probably inadvertently, damaging the world climate by corrupting the environment’s health, is not unknown but a repeating narrative in history, having found a fatal aftermath when polar caps started to decrease, wildfires began to proliferate and the seal level began to rise. In Boyle’s “Tortilla Curtain,” none of this themes was objected; there, the issue was the hypocritical “liberalism” as it is oftentimes practiced by young urban adults who chose to live in hip metropoles that are often located in areas which are either inhabited or close to borders from which immigrants usually cross over to ask for asylum. Those people promote liberal policies but are eager to become strictly illiberal when they were called upon to support those who are the most concerned, coincidentally. Those “pseudo”-liberals, as they can be called, acquired liberalism as a numb façade to not be bothered with any discussions on their beliefs; they do not want to appear apolitical while they actually are exactly that. They approach politics emotionally, are easily disgusted by those who approach politics equally emotional but from a different point of view. These two points of view are displayed by Kyra and Delaney as the emotional (il)liberals on the one hand and Jack Cherrystone, Jack Cherrystone Jr., Dominick Flood and Bill Vogel on the other hand. It was their incapability to find a common ground that finally collapsed their fragile community that was only possible to work while the “threat” of illegal immigrants did not overburden their system. Once the system was overburdened, the topic about which they could not care less had to be confronted, façades began to crumble masks fell off. Similar themes were observed in Europe in 2015, and finally in the United States in November 2016; on the one hand, Donald Trump was able to win the election through the electoral colleges that granted him more votes by electors, but on the other hand, he was able to gather enough voters among the people who voted for him, does turning the mechanism around in his favor. It was only a matter of time when the dark side of immigration would emerge. This time had come then. 

Conclusion

In the end, Boyle’s “Tortilla Curtain” did not lose any topicality, even after more than twenty years after being published. This might also be due to the repeating theme of crises at which both frontiers tend to run against one another. The United States, nonetheless, suffer especially in the immigration crises to issues that are essentially American, although some might agree on the latter one through own experiences that contradict this thesis: 

• The United States are founded on the ideals of freedom, they are a nation founded by fugitives of oppressive monarchies, who have displaced entire people through-out their foundation process. 

• The United States’ immigration system lacks a comprehensive mechanism that would make the whole process more transparent and more flexible, but overall, more functional (14). The current system collapsed under a sheer mass of unexpected “floods” that unitedly commenced their journey to the border, which also settled conspiracy theories of staged “floods” intended to break the country’s stability (15). 

The European migrant crisis that took place in 2015 but ebbed away since then, became a target of equally bizarre and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, all of which could be exposed as lies shortly after emergence. But what I wanted to highlight was the corrosion of the American immigration system: It is what leads most asylum seekers to become illegal aliens, as they are officially described. Cándido and América had to become illegals too, because they would have been declared economic migrants once they explained themselves before a clerk. There was no chance for them to be granted asylum. They had to go the hard way of not only having left behind everything to pursuit happiness from the bottom to the top, but also would they have experienced immediate hatred in sanctuary cities, as many migrants do, no matter where they lived, either in more liberal-leaning states or more Conservative-leaning. Contrariwise, more liberal-leaning states are even more likely to beget more hate crimes per capita (16). In the end, no state is without its black sheep, no matter the outcome of gubernatorial and general elections. In the end, when wealth is at stakes, more people are likely to think about them-selves rather than their next. Boyle’s “Tortilla curtain” managed to show this matter-of-fact clearly, with a political relation that did not die out yet.  

List of Book References

4. O’Sullivan, Terry M. (2010). “Department of Homeland Security Intelligence Enterprise: overview and issues.” New York: Nova Science Publishers.

6. Chomsky, Noam (1985). “Turning the Tide. US intervention in Central America and the struggle for peace.” London: Pluto Press.

13. Josepher, Bryce (2017). “Political Media Bias in the United States: Immigration and the Trump Administration.” United States, North America: Scholar Commons.