The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  At 6:45 in the morning, the mayor had accepted this counsel as wise and obviously true. He had forgotten about Escalante and the proto-martyr languishing in a Santa Ana jail cell. Then, in the waning moments of his third and final public appearance of the morning, at the Bonaventure Hotel, he had been given another rude reminder of Araceli’s existence. The mayor was paying a courtesy call to a group of striking hotel workers, and had just finished up with a few words in his thick-accented but steadily improving Spanish, when one of the striking maids reached over and squeezed his wrist. She was a short woman with the angular face and short hair of a female prizefighter, and she had pulled the mayor close to her. “No tengas miedo,” she said, in a tone that recalled the mayor’s late mother. “Ponte los pantalones. Di algo para apoyar a Araceli. Me enoja que no hayas dicho nada sobre esa pobre mujer.” The mayor gave a grimace-smile and pulled away, startled a bit by the strength of the woman’s grip.

  “She told me to put my pants on,” the mayor said suddenly to his consultant as his salad arrived. “That last woman in the hotel. The short one. Did you see her? I actually recognized her once I was forced to take a look. Die-hard shop steward. Walked precincts in each of my campaigns. She told me she was angry I hadn’t said anything about the Mexican maid. ‘Put your pants on,’ she said. ‘And say something to support Araceli.’ “

  “What is that, some sort of Mexican thing? Not having pants?”

  “Yeah. Precisely.”

  “Well, that’s emasculating. Is that why you ordered a salad?”

  “Very funny,” the mayor said, and with that he gave his famous, world-conquering grin—it was the flash of erect porcelain that had gotten him elected mayor, and that got him into trouble, sometimes, when he directed it in private at petite, single young women in their thirties. He dug into his salad, took a few bites, and began to talk. “But she has a point.”

  “She does?”

  “The way she sees it, she didn’t vote for me just to run the City of L.A.”

  “Right. The whole icon thing. The long-oppressed people thing.”

  Legions of people expected the mayor of Los Angeles to opine on the case of a wronged Orange County nanny simply because they shared an ethnic heritage. They saw in his election the fulfillment of his people’s long-held aspirations for power and respect. Never mind that most of the voters who had elected the mayor to office were white: he was expected to speak out in favor of immigration reform and amnesty and other subjects far beyond the influence of his actual, quite meager powers, as outlined in the city charter. When he spoke out for immigrant legalization, like these people expected him to, it caused another kind of voter to focus on the seeming threat of his Mexicanness, and a few to harden their belief that he was the leader of a Chicano conspiracy to enslave white people. His Mexican heritage was, at once, his greatest political asset and his heaviest albatross.

  “Not saying anything at all makes me look weak,” the mayor said. He did not use that word often in referring to himself, it was a sort of taboo in the mayor’s circle, and hearing the mayor say it caused the consultant to sit forward in his seat. “People are starting to think I’m running away from it.” The mayor’s career, from a rough-and-tumble Eastside childhood, to UC Berkeley and a quixotic minor crusade or two as a civil-rights lawyer, to the state legislature, and finally to election as the mayor of the second largest city in the United States, was a dance between affability and toughness, charm and ruthlessness. He understood that “weak” was poison in politics, just like it was on the streets of his youth. The early chapters of his biography were set in a preppy Chicano Catholic school, where the mayor-to-be wore cardigan sweaters and played Black Panther dress-up games, and finally got into the fistfights that led to his expulsion. When the mayor heard the word “weak” and its many synonyms he felt a twinge of the old aggression, and his silence for the past twenty minutes had come from having suppressed a powerful desire to tell that hotel maid to go fuck herself.

  It was a rare moment of self-doubt from a politician on an incredible winning streak, a man who spent his day subjecting his consultant and everyone in his circle to his constantly shifting enthusiasms, his volatile self-belief. He was going to plant a hundred thousand trees, hire a thousand police officers, and lay a cute TV reporter or two—all by Christmas. Now the imprisoned nanny was mucking it all up, and threatening to detract from his brilliance, and she was doing it all the way from Orange County. The mayor sensed that the pro-Araceli grumbling would eventually spread to his old civil-l ibertarian circles and to the unofficial club of well-to-do Westside liberals who funded his campaigns. A few of these people had already written letters to the editor, emails, op-ed pieces, and Internet postings that commented on Araceli’s “railroading” as emblematic of the “marginalization” of immigrants in the justice system and the workforce, and the “power relations of narrative and belief” in the city between immigrants and nonimmigrants, and other nonsense like that. The mayor understood that these people measured his silence in such matters, it was a running tally they kept in their heads. They kept expecting him to break out in a rash of cowardice.

  “I’m going to have to say something,” the mayor said.

  The consult ant brought his hands together in concentration. He was a wordsmith, an avid reader of history, and a dedicated student of marketing and message. Quickly he arrived at a broad outline of what the mayor might say—the trick, as always, was to make an essentially moderate and cautious position sound bold, principled, and eloquent, a skill all great American politicians possessed going back to Lincoln. He shared his ideas with the mayor and once he was done the mayor smiled at him and said, “Brilliant.”

  “The key thing is the tone,” the consultant said. “You want to sound measured. Like an adult. Above the fray.”

  Several hours later the mayor was in East Hollywood, at a memorial service for one of the last remaining survivors in Southern California of the Armenian genocide. When the event was over he addressed the four television reporters outside, who were expecting a few innocuous Armenian-centered remarks. “I’m going to take pity on you guys today, and make a little bit of news,” the mayor whispered into the ear of a female reporter. “I’m going to say something about that Mexican nanny. Get ready.” There was a brief scramble, a hooking up of microphones, a positioning of cables and cameras, and when it had settled, the mayor began:

  “Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the arrest, and now the prosecution, of Araceli Ramirez. It’s a case that has a lot of people concerned. And while it isn’t appropriate for me to comment on the facts of an ongoing criminal case, I’d like to make just one observation. One of the beautiful things about this country is that everyone, no matter if rich or poor, immigrant or citizen, is entitled to a fair trial. To be judged on the facts, and not on passions or prejudice. I’m concerned about the passions surrounding this case. I think everyone needs to take a step back, and allow the facts, and only the facts, to determine the outcome. We grant our prosecutors a lot of power to protect us—and that’s good. But we also trust them to use their power with discretion. I am confident that that will be the case here.”

  Two hours later, Ian Goller sent a transcript of this statement via BlackBerry to his boss, who was traveling in Bakersfield that afternoon. The district attorney of Orange County sent back a one-word answer: “Surprising.” Goller’s feelings were stronger. It’s outrageous. This isn’t even in his jurisdiction. The assistant district attorney felt a few pangs of wounded local pride, until he stepped back to think about what would lead such an ambitious and savvy politico to comment on The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez. Clearly, the mayor believed that Los Angeles and the Laguna Rancho Estates rested atop the same shifting tectonic plates, and he spoke cautiously to keep his footing as the ground beneath him rumbled. Goller’s own Republican boss might soon feel the same political tremors and decide that pursuing a weak Ramirez case wasn’t worth the risk. In “serious” California politica
l circles both the right and left feared ethnic earthquakes, which was one reason why the immigration problem lingered and deepened.

  The longer Araceli Ramirez stuck around Orange County’s courtrooms and jail cells, Goller concluded, the bigger the political problems she presented. The mayor of Los Angeles had spoken, ostensibly, to temper a rush toward final judgment. But his brief remarks only strengthened Goller’s resolve to shuffle her off U.S. soil and on her way to Mexico as soon as possible.

  22

  Araceli’s back ached because she spent much of the waking day turning and twisting on a thin mattress, feeling it slide back and forth over the steel sheet her jailers called a bed frame. She waited for night to fall and day to come back again. When the thin rectangle of her cell window briefly glowed orange in the morning, she could imagine she was somewhere else. Back in colonia San Cosme in Mexico City, where her last chilango boyfriend lived, the sun warming their faces, rows of fault-shaken buildings leaning over the sidewalks; or on the subway train when it climbed up out of the ground and ran in the open air, the passengers squinting in the sudden pulses of light. What a mistake it had been to leave Mexico City. Her step north had brought her to a cell in Santa Ana, to become familiar with the angles in the walls, the sounds of the corridors, among inmates hypnotized by the collective need to sleep. The ritual dispensing of pills caused a powerful drift of inmate will toward the recreation room at the end of the corridor, where a television set filled the jail with a perpetual stream of canned laughter and commercial jingles and their tin echoes. Her fellow inmates stayed in this neutral, half-conscious state even at three in the afternoon, when the natural sun was bearing down on people in the world. They were all in a kind of frozen storage, these women in their blue jumpsuits, sitting on their beds, some with charcoal blankets thrown over them, a hundred grungy little dolls in their cells stacked up like toy blocks, reminding her of a Diego Rivera piece from his red-star Marxist didactic days, a painting depicting bodies filling a bank vault. Frozen Assets.

  On his first day back at work, Scott was chased away from his office by too many “Are you okays?” and too many hugs, and by not getting a single IM from Charlotte, who turned her head away with a snap when he caught her studying him through the glass. At home it was Maureen who averted her eyes, even as she handed him a shopping list for the grocery store. But at the market, with the list in hand, it was all stares. First, the Latino guy at the end of the line of carts, who gave Scott a good long look that passed quickly from initial surprise to irritated aggression. This guy was, what, thirty, thirty-five? His bald-headed look transported Scott back to South Whittier and to the first recruits to a lifestyle his father told him was “for losers who don’t want to learn good English.” He had a goatee and the unanchored expression of a man about to enter middle age unawares and unprepared. Five, ten seconds passed, and Scott gave him a what’s-up? raising of his chin, but the guy didn’t blink. Scott pushed forward into the grocery store and began to fill his cart dutifully, but when he reached the checkstand he endured another, shorter glare of recognition from the Latina cashier, followed by a frown and then a look of deliberate indifference. He had seen this cashier perhaps a half dozen times but never engaged in conversation with her, and he now sensed she was disappointed with him somehow, and that his surname had something to do with her reaction. I’m supposed to be one of them. This explained too the stare from the shopping-cart vato. Scott Torres was being judged by a set of rules of tribal loyalty, simply because he possessed a Mexican surname. So strange, the clannishness of these people. Scott, with his one Mexican name, was responsible for the jailing of a woman with three: Araceli Noemi Ramirez. She was just a face and a name on the television, and he their customer, a familiar face—and yet they scorned him. Scott’s presence here at the checkstand, his basket filled with jars of baby food and diapers for his daughter, and juice boxes for his sons, meant less to this cashier than the abstract construction of Araceli, a Latina martyr in a jail cell.

  “Is there something wrong?” Scott asked the cashier, whose name tag announced EVANGELINE.

  “Is there?” Evangeline asked cryptically, and he was left to think about the question as he wheeled out from the store with his purchases in the cart, grasping a receipt between his fingers that was nearly a yard long.

  The representative of the public defender’s office was a tall, elegant woman with a low-key demeanor, a Filipino surname, and a button nose that suggested a heritage that owed as much to the Mayflower as to Manila. Ruth “Ruthy” Bacalan-Howland was about thirty years old, and she paused to think for a second or two whenever it was her turn to speak, looking down at her hands and then using them to pull idiosyncratically at the batik fabric of her long skirt. “Of course, you should not plead guilty to a crime you did not commit, no matter how good a deal it seems,” she said to Araceli. “Mucha gente lo hace, supongo, but really that’s not the way the system is supposed to work.”

  They were in the attorney conference room, which they had all to themselves. Ruthy Bacalan, a deputy public defender, had listened to Araceli explain the series of events that had landed her in “a very strange North American circus,” as Araceli put it in her accented but clear English. The attorney had then laid out the government’s offer, speaking the occasional confident if somewhat accented Spanish. She translated “misdemeanor” into the closest Spanish equivalent she knew: “delito menor,” a phrase that didn’t quite carry the innocuous shadings of the English original. “So if you plead guilty to this delito menor they will release you from jail—but directly into the hands of migración. To the American legal system, it’s considered a crime as serious as going through a red traffic light. But it does mean that you will never be able to return here again—legally—since they will hand you over to the immigration people that work inside the county jail even when they are, technically, ‘releasing’ you from jail. Of course, even if you fought the case and won, you still might get deported.” Ruthy Bacalan sat perpendicular to Araceli at a square table, with her long legs crossed one over the other, exposing her leather hiking boots, which had pink trim and pink shoelaces. The deputy public defender wore these shoes because she was seven months pregnant, with swollen feet that kept her perpetually off balance. “If you fight it, you get a chance to call witnesses. I would be your attorney, and the government would pay for everything. Gratis. But, once again, if you lost,” the public defender continued, “you could go to a prison for five years. Then you would certainly be deported.” Araceli forgot, momentarily, what the attorney was saying, and remained fixated on her footwear. These are shoes for an active outdoor woman, Araceli thought. Girlie-pink and rugged leather. With those, you can climb a mountain in feminine style. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen shoes like that in Mexico City, not even at the Santa Fe Mall.

  “Can I ask you, señorita, where did you buy those boots?”

  Ruthy Bacalan was momentarily taken aback—apparently, people whose futures hung in the balance did not often interrupt the conversation to ask about her shoes.

  “Oh, these. At the Sport Chalet.”

  “If I am ever released from this place and allowed to live in the United States,” Araceli said, “I will go to this chalet and buy a pair of those shoes. In fact, I will tell you that I want to stay here, and not accept the very generous offer to be deported directly to Mexico, because Los Estados Unidos de América is a country where women can wear boots like that.”

  “So you’re not going to accept the government’s offer?”

  “No. ¿Para qué?”

  “Fantástico,” Ruthy Bacalan said, her face erupting into youthful brightness, as if an undergraduate had suddenly arrived to chase the gloomy attorney away. Ruthy Bacalan had been preparing to resign from the public defender’s office, and not because she was pregnant and carrying forty-seven cases as a Deputy Public Defender II. Her recent conversion to Buddhism helped her with the stress, and she felt quite prepared to be a working mother. No, wha
t was causing Ruthy Bacalan to doubt her commitment to the public defender’s office was the lack of fight and purpose in the work, her servitude to the assembly line of advancing manila folders, and the flow charts that established all the hearings and procedures through which a soul had to be squeezed before emerging either guilty, exonerated, or in various legal limbos on the other side. She had come to this job out of a sense of civic duty and compassion, a belief that she might be able to reduce the suffering of the defendants who passed before her and imbue them with at least some constitutional dignity. In the cramped office she shared with two other deputy public defenders, she had sat down to meditate for ten minutes before leaving for this interview, and realized immediately afterward that she needed to place herself in a job where she might more directly confront the inequities of her time. Maybe as a teacher in an “inner city” school, or as a union organizer, or perhaps simply as a stay-at-home mom raising future citizens with good Buddhist values. And now this defendant had appeared before her, prepared to take a defiant stance in a case that might attract some media notoriety and send a small message to the city and the nation beyond.

  “I think you can win this case,” Ruthy Bacalan said quickly and eagerly. “Everyone in the office was expecting you to take the guilty plea.”

  “Why would anyone plead guilty if they did not commit the crime?” Araceli asked. “That makes no sense.”

  “A lot of people do it. There are a lot of things about the law and the courts that don’t make any sense.”

  “What you were saying before, licenciada? Let me make sure I understand correctly,” Araceli said. “You were saying I might be punished for trying to tell the truth. I mean, if I lose the case. Because I would be telling the truth—that I am not guilty—but they could send me to prison for a longer time because I tried to tell the truth.”