Anyone who ever waited tables in the right restaurant in Tampa or elsewhere might tell you about the multitudes of immigrant bus-staffers from Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, even Cuba.
They don't speak a lick of English; they work and quit and are sometimes fired with the resilience and presence of teeth in a shark's mouth--another would always be waiting, and willing to work for what they made, which was next to nothing.
I can't count the number of times I brought a customer's half eaten meal back to one of multiple, dispensible immigrant dishwashers, where, as in the case of a picked-over hamburger, one would ask me not to dump the plate then devour the rest of the burger shamelessly.
As a server I didn't know exactly how much they made, though the hamburger gave me a vivid idea; it also broke my heart to see, but when it came down to it, was I going to say anything about the unfairness? No. I'd worked in other restaurants where tips were pooled, and payouts to the bus staff were much higher, and based on our gratuity instead of sales.
The money I made in this restaurant was a dream, and the reality was much easier to ignore when it was short-tenured, easily replacable, and didn't speak English.
Not once in my entire fourteen-month tenure did a caucasian or African-American bus tables or wash dishes in the fusion restaurant where I worked. We the servers paid out four percent of our sales at the end of the night, which, depending on how much gratuity we'd made, came out to around a fourth of our take-home. Our base pay was $2.13 an hour, standard American server hourly wage, but also, I came to find out, standard hourly wage for the immigrant bus staff. They made two dollars an hours, and also, I came to find out, got an equal portion of all the servers' four percent. There were two of them for every one of us.
I was told one night by manager Kelly, after I'd taken seven hundred-dollars in tips, to keep that to myself. Of course. No other server would want to hear about it, but neither would the bus staff, because no matter what I made, they were taking home between twenty-five and forty dollars a day.
I found this out later from Luis Castillo, a Cuban, who was the only immigrant server in my tenure. He'd been living in Amsterdam, having been kicked out of the Cuban army as a teenager for being gay and refusing to wake up at five o'clock in the morning for drills, despite frequent beatings. Now he was in his early fifties and looked a lot like Raul Julia, but a bit rounder. While waiting for customers he read novels by Balzac in French, and was so unabashedly crude in his honesty, that he'd tell you anything you asked with glee: a case of crabs he'd had in the Netherlands, the brothel he'd vistied the night before, and the resulting hemorrhoid. He'd also tell you exactly what he thought about the wage divisions in the restaurant, because he knew what he made, and knew what the immigrant bus staffers made. He did complain for the bus staffers frequently, much to management's dismay. Before he quit and moved back to Amsterdam, he said, "Yenny, I tell you something. I would rather live under a bridge in Amsterdam, than in a big fucking mansion in America."
I quit soonafter to start a master's degree. I've thought of Luis often, but not of the bigger issue until last night.
MSNBC played viewer call-in-comments on the immigration march. "How dare they?" said one woman. "They are here illegally, and now they're demanding rights? How dare they?" I apologize for not having recorded the time or context of this quote, but I dare say this is a major sentiment echoed frequently on all channels at one time or another, and that will have to suffice.
My concern with this sentiment is in that it seems as if we'd just woken up one morning and here on our doorstep was this effronterous immigrant problem, this threat, this defiance. In the case of the immigration march being on our doorstep, what we refuse to acknowledge now is that the issue had always been there, around back, tilling shit to fertilize our lawns. Because we'll accept not having to get our hands in shit, or in restaurant dish bins or in sausage factory lines processing pork parts, but deny that it's necessary for someone to do it so we don't have to. That's the reality of capitalism. It's like a caste system with a promise: if you put in you'll move up, except for the immigrant workers it remains a caste system with them in the untouchables caste, constantly putting in--which is fine with America, until the immigrants demand some of the promise to move up, in which case we revert to the laws surrounding their citizenship status, and threaten to throw millions of them in jail: a foolish and realistically non-applicable option.
My hat goes off to Lykes, in particular, for shutting down to indirectly address the immigrants' concerns. If you've ever been inside a Lykes processing plant, you'd know it's a disgusting job. Lykes must know that too. Those who don't are all the Americans sneering "how dare they" over their bologna sandwiches.
The problem here is not with the immigrants' citzenship status, obviously. It's about the physical reality of capitalism. Hardly an American can say they've never driven past a road crew or construction site, or dined in a restaurant where their plates were cleared by an immigrant worker. They wouldn't have been outraged at the sight of them then, because who the hell wants to sweat their asses off all day long for shit pay? Now immigrants are throwing that question in our faces, as they deserve to, and all we can say is "how dare they?"?