The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
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Copyright © 2017 by J.M. Servín
Translation Copyright © 2017 by Anthony Seidman
Introduction copyright ©2017 David Lida
This book was originally published in Spanish by Joaquín Mortiz in 2006 as Por amor al dólar. It was released again in Spanish by Almadía en 2012.
ISBN: 978-1944700393
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962849
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of nonfiction.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
We gratefully acknowledge that publication of this book was made possible in part by the Mexican government and the Programa de Apoyo a la Traducción (PROTRAD).
Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in misery*, we shall learn nothing.
Henry Miller
(Mystery*, in the original Miller quote)
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: LIVING THE DREAM
PROLOGUE
PART I: THE BRONX IS BURNING
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
PART II: CONNECTICUT
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
BIOGRAPHIES
BY DAVID LIDA
There are two prevalent narratives about undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. The first is a tale of hardship, sorrow, and danger—the story of the struggle of people on the fringes of towns and cities, unable to enjoy the rights and privileges of citizens; of endless days of monotonous work that nationals won’t do any longer: landscaping, housekeeping, construction, scrubbing pots and pans, meat-packing.
The counter-narrative, repeated frequently by politicians and writers of pot-boiling thrillers about the drug trade, paints Mexicans without papers as cold-blooded criminals, “bad hombres,” and “rapists,” people who, if you so much as stand in their way, will shoot you between the eyes before tucking into a plate of enchiladas rojas.
However one-sided, there is a basic truth to both of these stories: The undocumented come from Mexico’s most struggling social class. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be undocumented. Immigration authorities have no problem issuing visas to Mexico’s wealthiest citizens, but few of them have any desire to live in Gringolandia. Mexico’s aristocrats stay away from the U.S. once they’ve earned their MBAs or other post-graduate degrees at Harvard or Stanford. After their commencement ceremonies, they prefer to return to Mexico, and plum jobs either in government, the private sector, or the family business, where on similar salaries to what they’d be earning in the U.S., scandalously cheap labor allows them to hire cooks, gardeners, maids and chauffeurs. I remember from the early 1990s a Mexican who referred to a gringo counterpart with a mix of contempt and disbelief: “He earns a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and he mows his own lawn.” This Mexican would travel to the U.S., but only to accompany his wife on trips to shopping malls in Houston and San Antonio.
J.M. Servín, author of For Love of the Dollar, is in a class by himself — at least as far as the literature of the undocumented is concerned. He is from the Mexican middle class. A little definition is in order. The term “middle class” in Mexico has nothing to do with what those same words mean in the U.S. (or at least nothing to do with what they used to mean before the economic crisis of 2008, when people in the U.S., whose salaries had been stagnating for twenty years, began to see an entire way of life disappear). The Mexican middle class, unlike the Mexican poor, does not struggle from day to day to put food in its mouth, but it definitely goes into panic mode at the end of each month when the bills are due. It is a social class that subsists on what would be considered slave wages in the U.S., and has few of the social benefits that middle-class people north of the border have traditionally taken for granted.
It’s a social class that has been hammered by peso devaluations that have occurred consistently since the 1970s. When Servín was born, in 1962, the peso held steady at 12.5 to the dollar, and would continue to do so until 1976, when overnight it went to 22 to the dollar. By the early 1990s, it was at 3,400 to the dollar, before the president tried to “fix” the problem by lopping off three zeroes at the end of the currency.
Throughout these years, the elite and the impoverished tended to live more or less as they had throughout Mexican history, but the middle class struggled to keep afloat, when the falling oil prices, high inflation, no credit and rising interest rates became Sisyphean. Through much of the 1980s, Mexico’s GDP grew at the rate of less than one percent per year, while inflation galloped at 100 percent annually. Many middle-class Mexicans who worked in both the private and public sectors lost their jobs, and began to emigrate to the U.S. by the thousands, to work in agriculture, construction, or maintenance. (One of these Mexicans was Servín’s father, who found work supervising a jewelry workshop in Rosenberg, Texas.) Many of those who stayed behind resorted to work in the informal economy—parking cars, cleaning houses, or selling cigarettes and chewing gum at traffic intersections (when they weren’t cleaning windshields or eating fire). These days, more than half of Mexico City earns its living informally. Servín came of age in the beginning of the 1980s, the start of what would become known to many in Mexico as “the lost decade.”
“My parents could name all the pawnshops,” Servín writes in For Love of the Dollar. “They transmitted their experiences to us as if by osmosis. ‘Property should be used to get you out of sticky situations’ was the family motto. My mother’s children grew used to living on the installment plan. Filling our stomachs was the priority.”
In the early 1990s, Servín went to New York on a tourist visa, which gave him permission to stay in the U.S. for a few months. He would remain there for seven years, minus a short stay in Ireland for what was essentially a drunken spree. For Love of the Dollar is a chronicle of those years, in which Servín did his best to ignore the prevalent social stereotypes of hangdog laborer or bloodthirsty drug dealer. Instead, he was inspired by some of his literary heroes, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose experiences as a young man in Africa,