In contrast to the prevailing narratives, For Love of the Dollar is a picaresque; a tale of adventure and misadventure, as Servín wends his way through the Tri-state area. He finds work in the kitchen of a restaurant in midtown Manhattan (but not before spending a hundred and twenty dollars to acquire a false Social Security number, in order to have the privilege of paying taxes on the six dollars an hour he earns). He graduates to being a “nanny” for the rich brats of a suburban family, where he helps himself to the liquor cabinet when no one is looking. He also mows the lawns in an elite golf club, and culminates his stay in the U.S. with a job pumping gas at a Mobil station in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Throughout, Servín is skeptical, and at times downright contemptuous, of his compatriots (including one who kisses a crucifix around his neck each time someone gives him a dollar tip for cleaning a windshield). He writes:
The day laborers were never too interested in learning English; they would let their bosses speak to them in choppy, rude Spanish or through interpreters. Sometimes they wanted to learn, but they couldn’t; at other times, they could, but there was always something better to do than go to classes...Sooner or later, the law of minimal effort would prevail. Single men would live crowded together in guesthouses or small rooms that were sometimes the property of their bosses. When they weren’t working, they bummed around the house, lazing away the day. The most obsessive ones saved up (or ostentatious used cars, luxury items, electrical apparatuses, or transactions with a coyote...They would return to their countries each winter, and they would return each spring to seasonal jobs, without money and with hangovers that would last until summer. They would complain, but the dollar’s an addiction.
Unlike them, Servín revels in his status as an immigrant in the shadows of his adopted country, living his version of the American Dream: listening to James Brown records and spending every cent he earns in dive bars, or on flasks of whiskey and grams of cocaine to keep him warm on winter nights in the gas station, or feeling up strippers in peep-show booths in Times Square (just before that part of New York was transformed into Disneyland). His quest for love and sex most often ends in mishaps along the lines of a low-rent Henry Miller, in encounters with prostitutes, adulterous wives, or waking up in a pool of vomit alongside other undocumented Mexicans.
I’m not saying that Servín is the only Mexican who ever crossed the border on a joyride. But as far as I know, he’s the only one who ever wrote a book about it. With a mordant eye, he never loses sight of his social status and the Faustian bargain the undocumented make along with their dollars. They were:
...black and Latino workers, undesirable renters, but ready to live by the highway and the interstate in a gloomy neighborhood surrounded by factories, warehouses, gas stations, and waste processing plants that attracted opossum, squirrels, and skunks. The streets were rarely traversed at night and, if so, only by people passing through and looking for drugs in the nearby ghettos, all located next to the train station. Our awareness that we lived in poor neighborhoods was consoled by the fact that the power and water always ran, the streets were paved, and that problems were taken care of quickly. The landlords asked for two months’ rent in advance, for our work phone numbers, and that we try to minimize our accents. As a “favor,” they wouldn’t run the credit on the Social Security number on the copy of our bank statement.
Much has changed in the twenty or so years since Servín left the U.S. and returned to Mexico. But some things stay the same ad infinitum. Since the 1970s, U.S. politicians, talking out of one side of their mouths, have spoken in accusing and censorious terms of the “immigrant problem” in the U.S., while at the same time, out of the other side, exploiting those same immigrants’ willingness to work for low wages in their communities (and pay taxes, sometimes at a higher rate than the wealthy in those same communities). Now that the U.S. has elected a president whose political platform was primarily a screed against the undocumented, perhaps before long we will regard For Love of the Dollar as a sentimental document, some nostalgie de la boue from more carefree times.
David Lida
Mexico City, 2017
Norma picked up her bag from the desk and left the room, slamming the door. It wasn’t the first time we’d argued, but it was the first time we’d insulted each other face-to-face. She had taken the liberty of snooping in my stuff and I caught her reading my stories. By way of apology, she admitted that they had a certain flair, but that they were corrosive and destructive. They reflected the worst of me without even trying. This type of “confessional” writing—that’s what she called it—negated everything that Norma understood about “holding beliefs.” But her fear of accepting the reasons she lived in an eighty-square-foot studio apartment was the real trigger for a squabble filled with bitter reproaches over the insinuations in my writing. Still, her complaints, as indignant as ever, didn’t phase me; I’d made the call years ago to make no enemies, least of all my sister—our hatreds are chips off the same block.
As far as I’m concerned, all of humanity’s acts are plagued by hatred and disappointment. Norma is ruled by her visceral opinions not only about me, but about all of those who surround her. Hatred, a much more sincere feeling than “love,” is the piston of rebelliousness, the only way of denying misers and scoundrels any respect. If we didn’t have the option of sugarcoating it with irony, the streets would be filled with execution walls and scaffolds.
Accepting hatred as a part of our essence keeps us afloat above the scared and resentful masses—whom Norma secretly loathes—those who are incapable of hating, who just keep themselves busy with any old trinket in their hands. A mass of unhappy people hounded by hunger and poverty from all corners of the world. Mexicans, as always, anguishing and puppet-like. Submissive, swindled, apathetic, and yet agonizing over little things. Loyal to their tyrants and to their sweet Virgen de Guadalupe. But if we were to position ourselves beyond hatred, we might aspire to the freedom of assuming responsibility for our decisions without laying the blame on others.
That’s how I was trying to sum up the contradictions in my fragmented culture and my daily experiences. It proved pointless to highlight the motives behind what I rejected and what I held on to. Norma was one of the few day laborers I knew who, at least until that moment, would open up to me about more than just the typical problems of people like us. She left the TV blaring as the final evidence of her furious presence in the room, then her high heels hastily descended the stairwell of the house on Alexander Avenue.
It had been a brief yet intense argument, leaving me exhausted. I turned off the television and lay down in bed. The ceiling fan looked like a vulture circling above its prey. The whipping blades were not enough to ease the tense and sticky atmosphere, nor to shoo away the flies sneaking in through some hole in the open window’s screen.
In which...the Artist arrives in the Bronx on the Fourth of July...the Artist’s sister becomes the Artist’s roommate...the Artist learns about brownstones...the landlord keeps an open mind about different ethnicities...the Artist gets to know the other boarders.
You could relax in the South Bronx only if you agreed to give up silence. Its residents formed the core of a refined version of barbarism within a society that was as opulent as it was inequitable. On the streets of the United States, enough