Latino Salsa Fires US Economy - And Bigotry

12/24/1997

Eric Ellis arrives in Castroville, California, in his series on the momentous economic transformation of the United States.

ANTONIO Costafuente proudly shows off the "green card" that keeps him in the US.

He opens the door of his beaten-up pick-up truck. Instead of reaching for his wallet in the glove-box, he beams at his 10-year-old son, Ramon, sucking on a Coke and stuffing McDonald's french fries into his mouth. "That is my green card. Born in the USA!" says Antonio, who 20 years ago swam across the Rio Grande that separates his native Mexico from the US.

Antonio and his mate Carlos, today selling vegetables from a roadside stall in Castroville - the artichoke capital of the world - are just two of hundreds of thousands of Latino "illegales" that are the backbone of the Californian economy, which itself cements the wider, booming, US economy.

The aphorism now is that without Latinos, the US would grind to a halt. For a Spanish speaker, it is very easy to go through a Californian day and not speak English to anyone.

Latinos wash white America's cars, cook its food, serve its hotdogs, pack its groceries, pick its fruit and vegetables from California to Washington to Idaho, pump its petrol and pack its skis and boots after a hard day on the slopes.

And that's not half of it.

If the US enters the 21st century bilingual it will have nothing to do with Berlitz or a progressive education system, but everything to do with the army of Latina housekeepers and nannies, hailing from El Salvador to Mexico, that tend white America's houses and raise its children - for the minimum wage, of course.

Castroville, 150 kilometres south of San Francisco and close to Monterey, famous as the setting for John Steinbeck's classic Cannery Row, is no different to any other small town in mid-California in that it is 90 to 95 per cent Hispanic.

It was here in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley - America's salad bowl, as it calls itself - that the late Cesar Chavez fought a long civil rights battle for the Latino community during the 1950s and 1960s.

Before them it was the "Okies" and "Arkies" from back east who fled the Depression to sunny California, where they didn't always need a roof and they could eat what they picked.

Many of their descendants today live in caravans on the outskirts of regional towns. Their less polite compatriots call them "trailer trash". But not the Latinos.

Where much of the focus on race in the US was on the more vocal black community, Chavez politicised and unionised his fellow Latinos working the farms of California.

Today, Chavez is celebrated as the Latino Martin Luther King Jnr.

To get a grip on how Hispanic California has become - it was formerly part of the Spanish colonies - one need only twiddle the car radio dials driving down Highways 1, 5 and 101 that connect San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Mariachi, merengue and salsa music spill forth from the airwaves.

In an only-in-LA tale, Beverly Hills is galvanised by a campaign by actor Julie Newmar, best known to Australian audiences as the first "Catwoman" in the high-camp Batman TV series of the 1960s.

From her Beverly Hills mansion, the much face-lifted Newmar has railed against the noise made by gardening equipment used by Latino workers hired by her neighbours. In a pamphlet and press campaign, Newmar yearns for the comforting, American "sound of rakes and brooms on a walk or driveway," instead of the leaf blowers used by Latino gardeners in what is often their first job in their adopted land.

Ms Newmar has taken to wearing earmuffs, and even wrote to the LA Mayor, Richard Riordan, seeking a ban. She has become a prime mover in a white lobby group called ZAP for Zero Air Pollution.

Other members includes actress Meredith Baxter, from the white-bread, white picket fence 1970s show Family, and the wife of Mission Impossible's Jim Phelps, Peter Graves.

The LA Council agreed to ban leaf blowers used within 500 feet of residences - or just about everywhere in urban LA - but relented when the aggrieved Latino garden workers' union stepped in. The ban is now on hold until January 1.

In the meantime, a company making the leaf blowers has filed suits claiming its constitutionalrights have been infringed, while Latinos say their civil rights and health are at risk without the automation.

Ms Newmar has threatened to move to New Zealand, the supposed image of white traditional values, and ZAP is threatening citizen's arrests of errant Latinos.

It's getting ugly out there in suburbia, but Catwoman and her civil rights during the '50s and '60s. mates better get used to it. There are about 30 million Hispanics in the US, about 11 per cent of the population, concentrated in the border States and the bigger cities but spread across the country.

They have increasing muscle in media, local and national politics and government, and while newly arrived Salvadoreans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans and Guatemalans might take jobs like tending Catwoman's garden at the entry-level, recent studies show they don't stay there for long.

They quickly vault ahead of the black community and are just behind newly arrived Asians in purchasing power and economic muscle.