Trump Gets Trumped

As Mexico itself enters into the fray of Donald Trump politics, lampooning the contentious Republican candidate recently in a Mexico City theater, here in Santa Fe, the reaction to the man is mixed in the immigrant community—at least if you ask the men in De Vargas Park who congregate every morning seeking day labor.

They're very familiar with Trump's calls for their deportation, along with his insults that most of them are nothing more than a bunch of  rapists, drug dealers and criminals. It's a piece of footage that is played repeatedly on Spanish-language television networks, which happen to follow Trump's daily antics as closely as the media here does.

But surprisingly, the vast majority of workers who talked to SFR this week say they do not harbor hard feelings toward the self-made real estate tycoon, nor do they fear the possibility that he could become the next president of the United States.

In fact, a few even say they are willing to accept a new US presidential regime that wants nothing to do with them while others, in a strange show of support, pointed out the obvious: That Trump has a lot of "energía," and that if anybody can change the country and shore up the disparity between the rich and poor, it's the loud guy with the combover.

"If he tells us we have to go, then I will go, because I try to obey all laws," says Noe Morales, a Guatemalan native, missing the irony that he's been living in the United States without permission for 15 years yet proud that he's only been cited by Santa Fe police once, for drinking a beer in the street.

Poncho Gonzalez, a 50-year-old from the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila, hands down the most optimistic statement of the bunch:  "He's got a lot of energy, this guy. Maybe he can help the country out. Maybe he can fix the situation here with the poor, regardless of whether I'm still here or not."

More than a dozen of the workers, one after the other, when solicited for their opinions just after sunrise, rendered forgiving, almost genteel opinions on the man during a two-hour interview.

Well, except for one.

"He's sick in the head, and he's out of touch with reality," says one middle-aged man who refused to disclose his name (he did say he was from the state of Guerrero, home to the resort towns of Acapulco and Ixtapa). "I don't think he realizes that many of us don't have a choice but to come here.

"We come out of economic necessity."

You'll hear that phrase a lot in immigrant communities: necesidad económica. They're familiar with it, having personally experienced it, much in the same manner that political refugees from Central America are familiar with the US government's criteria that will grant them asilo político, or political asylum.

Both phrases are often summoned in their defense as to why they went to extremes to swim the Rio Grande to get here, or why they spent days crossing the Arizona desert, in what amounts to a death walk for some. Such measures were taken to to escape political persecution, death squads or intolerable poverty south of the Rio Bravo (as it is known in Mexico and Latin America).

Why these men don't fear Trump, they say, is because they don't fear their illegal status. Calls for their deportation are nothing new.They've heard it all before, along with the countless other ballot measures designed to further marginalize their existence: in the early 1990s, when propositions sought unsuccessfully to exclude them from enrolling in public assistance programs or public schools, or as recent as a few years ago, when President Barack Obama delayed the deportation of children brought here illegally by their parents.

It was a political maneuver that's still being criticized by the far-right, who've equated it to a form of animosity, a no-no among those who want a more secure US border.

But Trump, to be sure, is no Obama, and only next year's presidential elections will determine what's in store for the thousands of immigrant residents who live illegally in Santa Fe and the estimated 70,000 who are said to reside in New Mexico. Meanwhile, Santa Fe remains a so-called "sanctuary city," and as such, local cops can't ask them for their "papers," and their status is of no concern to officials.

And here's a fact that you may not realize: In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, undocumented immigrants  have gained more rights, not fewer, as dozens of states across the country have set their own policies in the name of simple consistency, from allowing them to receive college aid to obtaining driver's licenses to make the roads safer.

As for the men in De Vargas Park, they get up early every morning and stake out a spot in the grass or on the street, hoping someone will drive by and offer them odd jobs, ironically right outside the state's Department of Workforce Solutions, New Mexico's agency that oversees labor issues.

They tell SFR that they take refuge in the church shelters around town or live in run-down apartment complexes, some of them a half-dozen at a time to reduce the price of rent in what is a revolving door to their sleeping quarters.

And they all readily admit that their struggle to make ends meet is relatively easy compared with the very plight that drove them here, along with the sorts of negotiations they were subject to in order to get to the Promised Land. Morales, for example, says he smuggled a bag of powder cocaine into the country at the behest of coyotes who helped him, then he shows his own tote bag, una mochila, to emphasize the size.

"I'm not proud," he says, recounting how he was among 50 men who not only paid coyotes, or human smugglers, for safe passage through the Arizona desert but were also called upon to transport drugs.

"Then," he adds, "when we got to Houston, we had to pay the coyotes even more money in addition to what we'd already paid them."

It would seem that Trump's hostility is a minor player in the greater scheme of things, and among the dozens of men comes Abelardo Rivera, openly and jokingly chastised by the bunch because he is a legal resident.

"The jobs are what lures all of us," says Albelardo Rivera, 66, a native from the state of Chihuahua, the largest state in Mexico.

Right now, Rivera says he's in the process of becoming a US citizen, a move that would finally give him the right to vote. And yet, when asked who he'd vote for were he to become a US citizen by next year's elections, he point-blank said he was uncertain and didn't necessarily rule out Trump.

And with that, he leaves the interview, joining a mass of others as a pickup comes to a crawl and they all gather round, competing for what may be just one job, shouting and raising their arms like traders during the old days at the Chicago Board of Trade.

A potential job, for the moment, outweighs politics.

Santa Fe Reporter