Section I.
Before I knew it, I had intermittently slept my way to Houston where I coincided with a man of my father’s age and his son who was entering high school. We did not notice each other until we reached the Louisiana border, where he had loudly begun to speak to his North Carolinian wife on the phone and watch what I could only assume to be Tiktoks or Youtube Shorts. I will not lie, I was cranky since I was only on hour 8 of sleep over these past 2 days and Port Arthur’s swamp at 7 am did not mix well with the oil refineries and petrochemical plants which were the only skyline of this small town. Dawn and delirium created a landscape behind the dusty windows of the Greyhound bus which made Port Arthur feel like the beginning of a Silent Hill film–with smoke which I mistook as fog engulfing the empty streets of Texas’ soon-to-be leading seaport for liquefied natural gas.
I could not help but warm up to this man after the moment he took the leap of faith of asking me the simple question: “¿Hablas Español?” (Do you speak Spanish?).
I meekly replied with, “Sí” (Yes).
He asked what the bus driver had said over the intercom as we approached our 10 minute pit-stop in Lafayette, Louisiana; there’s a hesitancy of whether to get off or not from what seems to have been a tumultuous trip. I asked him where he’s going, which opened the door for our short but fruitful relationship after the most sustained human contact I’ve had thus far was an erratic mother on her way to a wedding in San Antonio, a drug addict from the bayous of Lousiana who I had bought a burger in El Paso, and my boyfriend texting me about his new infatuation with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
He assumed a new prideful position.“I have just crossed from Matamoros [a border city on the US-Mexico border] a couple hours ago–they put us on this bus so I may reconnect with my wife in North Carolina,” he says in a cool tone.
Shocked, I pried more: “Oh, is this your first time in the US?”
He snickered, “Oh no no, I’ve crossed many times and have lived across the US. I have worked many odd jobs–construction, which I’m actually taking up again in North Carolina, farmhand, transportation, whatever.”
I grinned and he continued, “It was much easier back then. You could just cross and find work immediately”. He begins to laugh hysterically, “They’ve caught me plenty of times–but–I just came running back!” The whole bus was filled with laughter as the early morning sun began to flood us through the pockets of clean glass shields; I can’t help but laugh with him and ask which parts of the US he had lived before.
He went “Texas of course, but I loved California the most”. My eyes widened, and the voice which I usually deepened for straight men began to squeak. “Ahhh! I am from California–which part did you live in?”. He leaned closer to me, “I had lived in Anaheim–”. I interrupted him. “Oh wow that’s so close to where I grew up! Do you know Menifee?”, I asked with the usual silence following this question.
I then performed the usual protocol of describing the Inland Empire to be a region in Southern California that lied between Los Angeles and San Diego–but not by the coast. He nodded softly, so I proceeded to ask, “Do you know where Riverside is?”. He then smiled “Ah yes, I’ve worked there before!”. I rebounded with glee and described Menifee to be 30 minutes south of Riverside.
He reciprocated with stories of his home in the Mexican state of Guerrero, which he wouldn’t have left if it were not for the cartels which had increasingly extorted more and more money from him; then he proceeds to show me Whatsapp messages between him and his immigration lawyer who had cleared his name after federal authorities had mistaken him for another man of the same name who committed a crime. Sooner or later, I am the translator for the multiple people on the Greyhound who were recently processed at Matamoros with him and his son–the majority of whom were Venezuelans. The rest of the migrants, an eclectic array of Mexican, Central American, Haitian, Chinese, and Russian–yes, Chinese and Russian.
I was dumbfounded when he shared this with me, but in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised. Mexico has maintained an independent foreign policy on the issue of Ukraine-Russia conflict and the US-China trade war, allowing citizens of these US-sanctioned states to enter Mexico while also providing the opportunity to apply for asylum at the US border.
After we had parted ways at New Orleans, I had dug through plenty of local news reports on these transcontinental refugees. Apparently, more than half of Russian asylum seekers had their asylum applications approved–markedly better than other national/ethnic applicants on the southern border; similarly, Europe has opened its arms for Ukranians fleeing war while a little under a decade ago, it had allowed Libyan and Syrian refugees to die on its shores. Borders, whether European or American, are beacons of multiculturalism for a select few. Well of course–it doesn’t take a philosophy major to realize that. Yet when I close my eyes I can recall the first time I saw the border at night from above. Tijuana–the bustling metropolis where my dad was born, my mother was raised, and where I lost too many soccer balls to the cliff by my grandma’s house–brimmed with life through its yellow fluorescence and equally boisterous people. Yet, you can see where God himself has stabbed the Earth via the abrupt darkness which demarcates el Otro Lado. Within it holding only what I can presume is barbed wire and countless fences; mangled bodies of unassuming animals who have fallen for the traps set to kill human migrants from the South. The Earth itself is wounded with ugly sores and scars of rusted metal that popped out at first glance. Red headlights accumulated from Tijuana towards the US and blurred into a stream of blood which flowed out of the concrete walls like a hemophiliac’s paper cut–this has become eternal for some odd reason. Something which I should assume to be natural despite its most obvious artifice. But I feel it all within me: the world which we must win. And I see it within this man who had eyes like mine–like those of my father and his father. It’s the reason why I’m taking this 49-hour bus from San Jose to New Orleans.
Section II.
Taking the same roads as my father has as a truck driver is funny considering I’m getting paid to sit in my comfy bus chair to study labor movements in the US South, but I’ll take it. I had entered Stanford to study economics and math with dreams of solving inequality–and had done everything right when I was freshly 18.
I worked as a mail-boy at the Center on Poverty and Inequality, where I first acquainted myself with the sterility of office spaces and proceeded to work on three remote research jobs the summer after my freshman year in the midst of a global pandemic. But my sophomore slump began with a break-up over Facetime and nowhere to cry because I was cramped in a one-bedroom studio with three friends, along with being forced to listen to 30 year olds blabber on Zoom about bootstrap confidence intervals in my graduate Labor Economics seminar, which I thought would at least talk about laborers once. By winter quarter I had scuffled with my Macroeconomic analysis TA over the validity of the negative effects of free trade deals and had realized this major (or at least this major at Stanford) was not for me. I am not too regretful, despite the lost time of how I had completed all but one class of the major core requirements. I had still learned of my distaste for technocracy and social science’s death spiral of “big data research methods”.
Beyond any resentment I need to probably resolve on my own, the truth is I had learned more about our supply-chain crisis when I wished my father “Happy Birthday" over the phone than any classes I had taken.
On October 9th, 2021, he spoke of the Long Beach port being clogged with imports with no workers in sight. Prices had surged for all goods, and in typical dad-candor, he said “This is why you always need to have an extra generator, fuel, beans, rice, and water”; precarity has become assumed for us.
I cannot blame him of course–when the only safety net institutionalized within society is the family unit, we cannot help but operate this way. Nevertheless, he told me not to worry like any father tells his son. But aren’t we both so helpless to this all? I am 434 miles away from home and can only gain glimpses of what life is like through my occasional phone calls with my mom. He enthusiastically declared his desire to visit Stanford to watch a live football game during Thanksgiving break as if my mom hadn’t already told me he had changed his mind earlier that week given the pain near the right side of his abdomen–he puts on this facade for me; and when I remind him of his pain, he quickly minimizes the situation.
My mom had advised him to utilize vacation days as a means to rest, so he came up with elaborate plans of how to maximize 2 sick days with federal holidays. This is the natural state of the American worker. But I can’t shake it off my body: How could we live like this?
Why must I begin tearing up whenever he tells me about work on the phone? How he tells me that he is so tired. How he tells me that a new part of his body hurts. How he tells me that he does the work of 3 men. How the only way he got a raise was by directly talking to the manager after processing $610,000 worth of orders.
7 minutes in San Jose on the phone and it’s enough to make me feel the weight of the entire history of immigrant labor. Only fear accompanies me in these reflections given how I know the conclusion of this trajectory to be diminished states of man that my grandfather had become. Is our fate as Mexican men in this country always doomed to this curse? We kill ourselves for the empire that tore our homeland apart and say we do it for the family.
And while he says I have escaped this curse, I nod to entertain this fantasy so he can sleep easier at night; the white lies we tell to reassure each other are just another trait we share.
But we are an entire nation of him, my Apa, who has always been elusive to me despite how we are practically identical twins; what he did as a truck driver was even more astounding to me considering I still cannot drive. Similarly, the Inland Empire felt more like an inconvenience to introduce myself than any sense of home. Yet, it was home, in all of its barren glory. And I could only understand the Inland Empire, along with my father, if I had taken the roads they took towards the Mojave—its invisible network of rails and trucks which are most apparent for the nocturnal.
Before I had reached Port Arthur, I had already been on the Greyhound for about 40 hours from San Jose, CA. From 8:35 am to 7 pm, I reached the outskirts of LA towards the various towns which blended into each other known as the Inland Empire. The trucking hub of Fontana existed to me as my father’s former workplace and where my high school soccer team had been humiliated by Chicano teens with ultra-gelled faux-hawks. Yet, in the light of dusk in 2023, it had a thick smog with piles of unmixed concrete along the highways that shone bright against the billboards which insisted trucks to stop by their depot. Nearby, San Bernardino similarly had slow freight trains humming against the streets which seemed to frighten residents by the time 8 pm had come–no surprise considering it to be an intermodal shipping hub for one of the largest freight rails in North America, the BNSF. The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) is as long as its name considering its duopolistic control of transcontinental rail in America since 1996; its rails paralleled the Interstate-10 highway which the Greyhound Bus taking me to New Orleans trudged along. Yet, it is not the first nor last behemoth of capital which has dominated the area.
San Bernardino nestles along a valley which has been home to the Tongva people pre- and post-colonization. She has been transferred between many empires–of the monarchical and republican strain; the former of Spanish origin that synthesized into the Mexican Empire at the turn of the 19th century, and the latter of Anglo descent which would not merely influence its Mexican counterparts to become a republic, but also invade them to realize its goals of becoming an imperial republic. It wouldn’t be until after the Mexican-American War that San Bernardino became how we know it today: an outpost conveniently wrapped around dry mountains of the same name which shielded against the high desert of the western Mojave, whose crevice towards the desolate expanse of Joshua trees served as an entry point for the bounty of human, industrial, and agricultural capital entering and leaving Los Angeles and the rapidly-industrializing eastern United States. Sooner or later, it would become one of the crucial shipping hubs for the most populous and wealthy states in the American Empire–the frontier was no more for the cartographers who now sketch the boundaries of our nation to be fully integrated.
Nevertheless, when you enter the Mojave you cannot help but worship the San Bernardino mountains and how they protect us from the desert’s encroaching barrenness. Despite how sprawling Southern California has become, the voyeur of sparseness waits for us to leave the warm cradle of mountain ranges. Those in Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura, or Anaheim may not realize this, but the frontier still haunts the Inland Empire. And our people are sent into its mystery everyday for the sake of assuring what has arrived at the Long Beach port may be delivered to the various metropoles whose financial capital engenders a similar gravitational force to that of Jupiter, reeling in our teamsters like traversing asteroids whose course becomes either sucked into or whipped towards the next city.
By midnight we reached the easternmost Californian city of Blythe which nestles at a junction point along the Colorado River towards the final destinations of the Inland Empire’s shipping network. Follow the river north and soon you will reach the Hoover dam alongside Las Vegas; follow it south and you reach Yuma and the Mexican border; cross the river and you approach Phoenix, or turn back to the shining jewel of LA. The night makes it all too clear what these cities are for the metropoles of America as the cities blend deeply into the Mojave, with Chevrons and Burger Kings acting as lighthouses for truck drivers who transport the countless goods which have been recently processed at San Diego from Mexico, or have just arrived at Long Beach from across the Pacific. The dim street lights of the residential zones obscure wooden homes but reflect off the white coats of the hundreds of unused trucks which lay idle in arid plots of land; storage units and warehouses accompany them so they are not lonely.
The truth of our political economy reveals itself when everyone has gone to bed—where time gets compressed with dreams and stillness which cannot be extended to the teamsters of our nation. I suppose it's strange to see what my father had done in the early morning hours, where we would sometimes catch ourselves awake–I’m studying the religious wars in France, and he is on his way to feed the American Southwest. I cannot help but be disgustedly in awe of this bereavement we call efficiency, whose value-chain similarly corrals bus caravans of newly-admitted immigrants from the southern border towards the various growing cities in the Sunbelt that lie beyond the Inland Empire.
I’ve been looking for America for a long time and for once I can trust my own eyes. Strip back the noise of academic screeds regarding the irrevocable horrors embedded in this land, clarify the hallucinations which baseless national myths conjure, and you shall see its people who reflect into you.
Like the workers of San Bernardino who may be a vital component of our economy, yet suffer high poverty rates given their income level to be half of even that of the Inland Empire–whose income and educational outcomes are already below the state’s average. Yet, perhaps they should be grateful to the gracious magnates of the globalized economy for blessing them with the opportunity to ship their products at low wages. San Bernardino had been reeling from the end of the Cold War which prompted job losses for former military base workers, which the logistics and transportation sector soon provided solace for. We can understand the economic restructuring of our world via the alteration of the Inland Empire’s landscape for the emergent service-based economy in the 1990s.
The air force base was transformed into an airport and the vast expanses of land which defined the once sparsely-populated, agricultural Inland Empire had been filled with the mass construction of warehouses, shopping malls, storage units, retail stores and cheap residential homes. Far were the days of nuclear war hovering over us; workers no longer needed to produce defense-related goods for the sake of the US Military. Transnational capital was now the reigning sovereign of the 1990s with the collapse of the communist bloc and it demanded American workers to be servants which facilitated the mass consumption by privileged classes. Storage units filled with trinkets and extra couches that could not fit in newly constructed 2-story dream homes whose cheap prices were overshadowed by an even more unbelievable low monthly payment on subprime mortgages. Retail stores were flooded with affordable game consoles and toys of the latest fashion which still dominate the consciousness of nostalgic millennials who would never know peace again after September 9th, 2001. And warehouses held these new products from across the Pacific of the newly-liberalized economies of China and Vietnam, whose sweatshops underlied their affordability.
This was the American Dream 2.0. And soon my parents would move away from their dear home of San Diego/Tijuana when I was two years old so they too could experience the allure of the Inland Empire in exchange for my father’s commitment to work on the frontier of the Mojave and Central Valley. Our home scratched the sky to my eyes as a young child, and our pool proved a mighty challenge for my body which was one-third the size of our chihuahua. Outside the boundaries of our neighborhood were vacant plots which always had a lonesome white “For Lease” sign, and a massive beige building which blended with our drought-stricken soil that had “Revival Christian Fellowship” plastered on the facade facing me. My favorite restaurant, Carl’s Jr, was the same walking distance from my home as my elementary school and soccer games defined my weekends.
I was fairly happy as a child if you discounted my nonverbal disposition at family parties given how embarrassed I was of my low Spanish fluency. Yet, this delusion of grandeur would soon collapse during the 2008 Great Recession, which demonstrated to us how precarious it is to rely upon mindless consumerism, cheap credit, and servants to create a robust economy. Moving to a much smaller rental home away from my friends confused my 9 year old self; there seemed to be no real reason why this had to happen. I suppose there really wasn’t considering it was propelled by fictitious capital simulating economic flourishing.
But this was still the Inland Empire afterall, and I made the most of what a precocious child can in these circumstances. I dug massive holes in our backyard at the prime hours of my mom’s naps and my father’s work given how they would scold me if I was caught because we did not “own that land”. This same reason would be why my parents did not invest in our tiny backyard, whose dead grass was luckily garnished with our neighbor’s large willow tree that slightly spilled over from their side of the dilapidated fence. Only as a young man can I really understand these property relations and why my parents continually refused to fix our backyard. My mother would nevertheless still plant in the front yard; and my father would sometimes scold her given how this was a renovation for the property owner on our dime; but we had to still live.
This would not be the first time capital has extracted something from us. So if it wants to consume our flowers then let it–only as long as we can enjoy them presently, for this makes them ours to relish in.
I have such fond memories of the Inland Empire despite the fact that if I begin to recall too much I would start helplessly sobbing. I cannot say I have made peace with my elusive home, but it has taught me intimately of capital’s parasitic tendrils which has seeded within me an immense desire for its absolute defeat.
My parents would soon buy a new house in 2015 along the northern edges of Sun City, whose model retirement community massively stood out from the relatively new housing developments of Menifee. I had just finished my first year of high school, and soon was off to college by the fall of 2019. However, the fate of Menifee has become increasingly apparent given how every time I return home, the empty plots nearby had either been filled with new residential homes for professional LA and San Diego commuters, or warehouses for Amazon and Fedex which had already become commonplace for San Bernardino. I would hear of my sister or cousin taking a new grueling job at these warehouse jobs–some of which would only last 1-2 months. I realize that all I have discussed so far has finally reached our newly-incorporated city: that this is the new terrain of an too familiar class war.
My parents love to poke fun at me regarding my politics and outlook on the world. My posters, my long rants, my subversive aesthetic, just anything about me to be honest. However, it’s not because this is their opinion of such things, but rather, the mystery behind why I turned out this way. Again, this is fully my mistake; however, they also never asked me “why” am I like this. Don’t take this as an indication of apathy on their end. I just believe they don’t know what to do with me.
But I do not give my parents enough credit. I recall talking to them on the phone earlier and out of the blue they asked “How’s your podcast?”. I responded with “Oh! I was planning on starting in the fall–I just need to finish writing things this summer.” I can’t believe they remembered after only talking to them about it once, 3 months ago.
My mom went on to tell me “You work on many things! A book, pamphlets, podcast, that conference. Quite busy!” and I laughed! She reassured me to “continue with all [my] endeavors” and my father interjects to say “But do not forget to rest!”.
I laugh, but do they know I want to tell them the same things? I say “Of course I will rest. What type of life is it to not rest?”
Was that a rhetorical question? Yes. But is it not beautiful how we exist in parallels? How I could tell my mother to pursue her endeavors of whatever home renovation she seeks or to tell my father to not forget to rest. And yet, my lips remained shut to maintain this perfect moment of intimacy—reciprocating would seem contrived so I laughed and waited for the next topic.
Perhaps it’s the perfect distance we keep. Their brief questions regarding my career; my brief questions regarding our home. Love as the arbiter of succinct truths between us. Unconditional bonds that are happy to remain elemental for greater structures. But watch how their questions are always about me & mine are always about us [and what can be deemed ours—home]. We both seek to know more about what is most mysterious:
Their precocious son who has become a young man.
My home which had always felt liminal, but forever available.