Free Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson

cache to move before risking a life behind bars to steal more and replenish his stocks. The other vatos in his car, I noticed, seemed to be eying my car, truck, lawn mower - and me as well.
    In spring 2003, during the editing of the present book, all the mailboxes on our rural road were vandalized; our shed twenty yards from the house was broken into and ransacked a few hours after four Mexican youths stopped to inquire about "buying gas"; and twenty-four hours later our garage had all the spare furniture looted in the middle of the night. Roberto, who lives half a mile away, said he spotted three young Mexicans rifling through his mailbox, but could not catch them on his tractor as they sped away with all his just-paid bills. I reminded him that putting his mail in his own mailbox in rural Selma was like writing a blank check to a gang-banger.
    Worse are the meth labs that seem to spring up throughout rural
California
- the nation's drug capital for do-it-yourself chemists. Workers in these operations can make thousands of dollars in a summer. Such potential profits explain why the drug is ubiquitous on our streets and why aliens who use and sell it are cramming our prisons. Unlike the heroin or cocaine trade, meth is particularly attractive to the rural immigrant. It is usually concocted among familiar trees and vines, in a rented barn or shed miles from town, where the immigration authorities and sheriffs rarely intrude. It is a natural outdoor activity ancillary to farm work, likewise conducted in solitude and with the same network of smugglers and contractors known from the illegal trek into the United States. On two occasions, tough-looking men have shown up in my yard inquiring about renting my barn as a future "dormitory" for workers - code for a drug-making lab. If a man is here illegally and living in a stealthy world to begin with, having come from a culture where drug dealing and manufacturing are endemic among the bureaucrats and the police, then the occasional straying from the vineyard to the lab need not be so radically defined in Manichean terms of good versus evil. One year of drug chemistry might earn an illegal alien $40,000 in cash, and give him the much-sought-after victorious return to Mexico in a way farm wages never can; or, contrarily, it can earn him twenty years in Folsom Prison, a body illustrated with tattoos, and lifelong membership in a Mexican prison gang.
    Despite the dangers and drudgery, however, the wage for menial labor in America is far better than anything earned in Mexico. An unskilled laborer from the Sierra Madre is lucky to make $25 a week; in
California
he can easily earn nearly $10 an hour and often more. To the worker, the initial realization that there is such an El Dorado is dazzling, quite unbelievable. Young males under thirty years of age in their first tour of duty in America seem starved for work. They toil ten hours a day - amazed that they have more money in their wallets in a week than they once had in an entire year.
    I sometimes think that only the vast contrast with Mexico keeps the illegal alien in America alive; only the memory of the former harshness of real hunger, dirt floors, untreated illnesses and outdoor privies in Mexico steels him for what he must face in America. I once asked two raisin-tray rollers how they felt after ten hours of labor on their knees in 110-degree weather - "Better than in Mexico," one said. I thought to myself, "Well, better than in hell too, I suppose." I paid them $100 each, but noticed that their car's starter was just about out, and figured they had rolled all day for the cost of getting home.
    To talk with these young men is to hear of extravagant dreams   - all culminating in a grand and permanent return to their village in central or southern Mexico: a ranchero, a new block house, two Chevy pickups, alligator boots, black felt hat, jewelry - all the Mexican signs of material success in America. Of course, the university