In writing about migrants coming into Europe, the British critic John Berger once wrote (in The Seventh Man): “To see the experience of another, one must do more than dismantle and reassemble the world with him at its center. One must interrogate his situation to learn about that part of his experience which derives from the historical moment. What is being done to him, even with his own complicity, under the cover of normalcy?”

I try hard, but you know this is only conjecture, only an attempt at empathy.

You are Juan now. The terrible anxiety of the border crossing is behind you. Still there is plenty of anxiety to come. You rented a short-time call card from your coyote and made that one-minute call home to tell them to pay his henchman. You’ve made it to L.A. finally and by great good fortune you’ve found a hidey-hole. The famous Home Depot is almost an hour walk away, but you have your own small place now to be who you are. Seventy-five dollars a week in a garage partitioned into six spaces.

A closed area, a bed, a dangling string to hang shirts, two crates to store belongings—all these acquire a new meaning up here. Almost luxury. Mostly a refuge and safety from eyes, judging, disapproving, perhaps threatening eyes. Eyes of thousands of people you’ve never met, walking past you, on buses, driving in cars, always in a hurry. You have a place to retreat now and when you bend a partition closed and hook it shut like a door, you feel at least temporarily safe. There’s no foreign language to worry about. No angry shouts. No migra agents. Just lie back and think of your wife and children.

Nearby in the garage is an industrial washbasin you share and an open toilet that swirls away your shit all by itself. You also share two electric cooking rings on a small table. An old sheet of iron makes a comal to heat tortillas on the rings, and frijoles can be heated in the tin they come in. There is a tiny Mexican mini-market nearby where the Koreans speak bad Spanish and sell familiar food.

Your garage mates change often. Some speak the strange Spanish of Guatemala or an Indio language that is just noises to you. Still, most of you squat together by the cooking table in the evening and share experiences, share stories of your families, funny tales from home. You begin to collect useful items you see discarded in alleys or gutters, clothes hangers, felt for hot-pads, a bit of rope, anything really. You never know.

You also learn to beware. The city is not like your village. The village is based on always seeing people again. You learn the city is based on NEVER seeing people again. People try to trick you. One man, he seemed to speak like a campesino, sold you the address of a tile factory that needs regular workers, for twenty dollars. When you get to the address, helped by a kindly moreno bus driver who spoke halting Spanish, it’s only a tienda in a shopping area that sells women’s absurdly high-heel shoes.

As long as you’re “downtown,” you calm down and decide to look around, feeling a bit like a frantic chicken trapped inside a house. Your exploration is mostly looking into this new world through glass—fancy dresses, a barber shop, donuts, a whole tienda selling little glass animals and ceramic people – ¡Dios mio! – and at the corner, a small supermercado. Still, this place looks so big and impersonal you feel unthreatened going inside. The amount of things even in this small market is staggering, more than all the things on all the shelves in your village. People walk along the aisles with carts taking things with no expression at all, as if they’re stealing and trying not to be noticed.

Soon you realize people are paying for their collections at the cash register without saying a word. It’s so easy! You want to go crazy buying things, but it will take $1.75 on the bus to get near enough to walk home. You have two $20 bills to use. You have to consider the packages mostly by the pictures on them. You do know the word “chicken” and wonder how on earth they got a whole pollo into a small can beside the tuna cans. You put it in your cart just to find out. Beans in a bag. Red spaghetti with meat – the picture looks great. A plastic bag of large funny looking white tortillas. In a crate against the wall you find ordinary mangos and grab three.

You watch others paying and see how easy it is. You’re confident now. You make sure to watch the numbers increase on the cash register as the woman waves your packages over a magic window and you make sure to offer more dollars than that number.

The woman smiles and says “¿Quere usted comprar una bolsa?” “Do you buy a bag?” in very bad Spanish. “Yes, doña.” You nod and she puts all your purchases in a paper bag that will be handy to keep. There’s a clatter and she points to coins that have rolled into a kind of metal pig-ear.

There is so much to learn. You imitate gestures. You start memorizing the syllables of English words. You begin translating the signs you see, word by word. One strange thing you notice is that everything here is dead straight, or utterly smooth, or perfectly round. This world does not tolerate irregularity. Some of what you see shocks you, some impresses you.

One workday you lay rocks into a wall with cement, the next you paint a house or scrape a wood floor. Some days you are unfamiliar with the tools you are expected to know. A tile-cutter, a skill saw, or how to change the bit in a power-drill. Every day at the mosca (labor market), you are the subject of three calculations: a contractor’s, yours, and one neither of you knows about, how much capitalism needs its “labor reserve” today or this month or this year.

The men who hire you, or sometimes work with you, are mostly guëros – literally it means blondes, but to you it’s whites. (Clint Eastwood in “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” was as dark-haired as you can get but was called Blondie.) Most seem to resent you for some reason. You feel like you‘ve been kidnapped by the coyotes and dropped off in a hostile world. You are in an animal pen with hatred on all sides and no exit.

One day on the bus you hear, in very good Spanish: “Todos ellos llevan cuchillos. Ninguna mujer está a salvo.” (They all carry knives. No woman is safe.) You also find that the English words you learn change meaning without warning. You say “girl” very carefully, and they think you want a prostitute.

The jornalero pay from Home Depot keeps you going but it’s not enough to send much home. You need a real job and it’s time to make the jump to East L.A. and the factories, if only you can find a friend to help you.

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