Insufficiently Conservative

I created a sampler wedding album as a promotional tool for the wedding photography business Maria and I are trying to build.
It has photos from both of my sons’ weddings, a wedding of an in-law and some shots of a Hispanic bride dressing at home for her wedding.
We happened to get a chance to shoot the Hispanic girl’s preparations because Maria is good friends with her parents, a delightful immigrant couple from Mexico who operate a couple of Mexican restaurants in this area.
I love the images and think they fit well with our portfolio.
During the post-graduation open house for my stepson on Sunday, the album got passed around and a couple of the aunts who are in their 70s were startled to see non-Anglo faces among the photos.
Maria told me later that she overheard one aunt saying to the other that, “I don’t think he’s as conservative as we are.”
And I overheard them going on about how alarmed they are at the influx of Mexican and other Latino immigrants, legal and otherwise.
This from a bunch of women whose parents were born in Italy.
I had to chuckle when I heard suggestion that I might be more liberal than they. Truth be told, on most issues, I’m probably too conservative for their sensibilities.
But when it comes to slamming the door on people who want to escape from oppression or crushing poverty to live the American dream, I have to part company with people like Maria’s aunts.
My own mother was of the same mind as those women. I remember Maria and I taking her out for lunch the Easter before her October, 2000, death. We were driving through the small town where she had lived all of her adult life. It’s a community of about 2,500 mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant folks that, in recent years has seen an influx of Mexican families, drawn by the prospect of jobs at a new pork processing plant on the south edge of town.
“Just look at them, laying around and not working,” she hissed. “I’d like to kick their teeth in.”
Needless to say, we were startled. And, the vision of my 80-year-old mother being able to kick anyone’s teeth in was hopelessly bizarre. And, why would they be working on Easter Sunday?
I reminded her that our German and Swiss forebears came here for the same reasons the Mexicans do and it’s a damned fortunate thing for us that our ancestors weren’t shut out.
The subject got a good treatment recently in an episode of South Park when the townspeople were up in arms over space aliens coming to live in their town. The battle cry was a barely coherent, “They took our jobs!”
We hear that a lot from unmotivated losers who freak out over the idea of people they think are inferior having the ambition and gumption to make a success of themselves.
Immigrants have always given this country a booster shot of vitality that only underscores the genius of our brand of democracy and freedom.