Dear Mexican,
Why do Mexicans have padrinos for everything? I never understood why; can you help me out?The Godfather Fan
Dear Wab,
Many gabachos have long wondered about the galaxy of godparents that surround Mexicans from birth to death, but it's no misterio. Ostensibly, godparents (padrino is a godfather, madrina is a godmother, and padrinos means "godparents") are individuals who take a solemn vow during a Catholic Church service to look after someone about to undergo a sacrament, whether a friend's baptized child, a teen on the brink of his or her First Communion, or a bride and groom needing someone to pay for the tiered sheet cake at their wedding banquet. Gabacho Catholics and other non-Papists also feature similar pseudo-kinship traditions, but few play the padrino card as well as Mexicans. Beyond religion, we've set up an ingenious system: Whenever there's an occasion that requires a party—whether it be a weekend carne asada, a charity baseball game for a hometown benefit association, a birthday, or another day dodging la migra—Mexicans will ask their friends to be a padrino of a material item not so much to sanctify a deeper relationship between the two but because the party holder is just too damn cheap to pay for everything. The prospective padrino is always screwed, since to deny someone's godfather invitation creates enmity that fades away only with a shoot-out or a free case of Budweiser. Nevertheless, the compadrazgo system remains important since it binds families through thick and thin, and we all know how thin times have historically been in Mexico—unless it's lazy daughters, of course.
Why is it that Mexicans accept lower salaries than their legal or American counterparts? Example: One contractor in Columbus, Ga., told my son that he could hire 20 Mexicans for the same price he would have to pay my son! I know this is a racist comment, but it does seem that someone accepting $6 an hour compared to an American who usually gets double the money illegals accept is always going to come up short. Is this practice used to force legals and Americans out of the job market? I sincerely think that if everyone would ask for the same pay, there would not be this problem with immigration.Beaners on My Mind
Dear Gabacho,
Yours is a question that the American working man has asked since the days of Miles Standish. And the answer isn't a pretty one: socialism. Sorry, Beaners on My Mind, but the only true way to stem Mexicans and their illegal brethren from invading our shores isn't through pie-in-the-cielo fences or harsh legislation; it's through the institution of an economic system that ensures companies won't underpay or relocate offshore to the Promised Land of no regulations. America has prospered specifically because such a system doesn't exist in this country; instead, the Founding Fathers encouraged an economy where citizens had to compete against rapacious businessmen from the top, undercutting immigrants from below. In the past, such struggles motivated American workers to form unions, secure employee rights, create the eight-hour workday, and hustle. Today? The only scratches on the ample Know Nothing belt are high ratings for Lou Dobbs and a continual, wussy whine.
Reader Comments
Americans can't even comprehend what that kind of suffering is taking place.
Hillary Clinton's convenient turnabout on NAFTA and free trade
Friday, March 07, 2008
Cleveland Plain Dealer Letters Editorial Page
Voters are shopping their jobs away at places like Wal-Mart and now are vot ing their jobs away by supporting Hillary Clinton. Here is the real timeline behind free trade:
1956 - U.S. government starts moving factories outside the United States.
1970 - 120 factories moved from the United States to Mexico.
1980 - 400 maquiladora factories in Mexico.
1980s - While Hillary Clinton was on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart, about 1,000 U.S. factories were moved to Mexico.
1992 - 2,000 maquiladora factories in Mexico.
1994 - NAFTA is passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress and signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton; number of factories moved to Mexico doubles to more than 4,000; reports tell of "dirty manufacturing" in Mexico causing health problems and birth defects.
1995 - President Clinton rushes $20 billion to save the Mexican economy. Then he uses other means to rush even more money to Mexico. ( President asked Congress for $40 billion but they gave him just $20 billion instead- he said he would use other means to get the extra money to bail out the Mexican peso )
1996 - Hillary says NAFTA is good for everyone.
2000 - Hillary, at an economic forum in Switzerland, praises business efforts in supporting NAFTA.
None of the above stopped the flood of Mexican workers to the United States seeking economic survival.
Now, after all of that, Hillary says free trade has to be tweaked at bit.
Ray Tapajna
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Letters Editors
March 7, 2008
Read what ten Mexican bishops think about NAFTA at
http://www.bizarrepolitics.com/nafta-cultural-death
The U.S. 1956 Program that moved factories to Mexico was supposed to be a temporary one but it never ended and evolved into the breakdown of wages in both the USA and Mexico. It was supposed to last only a year or two to help the Mexican and Central American economies while providing cheaper goods for the American consumer. Now we have the cheaper goods but the working poor class in the USA are finding it is difficult to afford even the cheaper imports. The pillars of support for free trade are consumers and they are now being affected by the race to the bottom.
Labor has been a stepchild of philosophy and economics for a long time. And workers have no voice in the process of globalization and free trade - see more info at http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews/id40.html