If it's true that fiction can get around the prejudices people carry with them and subtly change hearts and minds, then our culture now ought to be full of the best, most empathetic people in history. We have more literature available to us than any culture in history, with many of the great works available for free online or on Kindle. There are resources to help understand that literature. And then there's the Golden Age of American Television, with streaming services giving us quality programming to challenge and stretch us. (Yes, there is plenty of good stuff to go along with the straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler movies.)
When I read a story like "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz, my first thought is whether a short story is actually good for anything in the face of a massive social issue. This is the second year in a row Best American Short Stories included a story from the point-of-view of illegal immigrants. Last year, it was "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez, which I didn't care for, largely because it didn't seem to say anything about the border and incarceration that hasn't already been said a million times. (Incidentally, most of the traffic I get on my site seems to be from students who are assigned Best American Short Stories in school. I can tell which stories are the ones they want to write about by following which of my posts they click on. Henriquez's story is by far the least-clicked link from 2018 BASS.)
This year, "Anyone Can Do It" is a solid piece. It's not clear whether the protagonist is actually illegal. She claims throughout to be from Texas, although, because the characters in the story talk about Texas as though it were still part of Mexico ("the Matamoros side of Texas" as well as the "Texas side of Mexico"), it's not clear that her claim would be recognized by the INS. (And I do mean the INS rather than ICE, because this seems to be set a few decades ago.) What the story does right is take a big social issue like illegal immigration and the socially useful work done by immigrant labor (picking fruit, in this case) and look at it from an intensely personal lens.
Delfina's husband doesn't come back from the orchard one night. Nobody's husbands in the neighborhood do, and everyone is worried they've been rounded up. A woman named Lis from down the street cons Delfina into using the family car to take the two of them to go work in the orchards while Lis's daughter watches Delfina's son. Delfina is suspicious, but eventually gives in. Lis steals Delfina's car, takes their joint daily wages, and runs off.
It's full of suspense for the reader as we watch the bad thing happen to Delfina in slow motion. We listen to her slowly talking herself into it, even though she is right to be suspicious, because what are her options? If she doesn't take a chance with Lis, she won't be able to pay the rent in a few days.
We see the "law" contrasted with "justice," as Delfina's son steals a toy car from a store while she is on the phone with her family. We know he shouldn't have done it, but given his life, who would want him to take it back? Even a reader who has particular political views about illegal immigration shouldn't fail to empathize with her as she struggles to take care of her kid. And the possibility that she might actually be from Texas, meaning she might be legal, means that at least that one objection can be held at bay.
For that matter, because Delfina is cheated by another member of her own community, while the only person who is kind to her is an old white man, a white reader can read the story without feeling personally attacked. So if any story is going to change how a hardcore send-em-all-back immigration hardliner feels, it would be this one.
But I don't think it will. The actual human cost of our current social policy isn't hidden. There are signs all around of what it means. Even if "change" from this story isn't measured in people changing their political views--because I can believe someone might feel genuine empathy and still think it's important to secure our borders--at the very least, the story ought to challenge the comfortable belief that immigrants are lazy and soaking up our social services. The title "Anyone Can Do It" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it's what Lis tells Delfina about work in the orchards, that it's both "easy and hard." Which it is. It's a simple thing to learn, but repeated thousands of times in the heat. The other meaning of "anyone can do it" is what skeptics of immigrant laborers might say, that their lives aren't really that hard, that they've actually got it easy.
Will this story make anyone stop saying that? Because I feel like with the advent of this surplus of great stories our culture is currently experiencing, we're also experiencing a sudden stubborn refusal to be emotionally moved by stories. Maybe we're so used to stories that stimulate empathy in us, we're actually building up an immunity to empathy.
If you're a student looking to this blog for help with meaning or theme or whatever from this story, I doubt you even need my help much. This isn't a difficult story to understand. The meaning is all right there. It's about the tough lessons experience teaches us, about how you can't survive without trusting someone but it's also a great risk, and about the real human cost of abstract political policies. Nobody could read this story and miss those things.
But even if we set the bar incredibly low for what "changing hearts and minds" might look like for a story like this one--if we say, for example, that it's a success if just one person reads it and does not, in his next conversation about immigration, immediately assume the lives of immigrants are easy--will this story succeed? Or is it just written for those who already believe?
It's not the fault of an individual fiction writer that we now live in an age where people can so insulate themselves against beliefs they disagree with that they become impossible to convince. But that's our age. Given how difficult it is to change anyone's mind, what am I actually hoping to accomplish when I write a story? What is anyone?
I don't believe in giving up. We have to keep trying, because to stop trying, to give in to some nihilistic impulse, is to be okay living in a world where nothing we do matters. So people should keep writing, if only to not live in that world. But I don't want to support the false hope that if someone can only write the right story, things might get better. While we have to maybe give ourselves that hope in order to get on with our daily lives, I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that it's probably a fool's hope. It just that it's a fool's hope that's about the only hope we've got.
Boy, you've got a lot packed in here. Excuse me while I babble.
ReplyDeleteI thought this story worked well because it kept us focused on Delfina and her dilemma of trust vs need. Leaving the legal/illegal status vague was a big part of that. And the suspense - when Lis said, "Give me the keys" I knew it was all over. I kept expecting the foreman to turn into a creep; I'm glad he didn't. I think of the title as "anyone can betray you, and anyone can be kind" - as you said, the roles are reversed, so you can't take anything for granted.
Last year's story had such a "ripped from the headlines" feel (even though it wasn't) it was impossible to read as a human story. And I checked my blog stats - I, too, show that prior story as not terribly popular (next to last, with "Prairie Wife", interestingly, being last. Danielle Evans was, deservedly, first).
I couldn't tell that this story was set in the 80s, until I read Doerr's comment combined with Muñoz' contrib note. Was it obvious?
The whole thing about easy/hard really triggered me. People who think being poor is easy have never been poor. And while I'm on a soapbox (I started to put this in my post but it disrupted the focus) the lowest-paid workers in any industry are invariably the ones who work hardest. The people who pick produce. Who pluck and slaughter chickens, wash commerical laundry, scrub floors and toilets, wash dishes in the finest restaurants around. In most industries, the people with the most customer contact are also at the lower end of the pay scale - nurses' assistants (they have more to do with your hospital stay than the doctor you see for three minutes in the morning), cashiers, receptionists. I was always baffled that businesses used to hire temps "just to answer phones" - why would you want someone who has no idea who anyone is, no idea what the business does, answering the phone and handling customer calls? But that's another story.
One of the reasons these immigrant stories are so hard for me to read is that I depend on these agricultural workers to keep the costs of food down. So it's all that white guilt piling on. We have small farms around here, organic places, and the produce is twice as expensive. So I'm part of the problem. People don't shop at walmart because they like exploiting overseas child labor or underpaid staff; they do it because they can't pay $50 for a damn shirt.
As for changing minds - at this point, there's often a battleground mindset and nobody's gonna budge. But I still remember, as a young kid, reading a book about runners that turned into a book about gay men, and it's the first time I thought, they aren't any different than anyone else in love, why do people hate them so much. That was before my mind set in concrete. Not sure it would work now.
By the way, what if it's the hateful voices that are just the loudest, making them sound like there are more of them? Granted, literary short fiction isn't exactly going to garner a lot of attention, but you use whatever megaphone you have to humanize and show the consequences of viewing people as having only instrumental value instead of the same intrinsic value as oneself.
I think it's very possible to find someone who hasn't yet turned people into vermin and can feel something besides hate (which is probably an overlay of basic fear and inadequacy, someone who needs to feel superior). And even if not - sometimes we all need to remember why we believe what we believe, anyway.
You did a better job with this story than I did. Let's see...stray notes..."Prairie Wife" is next-to-last in my count, so we got similar numbers.... I knew it was set a long time ago because of the payphone....I honestly wonder if organic produce pays its workers any better than the factory farms that supply Wal-Mart. That's an even more labor-intensive process, and I doubt it's all moms and pops growing that stuff....I probably was too mired in despair while reading this, which is as much a sign of the times as the stories in this volume.
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