If Alexis de Tocqueville were to travel the United States today, the color he would see peeking through would not be "aristocratic," as the French philosopher described it in his great travelogue, Democracy in America, but Latino. Latino-Americans, as recent immigration-rights protests remind us, have become the largest minority group in the country, and to see how exactly this has changed the texture of the U.S.—not just its color—Los Angeles Times reporter Hector Tobar hit the road and toured the Spanish-speaking United States. He traveled to Omaha and Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Northern Michigan, even the woods of Maine. The hotbeds of Latino culture, really.
Translation Nation (recently out in paperback), his record of this journey, is an essential and illuminating read that is full of discoveries, one of the most immediate being that while immigration begins at the borders, its effects are felt all over the nation. Like in Anniston, Alabama, where, disguised as a migrant in search of a job, Tobar travels by bus with several Mexicans to do swing-shift work dismembering chickens at a food-processing plant. It is mind-numbing, tiring work, "the kind ... that erases portions of your memory if you do it too long," Tobar writes. Once a week, a bus would come to the little town and take workers in for a day of shopping at the Piggly Wiggly. The only time Tobar sees an Anglo inside the plant is when it shuts down due to a contamination problem.
As bleak as these living conditions are, they do not always stay that way. Four years later, Tobar returned to Anniston and discovered that a Catholic church had been erected, and the Latinos were no longer living in trailers but in houses. In Dalton, Georgia, things were even better, as in a burst of "pure self interest" the town decided to spend $7,400 per child on providing good public education—to prevent social ills arising later on, councilmen say. The Latino-American community there now has a Spanish-language newspaper and neighbors who treat them for the most part with decency. At one point, Tobar is interviewing a man when a good ol' boy drives by in his pickup and waves.
"Do you know him?" I asked.
"I think he's one of my neighbors, but I'm not sure." Seeing that I was a bit confused, he added. "Sometimes, I'm out here working on the yard and white people, strangers, drive by and wave hello. In my pueblo people do that. But in Los Angeles, they're more likely to give you the finger."
This sort of treatment has pushed the illegal Latin migration into this country off the coasts and into the heartland, Tobar observes. Throughout Translation Nation, he introduces us to men and women who have come from Guatemala, Mexico, and beyond, and this book reads like a mosaic of Mayflower stories. We hear from truck drivers who come to this country and become mechanics, guerilla fighters who turn into labor organizers. Immigration, legal and illegal, is a chance for transformation, not just translation.
And not just for Latinos. Take Ben Reed, a white guy who goes on air as a DJ in Utah, becomes Ben-ha-meen Reed, announces in Spanish and channels his inner Mexican across airwaves.
Tobar clearly celebrates these cross-cultural moments, but they are not yet the norm. The INS has begun to set up detainment centers away from the borders, so when smugglers get pulled over for a busted taillight in Iowa or North Dakota, their cargo is not immediately set free.
"I wonder if at a date in the distant future the travails of the desert crossers will become the institutionalized and mythologized narrative that the Underground Railroad is today," Tobar writes at one point. If that day does indeed come, Translation Nation will be looked upon as both a cornerstone and a corrective—the kind of book that didn't just document life in America, but showed us the way of the future.