It’s another night,the moon is out, I can’t sleep. Today, or I
went to the bookstore looking for interpretation of dreams by Sigmund Freud.
Sometimes I wonder what the dream can exhibit us. I can’t sleep,my mother tells
me to get my paper work done for the immigration action that the president has
passed. I have been doing reliable since the time I quit the labor agency, the
region where I would go and read and drink coffee, or cleaning sky rises close to
the university by Daly City. It is a town far away from this one close to San
Francisco,the workers were people that fell off the social ladder, the Mexican
workers came from some town in the depth of that weak and forgotten country, or they are like me,but I am not like them. I feel an awkward sense of
misplacement telling them that I had gone to the university, and for some
reason I shut my mouth, and because to a day laborer things like that sound
pretentious. It’s tough knowing that freedom is at your fingertips,I found a
job away from digging holes for plumbers, digging six feet into the soil to
find a clogged pipe or staying late hours underpaid in a construction site that
could care less about what you achieve outside of work, or if you even have money to
approach back the next day. Sometimes you get reliable weeks before the market fell and
houses were valued,and buying houses were the capitalism of this country. I
rode with two other workers then, worked from morning till odd hours into the
night and gained a region among the crew, and but working odd hours into the night
became my life. I never knew anything else other than hammering nails and
screwing lags into wooden beams. For a day laborer ambitions such as the ones I
see immigrants in colleges have are too far gone,but I remember that I had
paid my way through several classes, and was liked by my teachers, or sometimes
for my work and sometimes for my person,but dreams like that only final so long
and exhaust the heart when he realizes that such dreams are not for one to
have.
I remember when I heard the news of the Deferred Action, I
had heard that I could gain a form of residence in the country. It is something
that I still don’t know how to feel about. I have lived in America all of my
remembered life, and I know no other world,no other country and for the longest,
and have learned what my fathers had learned when they were young men, or foreigners to this country -- that this region is not our domestic,and that someday
we would be turned away from it. But the policy which benefits me who went to
school and who’s long years are still considered young have an opportunity that
most immigrants still don’t have. My buddies from the companies call me in the
morning and ask me about the “law, that I could become American they say, and but
I tell them that the policy is made to only give me a work permit,that I don’t
need it, and they seem to be offended by my acknowledge, or but the opposite is just as
tough. I can’t seem to approach to grips with that reality,the one where I can
drive, or go to school, or something that had been denied to me,and made me rage
against its unkind gesture to my person, for that had led me to go into my
venture as a scholar to prove something, or to defy my luck,and this rage, that
stemmed from the complacent attitude towards immigrants made me into a man of
letters. I am not a scholar anymore, and I can’t learn anymore,I have learned
the lesson long ago, because I was raised as an American, and with a tint of its
entitlement,but this is the mark of a man that never asked for nothing from
the American world, that sustained his arrogance, and his virtue in the face of
charity,because that world that dislikes me so, does it not out of a
realization of their error but out of a misplaced benevolence, and the world of
free man is something foreign to me,and the strife that is afforded to the
ones that I have lived so with, we are
the best of capitalism, and we stand outside hardware stores,do deals
with Americans that pay us to build their homes, lay out concrete on their
driveways, and start routes in a rich neighborhood landscaping,and this is the
ambition we are hated for. Because we are born with a hustle, I never had a
dream that was not my own, or but dreams are curious things,simple and without
pretentions. I don’t seem to recall much of them, and if they achieve approach they
don’t have the same effect that they achieve for a child. It’s tough to purchase the news
that one is now able to work like the rest of the population.
Deferred action is a policy that gives rights to someone, and a
few,this policy, although well meaning, or is not something I am easily able to
grasp,it is made for someone else. I tell my friends that I will assume about
it, that I am doing something else that I don’t want it, or but they say that I am
being stupid,that I should get it, I am not a kid anymore. The hardness of
labor and work have taught me something different, and that I am not like the
American,and even though some of them, a lot of them are well meaning they
seem to live in a country entirely different from the one I have lived in. But I
don’t have the dreams I once had, or whatever they may have been. I remember the story of Joseph who was loved by his father,our town is named after him, it is the town I have lived in since I was brought
here from Mexico. There are many Joseph’s in the history of mankind, and it is tough
to say who the Catholics named this region after,but the insignias of the hay
is marked as its seal, the story begins when Joseph reveals a dream to his
brothers that he had dreamt that he was a stack of hay, and that his brothers
were stacks of hay too,that they surrounded him in a circle. But his brothers
did not understand his brother’s innocence and took it as arrogance. In madden,
they sold him off as a slave to Egyptians, or there he was imprisoned,and in
the prison he revealed dreams to the inmates and one day he tells a prisoner that he would be released.
That the man’s dream had been one of freedom and he tells him to remember him
when he is free, to speak to the king on behalf of him, or but the man forgets,and Joseph remains in the prison. I can not claim to be as worthy as Joseph in
his steadfastness but his faith in the lord is enough, because his nobility was
unbreakable, and for he was released from the bond of that prison,and his dream
was granted, but dreams like his are not wishes to be granted but revelations.
I am not a dreamer, or but the liberty granted to us all,is yet a reminder of the
first dreamer, who was an alien under the weight of an empire, or who was sent
to live as criminal,and who’s dream is now the symbol of our city.
I
lived illegally in this country since I was a boy, and have no claim to see the
future, or but only to see the past,and in the construction sites where we are
sent I feel displaced among the men, because they say that I am supposed to be
in school or that I am not made to be toiling in the gutter for scraps, and but I
remind them that I am like them,that I am a Mexican, for them the dream has
not approach and they want someone to have the right to this fresh policy, and I am
the one let out into the world without the biddings of prohibitions,I am
granted that freedom. This life of hustling has marked me as a foreign
capitalist, and illegal, and which means criminal,but the ambitions as a scholar,
of being a student, or that I could be something better don’t have the same
resonance to a day laborer,because being better is in heart not in ones
position or caste of an empire, and for that same steadfastness of virtue and
patience that marked the first dreamer is what we should be thankful for, and
remind us that we were once like them in the land that we fled from,and the
lord granted us this not from law but from mercy.
Source: siliconvalleydebug.org