We, the RiffRaff

Last night, my husband and I got to drive (ALONE) to our old house on the mountain to pick up some filing cabinets and utility cabinets for the bathroom in our new home. Lenya - our gracious pal - agreed to stay behind in the new house to watch my tired and overfed children (as long as we returned with a selection of decent ice cream).

Thank you, Lenya:)

Leaving town for the mountain is weird. Leaving anywhere for the mountain is weird. In town, my favorite restaurant of the past 10 years since we have been coming to or living in Jim Thorpe has live jazz blasting as you pass slowly by in your car. The tattoo parlor is blinking obnoxiously. There are children on the sidewalk playing everywhere. Even very young children, and the schizophrenic lady a couple houses up is pacing up and down the street talking to herself and rubbing her Thorazine patch.

But the mountain is dead silent. We pulled into our driveway and stood for a moment just to watch the fireflies light up all around us in the bear-saturated forest. The last two days we spent living on the mountain last week, we had more than 6 bears walking through our yard and driveway. We had two coyote pacing hungrily in our backyard. We had to keep the kids on the deck and watchful. In town, the dangers are very different.

"Are you sad anymore about leaving this place?" I asked my sweetheart.

"Not sad anymore. It just feels like I threw away $40,000.00," he sighed, speaking of our down payment.

"Like we saved for nothing," I said.

"Yeah. For someone else to live here much cheaper than we did. That's irritating. And there are all the comforts of living in a house that is brand new," he said. "Central air, excellent insulation."

It has been said to us, by an attorney, that the investor behind the loan probably doesn't want the Spanish name in his neighborhood where he also invests in several other mortgages. Who can prove it? I don't know. But it is not hard for Lee or I to believe.

We both remember the times in our 1905 house, before the new one was purchased in 2005, how difficult it was to heat without a pellet stove. How we lost our heat for four months, because we just did not have the $400-plus a month to heat the leaky place. We learned some tricks, but all utilities on the mountain only totalled $225.00 at its peak through any season. Those things are hard to give up.

"And the kids had all the room in the world to play," I noted. Our five year old has become very difficult as of the last 7 days. He has nowhere to run around when he becomes cantankerous. We have to walk to the park or drive there for him to have all that play time. That can be hard when you have medical chronic fatigue as I do. But, we have already walked to our favorite library in the world without having to pay for parking for once. We have gotten pizza at our favorite pizza shop a couple blocks away. Our children are haggling for ice cream from their favorite candy shop. So, our disadvantages have been replaced with advantages.

But none of these issues are the end of the world. None of any of this is the end of the world. It isn't even the end of our world. We know that most of the stresses we are currently experiencing will be gone the minute our home is sold to the investor who is very eager to purchase it.

What irritates me, and has finally begun to irritate my husband, is the pure discrimination we have faced with home ownership and renting since that day in July, 1995 when we got married.

Our first place assumed that we were not married and openly said so, "Because your husband is 'Spanish', we just thought you were living together. Does he have any children who will be visiting?"

What? It was assumed at our first apartment that we could not be married, because a Hispanic was involved in the relationship. It was assumed that the Hispanic had other illegitimate children hanging out somewhere who might need to be put on the lease in the future. I was incensed at these thoughts. Lee just ignored them.

The second place was fine, because it was in town and full of Hispanics and African Americans and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa. They didn't even notice Lee and I or my brother when the three of us moved in. A great place to live, and we had friends there and a huge courtyard.

The third place put us in an unready apartment with no updates, because they "assumed that it would not matter to us, because surely your husband grew up in the city and would be grateful for what he gets." You can argue such things, but every attorney I have ever spoken to says that white America still very much denies their prejudices, and it would be our word against theirs. That's not evidence.

We were poor and had a baby by now, so we just lived there with all the bug infestations, the bees who made a nest in our master bedroom, the mice we had to kill ourselves - even though our friends lived in the same complex (as did my brother) and they had all these great updates and services and paid less than us to live in a much better four walls. Even my pal, Yulia from Gorky, (Russia) said, "Why is your apartment so dark and ugly? I have white everything. New everything. I think they do not like Hispanics here."

And they didn't. Lee got a new job an hour and a half away and so we moved there. This time, into a beautiful town home community. Everything seemed fine until we went to sign the lease. The manager had written up a new clause just for us. "We need you to sign this agreeing that there will be no loud music, none of those low rider cars, and no riffraff. We absolutely will not tolerate any riffraff."

"I have a degree in Music Education from the second best school of music in the United States, ma'am. I am a claims adjuster for Allstate Insurance. I don't have any riffraff."

The crooked haired woman looked dubiously at my husband and just tapped her hand on the paper. About three months later, we got a continual pile of literature on our front step from the American Nazi Party and the Aryan Brotherhood - located just 10 miles away. I called the office and told them to have this stopped. They were quite incensed that I should bother them with such a command. They insisted they could not stop someone's freedom of expression, but they promised a white neighbor whom I had shown the literature to that they would stop it at once. "We do not want our residents feeling uncomfortable in any way!" the same woman from the office insisted.

When we moved out, we had the carpets steamed, the place repainted - all at our own very tight expense. But they refused to rent the place for several months after we left, replaced everything and charged us for rent and fees for months after we had moved out and purchased our new home. "I said no riffraff!" the rental manager wrote on one of our bills.

Our first home was humble, built in 1905, but we were immediately excited that it was our own place finally. Behind us lived a nosy PA Dutch couple who spoke to me and the kids at every chance. They offered us their Sunday papers after they had finished reading them. "Then you can just recycle them for us," Eva (as I called her) suggested. I really didn't care to read the newspaper, but I wanted to be neighborly, so I agreed. The minute Eva spotted my Leonardo coming home from work in his dress clothes and tie, she withheld the newspaper and all conversation for the next 5 years. She told our realtor how disappointed she was that he had sold the place to a "dirty Mexican with a gaggle of loud children".

We had three kids. The American average, and we weren't home very often. No matter that my husband is not Spanish or Mexican. He's Puerto Rican. How hard can it be to get that simple fact correct for an educated American public? The neighbors were rude. Eva and Adolph, as I called them proudly.

We moved to "the mountain" and all of our neighbors, immediately, refused to speak or wave to us. Except for an Italian-American girl at the bus stop and her Puerto Rican husband. Their house had been burned down by the adult son of a local township board member, when they tried to move in, and homemade signs like, "Spic Trailer Park!" lined the road leading to their home. Our road.

My husband is big, and so no one ever threatens him personally. But our very rude neighbor next door has never returned our waves or face-to-face conversation. Now all the rude people who never acknowledged us even when we were speaking to them, see our home almost empty, us moving, and they wave and smile uncontrollably.

When we were moving into this new rental home (which we are very grateful for) we were warned that the old grouchy man next door might not like Hispanics. Sure enough, he doesn't. He liked me until he saw Lee. Now, he doesn't even wave to me. He smiled at my oldest son - who is my coloring, but he doesn't acknowledge my darker children who look more like their father.

Recently a friend asked me, (and she is not the only one who has asked me this), "What do I say to my children when they hear people speaking Spanish in the store? What if they are illegal? How should I suggest they treat them?"

"Mind your own business," I said to her. "If they were speaking English it would not be your business what they were saying."

"But what if they are taking American jobs?"

"You mean crawling through mushroom fields, changing old people diapers at a nursing home, working far below minimum wage to build a multi-million dollar suburban home for some American family?"

She just looked at me, "Yes. What if the economy gets so bad I need those jobs one day?"

I just laughed. "Be serious. If you could live with less you not be overtaxed and overspent like you are now in every area of your American Dream life. You would not be worried about illegal immigrants, desperate for a better life, eager to take your job."

Whatever.

And three out of four of the women who have asked me this very same, very strange, question in the last couple of years, are way behind on many of their bills. Way behind on paying their credit cards. Way behind on making church attendance a regular part of their lives. None of this bothers me, none of this bothers their credit scores too much, but Leonardo has to reach so much further just to get the respect most of them were simply born with. The ones who have asked me this who are up-to-date on all such things told me once that when she sees her Puerto Rican neighbor walking down her street, she runs inside to lock up her antique silverwear. These people are supposed to be my friends, and they wonder why I sometimes find it hard to spend a lot of time with them.

Leonardo is getting kicked out of his home and he paid his mortgage, paid off his cars, pays his credit card bills, pays his tithes, has served every church he has been to, is a proud son of a US War Veteran, and is a proud American - as all Puerto Ricans are. Americans.

And I grew up in Los Angeles where 1 out of 3 people are foreign born. But I have yet to meet an immigrant - outside of most Canadians (but not all) that I have known - who didn't proudly call themselves American and dream of becoming a citizen one day, even if they did so desperately, coming here illegally and speaking Spanish. The language that made up half of the US long before the South West belonged to America. Think about it...Texas (Spanish for "tiles), Colorado (Spanish for "brown"), New Mexico (duh), California (Spanish for "beautiful island"), Nevada, Arizona...all Spanish and Spanish/Indian names. Long before there was a Baltimore or a New York City there was a Nuestra Senora La Reina de los Angeles (The City of Our Lady Queen of Angels - or LA as we white people shorten it and call it).

I wish I could just tell bigoted America to grow up. But it is stupid and has a long way to go. And I assume that Lee and I might face such further insults in the future. If I could encourage just one American - non-Hispanic - to view the language and people they don't understand as human beings looking to care for their family just as good native-born Americans do - to see Hispanics as mostly Christian with pro-life values and an extremely strong, unmatched work ethic - then, perhaps, I will have accomplished something for my Hispanic children in the future.

I do not like all her politics, but hats off to Judge Sotomayor for working her way to the Supreme location of the land. My olive-skinned/Indian-haired 9 year old daughter cheered when she saw the news last night. "Look, mommy! She is Spanish like me and she is a judge on the Supreme Court!"

I didn't even know she had been paying attention. "Why isn't she pro-life, mommy?" my daughter asked. "Isn't she Catholic and Christian like us?"

It is a true rarity to see a pro-choice Hispanic in either party. And it is just as rare to see the Republican Party not slamming Hispanics at every turn. My party - the Good Old Party. In the last election, out of respect for my husband and my children, I had to turn off the radio - turn off Rush and Beck and Hannity, because every show was about how Hispanics (all of them are illegal or refuse to assimilate according to these shows) are the greatest threat to the American way of life.

I am assuming these conservative Americans do not know the truth? That the largest number of illegal immigrants in America live on the East Coast and are Russian Jews or Israelis. A far greater number of illegal Chosen People live in this country than Catholic Spanish speaking ones. I wonder how many conservative Christians would hear Russian, see a Chassidic black hat and think, "That rabbi refuses to speak English and he is going to take my job in the drycleaner/deli/or Yeshiva!"