American dream - not.

March 23, Anthem.

Marvin, the midget clown, worked on a new act for the show this morning, something to do with burnt chicken coming out of the oven. The oven in that case is a plywood one made by el Tio Tito, complete with top burners. The chicken are the plastic kind that finds its way into clown acts. This morning he was painting one black, a small one, the big one left as is in its original glowing yellow. Samuel Angel, a tent worker, was helping paint. I haven't had the opportunity to see Marvin's act yet. He was contracted out of Mexico after Guennadi was thrown out but only arrived a couple of weeks ago because of the time it takes to get a visa.
He's from Mexico City, married with two children. He wasn't born in the circus but started working in one when he was 19, after winning some kind of scholarship to work in TV. He worked in various circuses in Mexico before coming here, working at at bar in Fort Worth as a dancer, and now here at Chimera. Por la necesidad, he says, I'm here only because I have to. Like all immigrants.

I've always been struck by how people born in the United States think people come to this country because of some romantic notion called the American Dream. All the immigrants I've known over the years only came for one reason: because they had to. The situation in their country didn't give them the opportunity to get a decent job and didn't offer much for the future of their family. The ones that could go back did.
I'm actually the only one to have come here because I liked the idea. That is still not the same as the American dream, but admittedly it comes closer, so I'm what you could call the exception that confirms the rule. I remember dreaming about coming to the US when I was a girl, fed by a constant stream of US-made movies and series on television, as well as by an enormous amount of US cultural imports you'd have to be living on the moon to avoid seeing. Whether we like it or not, we in Europe and in the rest of the world are eating up US culture day in and day out, in the latest Hollywood movie and attending gadgets and toys, the latest hit song on the radio, the latest series on TV, the latest fashion on the streets.
In France in particular we have a kind of split personality when it comes to the US: we profess to hate it but then we love it too. IN addition to all the afore-mentioned items, there is a MacDo, as we call the chain, in almost every town, and there is always a line. They're such a ubiquitous sign of "US imperialism" that when an anti-globalization group calling itself "the peasant movement" (Jose Bové, their leader, is in and out of jail and something of a star in France) looked for a target for their anti-US anger they chose to bomb the MacDo in a small town nobody had ever heard about before. In addition to globalization and US imperialism in general (one and the same thing anyway, the thinking goes), one of their aim was what is called "la mal-bouffe" in French, literally translated, "bad food," so the MacDo was an easy pick. Of course la mal-bouffe is also associated with the US, that goes without saying, bien sur, never mind the croque-monsieur traditionally on the menu for lunch at most bistros is a greasy lump of bad bread and worse ham sold at an exorbitant price.
I've been here on and off for close to 20 years, and I've never missed the croque-monsieurs. Before I turned vegeterian I was a hot-dog aficionada. But the immigrants who work their ass off in the most low-paying and back-breaking jobs and send money back to their family every month, they didn't risk their lives to come to this country for no hot-dog.