Cal Coast News reported that an ode to Mexican immigrants. Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,.

Hitchhiking, A Destiny. Cal Coast News. Tip Your Team.

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By DELL FRANKLIN. Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. Franklin’s latest book, “Hitchhiking, A Destiny”, is currently on Amazon.

Above where I live, on stilts, a towering two-story hovers, presenting earthquake terror. It is being reinforced and spruced up. It is a big job, more onerous because the contractor needs his construction crew of grunts to haul unwieldy and very heavy…. The job has been left to five-Mexican men of less than average size who show up in their aged pickups and dusty foreign compacts before 7 o’clock. They are always early, never late. They assemble their tools and belts. I am usually…. Reports differed on some details.

If they are sprawled against my garage eating lunch, I’ll issue them another good morning and sometimes I’ll talk to them in what remains of my Spanish, which once was serviceable but has lapsed since I seldom get to speak to Mexican…. Some of these men speak a little English but it is my aim to let them know that trying to communicate with them in their own language is actually a good thing in an environment where they are scorned as vermin and….

There is a hip-high wall attached to the bluff leading to the open chain-link fence and the three-story scaffold where these men work. A long narrow board with foot-stops is used as a bridge to climb the wall. It is, to me,….

But these men, in duos, hauling giant slabs of lumber on shoulders, repeatedly traverse the wobbly bridge and somehow load the lumber onto the scaffold. They complete this process, which scares the hell out of me, with ease.

They work nonstop. They talk in Spanish as they work, sometimes laughing but mostly communicating their work process. They play their Mexican music.

When I return around ten or eleven from hanging out at Cayucos Coffee or tennis or a hike, they have learned to leave a parking spot for me to park beneath some high shrubbery in the only shade on the block.

A carpenter friend of mine compares them with what it was like for mostly white Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, when there was a huge blue collar working class and big families settling into the best of the American dream, a happy….

Hard, dirty jobs were part of the deal in those days. Depression-era parents pounded it into us that these jobs were scarce and highly coveted during their years of struggle and deprivation.

Not like today, when young teenagers zip around on multi-thousand dollar motorized bikes and think this is the normal, and that suffering in this world is on some faraway continent where their people don’t count.

I haven’t seen many Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal, zipping around on these bikes.

Maybe, some day. And that is exactly the point where it can all go wrong.

These people are the best we have to offer. They make great soldiers because they’re used to hard times and can roll with the punches, the disappointments, uncertainty, discomfort, even tragedy.

Unlike the smug, insensitive, cruel people who disparage them, they are tough and resilient. And they do America’s dirty work while the rest of us get fat and spoiled on the constant chase of excess.

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