we are all mojados

The only Americans who aren't wets are full-blooded Native Americans. For the rest of us, our ancestors got here by crossing water -- either swimming it, or tossing around for six weeks in a boat in the North Atlantic and going "Bleggghh" all the way.

I've always suspected that the paternal ancestors who bore my surname were Newgate birds, transported as felons from London's notorious prison in lieu of execution and settled in Georgia, which began as a penal colony. I have no proof, but it makes a good story. The Swedes on my dad's mother's side came quite a bit later, and in a much more dignified fashion, buying their own tickets and passing through Ellis Island.

My mom's family was here very early, and received land grants near Baltimore in the seventeenth century. Later on most of them lived in western Kentucky where they grew their own vegetables and hunted squirrels, raccoons, possums, and God knows what. Her mother's ancestors were less illustrious, arriving in the 1830's from Ireland on those leaky old potato boats, "shoveled out" as they said at the time of the great famine. It was usually the landlord who paid for the 17-shilling passage.

For all of my ancestors, coming to the New World wasn't easy, but it was simple. They weren't subjected to legal hassles or demeaning, complex, lottery-like procedures to determine their immigrant status. Unlike today's waves of Latino economic and political refugees who are fleeing violence, repression, and grinding poverty, nobody questioned their right to be here except maybe the copper-colored original inhabitants whose land they stole, and nobody listened to them.

I'm leaving out, of course, our darker citizens who arrived involuntarily. They were also mojados of a sort, but that's a whole other story as we all know.

In 1978, the celebrated Norteño band Los Tigres del Norte synopsized in poetry and song the modern-day experience of coming to America the majority of them endure, and it's the same today as it was then, only getting harder.

Vivan los Mojados

Because we're mojados, we're always looking out for the law.
Because we're illegal and don't speak any English.
The Gringo is too stubborn to take us, but we always come back.

If you catch one of us in Laredo, ten pass through at Mexicali.
If a few others are kicked out in Tijuana, six more come in at Nogales.
Do the math, suckers, if you really want to count us.

If you have a problem with us, you can easily fix it;
Just give us a hot little gringita to marry,
Then when the wedding is over and we're legal we'll get a divorce.

If the wets go on strike and never come back,
who's going to pick your onions, your lettuce, or your beets?
Your lemons and grapefruit would be history then.

All your ballrooms would be closed.
If we wets weren't around any more, who would come to the dance then?
If even a quarter of us flew away you'd be inconsolable.

So long live the wets -- everybody who's migrating one way or the other;
Those who just want a vacation and those who are planning to marry
In order to get themselves fixed up.

It may be an emotional argument, but I strongly feel that it's grossly unjust to say to people, "OK, our ancestors were all immigrants, and the door was wide open then, but times have changed and now we're closing it."