Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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When I think about the American dream, I think of Julio Arana.
He was my student a decade ago, a crackerjack of a kid from Jalisco who didn’t know what he wanted to do with life but knew the United States was the place to do it in. Today, the 36-year-old is a real estate agent who owns seven properties and flips houses like a cook handles pancakes. But Arana prides himself most on helping young couples buy their first homes.
“I couldn’t have done this in Mexico,” he told me as we stood in front of his latest purchase, a beat-up 1925 Spanish Revival. Long-haired, tanned and tattooed, Arana wore a stylish brown hat and a T-shirt with Emiliano Zapata drawn as the grinning skull logo of punk icons the Misfits. “The one thing this country still offers is that the little guy can get it.”
We were at his newest acquisition because he wanted me to see something: On the side of the house, on a wall behind a trellis near the driveway, was a bas-relief stucco swastika the size of an adult head. Arana had no idea why the white-power emblem was there.
It didn’t matter: It was personal to Arana.
“The first property I bought, in Desert Hot Springs, I had to evict Nazis,” he said. “This is full circle.”
Just a few moments earlier, we had spoken to his neighbor, Marco Chavez. Arana told him his story — he came to this country without papers as an 8-year-old — and the 61-year-old Chavez shared a bit of his: An immigrant from Morelos who bought his home in the early 2000s. His five children are college graduates. He just finished a living trust.
“My chamacos have come out good,” Chavez told us in Spanish, “We’ve all done good.”
As Julio and I drove to another property ho told me “For us (immigrants) ... there’s all this opportunity around us. People leave their homelands out of despair, and their hope is gone. Here, there’s hope. I see it all around me.”
When my editor first told me that a nationwide Los Angeles Times/KFF poll found that immigrants are more optimistic about life in the United States than native-born Americans, my initial response was: story of my life.
I was raised in a run-down granny flat a stone’s throw from a lumberyard, the only place my immigrant parents could afford when they married in 1978. By the time I was 10 in 1989, my mother — a tomato canner — and my truck-driving dad had saved up enough to buy a post-World War II tract home in a better part of town.
Within five years, our street went from majority white to almost exclusively Latino. Our former neighbors moved to Washington, Arizona and other states because, they told my parents, the neighborhood wasn’t “safe” anymore, and California was changing.
Thirty-five years later, my dad and youngest brother are still there, the mortgage paid off years ago. I own my own home. So does the sister that follows me.
My parents never explicitly told us about the American dream. Each grew up in wrenching poverty in Zacatecas, one of the poorest states in Mexico. They couldn’t give us much besides a roof over our heads and back-to-school clothes from Montgomery Ward, but their lives were an unspoken lesson: Life in this country is tough, but life back in the rancho was far harder. You’ve got a shot here — so make something of it, because we did.
The poll also revealed that Latino immigrants aren’t just optimistic, on some measures, they’re more optimistic than other immigrant groups. It’s a tendency that USC sociology professor Jody Agius Vallejo said “studies have found time and time again” — and that more than a few pundits find weird.
She has devoted her research to studying upper- and middle-class Latinos, whose stories of hope and achievement like that of my family and Julio are legion. That includes the family of her husband, immigrants from Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, who settled in Watts in the 1960s and established a pioneering Latino grocery chain.
“I do get frustrated when people are surprised that Latinos are optimistic,” Agius Vallejo said. “Why wouldn’t they (be)? We can’t discount the fact that Latinos have been subject to significant discrimination and segregation and still make something of themselves. It’s a point of pride for them.”
When I think of the American dream, I think of generations of my family members, who picked and packed crops in segregated communities.
I think of my uncle, a member of Cement Masons Local 500 for more than 30 years who worked on projects including Disney California Adventure and what’s now called the Crypto.com Arena, lived the maxim he always told his children and us cousins: A trabajar. Get working.
He bought a small house in Southern California, traded that one for a bigger one down the street and then settled into a two-story home with a swimming pool, where he and Marbella still live. They’re finally empty-nesters: Last week, my cousin Plas, his wife and their two teenage daughters moved into a four-bedroom home in Anaheim after selling their condo during the pandemic and staying with his parents.
Plas is a delivery driver for Frito-Lay who didn’t go beyond community college but is probably the smartest person I know. He sells movie memorabilia and sneakers on EBay as a side hustle.
At 46, he’s the last of his siblings to own a home. His house is on the type of street where neighbors mistook mi tío for the gardener.
New floorboards, cabinets, fixtures, lights and walls gleamed. The granite countertops were on their way.
We moved on to his backyard, where mi tío had trimmed hedges that the previous owner let overgrow. He’s now 70 but looks decades younger. I asked mi tío how he felt about how life turned out in the U.S.
“I go to one street, there’s one of my kids. Go to another, another,” he said in Spanish. He’s usually gregarious but now was soft-spoken. “I worked for 50 years. This is my dream.”
“The reason people don’t feel (the American dream) is attainable is because everything is just more expensive,” Plas said. “They almost resign themselves to saying, ‘I can’t buy a house.’
“But when you grow up with dirt floors and laminate roofs, that motivates you to reach for more. When we went to McDonald’s growing up, it was a special occasion. When my parents would buy ice cream, we’d all get just one spoonful and knew to appreciate it.”
“Now,” Plas concluded with his usual sly smile, “my daughters leave cereal in their bowl.”
The poll might not be news to you. It might even seem boring. But its findings are vital. It’s the template for how this country can move forward from the chaos and division that have afflicted us since the rise of Donald Trump.
To adapt a phrase from Thomas Jefferson, the tree of liberty must be refreshed with immigrant hope.
The doom and gloom that too many Americans screech about on social media and in their personal lives — on both sides of the red-blue divide — is a betrayal of what brought their ancestors here, and what continues to attract people from across the world. Pessimism, not political differences, is what’s bringing down this country; the optimism of newcomers is our best shot to survive.
When I think about the American dream, I think about the buses of people arriving in Los Angeles from Brownsville, Texas. One-way trips arranged by the administration of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Abbott signed off on them shortly after Los Angeles declared itself a sanctuary city, meaning city personnel and resources can’t be used to help federal officials deport immigrants.
Abbott says he’s sending us migrants to protest the supposed lax security at the U.S.-Mexico border, but he’s really mocking the American dream.
Rank xenophobia like Abbott’s propelled me to not just devote my life to fight back, but also to look for the good in this country instead of the bad. Because if my parents could do it, why not me?
On a similar mission is Angelica Salas, the longtime head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Her group is part of a coalition of nonprofits and faith groups called L.A. Welcomes Collective, which helps connect the migrants Abbott has kicked out of Texas with housing and relatives in the United States.
“They are the most patriotic individuals in our country because they’re always hoping that America’s ideals and purported values will happen in their lives,” Salas said of the immigrants she works with. “If it doesn’t, then they hope it happens in the lives of their children. And if it doesn’t for them? Then their grandchildren. Their tenacity to not give up is contagious. “
That’s the spirit Americans need anew. Immigrants now, immigrants tomorrow, immigrants forever.
Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
