Dear Mexican: I live in a tiny, gated neighborhood that I would describe as solidly middle – to upper middle-class. On each side of me live Vietnamese small business owners whose kids attend prestigious universities; across the street is a Filipino medical technologist, and four doors down is the Korean engineer. On the next block over is the Sikh Indian family and a family from Nigeria. They are all recent immigrants and except for the Indians, none of them speaks English fluently. What is conspicuously missing is even one single Mexican immigrant family. How come immigrants from south of the border stay stuck on the bottom rungs of the proverbial ladder of success for generations? | Puzzled in San Antonio


Dear Gabacho: “First of all, the children of immigrants from south of the border make steady intergenerational progress. In other words, each generation is doing better than the one before it in terms of socioeconomic indicators. DUH!” says Jody Agius Vallejo, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and a scholar who specializes in the study of the Mexican-immigrant y Mexican-American middle class. The Mexican will only add the reality of middle-class suburbs like Whittier, California, where Mexis moved into a generation ago once they made money, only to have their gabacho neighbors white-flight it out of town – you can look it up!


Is it true that women migrant workers who work in the fields wear skirts or dresses over their pants so that when they have to use the bathroom in the fields, their private parts will be covered? | Screw Latrinos


Dear Gabacha: No, but I see where you’re getting at. One of the great Know Nothing conspiracies is the fundamentally fecal nature of Mexicans – essentially, that we’re shit and proof is in the periodic E. coli outbreaks that sicken and even kill Americans. They blame the disease on illegals not washing their hands properly, not bothering to blame the farm owners who push workers to skip bathroom breaks under threat of a lesser wage. Even more telling, incidents of E. coli entering the public have increased in los Estados Unidos even as sanitation standards are higher than ever before, suggesting something other than shitting migrant workers is amiss in our nation’s food chain – but why bother with reasoning when it’s always easier to blame Mexicans?