Many years ago, science fiction author C.J. Cherryh wrote a short novel about a society established by human colonists on a distant planet that was already inhabited by sentient aliens. The human colonists, rather than slaughtering them, simply lived side-by-side with the natives, and convinced themselves that the natives just didn't exist. The humans trained themselves to completely ignore the alien beings who lived their lives among them. The book was called Wave Without a Shore, published in 1981 by DAW Books and now long out of print.

Living in the crowded urbanization of Northern Virginia reminds me of this story. I live in a world that is filled with aliens, beings who don't talk my language and who I never interact with. Yet they live next door to me, down the hall, and all over the apartment complex. They are from Mexico, Central America, and South America, and there are, in the Metro DC area, hundreds of thousands of them. I see them, and yet I don't see them.

Some of them are here legally, many others, indistinguishable from the first group, are not. Most of them are men between the ages of 18 and 40, short, stocky brown men with high Indio cheekbones and Asian eyes. They wear dull-colored sports garb and backwards baseball caps, and they smoke a lot. In the summer, they wear tank tops, board shorts, and keep the backwards baseball cap. They don't speak any English, and they are not well educated. I am not sure whether they can read and write; no one keeps statistics on this.

You do not try to talk to these folk. They are suspicious and will turn away. Looking at them, especially looking them in the eyes, is very impolite in their culture. Even if I knew Spanish fluently, it would not be easy to have a conversation with them, since they speak local or rural dialects interspersed with Indian and slang words. And they don't want to talk to outsiders, because outsiders could turn them in. They also are not aggressive to outsiders or dangerous (that is, to white or black Americans), because since they are here illegally, the last thing they want is to be arrested for some crime and found to have false identification papers.

Why are they here? Because they can get work here, and back in Guatemala or Mexico, they can't. It doesn't matter how poorly this work pays, it is better than nothing. They work in landscaping, cleaning, construction, hard dirty outdoor work that doesn't require a lot of training or education to do. The women who make the journey work as nannies, maids, or office cleaners. Some of them are legally employed, others are not. If they are illegal immigrants, there is no law that will protect them against employers who pay them less than minimum wage. They work day after day with no restrictions or legal protection, just as they have done down in New Orleans rebuilding after the hurricane. And even so, I see them at the post office day after day, paying cash (sometimes gained "under the table") for money orders to pay their bills and rent and to send home to their relatives in the old country. I imagine that there are towns and villages in Central America where there are no people left but old men, a few older women, and children.

These invisible folk share our resources and our urban lives without any interaction. They use apartments in my building, sleeping on the floors of rooms rented from legal immigrants who pay the rent to the landlords. They use the laundry rooms, and park their vehicles in the parking lot. There are times when I never see the same person twice in our hallways. They are here today, gaining an ephemeral address so that they can claim a residence when they search for work, and then they are gone tomorrow. It is an endless flow of lives, none of which I will ever know. I won't know their sorrows or their joys or their families. They are shadows in the hallway, creatures in the back yard armed with hedge clippers or weed-whackers or air blowers, appearing once and never again. It is like some of those "magical realist" books written by the intellectual upper-class of those same Latin American countries: people who fill the world but who might not exist.

In the modern world, they live electronically. They may be impoverished illegal aliens, but they all have cell phones that someone pays for. Their group apartments and homes have satellite dishes so they can watch TV from the old country and their soccer games. They may even have internet access, though I have no way to find out. The shadows in the hall have a virtual life independent of their toiling existence here.

In writing this, I am perhaps transgressing the non-political nature of this Weblog. Social comment is not what ELECTRON BLUE is all about. I am not advocating any position on illegal immigration. It is just part of my world here in the city, a feature of the layered reality where virtual characters, mathematical axioms, and illegal aliens coexist without colliding with each other; a world of people as particles of dark and light matter, hidden and open, real and imaginary.

Posted at 3:19 am | link