Bloody foreigners, comin’ over ’ere an’ stealin’ our jobs

 

Not to mention our hats: The Bolshoi Ballet visited London some time in the ’sixties, and one young underpaid dancer was so dazzled by the wealth of capitalist goodies on open display in the shops that she tried to steal a hat. She was caught, and sentenced to deportation. Then as now, there were unpleasant people who said ‘Serve her right; send them all back where they came from’, but the view among decent people was that, since it had been a century or more since English people were sentenced to transportation (a free one-way trip to Australia) for such petty offences, this poor girl was being deported not so much for pinching a hat as for being foreign.

Fortunately attitudes have changed since then. Or have they? There has been a resurgence of ugly xenophobia in England, and in America a huge increase in deportations of recent immigrants. Obama himself has ‘justified’ these deportations on the grounds that the people being sent ‘home’ (in most cases their only home has been there in the United States) are criminals. It turns out that in most cases their ‘criminality’ was — shoplifting hats. Or more likely bread or milk for their children.

So the news that a film is to be made about the life and work of Cesar Chavez is timely and pleasing. Chavez is a common name in Latin America, so don’t confuse Cesar with Hugo. Cesar Chavez was one of the many Mexicans who, then as now, was welcomed into the United States every year during the fruit-picking season and then kicked out as soon as the farmers had no further use for them. He worked all his life to improve their pay and conditions. Of course, being a Hollywood production there is likely to be too much emphasis on his personal life and not enough on his work, but even so, as happened long ago with a Hollywood film about Joe Hill, (Joel Hilstrom), it may increase public awareness of how many of the rights and freedoms we in the richer, more comfortable countries take for granted we owe to the efforts of those who came originally from poorer, less comfortable places.