An ode to Mexican immigrants

September 28, 2026

Dell Franklin,

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s latest book – “Hitchhiking, A Destiny” – is currently on Amazon.

Above where I live, on stilts, a towering two-story hovers, presenting earthquake terror. It is being reinforced and spruced up. It is a big job, more onerous because the contractor needs his construction crew of grunts to haul unwieldy and very heavy lumber stacked in front of my garage up a rising path past my deck to the residence on a hill.

The job has been left to five-Mexican men of less than average size who show up in their aged pickups and dusty foreign compacts before 7 o’clock. They are always early, never late. They assemble their tools and belts. I am usually up at this point with a cup of coffee, and, from my deck, I greet them with good cheer because I have never witnessed more durable, maneuverable, uncomplaining, actually happy hard workers in my life.

There is a hip-high wall attached to the bluff leading to the open chain-link fence and the three-story scaffold where these men work. A long narrow board with foot-stops is used as a bridge to climb the wall. It is, to me, like a tight-rope.

But these men, in duos, hauling giant slabs of lumber on shoulders, repeatedly traverse the wobbly bridge and somehow load the lumber onto the scaffold. They complete this process, which scares the hell out of me, with ease.

They work nonstop. They talk in Spanish as they work, sometimes laughing but mostly communicating their work process. They play their Mexican music.

When I return around ten or eleven from hanging out at Cayucos Coffee or tennis or a hike, they have learned to leave a parking spot for me to park beneath some high shrubbery in the only shade on the block.

If they are sprawled against my garage eating lunch, I’ll issue them another good morning and sometimes I’ll talk to them in what remains of my Spanish, which once was serviceable but has lapsed since I seldom get to speak to Mexican people.

Some of these men speak a little English but it is my aim to let them know that trying to communicate with them in their own language is actually a good thing in an environment where they are scorned as vermin and treated worse than vermin by the Trump administration and possibly on edge that they will be roughed up by ICE, cuffed, sent to God- knows-where, and possibly deported to who-knows-where, leaving behind family and community.

I see the Mexican people on the Cayucos beach near the pier on weekends. There are always a lot of kids kicking soccer balls with their dads, small tents, lounge chairs, a table, lots of food, music, maybe some smoke and the whiff of  frying meat on a spit. They are all about their kids. They seem so happy and content.

A carpenter friend of mine compares them with what it was like for mostly white Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, when there was a huge blue collar working class and big families settling into the best of the American dream—a happy time when the money was good enough to buy a house in a safe neighborhood and live the good life.

Hard, dirty jobs were part of the deal in those days. Depression-era parents pounded it into us that these jobs were scarce and highly coveted during their years of struggle and deprivation.

Not like today, when young teenagers zip around on multi-thousand dollar motorized bikes and think this is the normal, and that suffering in this world is on some faraway continent where their people don’t count.

I haven’t seen many Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal, zipping around on these bikes.

Their kids?

Maybe—some day. And that is exactly the point where it can all go wrong.

These people are the best we have to offer. They make great soldiers because they’re used to hard times and can roll with the punches–the disappointments, uncertainty, discomfort, even tragedy.

Unlike the smug, insensitive, cruel people who disparage them, they are tough and resilient. And they do America’s dirty work while the rest of us get fat and spoiled on the constant chase of excess.

A famine of the soul.