Early Days...Goddamn I'm preachy!

Work and Wealth on the Border:

Representations of Ethnic Economics in the Works of Simon Ortiz and Dagoberto Gilb.

As human beings, we, as personal and social cultural entities, are conscience beings because of story, no other reason. (Ortiz,viii)

As any reader knows, what is left unsaid and unmentioned in a story is often as important as that which is stated. One can call attention to an issue by naming it, or by one’s refusal to speak its name. As often as our words help create the world, so do our silences. Much of what is meaningful and powerful in the world is rarely spoken of, rather it is left unnamed to grow in a void of silence.

Dagoberto Gilb is not one for silences. His The Magic of Blood is a calling forth of the lives, loves, fears and passions of an often-silenced segment of American society. He and Ortiz speak for their people and their selves, weaving tales of poverty and near-poverty, of the duties and failings of fathers, of the disempowerment of men and women (but mostly men) whose lives are forever at the mercy of policies and institutions that they have little or no say in. Gilb and Ortiz look at the oblivion of drink, the complex web of multi-lingual and multi-cultural interactions, and the loss of innocence and coming of age universal to human life. They chose mainly masculine voices to tell the tales, chose short, carefully crafted tales to tell, and chose the voices of the poor, the lower-class, and the struggling.

But for all their similarities, there is a gulf of silence between Gilb and Ortiz in regard to one central theme. While Gilb’s work abounds with references to work and wages, payments, rent, bills, and all the paraphernalia of a currency driven economy, Ortiz barely whispers these words, instead letting his silence speak for him.

Why this glaring disparity between two authors whose stories otherwise seem to have so much in common? Why does one speak with his silence and the other shout? I believe the answer lies in the differing concepts of wealth and work held, and the differing values placed on these seemly central issues by Native Americans and Latinos. But how do these ethnic economics compare to each other, and to mainstream Anglo-American economics, and what can we learn from them?

Dagoberto Gilb and the Latino Work Ethic

“You remember the days when we were not rich, but when poverty was different, not a thing to be ashamed of, and we got along okay. You remember when we had a certain freedom, and you know we don’t have it anymore….”

--John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (145-146)

Whenever one discusses an ethnic group in a general sense, one has to be careful to make sure that the stereotype is employed as a useful fiction, that while the general state of things might be a certain way, there are always exceptions to the rule. This holds true of an author’s work as well. While Gilb gives us an insight into a world inhabited by many Latinos, it is not the only world they live in. The borders of ethnicity and class are not fixed, but it is often easier to view themes and issues from a generalized view than to attempt to paint an exact portrait of the lives of any group.

The central theme in The Magic of Blood is the struggles of the laboring class in a society where there exist no guarantees to the basic necessities of life. The men and women who make up this class are constantly on the border of poverty. An injury or illness, changing economic trends, the whims of employers or social services, all these can push an individual to one side of the border or the other. This disempowerment is strongly felt by Gilb’s characters. As Frank Lopez, a supporting character in “FDR Was a Democrat” explains as he holds up a finger mangled in a work accident:

“Five months ago I smashed it…They took off my fingernail and bled it and said I crushed the bone. Then, to top it off, the very next day the company had problems and shut down the job. I got one days work.” (249)

One way Gilb’s laborers combat this disempowerment is through a work ethic that accepts lay-offs and unemployment as an inevitable part of working life, but nevertheless takes considerable pride in and places considerable emphasis on skill and perseverance. Gilb’s characters are often multi-talented, able to do a wide variety of work and willing to take whatever work is on offer. The important point is to be working, making a living for oneself and ones family.

Another strategy is a sort of voluntary lowering of material standards. Most of Gilb’s characters take pride in their possessions, even though they are few and far from new. As in the quote from The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s protagonists are not ashamed of their poverty, so long as they have pride in their work and their basic needs are met. A good example is Juan Romero, the title character of “Romero’s Shirt” who “hangs wall paper and doors, he paints, he lays carpet, does just about anything someone will call and ask him to do.” This same character had a car which “he’d kept up since his early twenties…and he worked on it so devotedly that even now it was in as good a condition as almost any car could be.” (94-95) There is a rather stoic, Spartan character to these men, they do whatever they need to get what they need. However, unlike the rural characters in The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s are generally urbanites, to far removed from the land to make a living from it.

The Latino work ethic is strongly related to the idea of machismo, not the Anglicized version of the word, implying chauvinism, violence, and misogyny, but in the Spanish sense, implying a code of honor whereby a man must provide for his dependents regardless of the personal sacrifice involved so long as one’s pride is intact.

While not ashamed of their poverty, Gilb’s creations are acutely aware of it, and it shows in their constant discussion and fixation on finances. There is hardly a story in the book where no mention is made of money. Prices, payments, wages, rent, unemployment benefits, and winnings are a constant theme, restraining or liberating the characters according to the seemingly random fluctuations of the economy. This does not mean that money in and of itself is of primary importance. As the unnamed narrator of “Look on the Bright Side” says at the opening of the book:

The way I see it, a man can have all the money in the world but if he can’t keep his self respect, he don’t have shit. A man has to stand up for things even when it may not be very practical. A man can’t have his pride and give up his rights. (3)

Rather than a prime motivator, money is used as a yardstick by which success is measured, but one gets the impression that despite his emphasis on money, most of Gilb’s characters would sooner give up material success than their own pride.

Simon Ortiz and the Socio-Economics of Native America

“Flat broke, not one sawbuck left.”

Nobody seemed to care much, including Paymaster Philbert. I mean, what’s money? It leaves Traditionals cold. It’s nothing. They had full gas tanks, full stomachs, good friends and family all around…who needs those green frog skins of the whitemen? If it might have made an American a little sick to his stomach to have blown two grand on handouts to strangers…it didn’t bother old-time Indians. Generosity was one of the great virtues of the old-timers, along with endurance and wisdom. They felt good. They weren’t worried. Something would turn up…

--David Seals, Sweet Medicine (54-55)

To understand why the virtual silence on the issues of wealth and work in Simon Ortiz’s Men on the Moon speaks volumes about the Native American worldview, one must examine and understand a system of economics so diametrically opposed to that of the industrialized west that it is rarely if ever discussed in the modern world.

In the Industrialized West, the foundation of the economy is surplus production, that is, producing more than what one needs in order to sell it at a profit. Profit implies competition, and in an equal exchange such as traditional barter systems, no profit is made.

Native Americans continue to be by far the poorest ethnic group in North America, with higher rates of infant mortality, shorter life expectancy, and higher rates of substance abuse than other ethnic groups. However, as Jerry Mander argues in In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, much of this poverty is caused more by the interruption of traditional lifestyles than by any inherent flaw in their traditional modes of survival.

Until roughly 400 years ago, most Native American societies were entirely self-sufficient in food, clothing, shelter, and most other material needs. Trade, in the form of barter, was reserved almost solely for luxury goods. According to Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Salhins, most pre-industrial aboriginal cultures also made of point of “deliberate under-production”.(20)

There is a conscience and consistent disregard for the notion of ‘maximum effort from the maximum number of people’…Labor power is underused, technological means are not fully engaged, natural resources are left untapped…production is low relative to existing possibilities. The work day is short. The number of days off exceeds the number of work days. Dancing, fishing, games, sleep, and ritual seem to occupy the greater part of one’s time. (Salhins, 25)

Salhins goes on to point out that in hunter-gatherer societies the average workday amounted to roughly four hours a day, and that in non-feudal, pre-industrial societies the work day was no more than an hour or so more on average. Many individuals did not do “productive work” at all. All this points to a culture more interested in rest than production, very unlike the Industrial West. (12-150)

Furthermore, most tribes had a combination of traditions and social sanctions that prevented individuals from amassing a disruptive amount of wealth. Reciprocal gift giving, communal food storage, and “potlatch”, the practice of giving away or destroying excessive wealth in order to gain social prestige, were all common practices, and in many tribes they remain so (Mander, 221-224).

These factors lead to an economy so unlike that of the industrialized west as to be almost unrecognizable as such. Rather than measuring wealth in material terms, subsistence economies measure wealth in leisure, communal harmony, and sustainability (Mander, 247-262). In fact, many tribes continue to practice traditional industries in order to feed themselves, and until recently there were many that still lived largely off the land. Examples of this abound in Ortiz’s text, in “Kaiser and the War”, with its recurrent talk of cornfields and sheep-camps, or Jimmo’s father making his own crutches from native wood in “Something’s Going On”. (59-60) As Suzy Erliche of Kotezbue, Alaska put it:

I came from a subsistence family. I grew up that way. I am very proud of it. I want my children to grow up that way. It brings strength to us as Inupiats. It is something different than going to the store. Our grocery store is millions of acres wide, and it brings us pride.

--Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey (165)

It therefore comes as no surprise that Ortiz, a member of the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo in North America would not place a great deal of emphasis on money, or on wage-work. To a traditional, or even quasi-traditional Native American, such things are not only foreign, but also somewhat distasteful. As another Alaskan Native, Antoinette Helmer put it:

Profit to non-natives means money. Profit to natives means a good life derived from the land and the sea…This land we hold in trust is our wealth. It is the only wealth we could possible pass on to our children…

--Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (301)

Wealth and Work on the Border: The Anglo-American Reality

The differing views of wealth and work, detailed in Gilb’s work and hinted at in Ortiz’s, serve to illustrate that while the different ethnic groups of the Border Southwest may share some characteristics, other telling differences lie just beneath the surface. When compared with mainstream Anglo culture, these distinctive “ethnic economies” shed a harsh light on the norms and values associated with work and wealth in America’s consumer culture.

Summing up the most basic and general facets of the mainstream consumer culture, one quickly sees the contrasts. Success and economic health are measured almost solely in terms of currency. Nowhere is this more telling than when one examines the Gross National Product (GNP), the primary measurement of economic health according to standard Western economics. The GNP measures the vibrancy of an economy by how much money changes hands, either in earnings or payments, and how often these exchanges take place. The problem is that this system is inherently flawed, as detrimental social costs, such as increased crime rates and hence crime prevention costs or increased rates of disease and hence medical costs, serve to push up the numbers in the very same way that social gains (increased home ownership, for example) do. When viewed from the point of view of either of the two ethnic economic theories previously discussed, this is not only strange, but also downright distasteful. (Mander, 25-30)

The same could be said for the issue of work. Despite growing concern over the nature of work in Anglo-American culture, there is still a common prejudice against manual labor of the sort that Gilb’s character engage in, and against the “lazy” subsistence economy of traditional Native groups. Jobs are ranked according to their rate of pay, and the level of specialization required, not according to their social impact or needfulness. That is to say that a professional athlete, whose work is highly paid and highly specialized, despite the fact that it does little to serve the community, is more highly respected than the multi-skilled handy man employed to repair public parks or the subsistence farmer supporting his family and community.

Finally, the concept of “newness” and its supposed desirability over “old” or “traditional” is not only the foundation of consumerist culture, but also a direct contradiction of both the pragmatism of Latino economic thinking, where one cares for possessions and purchases long-lasting products, and the immaterialist ethos of traditional Native America.

Reaching Across Borders

The hard-working, hard-drinking toughness of the Latino labor class is just one facet of a culture that also places a high premium on family, pride, craftsmanship, and tends to disdain crass materialism in favor of economic prudence. While there is danger in a life lived on the border of poverty, there is also great pride and accomplishments, which are often overlooked by the standard Anglo emphasis on material wealth and “white collar” prestige jobs.

The radically different economic thought behind Native America’s traditional and resilient cultures show by its stark contrast with Anglo-America’s that they are other ways of life possible. In our increasingly money-driven, money-oriented, and money-soaked world the existence of a time-proven and currency-free system offers a refreshingly different vision of a life that is slower, more stable, more relaxed, and free of much of the more egregious aspects of modern life.

Both Men on the Moon and The Magic of Blood are more than just collections of superbly written stories, they are cross-border views into cultures all too often ignored by “mainstream America”, with lessons to teach should the Anglo world wish to sit still and listen.

Works Cited:

Berger, Thomas R. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaskan Native Review Commission. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Gilb, Dagoberto. The Magic of Blood. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992.

Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War. London: Arrow Books, 1974.

Ortiz, Simon J. Men on the Moon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1972.

Seals, David. Sweet Medicine. New York: Orion Books, 1992.