Due to my weirdo nomad schizo artist lifestyle, I’ve recently picked up a bit of freelance, under-the-table work in a restaurant on evenings and weekends. Good cash, and a fun return to my proletariat roots - it’s always nice to see how things work on the ground level of society.
A major shift that I’ve noticed between now and doing restaurant work a few years back is that the entire kitchen staff seems to have “gone hispanic” - there’s not a word of english being spoken back there and there are strong hints that these guys are all under-the-table and undocumented.
But an interesting dynamic that I’ve noticed is that the common “enemy” represented by these hipsanics - with their alien and alienating language, lifestyle, and subculture - seems to have brought the black and white servers and staff of this restaurant together on a socioeconomic and sociocultural level. I’ve worked in enough restaurants and service jobs to see how sub-cliques form among staff along race lines, and it’s almost always been black and white before. Now, it’s black, white, and other on one side and hispanic on the other. The gossip, the snarking, the outright withholding of tip shares from hispanic bus staff - it’s kind of astonishing.
I’ve only been doing this about two weeks and I’ve already heard my black coworker refer to the guys in the kitchen as “wetbacks,” while the white hipsters joke and grin about calling immigration and so on. But it gets vicious sometimes - one waitress was so pissed off over the way that the bus staff kept talking to each other in grinning, cartoonish (think exaggerated and Speedy Gonalez-ish) spanish around her (frankly, she’s smoking hot and with my limited understanding of Spanish, it sounded like they were saying lewd things about her) that she flat-out organized a “tip strike” against them that evening. I think the exact quote that I overheard was something like, "fuck those immigrants! If they want to talk spanish, they can do that shit all they want when they get deported!’
What’s amazing is the raw camaraderie among the white, black, and asian staff that you frankly just don’t see in normal situations like this. The black bartender is all, “you my nigga!” to the white one, while the white and black waitresses hang out outside of work.
It truly seems that their common mistrust and irritation with the “others” - the hispanics - has caused them to draw closer together. Could this happen on a greater societal scale as hipsanics become the dominant minority in this country, bringing their language, lifestyle, and culture, all of which is often confusing and “foreign” to both whites and blacks?
