“Mexican Time,” and Other Lessons Learned Working in a Diverse Warehouse in Dallas

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

I thank the old friend who sent me this article.

 

 

Posted on May 14, 2017

Dances with Mexicans

By Yaroslav Lavrentievich Padvolotskiy
May 14, 2017
American Renaissance


What I learned as a warehouse worker.

I graduated from a Texas university in August 2015, hoping for a job teaching in a public school. I quickly found out that in Texas when a school says it wants a social studies or history teacher, it actually wants a football coach. It was going to be a long, tough road to a teaching job, so I looked for a bridge job, and found work in the warehouse of a company that sold auto parts.

The warehouse manager, Dave, was white and was nearing retirement after working there for 20 or 30 years. He started me at $12.50 an hour, but said, “Don’t tell the other employees that you’re making $12.50 because most of them start at nine or ten dollars per hour.” The other employees were mainly Mexican with a few blacks sprinkled in, and if they found out I was getting a higher wage, they would certainly cry racism.

The warehouse was a great education for me. I learned more about race working at the warehouse than I would have learned reading books for 10 years. Even a stint in the diverse United States Navy did not prepare me for what I experienced. While our military may be filled with non-whites who are not qualified to serve and are semi-literate nuisances, they generally mean well. At the warehouse, however, I met every type of personality from the Mexican and black inner-city.

At first I noticed small things, such as the unwillingness of the blacks and Mexicans to pay attention to detail. My job was to check orders to make sure they were accurately pulled—that the right parts went to the right customers. The pullers were mostly Mexicans, and they routinely made mistakes. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, but Mexicans could never admit they made one. Whenever one would pull an incorrect number of parts or the wrong part, or no parts at all, I would spend five minutes trying to explain the mistake so they could go pull the order correctly. By the end of my time at the warehouse, I started getting the parts myself; it was quicker and less aggravating.

Mexicans did not care about company property. They routinely drove forklifts into walls and into the metal racks holding auto parts. This happened at least once a month, and it was always the same people, yet they continued to operate the forklifts.

Whenever we had our 15-minute breaks (30 minutes in Mexican time), I noticed that Mexicans sometimes sat on breakable parts, such as gaskets. Explaining to one of them that you should treat something with respect even if it didn’t belong to you was like talking to a brick wall. Their attitude was that it wasn’t theirs so why should they care if they break it. If something breaks, oh well, the white people in charge have a lot of money and can fix it.

Maybe they were just too high to operate forklifts or care about breaking things. My colleagues routinely did drugs, mostly marijuana. One employee who smoked dope regularly was fired when he failed a urine test. The other browns and blacks were outraged and could not comprehend this. I tried to explain that there are consequences when you violate company policy. The other employees blew me off. This incident taught me that many people don’t understand—or don’t care—that breaking rules can have negative consequences.

Their attitude towards drugs is not surprising given their attitude towards laws in general. I remember listening to a group talk about doing something illegal—probably buying drugs—and I said it was a bad idea because it was against the law. One of them, a white woman dating a black man, replied with a giggle, “Oh, you’re one of those law abiding motherfu**ers. You wouldn’t last in the hood.” No doubt she was right. I wouldn’t last, and many whites in Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit in 1968 also realized she was right.

Mexicans and blacks are loud and obnoxious at work. Whites talked to each another at a reasonable volume, but blacks and browns practically screamed at each other. Their favorite subject was sports. Mexicans and blacks knew more about sports than they did about their own communities. None of them knew who the mayor of Dallas was, but they certainly knew the entire roster of the Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas Mavericks, and the Texas Rangers. Almost none followed the Dallas Stars, because ice hockey is a sport for rich white people.

The happiness of the workplace depended entirely on the outcome of a sports match. When the Texas Rangers lost in the playoffs to the Toronto Blue Jays, work almost stopped. How anyone could get that worked up over such a meaningless event was a mystery to me. Even when I played hockey in college I never got that mad over a loss; no one was going to die because I failed to close a passing lane or rode the bench. When you have an IQ somewhere between 80 and 90, sports may be one of the few things you understand.

Maybe they were obsessed with sports because every black or Mexican worker could have been a professional athlete. Listening to them talk about their glory days was like watching 12 different Dennis Hoppers in Hoosiers. The loudest and most obnoxious was Jorge. Jorge could have been a great soccer player and a golden glove boxer if not for the fate written in his stars. Why he always focused on what could have been is beyond me; however, it’s probably true that sports were his only ticket out of Dallas, because like most Mexicans he lacked education. Maybe Jorge was right. Maybe he could have been a professional athlete, but like most of the other workers at the warehouse, he chose to drop out of high school and get someone pregnant, which most likely ended his chance. It all comes back to choices and consequences: They do not understand that choices have consequences.

While they talked about their past championships, they were not exactly eating like champions: chips, soda, McDonald’s, and other junk food. Judging from their diets it was no wonder none of them wound up playing professionally. They loved fast food. Where they got the money for this, I don’t know. I bought lunch maybe once or twice a week and brought a sack lunch on other days. They ate extravagantly, which no doubt helps explain why non-whites are generally unhealthy.

Every black and Mexican at the warehouse claimed to know more about American history than whites. One day, Jorge informed me that millions of Mexicans were living in the Southwest before white people showed up. Dallas, Los Angeles, and Houston, along with the entire infrastructure of the Southwest, were built by Mexicans in the 17th century. We took it from them in the 19th century. When I tried to explain that the Southwest before the Mexican-American War was virtually uninhabited, Jorge replied, “That’s white people history.”

Every non-white employee was a conspiracy theorist, and they loved to theorize about Donald Trump and how he acquired his wealth. They were convinced he got rich through corruption. “How is he corrupt?” I would ask. “He just is. He’s rich. He’s white,” they would reply. I really can’t blame them for thinking this way; they were all from Mexico or inner-city Dallas, where government corruption is common. To them it was hard to imagine that people could get rich through hard work and persistence.

How did whites fare at the warehouse? I noticed on my first day that only whites and well assimilated Mexicans worked in the front offices, while blacks, Mexicans, and the occasional poor white man or woman worked in the warehouse. The warehouse workers resented this, and took their resentment out on whites who worked in the warehouse.

One man who bore the brunt of attacks was a mentally disabled white man in his fifties named Jerry. Jorge and Demetrius—Demetrius was black—were the two worst bullies. The rest of us would lose our tempers occasionally with Jerry because he was always making mistakes, but Jorge and Demetrius ragged him mercilessly. Jorge told us in Jerry’s presence that he once saw Jerry naked in the bathroom with an erection. Even Jerry had enough sense not to do such a thing, but Jorge loved to have fun at Jerry’s expense. Demetrius was just as bad, calling Jerry a dumbass, idiot, retard, faggot, and other colorful terms whenever he pulled an order incorrectly.

At times I became a target of abuse. After a little reflection I realized why they insulted whites and why we tolerated it; they have nothing to lose. If I had punched out one of my non-white colleagues I would have been fired and I might have gone to jail for assault. Any chance I had of becoming a teacher would be ruined. So, like whites everywhere forced to live or work with blacks, I grinned and bore it. The blacks and browns I worked with had been fired and gone to prison—sometimes several times. If it happened again they wouldn’t care. But they know we care and are afraid to retaliate, so they attack us.

Soon I was desperately seeking a new job—anywhere. I started looking abroad, and within two months found a job working at an English-as-a-second-language school in Kiev where my girlfriend—now my wife—was living. My students are white, my colleagues are white, and my neighbors are white. I can talk openly about my experiences in multicultural America. People here generally have an honest understanding of race and its relevance.

But for how much longer? It is alarming that young people, especially teenage girls, are being infected by the cultural disease that is killing Europe and America. They listen to American pop and rap music and almost all of them—male and female—mimic American fashion fads. A few even date outside their race—Turkish men being the most common non-white choice. If America is able to influence what they listen to, how they dress, and even their dating habits, it could influence how they think politically. I fear for the future of this country when they are old enough to hold public office.

I am still hoping for a teaching job in America, but it won’t be in Dallas or any other big city. I would rather spend my life working on someone’s ranch mending barbed wire fences than working in Third-World Dallas.