The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

21




First came the excitement of rushing through the jail, after being told she would face the judge, and then finding there was an anteroom before you got to the court. The guards guided Araceli into a cube-shaped room and directed her to wait alongside two other women on a bench bolted to the floor, one a Latina with eyebrows that looked like they were drawn with a 0.5-millimeter drafting pencil; the other an African-American woman with a head covered with parallel rows of hair and skin, as if plowed by a miniature farmer. The old cement walls of the cube-cell were freshly painted, and in their bone-colored blankness Araceli sensed hundreds of existential agonies, endured by people in much worse situations than hers. Araceli knew that her fate ended in Mexico, that at the end of her current visit to purgatory she would step into the disorderly but familiar sunshine of a Mexican border town, and that afterward she would walk to a bus station or a telephone booth and decide what to do next. It might happen in a year, or two, or maybe even in a few days, but eventually that would be her fate, and it calmed her to know this with certainty. The Latina woman to Araceli’s right apparently did not have such knowledge to settle her nerves, because she was repeatedly folding and unfolding a piece of paper. Finally she looked up at Araceli and showed her a row of crooked teeth, as if to say hello. She was gaunt and sallow-faced, with the nervous energy of a twenty-year-old, though she seemed a decade older than that, at least. She also seemed battered and confused, but not especially worried about being that way.

“I’m going to make a run for it,” the woman whispered into Araceli’s ear. Seeing Araceli’s confusion, she switched to thickly accented Spanish: “Voy a correr. Para ser libre.”

“¿Qué?”

“When we get into the court, there’s just a little fence. Chiquito.” The woman glanced at the other inmate on the bench, who seemed to be nodding off, and then raised her voice well above a whisper. “It’s a tiny fence about as high as your waist. I’m going to jump over. And I’m gonna book it for the back, and into the hallway, and down the stairs if I’m lucky. If I’m lucky I’ll get to the front steps and out the door. Now I can do it, because I’m still in my own clothes. Later, they’ll have me in jail blues, and I won’t make it. I have to do it now, because if I don’t, I’ll be locked away forever.”

Araceli gave the woman a glance that said, Please stop bothering me with your lunacies.

“I ain’t lying. Because this is my tercer strike. Uno, dos, tres strikes. ¿Entiendes? I got my first two strikes with my crazy novios. Armed robbery and ADW. Assault with a deadly weapon. Now they got me because I was making eyes at an undercover cop over on Pico. They got me good. And for looking at that cop, and asking him for fifty bucks, I’m looking at twenty-five to life, believe it or not. I said, ‘Okay, honey, if you ain’t got fifty, forty’ll do,’ and that’s when he showed me his badge, the tiny, ugly little f*ck. So I told him, ‘Don’t do me that way, Officer. I’m begging you. I got two strikes. I’ll do you for free, just let me go.’ But he was a real tight-ass, and that’s why I’m here, and that’s why I gotta run.” She gave Araceli a wild-eyed look of desperation and mischief. “You’re not understanding me, are you?”

“You’re going to run?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me,” Araceli said. “I don’t want trouble for me.”

The door opened and the paper-folder left, giving Araceli one last ugly smile. Araceli listened to the closed door for a minute or so, in anticipation of the noises of anarchy the inmate’s attempted escape would set off, but heard only mumbling vibrations of calmly spoken words. Five minutes later, the paper-folder returned with her head bowed, and a palm filled with paper shreds. She averted her eyes from Araceli, sniffled, and began weeping loudly. Before Araceli could ask what had happened, the bailiff called out, “Ramirez and Jones,” and Araceli stood up with the other inmate and followed her braided head into the courtroom.

Unlike Araceli, Jones wore a thin chain around her arms and legs, and a blue jumpsuit. The bailiff directed Jones to a chair in front of the judge, and Araceli to a steel folding chair next to the door they had just passed through. “You’re next,” the bailiff said to her. Forms were shuffled before Jones, an attorney sat next to her and whispered in her ear, and she was asked over and over again if she understood a statement about rights and procedures. Jones nodded several times, and looked impassively at forms that were placed before her, and at the finger of a man who was either a clerk or an attorney and who indicated places she should look. Then he gave her a pen, and whispered into her ear, and she began to sign her name. Araceli had never been in an American court before and wondered if most legal business was conducted this way, with gestures, mumbles, and whispers. Nearly everyone drifted through the proceedings with heavy, tired eyes, even the bailiff, who spent most of his time at his desk. What could be producing this drowsiness? Was it the early hour, the long banks of fluorescent lights, was it something in the air-conditioning? Was it all the paperwork, the forms in triplicate, the stacking of so many manila files? Araceli sensed that the bad-teeth, tres-strikes girl had entered this room determined to run, but had been anesthetized by the lights and the drone of bored voices. Now the judge began to speak. He looked like a schoolteacher, and sounded as if he was reading to the defendant from a prepared text, but he wasn’t looking at any papers before him and for a second it seemed as if he was reading words that were suspended in the air. What a strange trick! When the inmate stood up to leave, Araceli saw that her wrists and ankles were still shackled and linked together, even though she looked too lethargic to be a threat.

Finally, the judge said, “We’re ready for Ramirez, Araceli.”

She walked to the bench, and a skinny, older man with thick glasses stood next to her. “We’re ready, Your Honor,” the older man said, and Araceli was puzzled by his use of the first-person plural, which seemed to join him to her for some purpose. “I’m your public defender,” the man whispered into her ear suddenly. “But just for today. For your arraignment. Later, you get someone else.”

She nodded and looked back over her shoulder at the courtroom: there was, indeed, just a very short barrier separating the place where Araceli sat from the public gallery and the doors at the back of the courtroom. The only guard present, the bailiff, stood near the judge, and in the gallery there was a single witness, a man in business attire with a Mexican flag pin on his lapel. He gave her a twinkling-finger wave, and Araceli wondered if he was there to take her back to Mexico.

“Are they going to deport me?” she asked the public defender in a whisper. Resigned as she was to returning to Mexico, she did not like the idea of having other people decide for her what she should do. A woman should be able to pick the road on which she traveled, and it riled her to think the men gathered in this room—because there were no other women present now, besides her—would decide for her. She looked up at the judge, a kind of anti-angel in his black robes and white hair, holding the keys to the gates of freedom.

“I asked you a question,” she repeated to the public defender in full voice, loud enough to cause the other attorney, standing above a table next to hers, to look across. “Are they going to deport me?”

“No, not for the moment,” the public defender whispered back from the corner of his mouth, and before Araceli could ask him to elaborate, he, the judge, and other people in the court began to speak in another language she only vaguely recognized as English, a torrent of numbers and terms that she did not understand, with roots that seemed to be in Latin, except for some of the very last words the judge spoke before she was directed back into the cube and the jail beyond.

“Ten thousand dollars.”


Assistant District Attorney Ian Goller monitored the routine arraignment of Araceli N. Ramirez from his fourteenth-floor office, in a room adjacent to the office rarely occupied these days by the district attorney, because the boss was on the road, testing the political waters in preparation for a long-shot run for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate. Ian Goller was, at that moment, a worried man, though not for the reasons that should have preoccupied him. The matrices and spreadsheets that mapped and tallied the flow of cases through the courtrooms in the lower floors of his building, and in five satellite courthouses across the county, were arranged on his antiquated, smudged computer screen, and they pointed to a rising flood of drug trials that would eventually lead to a breakdown in the ability of the district attorney’s office to meet its legal mandates. But the slow drip toward judicial chaos did not concern him this morning, as much as the simple contents of a clear plastic bag, and a single piece of paper in a manila folder. Through the skin of plastic he could see the train and bus tickets retrieved from Araceli’s backpack, while the manila folder contained a copy of a hotel sign-i n sheet retrieved by a sheriff’s detective who had just returned from a trip to the desert. The tickets confirmed, with those stamped digital codes that juries loved, the truth of the time frame of the defendant’s version of events, and the document from the hotel-spa, along with a statement from one of the clerks, offered a disturbing contradiction to the statement of his primary witness.

One day and it’s already falling apart. He hadn’t handled a case himself in a while, and it had been a long time since he’d been confronted with the elemental messiness of a criminal prosecution seen in its prosaic details, with prospective arguments and “facts” tainted by the poor memory and moral fallibility of human beings. This is why I’ll never go back to litigating. Because people are idiots and they lie even when, no, especially when you put your faith in them.

If his boss were there, Ian Goller would walk into his office, past the door with the seal of the district attorney and its scales of justice. The Sage of Santa Ana, with his undeniable trial and political skills would then tell him how to handle this conundrum casually and effortlessly, but there were only pictures of his boss’s children in that office, and diplomas, and various photo-trophies of the district attorney’s encounters with national politicians and conservative celebrities, including a snapshot with a distracted and now-deceased President of the United States. Ian Goller could look at those pictures and the district attorney’s confident grin, and intuit what he should do next, and he could even hear the district attorney saying it: Just kick the can down the road and see what happens. Fifty-fifty, it’ll go our way.

The trial attorney he eventually assigned to the case would likely protest his inability to lift The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez over the low bar of proof required for a successful preliminary hearing. But a natural outcome already suggested itself, an obvious deal resting like a jewel box inside the charges the district attorney’s office had just filed. Simply negotiate the charges down from felony to misdemeanor in exchange for a guilty plea, give the defendant credit for time served and hand her ass forthwith to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement representatives at the county jail. She would then be swiftly deported, as were the legions of other foreign nationals without papers who landed there. News of the defendant’s erasure from the American justice system and media orbit would satisfy the constituents clamoring for punishment, and the defendant, in turn, would receive her freedom—in Mexico. Basic fairness to the people of California dictated such a result. After all, the defendant was one of two million residents of the state living every day in violation of Section 8, Title 1325 of the U.S. Code. It fell to county prosecutors to enforce this statute, indirectly, by waiting for each of those two million people to run afoul of some state law, be it a homicide or a DUI. Goller still saw in Araceli N. Ramirez’s actions a basic ignorance of American ways, and the recklessness and bad choices that characterized the existence of so many other, unambiguously guilty defendants. He believed the public defender would find the plea offer appealing, as long as the public defender did not see these train and bus receipts, and the hotel clerk’s statement, and realize just how weak the prosecution’s case really was. Thankfully, the rules and practices of discovery were such that the DA could plausibly delay releasing this information to the defense until after an expedited preliminary hearing. Given the nonviolent nature of the charges, the administrator at the public defender’s office would likely assign the case to a Deputy Public Defender II who would see the plea down to a misdemeanor as an easy and fair resolution, a quick deal that would allow him or her to bank a little extra time to work on the thirty or forty other cases on his or her plate. Deportation was, at any rate, a federal matter beyond the purview of mere county officials: every attorney in the two concrete buildings on the opposite sides of Civic Center Drive accepted such outcomes as a matter of course. There was a door at the end of the maze of jail cells and courtrooms into which a fifth of all the defendants in the county disappeared; the door opened to a vortex of weeping Spanish souls that drained into Tijuana and Mexicali and other forsaken places. Goller told his lawyers that each case that ended in deportation was, in its way, a victory for the rule of law. Even the most liberal member of the public defender’s office long ago accepted this state of affairs without effective complaint, and it fell to the PDs in courtrooms to explain to defendants again and again that they were about to be deported. Very often this information was relayed at ostensibly happy hearings during which sentences were reduced and probation granted, the news given by twenty-five-year-old PDs in quick murmurs relayed by whispering interpreters, which caused the oft-repeated paradox of defendants weeping inconsolably even as the judge was telling them to behave themselves after being “released.” They cried because they knew their American lives were coming to an end, and in the galleries their sons and daughters and wives wept too, once the truth set in. It was a cruel thing to watch, but it was as it should be, Goller thought. Soon, inevitably, his defendant and her problems would pass through the door that led to Mexico.

As he contemplated the quarter-inch-thin newborn baby of paperwork called The People of the State of California v. Araceli N. Ramirez, Ian Goller could already see its final fate on that day when, as an inch-thick folder, it would be rolled away into that mausoleum called Archives.


For the first few days without Araceli, the disorder at the home on Paseo Linda Bonita began to gather momentum at first light with the unmade beds, whose comforters and sheets endured in the shape of lumpy cotton corpses until late in the afternoon. Only Maureen tackled that essential household task, until she finally scolded Scott into action: “If you could make our bed, at least, before you leave in the morning.” He grumbled and complied, but left it all uneven. Was it that he didn’t care that the comforter was drooping on her side of the bed, or was it some kind of eye condition that prevented him from seeing it? She was going to have to teach the boys to make their own beds, and give them some incentive to do so, perhaps an allowance. They’re old enough to do chores now. I swept floors and folded clothes when I was a girl. Then there was the kitchen, whose crowded sink soon evoked the dishwashing station of a cheap diner, with sticky pots and pans beginning to climb upward and over the edge of the sink by 10:00 a.m., their leftover contents becoming encrusted as noon approached. All three bedrooms, the hallways, and the living room were littered with the sweaty fabric of shirts, socks, and underwear of every size but her own. She found Samantha’s soiled socks hiding under the couch, and pajama tops in the backyard, and children’s picture books on the floor underneath the dining room table. And then there was Samantha herself. Though the smallest member of the family, she tossed more objects into the splatter of disarray than everyone else put together. No one could tell her to pick up her hand puppets, her dolls, her stuffed lions, her rubber blocks, her Tinker Bell wand. Apparently, Araceli had spent a good amount of her day picking up after Samantha, who required a pair of eyes on her at all times and thus subtracted from Maureen’s ability to be in all the corners of the home where she needed to be. Samantha, you came to this world to make your mother’s life more beautiful, and feminine, but you’ve also made it infinitely more complicated.

The only solution was to spur gadget-man into action.

“Scott. The dishes. Could you, please?”

He studied the spread of steel bowls and plastic plates across the kitchen’s marble counters, three complete sets associated with the preparation and serving of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Why didn’t you use the dishwasher?”

Maureen didn’t answer this question, and allowed the aggression in her silence to linger until she heard the water start to run in the sink.

When the school year began and Maureen started volunteering three days a week at the boys’ school it was going to be very difficult. She was going to have to find day care for Samantha because they could never again hire a stranger to work in their home.

The consequences of their years of comfort, their pampering by Mexican hands, were there to live with. Voices of judgment continued to occupy the space beyond the pine, glass, and tile cocoon of Paseo Linda Bonita, and she sensed they were growing in volume and meanness. The need to escape that noise gave a greater focus and purpose to her cooking, scrubbing, folding, and other domestic pursuits, as if each muscle exercised in domesticity were building walls that sealed her off from those profane outsiders. But how long could you transform your home into a monastery, with all the televisions and radios permanently off, and the phone off the hook, before you went crazy? She tried calling Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, but the awkward silence and transparent excuses that followed her invitation for Max and Riley to come and play in the backyard and swim in the pool dissuaded her from calling again. What have I done for my friend to treat my family with the frigid distance the uninfected have for the diseased? For the rest of that day, Maureen understood that she had lost a part of herself when she stepped out the door with Samantha that fateful morning. Goodbye, happy innocence. She suppressed the recurring thought that she should call her mother. No, that would be much worse. Instead, she turned on NPR because she knew she would find dispassionate, adult voices, and for forty-five minutes she allowed the reasoned cadences of its afternoon news report to fill the living room and kitchen. She listened to a Prague coffee machine, the musical speaking-voice of a Louisiana shrimp fisherman. It was all very eclectic and relaxing, until she heard the sudden teaser: “Next, from California, a story that many people say defines the social divide in that sunny place. It’s a case involving two children, their parents, and a Mexican woman …” Maureen took three leaping strides across the room and hit the OFF button. Social divide? My home is a social divide?

Her “social divide” was, at any rate, erased now because Araceli was gone and in jail again. This knowledge caused Maureen to feel a pang of guilt every time she did something in the house that Araceli would have done. When she picked up a sponge at the kitchen sink, or emptied out the dishwasher, or took out the trash, she felt she was standing in Araceli’s footsteps. Is there a special place of torment, down there in the circles of hell, for those women who betray their sisters? I can speak the words that will set her free: but if I do, will I lose my children? The anger that she felt toward Araceli in the first days of her sons’ disappearance had dissipated. It’s a natural, motherly thing, to seethe at the person who took your sons. Now her guilt was assuaged only by the information provided by the assistant district attorney at her front door this morning—he had come to “warn” her that the “alleged abductor” of her children would likely go free in a plea bargain. He seemed to think this would make her bitter, that she would spew motherly recrimination, and she pursed her lips in a kind of simulated grimace, but in fact she was relieved. We worked on this house together, Araceli and I, it was our joint project. The orbit of men, of news and jurisprudence, has driven a wedge between us. Then the prosecutor had added that Araceli would be likely deported, and this had caused Maureen to ask her only question: “Deported? For a misdemeanor?” Araceli probably would have been deported anyway; it was inevitable once the police descended on her home. I am responsible for the exile of the woman who worked in my home. Or rather, Scott is. And me. We are. She thought these things as she prepared and poured her daughter’s milk, and in her distraction the white liquid spilled over the top of the bottle and onto the table where Samantha was sitting.

“Milk!” the baby screamed.

“Oh, my God, Sam, you talked! Your first word!”

“Milk!” her baby girl repeated.

Maureen gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead and reached for a rag to clean the spill. When she knelt down to wipe the white drops on the floor, a small moving object at the foot of the table caught her eye. It was an ant, and she watched it join the flow of one of two serpentine threads that converged on the tile underneath her daughter’s high chair. The ants were bumping, circling, and shifting around a spot of spilled and dried Cream of Wheat. Maureen followed their highway across the dining room to the kitchen, and found it led out into the backyard, passing underneath the door that Araceli once opened every morning to begin work.


While Maureen studied the ants and remembered Araceli, the story of the seemingly soon-to-be-deported doméstica caused the mayor of Los Angeles to daydream while ostensibly perusing the menu at his favorite downtown eatery. “The filet mignon here is so tender,” the mayor’s political consultant said, “you can cut it with a spoon.” The mayor of Los Angeles glanced across the white cloth of the table and the sweating goblets of water and gave the consultant a listless and distracted shake of the head.

“I’m thinking the Asian tuna salad,” the mayor mumbled. “Lost my appetite.”

The mayor had slipped into a brooding funk, a rare twenty minutes of reflective silence, causing his consultant and even the regular customers at the Pacific Dining Car to take notice. He was a man who spent most of his waking day in conversation and monologue—on the phone, in his City Hall office, in parking lots and passageways, in elementary school auditoriums, at doughnut shops, in Westside receptions, in his official Lincoln Town Car. The mayor was a self-described pathological talker who liked to brag that he’d been talking nonstop since the age of four; he knew his consultant had two small children and that he could call and find him awake at dawn. Six hours earlier, he had done just that, after catching the appearance of an up-and-coming state senator from Fremont, California, on Univision’s ¡Despierta América! talk show. “Hey, I just saw Escalante talking about that Mexican nanny again,” the mayor had said, without preamble. “He’s going to town on this. He was on Telemundo yesterday. And someone told me they heard him on the radio a couple of times.”

“Really,” the consullant had said wearily into his kitchen phone, while watching his eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter eat Cream of Wheat and simultaneously twirl their chestnut ringlets. The consultant was a New Jersey transplant of Italian heritage with a wild shock of gray Beethoven curls, a lefty pamphleteer who had risen from 1980s rent-control battles to become the master tactician of the progressive wing of the state Democratic Party, helping a variety of principled and competent leaders win election to office. “I think it’s obvious why Escalante’s doing this,” the consultant began. “He’s not on anyone’s radar, because he’s never done anything. A Latino politician who has to wave his arms like crazy to get the attention of Latino voters isn’t going anywhere. He’s got no shot at winning any statewide primary. None.”

Araceli Ramirez was a cause célèbre and a deepening obsession among the mayor’s core Latino supporters, but the consultant’s position on what the mayor’s position should be in her case had not changed. It was the same at 6:45 a.m. in the kitchen of his Northeast L.A. bungalow as it had been in two previous conversations on the subject: keep closed lips and fight the temptation to opine. “You’re the mayor of Los Angeles—this is in Orange County. Leave it alone. Because if you don’t, this crazy family and their nanny could blow up in your face.”

At 6:45 in the morning, the mayor had accepted this counsel as wise and obviously true. He had forgotten about Escalante and the proto-martyr languishing in a Santa Ana jail cell. Then, in the waning moments of his third and final public appearance of the morning, at the Bonaventure Hotel, he had been given another rude reminder of Araceli’s existence. The mayor was paying a courtesy call to a group of striking hotel workers, and had just finished up with a few words in his thick-accented but steadily improving Spanish, when one of the striking maids reached over and squeezed his wrist. She was a short woman with the angular face and short hair of a female prizefighter, and she had pulled the mayor close to her. “No tengas miedo,” she said, in a tone that recalled the mayor’s late mother. “Ponte los pantalones. Di algo para apoyar a Araceli. Me enoja que no hayas dicho nada sobre esa pobre mujer.” The mayor gave a grimace-smile and pulled away, startled a bit by the strength of the woman’s grip.

“She told me to put my pants on,” the mayor said suddenly to his consultant as his salad arrived. “That last woman in the hotel. The short one. Did you see her? I actually recognized her once I was forced to take a look. Die-hard shop steward. Walked precincts in each of my campaigns. She told me she was angry I hadn’t said anything about the Mexican maid. ‘Put your pants on,’ she said. ‘And say something to support Araceli.’ “

“What is that, some sort of Mexican thing? Not having pants?”

“Yeah. Precisely.”

“Well, that’s emasculating. Is that why you ordered a salad?”

“Very funny,” the mayor said, and with that he gave his famous, world-conquering grin—it was the flash of erect porcelain that had gotten him elected mayor, and that got him into trouble, sometimes, when he directed it in private at petite, single young women in their thirties. He dug into his salad, took a few bites, and began to talk. “But she has a point.”

“She does?”

“The way she sees it, she didn’t vote for me just to run the City of L.A.”

“Right. The whole icon thing. The long-oppressed people thing.”

Legions of people expected the mayor of Los Angeles to opine on the case of a wronged Orange County nanny simply because they shared an ethnic heritage. They saw in his election the fulfillment of his people’s long-held aspirations for power and respect. Never mind that most of the voters who had elected the mayor to office were white: he was expected to speak out in favor of immigration reform and amnesty and other subjects far beyond the influence of his actual, quite meager powers, as outlined in the city charter. When he spoke out for immigrant legalization, like these people expected him to, it caused another kind of voter to focus on the seeming threat of his Mexicanness, and a few to harden their belief that he was the leader of a Chicano conspiracy to enslave white people. His Mexican heritage was, at once, his greatest political asset and his heaviest albatross.

“Not saying anything at all makes me look weak,” the mayor said. He did not use that word often in referring to himself, it was a sort of taboo in the mayor’s circle, and hearing the mayor say it caused the consultant to sit forward in his seat. “People are starting to think I’m running away from it.” The mayor’s career, from a rough-and-tumble Eastside childhood, to UC Berkeley and a quixotic minor crusade or two as a civil-rights lawyer, to the state legislature, and finally to election as the mayor of the second largest city in the United States, was a dance between affability and toughness, charm and ruthlessness. He understood that “weak” was poison in politics, just like it was on the streets of his youth. The early chapters of his biography were set in a preppy Chicano Catholic school, where the mayor-to-be wore cardigan sweaters and played Black Panther dress-up games, and finally got into the fistfights that led to his expulsion. When the mayor heard the word “weak” and its many synonyms he felt a twinge of the old aggression, and his silence for the past twenty minutes had come from having suppressed a powerful desire to tell that hotel maid to go f*ck herself.

It was a rare moment of self-doubt from a politician on an incredible winning streak, a man who spent his day subjecting his consultant and everyone in his circle to his constantly shifting enthusiasms, his volatile self-belief. He was going to plant a hundred thousand trees, hire a thousand police officers, and lay a cute TV reporter or two—all by Christmas. Now the imprisoned nanny was mucking it all up, and threatening to detract from his brilliance, and she was doing it all the way from Orange County. The mayor sensed that the pro-Araceli grumbling would eventually spread to his old civil-l ibertarian circles and to the unofficial club of well-to-do Westside liberals who funded his campaigns. A few of these people had already written letters to the editor, emails, op-ed pieces, and Internet postings that commented on Araceli’s “railroading” as emblematic of the “marginalization” of immigrants in the justice system and the workforce, and the “power relations of narrative and belief” in the city between immigrants and nonimmigrants, and other nonsense like that. The mayor understood that these people measured his silence in such matters, it was a running tally they kept in their heads. They kept expecting him to break out in a rash of cowardice.

“I’m going to have to say something,” the mayor said.

The consult ant brought his hands together in concentration. He was a wordsmith, an avid reader of history, and a dedicated student of marketing and message. Quickly he arrived at a broad outline of what the mayor might say—the trick, as always, was to make an essentially moderate and cautious position sound bold, principled, and eloquent, a skill all great American politicians possessed going back to Lincoln. He shared his ideas with the mayor and once he was done the mayor smiled at him and said, “Brilliant.”

“The key thing is the tone,” the consultant said. “You want to sound measured. Like an adult. Above the fray.”

Several hours later the mayor was in East Hollywood, at a memorial service for one of the last remaining survivors in Southern California of the Armenian genocide. When the event was over he addressed the four television reporters outside, who were expecting a few innocuous Armenian-centered remarks. “I’m going to take pity on you guys today, and make a little bit of news,” the mayor whispered into the ear of a female reporter. “I’m going to say something about that Mexican nanny. Get ready.” There was a brief scramble, a hooking up of microphones, a positioning of cables and cameras, and when it had settled, the mayor began:

“Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the arrest, and now the prosecution, of Araceli Ramirez. It’s a case that has a lot of people concerned. And while it isn’t appropriate for me to comment on the facts of an ongoing criminal case, I’d like to make just one observation. One of the beautiful things about this country is that everyone, no matter if rich or poor, immigrant or citizen, is entitled to a fair trial. To be judged on the facts, and not on passions or prejudice. I’m concerned about the passions surrounding this case. I think everyone needs to take a step back, and allow the facts, and only the facts, to determine the outcome. We grant our prosecutors a lot of power to protect us—and that’s good. But we also trust them to use their power with discretion. I am confident that that will be the case here.”

Two hours later, Ian Goller sent a transcript of this statement via BlackBerry to his boss, who was traveling in Bakersfield that afternoon. The district attorney of Orange County sent back a one-word answer: “Surprising.” Goller’s feelings were stronger. It’s outrageous. This isn’t even in his jurisdiction. The assistant district attorney felt a few pangs of wounded local pride, until he stepped back to think about what would lead such an ambitious and savvy politico to comment on The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez. Clearly, the mayor believed that Los Angeles and the Laguna Rancho Estates rested atop the same shifting tectonic plates, and he spoke cautiously to keep his footing as the ground beneath him rumbled. Goller’s own Republican boss might soon feel the same political tremors and decide that pursuing a weak Ramirez case wasn’t worth the risk. In “serious” California political circles both the right and left feared ethnic earthquakes, which was one reason why the immigration problem lingered and deepened.

The longer Araceli Ramirez stuck around Orange County’s courtrooms and jail cells, Goller concluded, the bigger the political problems she presented. The mayor of Los Angeles had spoken, ostensibly, to temper a rush toward final judgment. But his brief remarks only strengthened Goller’s resolve to shuffle her off U.S. soil and on her way to Mexico as soon as possible.