“UFO” by Stanley Delgado / The Adroit Journal
“The only thing worth a thing in this life-thing was a dollar, better yet millions of them.”
“UFO” (3,400 words) by Stanley Delgado in The Adroit Journal’s latest issue is engaging on plenty of fronts. There’s a good-sized cast of characters for a short work, and significant shifts in settings and tone. Delgado paints with every color on the emotional palette, too: joy, humor, fear, anger, resentment, pride, humility, you name it, it’s in there.
The singular thing that recommends it, though, is its balance. It’s a story about immigration, and it’s especially relevant now. It somehow offers a nuanced consideration of the topic at the same time that it embraces extremes.
“UFO” covers a lot of ground, both geographically (from what seems to be a fictional province named Santa Equis in an unnamed country, to the farmland of central California, to the streets of Watts, Los Angeles) as well as temporally (from 1985 to the here and now).
Our narrator is one of five characters, all recent immigrants to the United States in the mid-1980’s. They orchestrate car accidents on the freeways of Los Angeles as an insurance scam, which is part of a larger bid to establish American citizenship.
The idea behind the scheme is rooted in the political: Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) granted temporary legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, but the bill behind it also created the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program, which granted legal residency to hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers who could prove they had worked in the U.S. for at least 90 days.
According to Benny, “an original bracero” (farm worker), and the man who drives the ill-fated cars the other four characters take a back seat in:
“The insurance companies cannot deport you[…] They cannot even ask if you are a citizen. If you want amnesty, you’re going to need something called ‘temporary evidence for permanent residence.’ Proof that you once occupied an American time and space. And these car crashes [are] how we prove it.”
The idea is abhorrent, and Delgado doesn’t shy away from the moral quandary at the heart of it, or the equally reprehensible treatment of seasonal farm workers that brings on the scheme in the first place.
“[Benny] said the only thing worth a thing in this life-thing was a dollar, better yet millions of them. Because when he came over here for work—couldn’t we believe it—that he had actually paid money to work in the United States. With the few coins in his purse, he had paid money to not pay more money for his paperwork back then, which actually, the lack thereof, meant his employers could pay him dirt, treat him like less. But we do whatever it takes to survive, he said. Whatever, however.”
The car crashes are referred to as “moves,” which smacks of the language of con men. Except the expression is used here to signify any attempt to move up in the world, whether illegal or legitimate. And in not making a distinction between the two, Delgado has his say about the ruthless economic system that undergirds everything in America. He does this in-scene and to great effect when the accident-scam targets a limousine that, after the collision, leaves the immigrant participants more battered and bloodied than usual.
“The veterans told us the limousine had drove off. A White woman in a ball gown took one look at us and demanded that her driver leave at once. She was old, with pearl necklaces, and next to her was an older White fossil wearing a tuxedo. They looked like movie stars, the veterans said.”
Certainly a case of two wrongs not making a right. But as literature goes, exactly the kind of scene that forces a consideration of every side of the issue in question.
Delgado takes this both-sides thinking to an emotional climax in the story’s close. Our present-day narrator, now an American citizen and a well-established car salesman, is not above pushing an expensive new truck on recently arrived immigrants who he knows can’t afford it (“I had a mortgage to pay, after all, and my children were applying to Ivy Leagues; whatever, however.”)
He’s soon confronted with a copy of his ivy-league-bound daughter’s college application essay:
“I want to attend this prestigious university for its community, its values, and its opportunities. I want my parents to be proud of me, as I continue their legacy of bravery. In this country, they were once called aliens, but I am here to prove that we are all human.”
It brings him to tears.
Aliens. And so “UFO,” which is unarguably what the scam-vehicle is as it flies—as it “moves”—up the highway. The idea is hammered home in the story’s closing paragraph. Our narrator suffers recurring dreams of himself on line at the immigration office. In the dreams, he cannot understand his own language when he speaks. Even “the translation is rough.”
“The translation,” he says, “does not capture my meaning. The translation is [a] different person altogether.”
Yes, American now. But at what cost?
The Adroit Journal is a registered literary and arts nonprofit organization that was founded in 2010 by poet Peter LaBerge. The journal “has its eyes focused ahead, seeking to showcase what its global staff of emerging writers sees as the future of poetry, prose, and art.”
The journal sponsors the annual Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prose to honor exciting student writers, as well as the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, which has been enriching the lives of its 500+ student mentees and 65+ established mentors since its inception in 2014.
They’re looking for “work that’s bizarre, authentic, subtle, outrageous, indefinable, raw, paradoxical. We’ve got our eyes on the horizon. Send us writing that lives just between the land and the sky.”
The Adroit Journal is not currently open for fiction submissions, but check in at their Submittable page for updates. They accept up to three pieces of fiction (9,000 words total), and accept simultaneous submissions. They are also a paying publication ($100 for all fiction contributors).
Read more of Stanley Delgado’s work at his website.
Many thanks to Stanley Delgado and The Adroit Journal for the fully-engaging and thought-provoking “UFO.”
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