texte

Bonjour Doudou!

Je n’ai pas bien compris ce texte est ce que vous pouvez me l’expliquer SVP ?
Je dois répondre pour une question aussi.


América

Cândido and América are illegal Mexican immigrant hiding in a canyon outside Los Angels. After her husband has been hit by a car, América decides to go to town and find a job.

“No”, he said. “I can’t let you do it. I was worried sick the whole day you were gone – and look at the bad luck it brought us”. He patted his arm in its sling by way of illustration. “Besides, there are no jobs for women here, only for men with strong backs. They want braceros, not maids.
She grinned and made a muscle with her right arm. “I can do anything a man can do”.
He tried for a stern and forbidding look, but it tortured his face and he had to let it go. She was tiny, like a child – she was a child. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds, and the baby hadn’t begun to show yet, not at all. What could she hope to accomplish at a labor exchange ?
“Pick lettuce,” she said. “Or fruit maybe.” He had to laugh. He couldn’t help himself.
“ Lettuce? Fruit? This isn’t Bakersfield, this is L.A. there’s no fruit here. No cotton, no nothing. There’s nothing here but houses, hoses by the millions, roof after roof as far as you can see…”
She scratched at a mosquito bite on her arm, but her eyes were alive, shining with the image, and her lips compressed round a private smile. “I want one of those houses,” she said. “A clean white one made out of lumber that smells like the mountains, with a gas range and a refrigerator, and maybe a little yard so you can plant a garden and make a place for the chickens. That’s what you promised me, didn’t you?”
She wanted. Of course she wanted. Everybody who’d stayed behind to dry up and die in Tepoztlan wanted too – hell, all of Morelos, all of Mexico and the Indian countries to the south, they all wanted, and what else was new? A house, a yard, maybe a TV and a car too nothing fancy, no palaces like the gringos built – just four walls and a roof. Was that so much to ask?
He watched her lips – pouting, greedy lips, lips he wanted to kiss and own. “Well?” She demanded, and she wasn’t teasing now. “Didn’t you?”
He’d promised. Sure he had. He’d held up the lure of all those things, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, the glitter the North like a second Eden; sure, a young girl like her and an old man like himself with gray in his mustache – what else was he going to tell her? That they would get robbed at the border and live under two boards at the dump till he could make enough on the street corner to get them across? That they’d hide out like rats in a hole and live on a blanket beside a stream that would run dry in a month? That he’d be hammered down on the road so he could barely stand or even think straight? He didn’t know what to say.
She turned away from him. He watched the morning mist enclose her as she began to pick her way over the boulders that cluttered the ravine like broken teeth. When she got to the foot of the trail she swung round and stood there a moment. “Maybe somebody will need a floor mopped or a stove cleaned,” she said, the words drifting down to him over the hum of the invisible cars above.
It took him a long moment, and when he spoke it was as if the air had been knocked out of him. “Yeah,” he said sinking back down into the blanket. “Maybe.”




II Going further.


5. What vision of the American Dream is given in this text?

merci bien Doudou!