The menu at Las Flores is enormous, as though trying to please both the locals and the Mexican workers. There’s a selection of authentic Mexican food, which includes several fish dishes marinated in lime juice and sautéed in homemade sauces; a selection of Tex-Mex, dishes invariably ending with the word gringo (as in taco gringo); and a selection devoted solely to fajitas. That the fajitas section is at once the largest and the one with the fewest entries, a kind of billboard built into the menu itself, speaks loudly to the fact that, according to Eduardo, he sells a hundred “chicken sizzlers” to every tilapia al ajillo.
Murphy and Nathan and Clay all thought the change to Oelwein, at least as measured by food, was great. Overstating the case more than slightly, Murphy slipped into mayor mode while perusing the margarita list and said, “Where else in this county—or even in Iowa—can you get good Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food on the same block?”
Clay was smoking a Marlboro Light as he looked at the menu, tilting his head by degrees, trying to line up his eyes with the reading-glass half of his bifocals. Looking over the frames, he said, “Um, have you heard of Des Moines, Murph? If I’m not mistaken, isn’t that in Iowa?”
“Even Greek food,” said Murphy, pressing the point. He was referring to Two Brothers Greek Restaurant, a block north, whose windows had neon signs advertising steaks and pizza. Nowhere on the menu was there a trace of tsatsiki, taramosalata, or even a gyro.
“Since when does Salisbury steak count for Greek food?” said Nathan.
Murphy was unfazed, though his smile served as a slight crack of irony in his facade. “To me, it’s just incredible the ethnic diversity in our little town.”
“Scribe,” Nathan said to me, “my guess is that Murph wants you to write that down.”
Heritage in Oelwein is not something that is taken for granted; in a farming culture predicated on the changeability of seasons, history is in some ways what there is to hold on to. And yet the Irishman, the German, and the Norwegian sitting in Las Flores that night truly celebrated the influx of Mexicans into their town. It seemed only fitting, therefore, that Las Flores occupies the ground floor of one of the oldest and prettiest buildings in Oelwein. Four stories tall and made of hand-laid stone with a vaulted entryway, it’s one of the most interesting as well, the street-level windows tinted nearly black, adding a sleek, modern aesthetic to the place. The restaurant itself is sixteen hundred square feet, enough to accommodate fourteen tables and nine booths. The smoking section seems to expand and contract depending on shifts in the clientele. The walls are fake brick from the baseboard to the sconces, and above that, synthetic adobe painted a pale yellow. Every few feet, and in no apparent pattern, hangs some kind of artisanal memento—a garish poncho, a gigantic sombrero, and a photo of a shoeless peasant strumming his guitar next to a burro. The cheesiness in no way undermines the authenticity. To the contrary, what makes Las Flores enduring—in an old building in an old American town—is in some ways the paradox of its novelty.
That Mexican immigrants stereo typically work hard, I was told, is considered the highest form of praise in Oelwein. That they are brown-skinned and speak a language which sounds fast in a town where people typically take their time formulating their sentences is, just as with the Italians in the early twentieth century, going to take some getting used to. There is respect, to be sure, though with predictable limits. As the real estate broker told me, “Not many landlords are lining up to rent to Mexicans.” The feeling that the new arrivals are taking away jobs from the locals is up for debate, and does not seem—by my count, anyway—to be the flash point it is sometimes portrayed as being in newspapers across the country. On the other hand, the fact that the immigrants lack medical insurance, says Clay, is a tremendous strain on the already overtaxed local hospital. And then there is the question of the drugs, particularly meth. According to Jeremy Logan, meth is distributed by a few well-placed Mexican dealers who are increasingly busy ever since the Combat Meth Act went into effect.
Still, no one was on a witch hunt. Far from it. Everyone at the table—the doctor, the mayor, and the prosecutor—accepted that Eduardo, the owner of Las Flores, was probably an illegal immigrant without feeling the need to verify it as fact. As Nathan said, you wouldn’t have to look very far into anyone’s history around those parts, his own included, to find a similar story told in another time. He instinctively grasped what Representative Souder—for one—did not, which is that if you encourage people to come to your country, you cannot then hold it against them for showing up. As a prosecutor, Nathan simply didn’t ask people’s status. That way, he wouldn’t be party to forcing someone out “through the gate,” as he put it, “which is left perpetually and invitingly open.”
One of the attractions at Las Flores is the sixty-four-ounce margarita, which is drawn from a clear plastic machine inside of which three large mechanical spatulas stir separate vats of red, green, and yellow slush. Murphy ordered strawberry, no salt, while Nathan asked for regular, extra salt. Meantime, Clay lit another cigarette. In front of him was a twenty-four-ounce Diet Coke in a brown plastic glass with crushed ice. Clay had been sober five months and counting—long enough to have had the Intoxilock removed from his truck.
Clay had also, though, been having trouble at Mercy Hospital, where he was chief of staff. After ordering tortillas and salsa, chimichangas, and fajitas, Murphy and Nathan listened as Clay launched into a critique of the hospital’s owner, Wheaton Franciscan Health Care, which drew heavily on the anti-corporate formulations of Noam Chomsky—Clay’s latest hero. Clay, a devout but non-churchgoing Methodist, was a fan of God in his specific way and suspicious of churches generally—especially the Catholic church. According to him, the Wheaton Franciscans, technically a nonprofit order of the church, had “systematized their disrespect for human life to such a degree” that Clay was either going to quit or be fired as chief of staff. What galled him even more than what he deemed the hospital’s substandard equipment was the fact that, in order to save money, patients’ tests were being sent by computer to doctors in Australia and India to be read and analyzed, with the results e-mailed back.
“I mean, what the fuck?” said Clay. “How ’bout no, okay? How ’bout, I’m not trusting my mammogram to some guy in Mumbai? It’s not that they’re not talented doctors,” he went on, “it’s that they’re not here. Part of being a doctor is holding your colleagues accountable. If some guy in India misreads my patient’s biopsy and the patient dies of cancer, do you think we’ll get the guy from India deposed at the civil hearing that takes my license and sues me for all I’m worth?”
Clay stared at Nathan, who stared back impassively. As things around him heated up—Clay’s temper, for instance—Nathan’s heart rate seemed to slow considerably.
“Not likely,” said Clay, finally answering his own question.
“Okay,” said Nathan.
Murph said enthusiastically, “I’ll be darned.”
As Clay saw it, the hospital and insurance systems lacked critical oversight. For example, Wheaton Franciscan had recently begun placing physicians, most from India, in underserved areas across the rural United States. Like the Mexicans who worked in the slaughterhouses, the Indian doctors would work for less money than the American doctors. The trouble was, said Clay, few of the foreign doctors stayed for the entire two-year rotation, for the reason that the Indians’ cultural milieu didn’t mesh with that of places like Oelwein. These shortened terms, said Clay, drove the quality of care down and destabilized the staff. At Mercy, he continued, three doctors had left early in the past eighteen months, keeping the ER in utter turmoil. What’s more, insurance companies used high doctor turnover as a criterion for raising premiums. Practicing medicine in Oelwein felt more and more difficult, said Clay, and morale was low.