Wednesday, November 16, 2016

2 Americas:

The Two Americas of 2016

By TIM WALLACE NOV. 16, 2016

For many Americans, it feels as if the 2016 election split the country in two.

To visualize this, we took the election results and created two new imaginary nations by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas.

Trump’s America

Greater

Puget

Sound

Alaskan

Outpost

Rolette

Cove

Spokane

International Falls

Baxter

Island

Missoula

Lake

Minot

Connecticut

Strait

Helena

Eugene

Estuary

Portland

Sound

Boundary

Water

Bismarck

Augusta

Fargo

Bozeman

Lake

Billings

Boise

Upstate

Twin Cities

Reservoir

Boston

Harbor

Teton

Tarn

Pierre

Buffalo

Bay

Sioux Falls

Madison

Lake

Casper

Ithaca

Lake

Detroit

Delta

Des Moines

Pond

Lakota

Lakes

Elko

Salt

Lake

New York

Narrows

Chicago

Sea

Reno

Reservoir

Cheyenne

Cleveland

Cove

Pittsburgh

Puddle

San

Francisco

Bay

Indy

Puddle

Omaha

Acela

Channel

D.C.

Delta

Denver

Sea

Champaign

Kettle

Kansas City

Isthmus

Cincinnati

Slough

Charleston

Colorado Springs

St. Louis

Pond

Norfolk

Sound

GREAT

AMERICAN

PLAINS

Louisville

Lake

Bakersfield

Hook

Las Vegas

Harbor

Raleigh

Bay

Lake

Flagstaff

Knoxville

Los Angeles

Bay

Tulsa

Nashville

Pond

Santa Fe Sea

Amarillo

Wilmington

Memphis

Harbor

Oklahoma City

Phoenix

Columbia

Lake

San Diego

Inlet

Atlanta

Lake

Miss.

Lake

Bay of Tucson

Fort Worth

Dallas

Pond

Selma

Sea

El Paso

Bay

Jacksonville

Austin

Pond

Houston

Bay

San Antonio

Lake

New Orleans

Inlet

Lake

Disney

By Tim Wallace/The New York Times

Laredo Gulf

Tampa

Bay

Corpus Christi

Miami

Bay

Geographically, Donald J. Trump won most of the land area of the United States. A country consisting of areas he won retains more than 80 percent of the nation’s counties.

While Trump country is vast, its edges have been eroded by coastal Democrats, and it is riddled with large inland lakes of Clinton voters who were generally concentrated in dense urban areas.

Clinton’s America

Seattle

Montana

Archipelago

Old Glacier

Gulf

Maine

Cove

Lutsen

Island

Portland

Northwest

Sea

Albany

Narrows

Coos

Bay

Minneapolis

Boston

Great Bays

New

England

Buffalo

Milwaukee

Detroit

Wyoming

Shallows

Reno

Island

Cleveland

New York

Salt Lake City

Chicago

Philadelphia

Midwest

Isles

Des Moines

Pittsburgh

Denver

San Francisco

Washington

Cincinnati

St. Louis

Norfolk

Blue Ridge

Sea

Bakersfield

Bay

Las Vegas

Raleigh

Great

American

Ocean

Nashville

Albuquerque

Island

Los Angeles

Carolina

Islands

Santa Fe

Memphis

Maricopa

Sea

San Diego

Atlanta

Mississippi

Island

Tucson

Island

High Plains

Sea

Dallas

El Paso

Island

Jackson

Georgian

Strait

Hawaiian

Islands

Alabama

Gulf

Houston

San Antonio

Tampa

Isla

Grande

By Tim Wallace/The New York Times

Miami

Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won the cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, but Mr. Trump won many of the suburbs, isolating the cities in a sea of Republican voters.

Mrs. Clinton’s island nation has large atolls and small island chains with liberal cores, like college towns, Native American reservations and areas with black and Hispanic majorities. While the land area is small, the residents here voted for Mrs. Clinton in large enough numbers to make her the winner of the overall popular vote.

Monday, November 7, 2016

Harry Belafonte: What Do We Have to Lose? Everything

By HARRY BELAFONTENOV. 7, 2016

Montgomery, Alabama, 1965 CreditBruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

“O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath —

America will be!”

— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

What old men know is that everything can change. Langston Hughes wrote these lines when I was 8 years old, in the very different America of 1935.

It was an America where the life of a black person didn’t count for much. Where women were still second-class citizens, where Jews and other ethnic whites were looked on with suspicion, and immigrants were kept out almost completely unless they came from certain approved countries in Northern Europe. Where gay people dared not speak the name of their love, and where “passing” — as white, as a WASP, as heterosexual, as something, anything else that fit in with what America was supposed to be was a commonplace, with all of the self-abasement and the shame that entailed.

It was an America still ruled, at its base, by violence. Where lynchings, and especially the threat of lynchings, were used to keep minorities away from the ballot box and in their place. Where companies amassed arsenals of weapons for goons to use against their own employees and recruited the police and National Guardsmen to help them if these private corporate armies proved insufficient. Where destitute veterans of World War I were driven from the streets of Washington with tear gas and bayonets, after they went to our nation’s capital to ask for the money they were owed.

Much of that was how America had always been. We changed it, many of us, through some of the proudest struggles of our history. It wasn’t easy, and sometimes it wasn’t pretty, but we did it, together. We won voting rights for all. We ended Jim Crow, and we pushed open the Golden Door again to welcome immigrants. We achieved full rights for women, and fought to let people of all genders and sexual orientations stand in the light. And if we have not yet created the America that Langston Hughes swore will be — “The land that never has been yet” — if there is still much to be done, at least we have advanced our standards of humanity, hope and decency to places where many people never thought we could reach.

What old men know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered in Reconstruction, by a white America grown morally weary, or bent on revenge. Lost as the gains of our labor unions have been for decades now, pushed back until so many of us stand alone in the workplace, before unfettered corporate power. Lost as the vote is being lost by legislative chicanery. Lost as so many powerful interests would have us lose the benefits of the social welfare state, privatize Social Security, and annihilate Obamacare altogether.

If he wins this Tuesday, Donald J. Trump would be, at 70, the oldest president ever elected. But there is much about Mr. Trump that is always young, and not in a good way. There is something permanently feckless and immature in the man. It can be seen in how he mangles virtually the same words that Langston Hughes used.

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.

Mr. Trump, who is not a poet, either in his late-night tweets or on the speaker’s stump, sees American greatness as some heavy, dead thing that we must reacquire. Like a bar of gold, perhaps, or a bank vault, or one of the lifeless, anonymous buildings he loves to put up. It is a simplistic notion, reducing all the complexity of the American experience to a vague greatness, and his prescription for the future is just as undefined, a promise that we will return to “winning” without ever spelling out what we will win — save for the exclusion of “others,” the reduction of women to sexual tally points, the re-closeting of so many of us.

With his simple, mean, boy’s heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him blind into a restoration that is not possible and could not be endured if it were. Many of his followers acknowledge that (“He may get us all killed”) but want to have someone in the White House who will really “blow things up.”

What old men know is that things blown up — customs, folkways, social compacts, human bodies — cannot so easily be put right. What Langston Hughes so yearned for when he asked that America be America again was the realization of an age-old people’s struggle, not the murky fantasies of a petty tyrant. Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose, and we must answer, only the dream, only everything.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Latina Hotel Workers Harness Force of Labor and of Politics in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS — She begins her day in black, the natural black before dawn and the requisite black of her uniform: the T-shirt, the pants, the socks, the shoes with slip-resistant treads, all black. The outfit announces deference.

She crams fresh vegetables into a blender and holds a plate over its mouth as the machine whips up her green liquid breakfast. Its whine sounds the alarm for her four school-age grandchildren who, one by one, emerge sleepwalking from corners of their crammed rented house.

Time to go. Before shepherding the children into her silver Jeep Patriot, the woman straps on a fabric back brace and covers it with the last piece of her uniform, a gray and black tunic. Then, above her left breast, she pins two small union buttons beside her silver name tag.

The combined effect says:

This is Celia. Underestimate her at your risk.

Celia Vargas, 57, with dark wavy hair restrained by a clasp, works at one of the hotels in perpetual gleam along and around the Strip. She is a “guest room attendant” and a member of the Culinary Union, one of more than 14,000 who clean hotel rooms while guests donate money to the casino of their choice.

Celia Vargas, a guest room attendant at a hotel in Las Vegas, drove her grandchildren to school on Wednesday. Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Ms. Vargas, who is from El Salvador, and her Latina union colleagues are a growing force in the politics and culture of Nevada, vocal in their beliefs and expectations. Their 57,000-member Culinary Union, a powerful supporter of Nevada Democrats, is now 56 percent Latino — a jump from 35 percent just 20 years ago.

“The power and courage of guest room attendants are the foundation and a big source of strength of the Culinary Union,” Bethany Khan, the union’s communications director, says. These workers, she adds, “are the majority of the middle class in Nevada.”

Most of the hotels on and around the Strip are union shops, but the one that employs Ms. Vargas has yet to sign a contract. Even though its workers voted to unionize last December, and even though it is violating the law by not coming to the bargaining table — a point reinforced in a decision and order issued on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board.

So Ms. Vargas wears her back brace, hidden, but also her buttons, prominent.

A wooden rosary draped over the rearview mirror sways as her Jeep wends through a working-class stretch of Las Vegas; this is not where Donny and Marie live. She drops her grandchildren at their school, then goes to the house of a friend from the Dominican Republic. She is standing outside, dressed in the same black and gray.

The Jeep drives deeper into the Vegas peculiarity, past the 7-Elevens and massage parlors, the smoke shops and strip clubs. Soon the casino and hotel giants of the Strip are framing the view, including one that sticks out like a gold tooth in a wicked grin.

This is where Ms. Vargas will clock in at 8:30, and where she is expected to clean a checked-out room in less than 30 minutes and a stay-over in less than 15. Every room seems to reveal something about the human condition.

“Sometimes I open the door, and I say ‘Oh my God,’ ” Ms. Vargas says. “And then I close the door.”

People leaving the Culinary Union to canvass. The union is a powerful supporter of Nevada Democrats. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Despite their name tags, guest room attendants are anonymous. They go unnoticed by many as they push their 300-pound carts to the next room, and the next.

A glimpse of what is expected of these attendants can be found at the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, a joint venture between the culinary and bartenders unions and many properties along the Strip. Here, people are trained as cooks or baker’s helpers, bus persons or bar apprentices — or guest room attendants.

A corner of the academy’s building features a series of mock guest rooms, each one representing a specific hotel’s style: a Bellagio suite, an MGM Grand, a Caesars Palace. Students learn how to lift mattresses without injuring their backs; how to wear gloves while reaching with care into wastebaskets; and how to maintain quality while moving quickly, because there’s always another room.

“Get in and get out,” says Shirley Smith, a former guest room attendant who now trains others.

Consider all the items on that cart. Linens, magazines, water bottles, coffee, toiletries, tissues, magazines, glass cleaners, disinfectants, bathrobes, dusters, a vacuum, and assorted brushes, including one for the toilet and one for the crevices around the tub and shower.

Now consider the job itself.

“We make the beds, dust, vacuum, mop, fill the coffee, the creamer, the sugar,” Ms. Vargas says. “We wash the toilet, the bathtub, the shower, the Jacuzzi. Worst, sometimes, is the kitchen. We clean the kitchen.”

All in a half-hour. Nine, 10, 11 times a day.

Maria Anaya practiced making a bed in the mock guest rooms at the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, where those seeking to become guest room attendants can take a two-week course. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

And when her shift ends in the early evening, Ms. Vargas has often sweated through her back brace and black T-shirt. Aching here there and everywhere, she drives home and tells her family that Grandma needs to lie down for a little bit.

Grandma’s full name is Celia Menendez Vargas. She grew up in the city of Santa Ana, the daughter of a soldier and a nurse. As civil war engulfed El Salvador in the early 1980s, her husband was killed in a bus bombing, and various family members fled to asylum in Canada and Australia. She entrusted her two children to an aunt and sold her belongings to pay for illicit transport to the United States. She was smuggled in a wooden container on a truck bound for Los Angeles.

“Illegal,” she says. “Like a lot of people.”

She worked for four years as a live-in housekeeper, applied for residency and saved up the money to arrange for her two sons to join her legally. She remarried, gave birth to a girl in 1986, divorced and kept working. Newspaper deliverer. Garment factory worker. Babysitter. School custodian. Food-truck cook, making pupusas, those Salvadoran corn tortillas filled with cheese or meat or beans.

Ms. Vargas, who is from El Salvador, cooked dinner at home with her grandchildren Ryan, Karla and Evalina Alonso-Molina, ages 7, 13 and 10. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In 1996, Ms. Vargas became an American citizen. Her reasoning is familiar, yet fresh: “For me this was very important. I always think this country was the best for the future of my kids.”

Friends were urging her to come to the soccer fields some Sunday and meet a man who was also from Santa Ana, but her heavy work schedule precluded romance. “Always working,” she says. “Working, work, work.”

They met, finally, she and Jorge Alberto Vargas, and were married in 2003. A few years later they moved to Las Vegas, on word that jobs were plentiful in the neon oasis.

Mr. Vargas, who had a work permit based on political asylum, became a chef at a casino on the Strip, and things were fine until they weren’t. Three years ago, he was detained after being arrested a second time for driving under the influence, although the family maintains his second arrest was a medical episode related to diabetes. He spent more than two years being shipped to various federal detention centers — Nevada, California, Texas, Louisiana — before being deported back to El Salvador in July.

Ms. Vargas saw him last a year ago, for 30 minutes; she cries at the memory. She keeps his clothes boxed in the garage, and files document after document with the government, working toward that day when they might be reunited.

This and other travails consume Ms. Vargas. But she has returned to the work force, finding a job as a guest room attendant in this glittering gold nonunion hotel. It paid a little more than $14 an hour — about $3 less than what unionized housekeepers were making, and with nowhere near the complement of benefits.

Ivelice Martinez, who is from the the Dominican Republic, rode with Ms. Vargas to work. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Some of her colleagues began to agitate for a union vote. Union pamphlets and cards were surreptitiously exchanged in the parking lot, in the bathrooms, under tables in the employees’ dining room. Ms. Vargas joined in, motivated in part by the $17,000 in debt she had accumulated by undergoing surgery for breast cancer; she wanted better health care benefits.

At one point she and a few other workers were suspended for wearing union buttons, but this concerted union activity is federally protected. After the Culinary Union filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, she was quickly reinstated with back pay, her buttons intact.

It has not been easy. Downsizing after her husband’s deportation, selling her bedroom set, moving in with her daughter and her family. Publicly agitating for the union — and for the Democratic nominee for president — and then fretting that there might be retaliation at her nonunion, pro-Republican workplace. And working, constantly working.

“I tell my children, we have to work,” Ms. Vargas says. “It’s not for government to support me. We work work work.”

She pulls into the employee parking lot of the gold hotel, set aglow now by the unsparing morning sun. Searching for a parking spot, she passes other women, many of them also in black and gray tunics, hurrying toward the service entrance.

Ms. Vargas wears her name tag and union buttons on her uniform. The workers at her hotel voted to unionize last year, but their employer has yet to sign a contract. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Soon she is heading for the same door, one more guest room attendant who wears a back brace while cleaning rooms for a presidential candidate whose name is on the bathrobes she stocks, on the empty wine bottles she collects, on her name tag.

He will receive her labor, but not her vote.

A version of this article appears in print on November 6, 2016, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Force of Labor And of Politics In Las Vegas Hotels. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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