Daily Inspiration Quote by Alma Guillermoprieto

The line lands like a polite throat-clearing that immediately turns into an indictment. “And, of course” performs a sly bit of rhetorical judo: it frames Mexican labor in the U.S. as something everyone already knows, then exposes how that “common knowledge” has been comfortably walled off from moral and political consequence. Guillermoprieto’s intent isn’t to shock with revelation; it’s to shame the listener’s selective attention.

Her list of workplaces is calibrated for maximum intimacy. Homes and gardens aren’t abstractions; they’re spaces of privacy and comfort. Factories and carpentry shops signal the physical scaffolding of American prosperity. Restaurants are the masterstroke because they implicate nearly everyone. The reader doesn’t need a policy briefing on migration; they only need to remember the last time they ate out. By the time she gets to “dishes,” the subtext is clear: the border is not a hard line but a one-way membrane for labor that Americans depend on while pretending not to.

The final clause, “washed by a Mexican,” is deliberately blunt and slightly abrasive. It compresses a whole labor system into an image of hidden work and lowered status, pushing against the euphemisms that make exploitation palatable (“help,” “workers,” “illegals”). The context here is the long-running U.S. habit of treating Mexican migration as both threat and infrastructure. Guillermoprieto forces the contradiction into a single, unavoidable scene: your meal, your plate, someone else’s invisibility.