Daily Inspiration Quote by Alma Guillermoprieto

It reads like a calm question, but it’s wired as a trap: answer it honestly and you’re forced to admit how dependent California is on the very people its politics so often treats as disposable. Guillermoprieto isn’t asking about a border; she’s asking about a backbone. The hypothetical “from one day to the next” is the key move. By compressing time, she strips away the usual evasions - gradual demographic shifts, abstract talk of “flows,” the comforting belief that markets magically “adjust.” Overnight absence turns invisible labor into an unavoidable public emergency.

The line also flips the burden of imagination. Immigration debates routinely demand that Mexicans justify their presence, prove their “contribution,” or apologize for being seen at all. Guillermoprieto reverses the moral math: what, exactly, would “California” be without them? Not in a sentimental way, but in the blunt mechanics of food, caregiving, construction, hospitality, logistics - the infrastructure of daily life that doesn’t make headlines unless it breaks.

As a journalist, she’s deploying a classic reporting instinct: make the reader confront the unphotographed parts of the story. The subtext is accusatory without being preachy. If your first reaction is relief, she’s pointing to cruelty; if it’s panic, she’s pointing to hypocrisy. Either way, the question exposes how racialized labor can be essential and still be treated as temporary, suspect, or removable - as if an entire population were a faucet you could just turn off.