Vroom Vroom

By Madeleine / Spring 2025

When I imagine a race, I think of car racing. The car I drive in the rat race is a 2020 Volkswagen Jetta I got off the dealership lot. Sometimes I take it through the car wash, tip a guy who looks like my boyfriend to dry it off. Marco drives a 2009 Volkswagen Jetta, that he wired a couple thousand over the border to a family friend for, after he got deported and left the car behind. I drive my car to school and work. Marco drives his car to his dad’s job and back. Then to drop his sister off at school and back. Then to drop his mother to work and back. Then to his job and back. Sometimes to school and back. And then to pick up all of his family at the end of the day. At least that's what happens when the car is actually working. It doesn’t do that all the time. He drives the car to Logan to pay his car insurance, a forty-minute trip there and back. I spent those forty minutes doing homework. I spend a lot of time doing homework actually, because that's what you do when you're racing to win.

From a young age, I've known that I wanted to win the rat race. I’ve had my eye on the prize: Comfort. This looked like a car nicer than my Jetta, and enough money to pay someone else to fix it when it inevitably breaks down. My own house, and a white picket fence around it. My parents set me on the right path to win. My mom taught me to play by the book, and work hard. She was granted citizenship after marrying my father, and has since looked down on her fellow Mexicans who do things the illegal or “wrong” way. She started a business and has since bought two houses, and a BMW. My father taught me that it was academics that would get me my goals: Every day of fourth grade we would meet at the dinner table at exactly six pm, we would go over my vocabulary list for the week. We would review the words together, and then I would be quizzed until I got them all right. Then we could have dinner. It was not hard to be spelling bee champ with such a coach. That was my first win. It was my first small rat race win. Next, I knew I needed straight A’s so I could get into a good University, so I could get a good job, so I could really win. The Jetta might not be a great race car, but with effort, it could still get gold. While I did practice spelling tests at my dinner table, a boy sat at his respective dinner table, some two miles away from me, in a small and crowded apartment, trying to fill out his father’s health insurance paperwork for him, his vocab lists long forgotten and crumpled at the bottom of his backpack. Some ten years later I would meet that boy in our highschool’s senior Gov class that we needed to pass to graduate. He would know the answer to every question the teacher asked, and he would get a higher grade than me on the midterm. I would end that class with a 92, and he would barely qualify for graduation with his 71.

This was when I learnt that though we are all competing in the same race, some of us drove on bumpy roads, some cars with more mileage than others, some leaking oil. I learnt that it was much lonelier in my new car, than passenger in his shitmobile.

Let's backtrack. This isn't actually about car racing. It’s about rat racing. I wish to reference Steve Cutt’s Happiness, a short animation that follows a rat chasing happiness all the way to his trap: a job, and nothing but, nothing else that could ever bring him happiness and the lie that he will find it in the money he will make at the job. The moral of the whole thing is that we are just like these rats, chasing false gods that promise us happiness. Chasing the cheese, or the money or the job that will bring us this money, or the money that will buy us that white picket fence. But just like the rat, none of it will ever really make us happy. At minute 2 we see him in his little rat car, in big rat traffic, sitting behind what looks like hundreds of other cars. To tie this allegory back to mine, the reality of the rat race is that we are told the lies of the American dream. That we just need to be smarter, work harder, it's about putting in extra hours at work, getting less sleep, and spending less time with our loved ones. But the truth of it all is that that only serves to pit us against one another. It only serves to drive us apart, keep us in our own lanes, and in our own cars, forever chasing our tails and wondering why it doesn’t make us happy. The truth is that I was never going to win this race, stuck behind hundreds of other people in 4pm rush hour traffic, all getting off of our jobs that we hate, to spend time with the families we’ve isolated ourselves from. It doesn’t matter if you're driving a BMW or a new Jetta or an old one. None of them are going anywhere for a while. The affluent rats, the real “winners” aren’t sitting in traffic. They’re helicoptering over us. But even they aren’t winning. They’re also alone.

But I grew up upper middle class, with parents that would’ve given me the world. It was hard to believe that I couldn’t have everything. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that my white picket fence dreams were in danger, but harder to cope with knowing he always was. They go hand and hand though. His parents brought him over and into the United States illegally when he was four years old. He was late to learn English, barely beginning that process once he was already in school. He immediately fell behind his peers, not understanding the teacher enough to even be aware that he had homework to do, much less understanding what the assignments asked of him. Once he did understand, he had fallen behind on the concepts. From a young age he understood that the dreams I was chasing he would never achieve. He understood that without a social security, he could never get more than a minimum wage job, so why bother with the academics that already came so hard to him? He didn't have time for that anyways, being in charge of managing the bills his parents couldn’t read, the neighbors his parents couldn’t talk to, every household managerial task, and once he was old enough, his own job. Despite all these roadblocks, he still somehow found a way to become the most intelligent and interesting person Mira Mesa has ever grown. He has the best style in the friend group, despite sourcing nearly all of it from the apartment’s dumpster or goodwill. When I unwind from work, I scroll through a feed of endless vapid pop culture. While he unwinds, he watches YouTube documentaries about the fall of the Roman Empire, the history of rap, and linguistics. While I was sitting in a classroom figuring out what was most likely to be on the test, and what the teacher wanted to hear from me on the topic, he was learning. But that’s not what the machine actually wants from us. I became a good little citizen, I know how to get to the next room by the time the bell rings, and how to cite in MLA format. He knows everything else. Though he is so hardworking, and interesting and funny and dynamic. Though he has so much to offer… it all means nothing in the rat race. All of these things that I have been told matter to the rat race, hard work and grit, really mean nothing in his race. Even if he had overcome the language barrier earlier, overworked himself to take care of his family and his academics… he's right. It doesn't mean the same thing for him as it does for me. All that effort won’t grant him citizenship. All that effort won't get him a job, like it would for me. All that effort won't guarantee him any sort of protection. By the act of him being here, breathing United States air, on stolen land that should’ve been his birthright, he is a criminal. He has had to be careful, in hiding, his whole life. He does not move as freely as the rest of us. And now, under this presidency, he is hunted. Just be careful, doesn’t cut it anymore. Marco and his family are shut out from the American dream they traversed and struggled through the desert to get to. And even then, the American dream that they were sold is different from the one I was. For his family, winning looked like stable money, warmth, a roof over their heads. It meant a better life for their kids. For me, winning was all that and more, a better life for myself, vacations and fast cars.  I know now that that dream alone wasn’t ever worth it. What is an empty house worth? What is a fast car without anyone to laugh in it with you? Still, I grew up believing I could have it all. But a life where I have it all, both Marco and my white picket fence, is looking bleaker and bleaker. The formula did not account for this. I have found the funniest, most vibrant person in a hundreds mile radius. The dream is now to keep him. But there is no formula for that. My 4.0 won't make us happy, and a good job could help us create a family, but it won't protect us. This system puts our future at risk. How can we plan ahead? If the future is uncertain for everyone it is yet more uncertain for us. There is yet more of a sense of unease amongst undocumented immigrants and their loved ones. The guy who sold hotdogs in front of the target between our houses is gone. The girlfriend of his neighbor called ICE on him after a fight. It is hard to build a home on uneasy ground. Harder yet during earthquake season.

I thought of Marco and the plight of the undocumented immigrant when watching the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire documentary. The inhumane treatment those women experienced, the lack of trust and autonomy, the meager wages juxtaposed against long hours. We look back at the lives of those women with horror, seeing the horror of that life only after their gruesome deaths. I wonder what horrible thing would have to happen before the United States opens its eyes to the treatment of the undocumented human. In the documentary, a girl recalls how she would have liked to be attending lectures, and singing and dancing, but she had no time, weary after long hours working. I think of Marco closing up at McDonald’s and getting home after 2am. Waking up early the next day to do some under the table jobs, digging ditches, uprooting bushes whose place will soon be taken over by a jacuzzi, for some wealthy homeowner. Then back to McDonalds. Then over to mine, with a rose picked from the bushes in front of the fast food restaurant. The next day to do his rounds of drop offs, before getting back home and realizing he doesn’t have the energy for the classes he’s enrolled at at the local community college. That night his family will take the bus home, because he clocks in early. He’ll call me on every break he’s got, the thirty as well as the two tens. He’ll tell me about how an artist he liked released a new album, and then he’ll tell me why he liked it, citing how it’s reminiscent of early hip hop, and get carried away telling me about the career trajectory of the Wu Tang Clan. I’ll do homework while I wait for his next break. His manager will freak out when he goes a couple minutes over thirty, and he’ll tell me on his next break how much he wants to quit, but to apply for a new job is to take another risk at being found out. He’ll keep working the blue collar jobs on the side, making less than a citizen would, but making enough to keep going back. On his next break, he’ll tell me about how his car tried to blow up again, but he fixed it, somehow, at least enough not to blow up today. Then he clocks back in. I think that maybe if he had the energy, he would enjoy a lecture. I think about how he loves to dance. When will this American dream factory burn down? How can I keep him from burning down in it?

I barely passed my drivers test. It was a miracle that she gave to me, truly, I made nine mistakes in the nine minute drive. Marco is a great driver. You’d think he could smoke us in the race. I saw this tweet the other day, that I now cannot find and can only summarize. A New Yorker said that he was bored in NYC, because he couldn’t find any interesting and intelligent people. The tweet asked where all the Einsteins were, so he could move there. A woman quote tweeted his tweet saying something along the lines of: right there in New York City with you, sir. But they are cleaning your floors and working back of house in the restaurants you get lunch at. Which is all to say: that the best drivers don't win races just because of it. People who can afford nice cars can win races, people who have been lucky enough to have both the money and the time to race.  If Marco had my mom’s BMW, if he had been born here, if he hadn't had to scrap for what he's got, if he had generational wealth, if he was lucky. He could win races. What is lost when life is out of balance? When we let lines drawn in the sand dictate who we value as more human than another? When we let systems decide who is more valuable? We loose Einsteins.

Cars were created to go long distances with ease. For example, the distance from your home to your job. The automobile has done great things for corporate America. I have no fond memories driving to work, bleary eyed and tired from the day previous. Yet day in and day out, we do. We lose sight of what we are driving towards. We know we must, and so we do. I think of Paul Tillich’s ideas on the dimension of depth. I think, as I move along the horizontal plane, of the vertical one, the whys. I ponder the dimension of depth, as I sit in the passenger seat of my own car. Marco is driving me home from school. I think about  what it all means when we take away the horizontal. I sit with what Tillich says about asking oneself why and coming up empty. I think about how to fill this emptiness, the question of the meaning of life. In my pondering, the horizontal and the vertical axis meet at my car. I am sitting in the car with a wonderful man. This car is a tool to aid me in getting to school, and getting to work and to run my errands. It is also a tool to be closer to him. In this closed space, as he drives me home, it is just him and I in this intersecting axis and once we step outside this car there will be injustices. Outside of this car sits the reality that we will not be treated the same, and there will be fear, and the future will be uncertain, and the machine will take us both for all that we are worth. But right now, his good driving is operating my good car. Right now we don’t have to fear the future. I get to hear how his day is going.

Works Cited

Triangle Fire.  directed by Jamila Wignot. , produced by Jamila Wignot, and Apograph Productions. , Public Broadcasting Service, 2011. Alexander Street.

Cutts, Steve. Happiness,  YouTube, Nov 24, 2017.

Tillich,  Paul. The Lost Dimension. 1958.