The Undocumented Americans

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

  As time went on, it became clear he wasn’t going to have this baby, and he got lonelier and lonelier. “You come here thinking of your kids, but the process changes you. You’re transformed, and sometimes you can’t get out of that place. Some people never knew their fathers. They have traumas from childhood, from the crossing, and they don’t know how to handle those problems but they can buy a Corona.” Soon, he started spending all of his time in bars, leaving them at dawn and going straight to work after. He’d send money home and spend the rest on alcohol. He was consumed by guilt.

  Then one night in January, he drank too much while he had the flu, and the combination of whiskey and a fever led to hallucinations, including one of being hunted down by police dogs. Julián tried to shake off the hallucinations but he couldn’t. So he started screaming. Nobody came to his rescue because he was alone. He woke himself with his own screams, and upon waking he told god that if he let him have a peaceful sleep, he’d stop drinking.

  “I don’t know if it was a miracle, but since then I haven’t wanted to go to bars anymore. I just want to work. What distracts me is work. What makes me happy is working. When I’m not working, I freak out.”

  If you left America, what would you miss? I ask him.

  “I’d miss the money,” Julián says.

  Me too, I say.

  We both laugh.

  * * *

  —

  Joaquín also crossed the desert four times. His first time crossing began at nightfall. Five or six men covered in guns pick up the crossers in an old yellow truck, then drive them to a line in the sand where the narcos are waiting. You know they’re narcos because they’re wearing chains and their eyes are dead. You need a password to cross. The coyotes whisper the password, and the migrants get off the truck. They are dumped onto another truck. Only one coyote can go with them. Were you scared? I ask. “Are you kidding? I was terrified,” Joaquín says. “They’re narcos.”

  They drive to a mountain. They dump the truck. Time to climb the mountain, putas. Joaquín isn’t a thin man, but he’ll be fine. He’ll be fine! He exercises. I mean he wakes up every morning and does stretches while he does his morning prayers. Reach to the sky, now touch your toes, side to side. The mountain is steep, and it is hot, and his backpack is heavy. He climbs for about an hour imagining he is a guest on Sábado Gigante recounting his tale of rescuing a girl who fell into a well. Then his backpack straps break. Right at the seams—irreparable. His backpack, enormous, carries all his cans of food and water gallons, plus an extra layer of clothing for the freezing desert nights. Before he even thinks them, words rush into his mouth. They flood in there and all he has to do is vomit them. “Friends, I’m staying here.” He’s calling it. He’s done. He hadn’t even realized he’s exhausted, but he allows himself to admit it. All he wanted was an out. In his mind he is going to sit down on the mountain and take a nap; finish the provisions in his backpack; have a feast of canned beans, saltines, and water; and then, after he’s run out, sit there in the sun—it won’t take very long to start dying. Eventually the animals will notice and they’ll eat him and he’ll let them. He’ll put up some struggle, it’s human nature. Hopefully he’ll be so dehydrated by then that he won’t even notice the tears in his flesh—it’ll feel like paper cuts on a really bad sunburn, and to the bobcats he’ll be jerky. “When you choose to die, you really have to decide to die,” Joaquín tells me. But then, these two young guys—to this day he doesn’t know their names—these guys step forward and get all up in his face like they’re going to punch him. He takes a few steps back. They get in his space again. One of them thrusts forward, furious, and yanks Joaquín’s backpack from him. “This is why you wanna die, ’mano?” Then the other one walks behind Joaquín and begins to push him by his shoulders. Up the mountain. Up the incline. Cursing under their breath. Joaquín chastises himself the whole time. These kids don’t want me dead so now I can’t die. What do you do when your out was to die and now you can’t die because you’re living for total strangers? There was another mountain after the first one. And on the second mountain he grabbed back his backpack and walked right behind the coyotes. “And by the time we climbed down, I had gathered so much strength,” he says. “I think about those kids all the time. I think about them every day. Every time there is a raid, I think about them.” He knew they went to Las Vegas, but they could be anywhere now. They could be deported. They could be dead.

  Joaquín’s first steady job in New York was at a “boat company,” which I took to mean a ferry service. He was on a boat on the Hudson River on September 11, 2001, when he saw the planes crash into the towers, and without even knowing what had happened, his boss rounded up the workers and told everyone to get ready to head into the city to help. By the time they arrived, the second tower had fallen and there was debris and dust everywhere. He couldn’t even see where he was walking. The boats transported workers in and out of Ground Zero for two weeks, dressed in the yellow suits and masks generally used for oil spills; the workers and the boats were hosed down at night with a power wash. He feels proud of the work he did there. “They gave people who entered that zone an ID, and I remember the day we were supposed to hand that ID back. I couldn’t return it. I just couldn’t. I kept it as a memory that I worked at Ground Zero.”

  Then one day, out of the blue, the boat company owner gathered all of the Mexican workers. “I’m sorry but I can’t work with you anymore. Immigration can find me, and they will fine me,” he said. Then he made them sign some forms likely liberating the employers from any responsibility from suddenly firing them. Joaquín didn’t read them before signing the documents. Neither did the other guys. “That’s what I regret. I didn’t take a photograph of those forms or make a copy of them. We didn’t even read the letter.” That was before Colectiva Por Fin, and their Know Your Rights training for day laborers. He insists he would never let someone do that to him again. “They have really opened my eyes to the rights of workers. I’m more awake than I was before and I wouldn’t sign something again without reading it,” he says.

  After he was fired from the boat company, Joaquín arrived at the corner. He was now a day laborer.

  * * *

  —

  Hurricane Sandy hit the night of October 29, 2014, at the precise moment the Atlantic Ocean and New York Harbor both reached full tide. High tide on that night meant the water levels along the southern coast were already elevated about five feet higher than usual. Furthermore, it was not only a high tide but a spring tide, meaning the moon was full and the tide, which operates along a cycle, was at its highest monthly point, about half a foot higher than the highest point of the high tide you would see during a normal storm. Once it picked up its full force, Sandy came through the East Coast a thousand miles wide, making it three times the size of Hurricane Katrina. It was a spectacle of wind and the ocean’s fickle, maniacal force, and New York’s man-made dunes and bulkheads only dulled the hurricane’s mighty impact.

  The Hurricane Katrina cleanup set the model for Hurricane Sandy. After Katrina, about half of the reconstruction crews in New Orleans were Latinx, and more than half of those were undocumented. They worked the most dangerous jobs for the lowest wages. They picked up dead bodies without gloves and masks. They waded waist-deep in toxic waters. During this same period, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin asked a room of business leaders, “How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?” There would be no way.

  The first and biggest contractor to come on the scene after Sandy hit was AshBritt Environmental, now famous for having squandered $500 million in government contracts after Katrina, while charging 44 percent more than local contractors and paying subcontractors only $10 of every $23 it received per cubic yard, out of which the workers received their paltry wages. The company left behind two EPA-designated superfund sites.

  But Sandy brought death before the contractors came. Most of th
e initial deaths were due to drowning. There were forty drowning deaths, and half happened in people’s homes. Much of Staten Island ignored orders to evacuate because evacuation orders had also been issued for Hurricane Irene the year prior and then the storm swerved around Staten Island and landed upstate, leaving the boroughs intact. When the orders came this time, half of Staten Island was designated as Evacuation Zone A, meaning that half was especially vulnerable to flooding, and city officials targeted that area with phone calls, televised reminders, and door-to-door calls for evacuation. The community says National Guard members also went door-to-door in neighborhoods in the storm’s path, but activists tell me that immigrants felt unsafe when they saw uniformed people knocking on doors at all hours, especially if they lacked papers.

  The storm caused $62 billion in damages in the United States, killed 125 people, and left 7.5 million people without power. The city had not prepared for that kind of devastation and was slow to provide aid. Day laborers were among the first people on the ground to help. “In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first responders,” one labor organizer told me.

  Pedro Ituralde is a forty-one-year-old Chilean man who was the longtime executive director of Colectiva Por Fin and now leads Nuestra Calle. He had just come back from a trip to Chile when the storm hit. He sprang into action, organizing volunteer brigades of day laborers so that four or five brigades were on the ground at all times. They cleaned flooded basements, removed fallen branches and trees, repaired fences, waded in dirty waters up to their knees to remove furniture from houses, removed drywall, picked up debris, whatever needed to get done.

  Every single day laborer I meet loves, trusts, and speaks adoringly of Pedro. He is an institution in immigrant Staten Island, something of a godfather figure despite his youth and the fact that he is openly gay, and this in the all-male Latinx day laborer community. I ask him how he maneuvers that. “I ask them if they’ve ever been discriminated against, and they all say yes,” Pedro says. “So I tell them the LGBTQ community is discriminated against just like they are, and it is their job as people who have been hurt by prejudice to not hurt anyone else. And they all get it.” It is the only sliver of personal information about himself that Pedro is willing to share in our three years of constant communication, visits, phone calls, emails, texts, and bribes in the form of midday cappuccinos and flans delivered to his office. He does not want the focus on himself.

  Pedro was inspired to organize the storm volunteer brigades after hearing stories from Latinx New Yorkers who went to government-run restoration centers and were turned away by guards who told them, “You don’t belong here,” or, “You’re not from here. I know you’re lying.” Occupy Sandy, a group made up of former Occupy Wall Street activists, donated supplies to the worker center—sleeping bags, batteries, toilet paper, and flashlights, as did Mexican pop superstar Thalía, who lives in New York and in a message of support called the day laborers “my brothers.” The men stuffed the supplies into bright yellow drawstring bags with Colectiva Por Fin’s logo on it. This was a team-building move proposed by Pedro, who is also known to make his team members do trust falls. The yellow bags became famous across the beachfront communities on Staten Island. Pedro tells me he heard a woman call into a local radio show to complain about the government’s lack of response, saying the only people who had their shit together were the day laborers. “We helped two hundred and forty families,” he says. “And that was the government’s job.”

  Along the beach, Colectiva Por Fin set up a tent where they ran daily Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) trainings and offered vests and masks for laborers who needed replacements. The experience built goodwill in the community. The local precinct’s police chief began coming to the Colectiva Por Fin offices to meet the men, and Pedro brought some day laborers to community council meetings. When community members said that they ruined the neighborhood by urinating in public or hollering at women, the men responded, “That may be one person. Look at me, look at us. Day laborers as a whole do not behave that way.”

  The first jobs after the storm hit were removal of garbage and debris, knocking down damaged walls or other large structures, and the removal of mold. Unlike most volunteers, day laborers had the skill set to do extensive renovation projects, including specialized work like painting, electrical wiring, and landscaping. Beyond helping those in need, the workers were networking, giving their neighbors a sampling of their skills in hopes of encouraging future working relationships, but many people just took the free labor and never contacted them again. Some home owners even failed to provide essential tools for cleanup, such as masks, or even mops and garbage bags, and volunteer workers had to bring their own.

  Joaquín was one of the volunteers during Hurricane Sandy. At first, recovery days were workdays like any other. He woke up, bought a buttered roll and coffee with milk and sugar from the bodega (he only drinks his coffee black on weekends, the morning after he drinks beer), and went to work. He worked seven days a week. He is a big man, so first he helped residents get everything onto the street, anything that had been touched by salt water, mostly furniture. He went into a lot of basements, a little scared each time that he was going to walk into live electrical wiring since they were often pitch-black. After long days on the street, he went back to the single room he rents, where he took a long bath with Epsom salts, ate a mug of oatmeal with milk and sugar, watched TV, then went to sleep. He sometimes caught the end of a variety show, but mostly it was just the Spanish news. Joaquín fell asleep to news of the hurricane’s damage. He didn’t think of himself as a protagonist in the story of Sandy—he still doesn’t—but he tells me his clearest memory of the hurricane aftermath is meeting two elderly Asian women so frail they could not carry anything and had nowhere to sleep. He gave them inflatable beds. It is one of the most prized memories of his life.

  Julián volunteered, too. He fondly remembers traveling all across Staten Island and sometimes to New Jersey to go knocking door-to-door to see who needed help. He admits he felt sad that after the recovery efforts were well under way, the island forgot about the day laborers. He sometimes feels used, but he doesn’t resent his neighbors and doesn’t regret the time he spent helping them. “I was scared, there was disaster as far as the eye could see, I had friends who didn’t make it, people got sick, but we helped each other out. We felt like we were part of the community. We finally felt like we belonged,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, outside a worker center, some day laborers came to me to talk about why I was there. To write about them in a way they’d never been written about before! I say. They had an ask. Could I please tell the real story about them? Not the one we’re used to seeing in the papers, about them pissing in bottles and catcalling women. The real one. Yes, yes, I promise. I always promise things before I know whether or not I can deliver.

  * * *

  —

  Some many months later I stumbled upon the story of Ubaldo Cruz Martinez. Ubaldo was an alcoholic and many of the day laborers I talked to knew him or knew of him but didn’t really want to talk about him. They were so careful about their reputations and he was a homeless alcoholic who drowned in a basement during Hurricane Sandy because he was probably drunk. Did they feel sorry for him? Yes. Were they embarrassed by him? Probably.

  Ubaldo was found floating in dirty water, and his body was repatriated to his hometown of San Jerónimo Xayacatlán. The bell at the church rang at one o’clock in the morning to mark the return of one of their own. People in the town gossiped that it was a shame he had died with no friends and with nobody to cry over his grave.

  Before the hour of this death, on October 31, Ubaldo leaned against a cement building for balance and he saw a small crescent of fur on the gravel, the rain already beating down. He walked to it, and discovered a small skinny squirrel, making a copper wiry sound, a wound on its abdome
n. A stray, a stray like him. It was beginning to rain at a blunt slant, a lancing rain. He picked up the squirrel and walked into the basement where he was squatting. He made himself a Nescafé to sober up. The squirrel was cold to the touch so he put her in a shoe box and padded the box with his socks that he warmed in the oven. He had some condensed milk in the cupboard that he warmed in the microwave. He didn’t have a dropper, so he fed it to her through a straw, sucking up the milk with his mouth, then putting his finger on the top of the straw, putting the straw into the squirrel’s mouth, between her bunny teeth, to release the milk drop by drop. He knew he was not leaving this basement tonight. He couldn’t get himself anywhere. No one would want him. They’d given up on him long ago. He had kids in Mexico. They’d be orphans. His heart raced. His hands became moist. Stroking the squirrel kept him calm as the basement filled with water. He put on his Ochoa jersey and a thin gold chain, and he decided to wait for what would come. He stroked the squirrel until the water got up to his shoulders and he treaded water. He held onto the shoe box above his head. No creature should have to die alone.