The Undocumented Americans

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

  Paloma is an older member of Lucero’s support group. She talks like a mumble rapper, low and guttural and with a deliberate lack of enunciation. She can laugh and cry within seconds. Paloma is recovering from cancer, lives alone, and is severely traumatized. She says she is so afraid of ICE activity that she literally runs in and out of doctors’ appointments so they don’t catch her. Like, runs. She has installed surveillance cameras outside her apartment in case agents come to her door. “They don’t want us in this country,” she says. “We have to be careful.”

  One Sunday I meet Paloma at the ten o’clock mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Queens but she does not want me to sit with her. “You can meet me outside after,” she says. The church is filled with a couple hundred families. I take a seat in the back.

  The Catholic Church is, above all things, reliable across centuries. I can see this same mass taking place at the height of the Cold War, maybe even during the Inquisition. The priest has white skin and white hair, while the hundreds in the pews are brown-skinned people with black, black hair. He hates one bishop. He loves another bishop. They’re not even American bishops. He sometimes makes side comments under his breath that I assume he assumes the congregants won’t catch (“Margaret Thatcher, a British woman who looked like a man”) during a short rant against communism. He advises the congregants against practicing witchcraft or seeking traditional healing when they return to their home countries “on vacation,” and leads them in prayer, asking god “that the church be enriched by mercy and charity” before passing the collection plate. It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, and I’d forgotten the back rows are reserved for people who go in and out, mothers with young babies. (“This is the scandalous symphony we’ve been listening to all morning,” the priest mutters harshly when he hears the cries of a baby with Down syndrome being held by a young woman standing in the aisle.) Today’s reading is from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. There is talk about abominations. I look up at the ceiling.

  I meet Paloma outside, by a white marble statue of Jesus Christ yanking open his flowing robes, revealing his sacred heart. The sacred heart of Jesus is depicted as the literal coronary organ—pierced, aflame, surrounded by thorns, and wounded. It signifies the power of his love for us. I’ve seen it tattooed on gangsters and I love it.

  We walk several blocks to La Hacienda, a Colombian restaurant that I remember loving as a child. On the way there, Paloma repeatedly walks into traffic. She doesn’t look both ways, she doesn’t even look one way, she just lunges in front of honking SUVs. I don’t say anything but link my arm through hers to guide her, at times pulling her back so she’s not hit by a car. Her vision is fine. I wonder if it’s a death wish, Freud something something, but then I notice that I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of me. Women roast corn and kebabs on makeshift grills on every corner, and cumbia blasts from record stores that still sell CDs. My senses feel rushed. It’s a short walk to the restaurant, but Paloma gets short of breath and struggles to talk on account of her ruined lungs. I get out of breath, too.

  At the restaurant, she orders raspberry juice in milk and I order a Corona. Whenever I steer the conversation to 9/11, she begins to cry. My parents scolded and taunted me whenever I cried as a child—they found it weak and threatening—and so I don’t like to see people cry. It embarrasses and angers me. I change the topic every time her eyes water. Paloma had cleaned properties in Lower Manhattan that included international banks and—the irony—the former Immigration and Naturalization Service building. (INS became ICE in 2003.) On the morning of 9/11, she was working on the fortieth floor of a government building when a fire erupted in the elevator—the buildings around the World Trade Center were also damaged by the blasts—and the workers had to flee down the stairs. She left a shoe behind. The building was still smoking when they returned to clean. “We even ate on top of the dust,” she says. “Yes, we were heroes, but the dangers of the job were hidden from us so that we could work. If they had put up a sign at the site listing what we could come to face, we wouldn’t have gone in.”

  Paloma has a string of illnesses that are common to all of the cleanup workers—sleep apnea, PTSD, depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal issues. She also has breast cancer. She can’t work because her bones hurt, and she often gets fevers, chills, and vertigo. She is waiting for the Zadroga Act to send her a compensation check, which some friends have already received, friends who don’t even have cancer.

  Paloma fled Colombia for the usual reasons—economic depression, bankruptcy in the family, the need to support her ailing mother. But she also had another reason. “The truth is I am an escape artist,” she says. Paloma grew up with an abusive stepfather. Once, after he beat her, she swore she would run away as soon as she had the chance. This was the 1970s in small-town Colombia, and she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Her only way to escape was to get married, so that’s what she did—she married the first guy who asked. She was seventeen. “I did it to escape,” she says. She immediately got pregnant, and would come to have three daughters. She didn’t love being a mom but she did her best. She got increasingly restless as the years went by. It all began to change when her fifteen-year-old daughter Lucy got pregnant and her boyfriend didn’t want to marry her. (“Am I supposed to marry her just to make you happy?” the boy yelled at Paloma. So she punched him in the face.) Lucy bounced back quickly after childbirth and began leaving the baby with Paloma all the time so she could go out with her boyfriend or go to parties. Paloma didn’t love being a grandma, and she didn’t love being a full-time babysitter. “I didn’t want to live that life. I got tired of it. I’m not the type of woman who just puts up with shit,” she tells me. “I wasn’t born to be just a mother, just a grandmother, just a wife. So I escaped.” She left her grandchild, her three daughters (including one who was just seven years old), and her husband, and she came to the United States alone.

  Paloma tells me that her brother drowned himself, one of her cousins hanged himself, and another one threw himself off a tall building in Bogotá. She wonders: If she had stayed in Colombia, would she have followed suit? She acknowledges this thought with contempt. “What they did was cowardly,” she says. “My entire family is weak. I’m not weak like them. I’d rather be miserable here than end up in a cemetery in Colombia. I’m here, and I may be crying, but at least I’m not dead.” I ask Paloma if she would choose to have children if she had a second shot at life, and she thinks for a long time, wrapping her head around the fact that it could be a choice. “No,” she says finally. She has spent years apologizing to her daughters, but they resent her for the abandonment and it’s a wound that doesn’t heal. It’s what would await her in Colombia if she went back. More open wounds. After she finishes her juice, she leans close to me and tells me about Cruz.

  Cruz is a little older than she is. Cuban. When he was young, he was bad, served his time, but he’s clean now. They met when he was working delivering furniture and delivered a refrigerator to her home. He told her he liked her—a straight shooter, which she admired—and he gave her his phone number. Six months passed, and she called him one evening. “I was bored,” she says, giggling. They went out for cappuccinos and talked all night. He wasn’t scared by her baggage, by the depression and panic attacks, and she comforted him because he had been recently widowed. Cruz wants to marry Paloma, but she won’t divorce her husband in Colombia, even though soon after she left, he began dating the children’s teenage nanny, because when he dies she is entitled to part of his pension. She and the nanny will split it. I love this woman.

  Paloma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. Her doctors believe the cancer is linked to her elevated exposure to toxins during the post-9/11 cleanup work. The news made Paloma feel bitter, hopeless, and punished by god. Surely he was punishing her for abandoning her children. What kind of mother would do that? She threw herself into church, into prayer. She spends a lot of time on
line watching Christian movies and reading Christian blogs. “I’m more than a believer,” she says. “I’m a fanatic. I see Jesus Christ right in front of me, as real as I see you.”

  At first, Cruz would accompany her to her doctors’ appointments. After her surgery, he hid in the hospital room so he wouldn’t be kicked out after visiting hours and could spend the night with her. But she was getting ready to die. She took all her savings, including a little compensation money she had received from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, and traveled to Panama alone. The first vacation of her life. Then she went back to Colombia, why else but to die, to die in her homeland surrounded by family, which seemed appropriate, even if she knew they wouldn’t give her a hero’s welcome, and they didn’t. Then, at a routine doctor’s appointment in Colombia, the doctor told her that she was cancer-free. “I said, I’m out of here!” she says, and she peaced out just like that. She came back to the United States by a means I am not going to disclose. She arrived in Las Vegas, and Cruz rented a truck from New York, driving for days to pick her up and bring her back to the city. On their road trip, they’d drive for seven-hour stretches, then stop at the closest town to explore. “It was a special trip,” she says. “One of the most special moments of my life. Can you believe he did that?” At a routine appointment in New York, the doctor told her he had bad news. The cancer was back, and it was aggressive. After several rounds of chemotherapy, Paloma is too weak to work and her savings are depleted.

  I ask for the check, and Paloma asks that both our leftovers—roast chicken, rice and beans, sweet plantain—be packed to go. I ask her if we can pass by a Colombian bakery so I can buy her some baked goods. “Sweetie, I would say yes, but I’m on a diet,” she says. Her doctor told her she’s a little on the heavy side for her height. She plans to lose twenty-five pounds. Tonight she will eat our leftovers. Tomorrow she will eat only apples. She walks me to my train stop, again veering into traffic unless I hold tightly on to her arm, the fog thick and close to the ground so we can’t see ahead of us and we can’t see our feet. When I hug her, I slip a twenty-dollar bill into her hand. “For a special treat,” I tell her. “I’m on a diet, Karlita, but god bless you,” she says.

  Like Paloma, some of the members of Lucero’s group have already received a few thousand dollars here and there through the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a program set aside by the federal government for proven victims of the attacks and their living relatives. The man in charge of evaluating applications for the fund was Kenneth R. Feinberg, a lawyer who had successfully settled the Agent Orange lawsuits on behalf of the U.S. government. He had unlimited funds but a clear end date. In 2003, the fund stopped accepting applications, a time when many individuals were only beginning to exhibit symptoms. Workers who did not make the deadline fell back on unsubsidized treatment in city hospitals or workers’ compensation payments. Treatment options were slim for undocumented immigrants.

  Over the phone, Feinberg tells me he thought that the 9/11 Fund was “an extraordinary example of inclusiveness.”

  “At the urging of Attorney General John Ashcroft, we promulgated that no immigrant in the country illegally would be harmed, we translated the application and rules into four languages including Spanish, Korean, maybe French. We made sure that all immigrants were given the opportunity for free legal counsel. We held town hall meetings in the Bronx where we explained to surviving immigrants that the death of their husbands would in no way prevent them from filing.” He laughs. “I can’t think of a federal program more inclusive and respectful of diversity.”

  But in order for victims to be recognized by the Victim Compensation Fund, they had to show paperwork proving they worked at Ground Zero or lost someone that day. The undocumented often work in clever ways to leave no paper trail. There is no telling how many were killed because restaurant owners and managers have refused to come forward with the names of missing people for fear that they will be fined for employing undocumented laborers. Deliverymen lost their brothers that day. Some men worked the “graveyard shift”—between midnight and 8:00 A.M.—and were finishing up their last deliveries and going home when the planes struck. Advocacy organizations like Asociación Tepeyac worked tirelessly to field calls from families who had not heard from a loved one, and later to help the men and women who cleaned up Ground Zero. Dr. Charles Hirsch, New York City’s chief medical examiner, became “the gatekeeper to the official list” of WTC victims. The final list contained 2,749 names of deaths that had been ruled homicides. These 2,749 names would be inscribed on the memorial. The chief medical examiner’s office said that there were no more missing people. Said Julie Bolcer, director of public affairs, “The list accounts for everyone known or reported to have been there. There are no unknowns.” A few weeks after the towers fell, the city gave families who reported disappearances an urn containing Ground Zero ashes. The Mexican consulate held its own memorial service, reading the names we know and praying for the names we don’t.

  After my father lost his job as a taxi driver, he found a job as a deliveryman at a restaurant down in the Financial District. Deliverymen in that area call themselves “delivery boys.” Throughout my teens, I always corrected my father when he said this because I assumed the guys had heard it from some white supremacist boss who was trying to emasculate them and they accepted it as a neutral term. It made me furious. “There’s a history to white people calling men of color boys,” I would tell him.

  In the mornings, my father would deliver breakfast to offices in the Financial District. A raisin bagel with cream cheese and coffee with hazelnut creamer. A blueberry muffin and black coffee; two cranberry scones and three coffees, two cream, one sugar. A single croissant, and a single coffee, sent back because it was brought with white sugar and not Splenda. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. Oatmeal with brown sugar. Yogurt parfaits. Orange juice and a banana. A chamomile tea. A granola bar and a chocolate milk. There was no delivery minimum, so my father delivered it all. Because the deliveries were so small, sometimes he didn’t get a tip. Sometimes he was told to keep the change—a quarter. Sometimes he was tipped in pennies. He had to say, “Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am.” Sometimes he was given a twenty-dollar tip for a five-dollar breakfast. He always told us about those tips. They were usually from Puerto Rican executive assistants who talked to him in Spanish and asked to see photos of me, so good and studious, bangs cut right above my eyebrows. My father complimented their nails and asked to see photos of their babies.

  Sometimes the deliverymen carried catering orders. Those would sometimes involve two deliverymen, but that wasn’t ideal because they had to split the tip. You never wanted to split the tip. The delivery orders were large, but you can carry a lot with two hands if you really try. The breakfast catering orders were usually an assortment of scones, croissants, muffins, and bagels. You couldn’t eat one yourself, though. The boss always knew if you ate one. If you needed a water, you had to go up to the cash register and buy the water. There was no discount. Sometimes the older men needed a Red Bull, but the boss put up security cameras in the kitchen area so he could tell if you had a Red Bull. He wouldn’t even charge you for it if you had one. He’d just fire you. Do you think I need you? I don’t even need to put an ad in the newspaper for this job. There are twenty Mexicans who’d line up for your job—you think I’m going to spot you a Red Bull?

  My father is an aesthete. Everyone wanted him for the catering orders because he’d do beautiful designs with the scones and the muffins. Like topiary shit. He sometimes had to write labels on heavy stock printer paper and he’d use his fanciest script; he taught himself calligraphy, like he taught himself everything, and everyone would go, Wow, you’re so talented! They always made him write the words on cakes. Beautiful fucking handwriting. He’d come home glowing if they complimented his handwriting. (My cursive was beautiful for a long time until I started taking lithium and then my hand shook bad.
My dad was so sad.)

  My father didn’t use a bike; he made all his deliveries on foot. He speed-walked while carrying many heavy bags of food to offices on Wall Street. The plastic handles of the bags would twist and cut into his fingers, and he eventually developed large calluses on both his hands. His polyester pants rubbed up against his calves so much that he eventually lost all the hair on his legs. They’re smooth as a baby’s bottom, even now. He went through many pairs of inexpensive black rubber shoes. My mother massaged his feet at night. My dad’s feet are small and fat, like mine, so you can’t tell when they’re swollen. After a few years, my dad’s feet would hurt so much that he walked like he was on hot coals, sometimes leaning on me to move from the couch to the bed. “Ay ay ay ay,” he’d say as he limped, like a mariachi. Most of my dad’s co-workers were Mexican, and he learned how to cook Mexican food from them and he learned Mexican swear words, which my mom hated. Some of them were young, teenagers, and my dad would scold them and tell them to go back to school. He made his first gay friend at that restaurant. They called him Che, because he was Argentine.