The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Because if you’re going to write a book about undocumented immigrants in America, the story, the full story, you have to be a little bit crazy. And you certainly can’t be enamored by America, not still. That disqualifies you.

If you ask my mother where she’s from, she’s 100 percent going to say she’s from the Kingdom of God, because she does not like to say that she’s from Ecuador, Ecuador being one of the few South American countries that has not especially outdone itself on the international stage—magical realism basically skipped over it, as did the military dictatorship craze of the 1970s and 1980s, plus there are no world-famous Ecuadorians to speak of other than the fool who housed Julian Assange at the embassy in London (the president) and Christina Aguilera’s father, who was a domestic abuser.

The fact that The New York Times described them as “idling” infuriates me. What an offensive way to describe labor that requires standing in hellish heat or cold or rain from dawn until nightfall, negotiating in a language not your own, competing with your own friends for the same job, then performing it to perfection without the certainty of pay.

For many years when I have heard nice people try to be respectful about describing undocumented people, I’ve heard them call us “undocumented workers” as a euphemism, as if there was something uncouth about being just an undocumented person standing with your hands clasped together or at your sides. I almost wish they’d called us something rude like “crazy fuckin’ Mexicans” because that’s acknowledging something about us beyond our usefulness—we’re crazy, we’re Mexican, we’re clearly unwanted!—but to describe all of us, men, women, children, locally Instagram-famous teens, queer puppeteers, all of us, as workers in order to make us palatable, my god. We were brown bodies made to labor, faces pixelated.

Immigrant rights advocates furiously protested the law, challenging officials on how exactly they defined an “undocumented look.” But Vincent, my best friend from college, and I, two undocumented kids, whispered to each other that even if the authorities “couldn’t,” we could pretty much almost always tell. The backpack my father carried on his commute to and from work, the one that held his earnings in cash, was a red flag. His black rubber orthopedic-looking shoes and his dark-blue jeans, immigrant-blue, an immigrant rinse.

I ask Santiago where he learned to translate so well and he tells me that like many children of immigrants, he grew up interpreting for his parents at everything from PTA meetings to doctors’ appointments. “It made me feel important,” he says. “I was representing my parents.” I tell Santiago I did the same thing, that we all did. I ask him why he omitted all mentions of Trump in the speech. “I didn’t want to mention that guy,” he says. “I wanted to make them feel safe.”

When my father lost his restaurant job of fifteen years, I asked one of my contacts from Colectiva if she knew of any jobs, and she said that he could go to the worker center at 7:00 A.M. to begin working as a day laborer. Imagine that. Day one as a day laborer, at age fifty-three.

Many of the day laborers don’t have family living with them on Staten Island and are lonely, so talking with me at the end of a long day from the tiny corners of their rooms is something they seem to like.

When immigrants who did not go to school in this country—or at all—talk about their experiences at “school,” they usually mean the local library or community college, where they take English classes. Every immigrant I know has embarked on involved attempts to learn English beyond just immersion.

City University of New York officials recall a nighttime security guard at Brooklyn College telling them he saw immigrants line up before 4:00 A.M. for a 9:00 A.M. open registration for ESL classes. The nativist claim that immigrants do not want to learn English makes me hysterical.

I think every immigrant in this country knows that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and to some people, you will still not speak English.

I ask Julián what he’d like readers to know about him, and he immediately says, “Tell them I crossed the desert four times to see my children.” The border was more porous at the time, and his children were in Mexico, so he headed home during the New York winter.

“The coyotes are always drugged and drunk because they’re afraid to do what they do sober,” Julián explains.

Like most marriages divided by a border, his ended in separation. He sent money to his kids in Mexico, but he was lonely in New York and he dreamed of having a new bouncing little brown baby, ideally a girl, and he wanted to raise her bilingual.

“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.

“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 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.

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.

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.

“In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first responders,” one labor organizer told me.

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.”

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.

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.

Can we imagine that he was capable of kindness, even as he was drinking? That he was capable of courage, even as he was wounded? What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?

The first responders were firemen and EMT workers. The second responders were undocumented immigrants.

He wondered if he’d be asked to present his papers—the terrorists had been foreigners—and got out of line. An official of some kind—from where, he doesn’t remember—overseeing the line walked over and asked him why he left the line. Milton fumbled. The truth is, I’m not here legally, he said. Get back in line, she said.

At first, observers applauded them as they watched them work. They took pictures. Then as the site began to crowd with cleanup workers, it was clear that most of them were Latinx. Some of the people observing them now started yelling, “Leave! Leave! Leave!”

After a few days of work, Milton started spitting out mucus. Something scratched at the back of his throat, so he had to keep clearing it—something wet and dry at the same time. After one week, he got his first paycheck from the subcontractor: sixty dollars a day for working a twelve-hour shift; some days were longer than twelve hours. When he tried cashing the check, it bounced.

When I return to visit the group again in early 2017, all anyone can talk about is deportation. A woman named Lourdes with two long braids reminds the group to be careful. She tells them to carry around their prescription bottles with them as well as their hospital ID cards to present to ICE officers should they be approached. She says ICE once entered her home but they left her alone once she was able to prove that she was receiving treatment at a local hospital’s World Trade Center worker program. But that was one nice ICE officer, she says. Any of them could be deported at any time.

“The Americans who own the contracting companies are all white. They hire Hispanic people to work as subcontractors and they’re the ones who deal directly with laborers. When the American contractors come to the work sites, the subcontractors treat them like gods,” he says. “They make us stop talking if we were talking, and we have to turn off the music if we were listening to music. We even stop working out of respect for them. They arrive in fancy cars and expensive clothes, and when they come in, they don’t talk to us. They don’t even look at us. They only talk to the Hispanic subcontractor.”

Contractors have mastered a plantation model in their line of work, exploiting whatever sense of community that might exist among Latinx people. The workers think there are people along the chain of command who are watching out for them, but melanin and accents are ineffective binding substances.

Milton feels genuinely sad that these animals are gone and tells me he hates the American culture of hunting. “Hunting for pleasure is putting an end to creation. God creates for a reason,” he says.

Rafael had been a firefighter in Mexico and showed his Mexican firefighter badge to the first responders, and they geared him up. They didn’t care that he was foreign. They needed all the help they could get. As everyone else was running out of the buildings, Rafael ran up the North Tower. He encountered a pregnant woman whose water broke. She begged him not to leave her, and he didn’t. He reportedly carried her down twenty-eight flights of stairs. Not long after they made it out, the tower fell.

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.

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.)

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

My father would travel anywhere for a dollar. My father would chase a dollar down the road, a dollar blowing in the winds of a hurricane, even when there was an equal likelihood of getting swept up by the wind. My dad would always take the chance. A dollar is a dollar.

The U.S. government’s crimes against immigrants are beyond the pale and the whole world knows.

But when I was growing up, and throughout the Obama administration, these same crimes were happening, if on a different scale, and I’m not sure the same people cared.