The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

The first responders were firemen and EMT workers. The second responders were undocumented immigrants. Lucero Gómez is a social worker who runs informal group therapy sessions with mostly undocumented, all-Latinx former Ground Zero cleanup workers. Lucero tells me that almost immediately after 9/11, undocumented immigrants started getting phone calls “from a very underground kind of network of people who are undocumented and need work. They called at night. They said, ‘Tomorrow there is work, come work.’ ” The city hired contractors—Americans, Anglo, white. The contractors hired subcontractors, many of them bilingual Latinx people with the golden ticket of American citizenship who could present themselves as friendly faces to other immigrants—“We look like you! We speak like you!”—and would make the eventual abuses unexpected.