The Undocumented Americans Read online

  The city is different now. After dinner, we drive around East Flint, the Latinx part of town, and she points out where her childhood home would be if it hadn’t been demolished, and where her schools had been, all of them now shut down. There used to be four high schools in the area, but two closed down. Even with the population flight, the remaining two schools are overcrowded. Here was the carcass of a grandfather clock factory. Here was where Buick City once stood, 235 acres of factory grounds now surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire, and overrun by pink weeds. Here was the old General Motors Institute of Technology, where they sent engineers, its name hardly visible on the stone. They had tried to turn the Chevy plant into a park, but instead it just sits there, weeds and vodka bottles. Empty plastic water bottles have become so abundant that people shove them into the spaces in their wire fencing, so yards and lots look like modern art exhibits. Houses, apartments, and trailers are boarded up with graffiti and children’s rocking horses sit dirty and spooky on the lawn.

  * * *

  —

  I make plans to attend Sunday mass with Margarita Davila at a church that proudly bills itself as the only one in the area that offers Spanish services. Margarita is a sixty-eight-year-old Mexican American immigration activist with small rimless glasses and short, curly blond hair. She picks me up from my hotel in her red pickup truck, a jewel-encrusted rosary hanging from the mirror. St. Aloysius is located right outside Flint proper and the faithful have to make the drive. Today they will be celebrating First Communion for the kids.

  On our way we pick up Cesar, a Venezuelan man in the middle of a political asylum petition who has no car. The week before, he had attempted to take the city bus, but public transportation is not reliable here, and he showed up at 11:00 A.M. for an eight o’clock mass. He tells me he was an optometrist back home. Once he is alone with me, he touches my arm and whispers, “We are not all Mexican immigrants.” He writes down his name and number and slips it to me.

  Today’s worshippers form a line at the entrance of St. Aloysius Church, and each of us dips two fingers into the holy water as we walk in, then we make the sign of the cross on our foreheads, lips, and chests. Parents are taking pictures of their kids dressed like little brides and groomsmen, all in white for First Communion.

  When you walk through Flint the most striking aspect of the streetscape, second only to boarded-up houses, is the sheer number of bars and churches. I ask Margarita if Flint residents are especially religious, and she says they just need the services the churches provide because the state is so absent. Despite the horror of it all, she says the water crisis has made more services available to them. “They finally realized we were here,” she says.

  A few undocumented church members gather to meet me in the church auditorium after services, and we sit down at a table for doughnuts and black coffee in Styrofoam cups. They sit with their hands folded in front of them, their posture boot-camp perfect. Margarita had made a post on the church’s Facebook page announcing my visit, and it’s not exactly how I’d have described myself (self-made cult escapee) but how other people like to describe me (Yale PhD student) and that shit is distancing. They know what I’m here to ask them and they are ready to talk.

  They spread their arms wide to show me how the auditorium was filled with donated cases of water when the story first hit the news. “As far as the eye can see,” a woman tells me. “I always said the reason we were getting help was that we were in the news, but they’d see as time passed. I knew it was all going to disappear.” The auditorium is now empty.

  “I’m grateful to have water at all because many people in this world don’t have water,” says a woman named Lilliana. Before we talk about the poisoned water, they begin by discussing blessings. Lilliana begins with her blessings—I later learn Lilliana is fighting cancer—and only after I’ve revealed my own blessings am I allowed to carry on with questions. “Well, first there were the rumors,” she says. “We suspected something was very wrong.” The water was the color of rust and tasted like actual shit but when residents called city officials, they were told they were crazy. Then General Motors stopped using Flint-sourced water at one of their remaining truck plants because they feared the water would corrode the parts. Junior, Lilliana’s son, says GM employees told their own families about the water but word did not get out. Junior has papers. One of his jobs is to go door-to-door installing filtration systems and teaching people how to use them. He knows that some people in the Latinx community are undocumented, so he tends to ask his co-workers to stay in the car while he goes alone and deals with the paperwork. He motions on an imaginary iPad the scrolling and skipping he has to do for people without Social Security numbers. They tell him they don’t trust him because he’s with the water company—with the city. “But I tell them, what? Soy raza. I’m just like you. I’ve got you.”

  “There is a huge problem with trust in the community,” says Margarita. “The state can say the water is made out of gold, and people still wouldn’t drink it.”

  Lilliana’s daughter, Karen, says that all of her children’s blood tests for lead came back with the same level. Then her test came back with the exact same level, as did her mother’s, her father’s, then everybody else’s. Everyone’s was identical. Karen asked around in the community, and her neighbors reported the same level as well. The tests were run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “When I saw that the tests were being run from the state, I said, how could I possibly trust you?”

  “Even if the level was true, it’s inaccurate because what they don’t tell you is that when lead enters your body, it doesn’t just stay in your blood, it goes into your bones, it digs really deep, and tests don’t detect that,” says Lilliana. Research has found that exposure to lead in childhood can have devastating long-term effects like high blood pressure, kidney damage, and intellectual disabilities including challenges with speech, language comprehension, memory, fine-motor skills, and behavioral self-control. Because children of color are much more likely to be exposed to lead at a young age, it is devastating to think about what will happen to an entire generation of Flint children. What promises can you make to a child about the world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years’ time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

  Having to use bottled water makes everything about running a household more difficult. Lilliana goes through four or five cases of water a day. The youngest grandchildren cry and tell her she is mean because she gives them quick lukewarm showers and has prohibited baths. “If you use hot water, the hot water opens your pores and the lead gets absorbed through your skin,” she says. “Many people say that your skin doesn’t absorb lead, that you only absorb it through your stomach, but that’s just not true. Hot water opens your pores and it gets way down deep in there. So lukewarm and cold-water showers it is.”

  Lilliana left Mexico for the United States twenty years ago and is my mother’s age. She used to work in housekeeping until she got sick, and now she stays at home taking care of her five grandchildren. She does not know whether her breast cancer, newly diagnosed as of two months ago, after years of clean self-exams and annual mammograms, has any correlation to the leaden water, but she is an optimist and a master of avoidance, so she does not want to talk about the possibility.

  “After moving to Michigan, like many immigrants, I kept saying, Next year I’ll leave, next year I’ll leave, next year I’ll leave, and I never left. It’s all a lie. I don’t love Flint, but I do love Michigan. I love the greenery. I love nature. And there are so many birds in Michigan. My husband gets upset with me be
cause I get up out of bed at dawn every morning to go watch the birds wake up. I like rising with the birds. I like to hear them sing.” I ask Lilliana if she owns pet birds. There is a long pause. “I don’t own birds. I set them free.

  “You see, my husband got me some small birds as a present but I don’t like them in cages so I went outside one day and I released them. I had two blue birds and one green bird. I wanted my birds to be wild so I never even named them. They kept returning to my yard. I used to talk to them about how their day was going. I asked them when they were hungry. They were very attentive.”

  It was her son who told her she had cancer. There’s nothing strange about children of immigrants serving as interpreters for their parents at doctors’ appointments, but on this day the doctor spoke to her son for a long time and she knew from the look on their faces that something was wrong. Then the doctor hugged her and said, Lo siento. The Spanish word for “cancer” is “cancer,” but he left it to her son to tell her the news. She went home to be alone, she wanted to be alone, but who could be alone in a house teeming with family. “I didn’t want to tell anyone. I said to myself, I’ll treat it and it’ll be fine. I’ll get out of this. I have always moved forward and removed every obstacle in my path.” She learned everything about the disease and asked all the right questions. But then the doctors told her to go back to Mexico because the radiation would be too expensive here and she wouldn’t be able to pay out of pocket. Junior asked her if she wanted to go back. She said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Lilliana starts chemotherapy shortly after our first meeting. Margarita found her a doctor who will treat her at a reduced fee, and even after I leave Flint, Margarita still sends me periodic updates about Lilliana. She takes Lilliana to the hospital one day and then texts me to say her nausea is so bad, she is thinking of stopping treatment. I text Lilliana photographs of beautiful birds to cheer her up: the hyacinth macaw, a black-billed bluebird with yellow-black eyes, a wood duck and a cute yellow duckling, an Atlantic puffin with its stupid face, the golden pheasant and its hillbilly yellow ’do, the red macaw, classic Amazonian prince. I keep texting birds but don’t hear back.

  Later I dream that the hawks started coming after she loses her hair from the chemo. Outside her house, the usual yard birds gather, drawn by the feeders filled with seed Lilliana placed out there and the big mature trees surrounding her home. The first time it happens she sees a raptor snatch a mourning dove and fly off with it. It makes her sick and she goes back inside. Then she sees it happen again. This time it is a cardinal and the raptor goes up to her roof to take plunder in its organs. Lilliana keeps going outside every day for stretches of time because it helps with her nausea and that’s when she starts seeing hawks flying overhead. They are different sizes. They don’t look like they could carry dogs and cats like her neighbors were saying, but they do look like they could kill. Soon they begin circling above where she stands to watch them from her yard, and when she stands beneath them, with some fear, to observe their majesty, she becomes certain that her limbs are tied to their wings with string, like a puppeteer’s, and that she can control their movement. They are migratory birds. Perhaps they had gotten lost, and she needed to guide them to warmth, she thought. They’d die if she did not precipitate their movement with her movement, with the movement of flight. She needed to leave this house, this sickness. She feels ill in her heart because she could not leave the house, so the raptors form nests in the large mature trees surrounding the house and they’ve been there all this while, flying above her in whatever way she moves that day, to hunt or to take shits on her husband when he comes home at night.

  * * *

  —

  You have already met Theodoro, but he was quiet before, so you did not notice him. He was one of the immigrants I met with in the church auditorium after mass. I had tried to make a lot of eye contact with him when he spoke because as soon as someone interrupted him, he shut down and looked pained. Theodoro is a lonely, ancient man, but he says he is fifty-six. He is a tree. His mouth is curved downward, wrinkles set deep like bark grooves, and he looks even older when he smiles. We talk on the phone late at night, after he’s home from work, and our conversations feel like dark, hardened sap.

  Theodoro came to the United States on August 20, 1998. He remembers the exact date. That was two years after his fifteen-year-old son first came north to go work at a top Chinese restaurant in Michigan that he heard, through friends, was hiring. First Theodoro worked at a cucumber plant, then in restaurants as a dishwasher and a cook, then in various factories: making Volkswagens, weapons, dishwashers, plastics, and soap.

  But his favorite place to work was at a chocolate and sweets factory in Detroit, where he spent ten years. He started out cleaning bathrooms, but the couple who owned the factory saw that he was a good worker and said, Theodoro, leave that alone. You can go work in the granola station now, so he put on a blue lab coat and became a sweets man.

  “My years at the chocolate factory were the most beautiful time of my life,” Theodoro tells me. He learned how to make caramel-covered popcorn, pecan pies, cherry-center bonbons, little chocolate turtles with nuts inside. The aromas, of course, were incredible, but what he loved most were the machines. “At the start of the assembly line, I mixed in honey with the peanuts, then saw them go into the chocolate machine where chocolate cascaded down like a curtain but also up like a geyser; it showered chocolate from both directions, if you can imagine that. Now, at this point the chocolate was very hot, and it went into a cooling tunnel. There were times when I worked the night shift to make chocolate overnight, and the factory was quiet and cold, a few people making sweets for the world. I was very good at my job and I helped everyone around me, even though my supervisor said, That’s not your job. But I wanted us to work as a team, so if I had a second, and my co-workers were slowing down, I ignored him. The last year I was there, they got these really old ovens that toasted the granola for a really long time and out it came, toasted and brown, smelling like heaven, and you had ten people working on eighty trays at a time. There were metal detectors in the cooling station, to make sure the batch was clean. It smelled like paradise. When I talk about it, it sounds impossible, but I saw it happen.”

  Then the company was sold to an owner from Ohio who was going to hire only American citizens. Theodoro’s bosses broke the news to him on New Year’s Day 2012. “I had been working for just about two hours and they sent for me. Theodoro, they said, we can’t keep you here. This company isn’t ours anymore.” They gave him a certificate saying he was one of the best employees they’d ever had, and they hoped that when he showed it to future employers he wouldn’t have to wash bathrooms anymore.

  “Did they say that to you?” I ask.

  “They really did,” he says.

  He lives alone in a house he purchased in 2009—cash. I ask him how it feels to be alone. “Sometimes I think of sad things, but I need to be in a good mood, so I put myself in a good mood,” he says.

  “Why do you have to be in a good mood?” I ask him.

  “So I don’t feel lonely.”

  He lives with his two pit bulls, Gracie and Bella. Gracie is a two-year-old blond pup and Bella is her six-year-old mom. He calls them both “the puppies.” After rescuing them, he swung by a local mechanic to buy a large wooden doghouse to put in his yard. The dogs play outside for hours every day, get muddy, then need to be bathed. Gracie prefers to be bathed in very hot water, and when he is soaping her up, she is so comfortable that she’ll fall asleep in the tub and has to be carried out in a towel, her limbs heavy, a truly spoiled creature.

  I picture Theodoro hanging a tire from a tree in his backyard, where he sits with Gracie and Bella on his lap and he swings with them, at first his feet barely off the ground, then higher and faster until he feels that if he falls, they will fall with him, and if one of them falls, he will fall with them, one body in motion jus
t as they move alone in their house, alone in their yard, alone in all of Michigan, with not a soul in the world who loves them more than they love one another.

  I ask Theodoro whether he gives Gracie and Bella tap water.

  “No. I always give them water from the little water bottles they donate to us here in Flint,” he says. He gives from his rations.

  Theodoro did not hear about the lead in the water until it made the international news. “When you’re undocumented, you’re the last to know,” he says. He went to distribution centers but they asked Theodoro for a state ID. He does not have a state ID, which undocumented immigrants are currently barred from having in Michigan, so he kept going to other sites until he could get water without an ID—he needed the water for his dogs. Men in uniform helped him put cases of bottled water in his car trunk, and he tells me this with a tone of admiration; he fears the National Guard but is also in awe of them.

  I am lonely, too. I only feel peace with my puppy mill dog. When I got him, it was the week of Trump’s inauguration and I was watching videos of black labs and German shepherds helping veterans with PTSD, jumping up at their faces when they were crying, shielding their bodies with their own, and I just cried into a pillow, wanting to be protected. I was super suicidal, and one night my partner was just like, you’ve never even been around a puppy. So we went into a pet shop just to play with a dog—look, we tried rescues, they denied us because we didn’t have a yard—to distract me for long enough to stop me from slitting my wrists, and they brought out Frank. He’s a Boston Terrier. A brown one. A really fucked-up-looking one. His eye was busted. He couldn’t walk. My partner held him and deposited him into my lap and he fell asleep immediately, and when I got up because my leg fell asleep he bit at my pant leg and demanded I go back down on the floor, and I looked up at her and said, well, we can’t leave him here. I hadn’t gotten my book advance yet, so we took him out on layaway. Fucking shady shit. We took him home, and put him in his crate, and in the middle of the night I had a panic attack and we brought him out and put him on my chest and for the first time in my life I felt safe. He smelled like an unsullied childhood. He smelled like a baby without a childhood. He smelled like god had made an exception for me. So long as I kept myself alive to keep him alive, we’d be all right.