The Undocumented Americans Read online

  I headed to Staten Island to report on the lives of undocumented day laborers in early 2017—it was close to where I lived in New Haven, and I was terrified about Trump having just assumed office. I was scared for all immigrants and felt guilty about myself as a so-called DREAMer. I was on DACA and I was afraid there’d be a raid. I was afraid that in any situation where there were large groups of undocumented people congregated, there could be a raid. My first trip there, I took a taxi from the Newark train station, about a thirty-minute drive, to the neighborhood of Silver View, home to one of the oldest day laborer corners in New York City. I got carsick, so I closed my eyes and filled the time with a mental rosary chain of short prayers to god, out of whose favor I had fallen years ago. I rested my head on the window and asked him to protect my family first, and if he had some goodwill left over, I prayed that there wouldn’t be a raid on the warehouse where I was going that night.

  Before visiting Staten Island, I’d never met a day laborer. To me, a city girl who knew undocumented men mostly as restaurant workers, day laborers seemed like an almost mythical archetype, groups of brown men huddled at the crack of dawn on street corners next to truck rental lots and hardware superstores and lumberyards. Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have parted the sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff—working brown men and women on one side and academically achieving young brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the other heroic dreamers. Day laborers weren’t real to me, and what I had heard about them wasn’t good. The New York Times described their work as “idling on street corners.” They haven’t had the best PR.

  So who are they? There are varied estimates of the number of day laborers in New York City, from a little under six thousand to more than ten thousand. A 2006 survey of day laborers, who are mostly men, reports that 75 percent of respondents identified as undocumented, two-thirds supported their families with this line of work, 60 percent said day laboring was their first job in the United States, and 85 percent were looking for more permanent jobs. They represent a wide range of skills, from muscle to flooring to woodwork to welding to painting to cement work to brickwork to carpentry to insulation to stucco to electrical work to just about everything else in the construction universe.

  The typical place they find work is the street corner, where a delicate choreography takes place. One guy told me the exchange goes something like this: A man pulls up in a truck and says, I need X done. If a person has that skill, he’ll ask for a quote—how many hours, in what location, how much per hour. Sometimes while you are negotiating, two other workers willing to do the job for less jump into the truck and the employer shrugs and drives away. Sometimes a group piles onto the sides of the truck, and the employer gets spooked. They don’t know us. It’s the group that scares them. If they’re scared, they might hastily pick one or two guys, or they might drive away. An average of sixty workers gathers on each of the known street corners in Silver View every day. On a quiet day there might be three workers, on a busy day a hundred. They mostly get paid in cash, and the employers are free to do with and to them whatever they want.

  The day laborers I meet are professionals, talking about the importance of negotiating rates and building networks through good work and recommendations. They call their employers patrones, a Spanish word that means “bosses” but with a colonial aftertaste, often do not get protective equipment, meal breaks, or even bathroom breaks. They have all experienced racist abuse and wage theft at the hand of their employers, are all owed thousands of dollars by white men who made them work for days, promised payment, then simply disappeared. Some days laborers are dropped off at remote locations to do work, then left there without a ride back, unpaid and helpless. 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. Workers absorb exceptional emotional and physical stress every day and, because they are undocumented, they’re on their own, with no workplace protections, no regulations, and no collective bargaining.

  This is where the worker centers come in. Worker centers were established to formalize this very informal sector of day laboring. There are now more than sixty-three worker centers across the country. Colectiva Por Fin is a storefront nonprofit on Staten Island that since 1997 has provided practical advocacy, representation, and training for day laborers and the immigrant community on the island at large. It sits on Silver View Road along with Nuestra Calle, another worker center, right near the busy street corners where day laborers generally congregate, and they make a world of difference for the men. First, they are indoors, so the men don’t have to stand outside for hours on end in extreme weather. The centers provide restrooms, water, coffee, phone chargers, and dispatchers. Dispatchers serve as bilingual intermediaries between workers and employers, cementing transactions and preventing abuses or irregularities. It’s a stressful job.

  Santiago, a dispatcher at Colectiva Por Fin, is a U.S. citizen born to Mexican parents. Workers collectively set the rates for particular jobs annually or semiannually, and Santiago’s job is to make sure those rates are honored and workers aren’t drawn into potentially abusive arrangements. “Some employers think that exploiting them might be easy because they are undocumented,” he tells me. Santiago is just twenty-five years old.

  I’m attending a monthly meeting at Colectiva Por Fin on my first night on Staten Island. The room is small but as more men come in, it seems to double and triple in size. On the wall, migrants are celebrated through art that strikes me as deeply annoying, mostly the word “migrant” reconfigured as butterflies. I fucking hate thinking of migrants as butterflies. Butterflies can’t fuck a bitch up. Tonight, about fifty men end up gathering in the room, plus a couple of women, including a young, white female pastor who works for Project Hospitality, the parent nonprofit. The executive director of Colectiva Por Fin is here, an Argentine man named Simón Torres. He is new and the men are still making up their minds about him. There are two African American day laborers at the meeting and an older white man with a shock of white hair and mustache. His name is Charles and he is here as an organizer from AmeriCorps. Because of these three people, the meeting is conducted bilingually by Santiago, effectively cutting the meeting shorter while making it feel longer at the same time. Out of the fifty Latinx workers, perhaps only a few are able to ascertain the fidelity of Santiago’s translation.

  The men here tonight are workers. 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.

  And here they are now, the workers. Some are very young, just past their teens, and some are quite old, around seventy. They are all wearing dirty work boots, but carefully kept. You know how jeans come pre-ripped? That’s how their boots look. Dirty from work, pristine from care. The workers are very brown, brown from their moms, browned from the sun. They are short. But they are built. They look like they can walk on burning coal, build a house, and open a bottle of beer with their wedding rings.

  When I scan the room, I see men lighter and darker than my father, some older, most younger—they speak harsher, softer, mumbling, or sung, but I see my father’s face in their ever
y one, and I know that this astigmatism will always be with me; the light will always fall this way. I think about the 2010 Arizona immigration law known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, a.k.a. Arizona SB 1070, a.k.a. the “papers please” law. It gave law enforcement officials the power to approach anybody they suspected of being in the country illegally and ask for proof of legal documentation. That meant they could stop anyone they thought looked undocumented. 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 offered to buy him new clothes but he said, Para que? Vincent offered to buy his dad a change of clothes for when he traveled home from his construction job but his dad said, Para que? too.

  Santiago is an accomplished and artful translator. He works quickly and in real time and transmits tone impeccably. Charles from AmeriCorps gives a long-winded speech inviting the men to an upcoming church dinner. He keeps mentioning the president’s name. In his translation, Santiago omits every mention of Trump. Charles says the dinner will feature American fare—“You’re going to get to try American food; I promise you’ll love it.” That sentence too disappears in our young dispatcher’s hands. Charles ends his speech by saying, “If things get worse, and I really, really don’t think they will, Americans will come out and protect you.” Santiago doesn’t translate any of that either. He’s pretty fucking good.

  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.”

  I ask why he completely omitted Charles’s promise to protect them if things got bad.

  “The reality is…it’s not just Trump. Staten Island is a very conservative island. Charles might think it’s not getting worse, but he is not going to be affected, unless they stop federal funding of his organization, and then he could lose his job. But the whole immigrant community has everything to lose.”

  But what about the guarantee that Americans would come to our rescue? I ask.

  “Unless these Americans are lawyers or federal judges, I don’t see how that’s true,” Santiago says.

  * * *

  —

  A year and a half later, I’ve been to Staten Island so many times, I’ve lost count. I’ve grown attached to these men and look for any excuse to go back to learn more about the world the day laborers have created in the most anti-immigrant hood in the city. I’ve stood with them on street corners and sat with them in the worker centers, I’ve had coffee with them at Dunkin’ Donuts, ate lunches with them at Ecuadorian restaurants they insist on paying for, delivered dinners for them to share in the worker center office, I’ve accompanied them to testify in City Hall, attended their Christmas party where none of them asked me to dance, went to their soccer matches, and spoke to them on the phone late at night. We texted Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one another one minute after midnight. I blocked one of them on my phone because his intense loneliness was dark and desperate and it scared me. Come a blizzard in Connecticut, where I live now, and I think of how thin the lining is in their jackets; when the season changes and the pavement gets so hot that I don’t walk my dog for longer than a few minutes out of concern for his soft padded feet, I think of how hot jet-black hair gets under the sun, like my brother’s, like my father’s, like mine. When I see acrylic blankets I think of them alone in their rented single rooms, and when my father visits me in my big apartment with all the natural light and big fiddle-leaf trees, I see them in his missing teeth and swollen hands. 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.

  * * *

  —

  Julián is fifty-two years old but looks much, much older. When I first meet him, he is sitting alone in the corner of the worker center wearing headphones as men wait for their assignments. His beanie is pulled over his eyebrows, covering the tops of his ears, actually almost half of his ears—he has small ears. Everyone else is talking and laughing. I ask him what he’s listening to and he says, “Christian music to uplift the spirits.” I persuade him to give me his number, but it takes a few conversations for him to open up. It’s clear he has spent a lot of time alone with his thoughts. 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. With Julián, once he is ready, our conversations are like the opposite of bloodletting, the darker, thicker stuff coming out first, and then we work our way toward a light exchange about the weather before we hang up.

  Julián didn’t know a word of English when he came to the United States. His first meal in America was a bag of potato chips and a fifty-cent bottle of water. Remember those? He had nothing. He started work as a dishwasher at a restaurant two days later. His bosses were despots. They screamed at him, they swore. They had a rule that no outside food was allowed in the kitchen, but the only food the workers were allowed from the kitchen were eggs and potatoes. The cook was Latinx, like them, and he snuck them meat—cuts of chicken and steak—when the bosses turned their backs. “Pinche pendejo,” the cook said.

  The hours were long and pay was terrible, so he decided to give day laboring a try. On his first day, he was terrified. “I was scared to work because I did not know English,” he says. “The employers yelled at me because I didn’t. I would stand on the street corner with my friends, but because I was so scared, I sent them to do jobs that I was hired to do. I was scared that I could not speak English, and that in turn made me scared I could not do the job. But then I went to school.”

  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. Years ago, on a bus in Queens, an older woman bitterly spit out in my direction as I passed by, “I wish these people would just learn English.” I had not been speaking—at all, in any language. I was holding a book, in English. In fact, I was home for the summer after my freshman year at Harvard, where I would win a writing award named after an eighteenth-century American transcendentalist—we both just happened to write in English. But it was summertime, and I wore short, thin, slutty things, so I was tan, a deeper brown than usual; my hair was so black it was almost navy. 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. He still needed a coyote for the crossing. At night in the desert it got so cold, he thought his skin would shatter like hard candy. During the day it was so hot, he thought demons had possessed him. He carried with him four gallons of water and a backpack with food. He wore construction boots, and his feet were covered in blisters. Once, he stayed behind with some people who’d gotten sick and the coyote just left them. “The coyotes are always drugged and drunk because they’re afraid to do what they do sober,” Julián explains. They survived by eating cans of peppers and drinking puddles. Two of them died. They threw up something green, then collapsed. He tried to help the living, but also didn’t want to join the dead, so he did what he had to do.

  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. That was the main thing he fantasized about at night, as he lay in the dark waiting for his exhausted body and his racing heart to catch up to each other so he could sleep: He dreamed of having a baby who would have a first word in Spanish—papi—and a first word in English—mommy. He’d give the baby an American name and learn to pronounce it the right way. Maybe “Lincoln,” which was hard because your tongue had to be so sneaky in the middle of the word. He’d take Lincoln to all the Disney movies and at first he’d be able to follow just enough of the plot to not fall asleep, but eventually he’d get the jokes. He’d go to parent-teacher conferences and not rely on his kid to translate. No, he’d wear a suit and a tie and ask the tough questions himself, so the little imp couldn’t hide her naughtiness. “I think it would be beautiful to speak in English to your child,” he says.