The Undocumented Americans Read online

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  Did this happen?

  Are we in gangs?

  Do we steal Social Security numbers?

  Do we traffic our own children across the border?

  Is this book nonfiction?

  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?

  CHAPTER 2

  Ground Zero

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, after the North Tower of the World Trade Center fell, killing some fourteen hundred people, firefighters rushed to the site with blueprints and floor plans, marking locations where they believed elevators and stairwells would have collapsed with the people they carried. They were looking for survivors. Global positioning technology plotted patterns formed by the spots where bodies, or parts of bodies, were found. But days went by and only eleven people were found in the rubble, and it soon became clear that the mapping technology would be used to locate the dead.

  The fires at Ground Zero were mean and hard to extinguish; they burned long and deep, flaring when exposed to oxygen and fueled by tons of highly conductive papers and furniture soaked in jet fuel. Thermal heat maps from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey showed swaths of rubble burning at temperatures above 1,292°F, hotter than the burning point of aluminum. By December 3, 2001, New Scientist dubbed it “the longest-burning structural fire in history.” Officials continued to call Ground Zero a “rescue operation”—implying it was still possible to find survivors, but they couldn’t keep hope alive and at the same time submerge all sixteen acres with water and flame retardant—until the hundredth day of the fire, when the last flame was extinguished.

  Rescue workers called the sixteen acres of debris on Ground Zero “the Pile.” The powdered debris in the Pile contained more than 150 compounds and elements including plaster, talc, synthetic foam, glass, paint chips, charred wood, slag wool, two hundred thousand pounds of lead from fifty thousand computers, gold and mercury from five hundred thousand fluorescent lights, two thousand tons of asbestos, and ninety-one thousand liters of jet fuel. The nearly three thousand human beings who died made up such a minuscule part of the debris that the odds of finding identifiable remains were less than one in a quadrillion. It was a site of desolation set on fire.

  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. Vans drove from Queens out to Long Island, through Nassau and Suffolk Counties, up and down the immigrant enclaves, looking for day laborers to bring to Ground Zero. The workers were mostly Eastern European and Latin American. Many of the women knew the area well, having cleaned offices and apartments in Lower Manhattan for years. They knew they’d be called to dust. There was so much dust.

  In 2001, Milton Vallejo had been working nights as a security guard at the World Trade Center. Milton is tall and gentle. On the morning of September 11, the day shift guards, friends of his, came in to take over and he joked around with them for a bit, then headed to the subway. He was underground when the news hit. He couldn’t breathe. He raced home. He watched the news. He prayed to god. He had to help. It was his duty. Plus, work was work. The next day, he made his way back to the World Trade Center, now called Ground Zero. He found long lines of people waiting to enter the site. 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. When it was his turn, she had him sign his name on a blank sheet of paper and compared his signature to the signature on his Colombian passport. “They made all of us sign on blank paper, then compared the signature to any ID we had. Then they let us in,” he says. 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!”

  “It looked like a Western, just like a desert,” Milton says. “Everything was dust and water and there was no light anywhere.” Milton was assigned to clean basements, where he waded waist-deep through dirty water and chemicals. He tied plastic grocery bags around his ankles. The dust was the hardest to clean because it blinded him and stuck to his wet clothing. He wasn’t given goggles. The subcontractors gave him air masks, but they were flimsy and broke easily. 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.

  I first met Milton at one of Lucero’s group sessions in 2011. That day, the meeting was dedicated to a discussion of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, a law that promised to provide medical treatment to 9/11 cleanup workers.

  The people at Lucero’s sessions had all become sick. They carry hospital ID cards issued by Mount Sinai and Bellevue, where they are treated. Many of them have developed cancer. They have rhinitis, gastritis, arthritis, severe acid reflux, asthma, high blood pressure, and back pain. They have PTSD, anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Their psychological symptoms are triggered by the smell of barbecue, by darkness, by any news coverage of natural disasters. The group helps them in some ways, but Lucero is just one person and cannot do it alone. Meetings are irregular.

  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.

  Lucero doesn’t have much control over the group, which is rowdy. Everyone talks over one another and they sometimes answer their phones, screaming into them, while they’re still in their seats. One man, Enrique, is quiet for most of the meeting. He tells me that nothing happened to him that day, that he was spared. He is wearing a light windbreaker that he leaves open, and he repeatedly brings one side of the jacket close to his face to take a sip from a straw. A bottle, in a brown paper bag, is in the inside pocket.

  Enrique says he doesn’t feel the effects of the cleanup, but it isn’t true. He has flashbacks to Ground Zero all the time. A few weeks ago, he was working on top of a six-foot ladder in Brooklyn and had a flashback to being surrounded by dank water, in the dark, next to fallen lights, shattered glass, and ash, the strong smell of mildew and chemicals soaking fabrics and furniture. He fell off the ladder and broke his arm. “I become suddenly frigh
tened by absolutely nothing, like a cat,” he says.

  Enrique was hired to work at Ground Zero by a company named Good Shine Cleaning, owned by a married Colombian American couple. American citizens. “The lines for cleaning jobs were hundreds of people long and companies just picked everyone up and put us in trucks,” he remembers. “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.

  I know the members of the therapy group struggle with mental illness, and when I ask, gently, what meds they’re on or what their panic attacks are like, they tell me but seem a little embarrassed. In our community, there is an ingrained idea that if you are sick, it’s a weakness, a symptom of our internalized bootstraps mythology. “You don’t have to pretend with me,” I say. We end up confiding in each other.

  Milton attends the 9/11 group therapy meetings regularly, and when he sees me again, after so many years, he bows slightly, kisses my hand, and says, “Señorita Karla, you’ve returned.” He is on medication now, and it has helped, but at the beginning of his treatment, things were bad. “I tried to take my life,” he says. A psychologist who worked with some of the 9/11 survivors talked him down from overdosing on pills over the phone, reassuring him that he was loved. Milton also sees a psychiatrist who once talked him down from throwing himself onto the train tracks.

  Milton speaks in an overly formal way with the affect of a dictator. This makes me think of my father, another amateur Fidel—and I think about meeting my father for what felt like the first time, all those years ago, when I was five. One of the first things he did was take me to the zoo. It was both random and perfect, a reminder that we were still here, animals ourselves, on earth.

  I ask Milton if he’d like to go to the Queens Zoo. He says yes.

  The Queens Zoo does not have a lion, which is the mascot of Milton’s favorite soccer team. Milton used to play professionally in Colombia, and then he played in a league of immigrant men every week in the park for years, before he was diagnosed with asthma after 9/11 and had to stop. Although he has mixed feelings about observing animals that are “trapped,” Milton takes lots of pictures at the zoo. He has never been to one before, and I wish I had taken him to the Bronx Zoo, which is bigger and better in every way. The only animals here are coyotes, elk, owls, pumas, lynx, bald eagles, cranes, alligators (seasonal), bison, antelope, peccaries, thick-billed parrots, and Andean bears. It is cold and windy, not a great day to spend time outdoors, and Milton is wearing a cream coat over a white puff vest, white sneakers, and a checkered gray scarf. I’m wearing a puff coat too, and sometimes when we pass our reflections on the glass panes of animal exhibits, I wonder whether a stranger passing us would think I am his daughter.

  We go by the graveyard of extinct animals. It is what it sounds like—tombstones on the ground with pictures of extinct species and their year of extinction. There is a golden toad (1989), a dodo bird (1681), a Tasmanian tiger (1936), and pig-footed bandicoot (1901). Do you know what that is? When they were alive, they looked like tiny sand-colored mice with bunny ears, and stood with a kangaroo’s stance—really cute. 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.

  Does god allow death for a reason? I ask him. Milton does not know.

  The chief tragedy in Milton’s life is the loss of his friend Rafael Hernández, a Mexican volunteer firefighter who also served as a 9/11 first responder. Milton met Rafael at a resting station for relief workers, where he saw him in a blue helmet. “It looked like he was wearing a costume,” he says. He asked Rafael if he spoke Spanish. “Uh, I’m Mexican,” Rafael replied. They became friends.

  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.

  Rafael didn’t leave Ground Zero for months, working day after day. Eventually his lungs got so fucked up he had to be hooked up to a respirator to sleep. He died in 2011, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. Milton shows me a shrink-wrapped CD a folksinger friend had made in honor of the anniversary. The back of the CD shows a fading image of the two towers with the faces of Milton and Rafael above them. Rafael was declared to have died of “natural causes,” which officials later explained actually meant “alcoholism and obesity,” but Latinx leaders in New York have refused to accept that pronouncement. His body was repatriated to Mexico and his organs kept in New York for further investigation. In a Fox News Latino television interview taped before his death, Rafael is incorrectly introduced as “Juan Hernandez: Hero in His Adopted Homeland.” The camera zooms in on his heavily inked upper arm, tattooed with a huge bald eagle, an American flag, the downtown Manhattan skyline, the Twin Towers, and his initials: “R. H. Mex.”

  Their friendship was so famous that some gossips in Queens say they were gay, Milton tells me. He misses Rafael. He was the only person who could really understand what it was like to be there. As a way of coping, Milton has written a memoir called Sueño, pesadilla, paraíso (“Dream, Nightmare, Paradise”). He explains the title: “My dream was never money. I had a great job in Colombia. My ex-wife and I fled the war. Before Pablo Escobar was extradited, he ordered bombs to be planted everywhere as an act of revenge, and I narrowly escaped two bombs—a car bomb and a bomb at a local mall. So my dream was to find a peaceful life. My nightmare was 9/11, and also going from working in an office to being mistreated in a factory—to being treated like an uneducated person. My paradise is having found god, and paradise will be returning to Colombia when I am old.” After he told Rafael he was writing a book, his friend used to say he wanted to weld together their living room walls, his in Mexico and Milton’s in Colombia, so they could share a wall and write their books together as old men.

  Milton believes that he has been chosen by god to be a messenger for the Ground Zero undocumented workers, maybe for our people in general. He looks so damn earnest when he says this—not in the pathetic way that makes me want to kill myself, in the self-assured way that makes me feel like I’m back in my mother’s uterus—that I almost believe him. When I mention this to my friends, they think it’s fanaticism, but I don’t. I believe him.

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  The first of our losses happened on September 11, 2001. Years later, during my freshman year at college, a popular topic of conversation in the dining hall was where you were on 9/11. I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immi
gration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the target of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia. The Secure Communities program would require local police to share information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers began to be managed by private prison groups. And New York State, as well as most other states, axed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

  I think about this often; that was the night my dad started dying. In this memory, my father comes home from work and I greet him in the doorway to give him a kiss hello and ask for his blessing. Do you know this custom? I’ve only seen Ecuadorians do it. You go up to your elders and say “Bendición,” and they kiss you or do the sign of the cross on your forehead and chest and say “Bendición.” It’s how you say hello or goodbye, like your de facto state is a state of cursedness and your elders can un-curse you, but only for a little while, so you have to keep asking. So I stand in the doorway in my bare feet and say “Hello, Father. Blessing please.” He walks slowly and comes toward my body at a strange angle a child could only interpret as a terrible fall. He collapses onto me to cry into my neck. I’m little, but he does. Collapse, I mean. My father the dictator, heaving full-throated sobs. He hands me a letter. The letter says, in English, that Governor George Pataki had suspended driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants as part of a national security measure. My father had just lost his job as a taxi driver. He had also lost his state ID. Over the next two decades, he’d lose many more things, but let’s put a little blue thumbtack on this memory map, the first place in hell we visited.

  It was hard to see my father fall because he was the most powerful person I knew. He had kept me alive. He was a difficult man and he had recognized me as a difficult child. I was polite and craved approval from authority figures, but I was also dark and precocious. Not precocious in the we-live-in-Tribeca-and-my-kid-is-a-born-artist kind of way. More like my immigrant-third-grader-is-reading-Hemingway-but-is-secretly-drinking-Listerine-and-toothpaste-until-she-throws-up-because-she-wants-it-to-kill-her kind of way. My father read parenting books about how to raise troubled children, but those children were never straight-A students who were soft-spoken and loved teachers. It confused him, and the dissonance made him angry at me. When I was off from school, for any kind of break, my father would plan out my day in half-hour increments, scheduling everything from bath time to TV shows to coloring time to math drills to time to play with dolls, and even bathroom breaks. He called it my schedule and he handwrote it on graph paper in different colored inks and taped it to my desk. My mother stayed home at the time, and she enforced the schedule. If I became too emotional, I was sent to take a cold shower. If my mood became low, he made me go running or roller-skating. He’d give me research projects about animals or important politicians and entire passages from the Bible to memorize. He’d set aside magazine or newspaper articles for me to translate in perfect handwriting into blank notebooks. He could not review the fidelity of the translation but he judged my penmanship. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had not been kept away from my own thoughts for so many years. I believe god sent my father. Maybe that’s why I believe god could have sent Milton, too.