The Undocumented Americans Read online

  They had four kids who became their whole lives. On weekends, they’d go to the beach or to the park to play soccer. They threw parties at home and danced with one another. “Everything that we didn’t have ourselves growing up, we gave to our children,” she says. In Miami, Harrison worked in construction near a chemical plant. After two years at the job, he got sick. “At first, we thought it was a cough, and we didn’t want to waste money, so we didn’t go to the doctor. He’d just take aspirin.” When he finally went, doctors said he would need chemotherapy immediately. The hospital asked about legal status. When the family said he didn’t have papers, the hospital turned him away. So did cancer treatment centers. “I said, ‘Am I supposed to take my husband home and wait for him to die?’ ” she says. Did they seem sorry? “They were cold. Totally cold.”

  Salome’s friend recommended a woman from Miami Beach who described herself as a naturalist. They had nothing to lose. Joanne was tall and blond and said she had cured stage-four cancer patients with her treatments. She began making changes to Harrison’s diet, instructing them to eat organic and buy exotic fruits they had to drive all over Miami to find. “When you want to hold on to someone, when it’s time for them to go but you don’t want to believe it, you go and find the exotic fruits,” explains Salome. One morning, we drive to a Latin American diner in Little Havana and order Colombian breakfast platters of fried eggs, black beans, cream, and arepas. The coffee is light and sweet. Bodega coffee. Un café regular is the same anywhere. Salome takes a marble-speckled notebook out of her purse and pushes it to me. It is a record of the naturalist’s treatment, some in Harrison’s large shaky handwriting, in Spanish, and some in their daughter Olivia’s handwriting, girlish and in English. She was sixteen at the time.

  All the tea you can drink. Miracle oatmeal. Stopped vomiting and soothed stomachache. Girlish, bubbly handwriting.

  Chew the juices as if they were solid food for 15 minutes before bed. I imagine Harrison pretending to chew liquid for fifteen minutes, his jaw muscles tightening, the fluids dribbling through his lips, feeling like an idiot, showing his family he was putting up a fight, maybe believing it himself.

  I am doing everything I can to stay alive.

  Harrison’s brain tumors affected his memory so he often forgot he had cancer. Salome had to break the news to him over and over, until she stopped. When the pain overwhelmed him, they took him to the hospital, because the ER can’t reject anyone. The doctors gave him morphine and then sent him home. By this point they were paying out of pocket. Shortly before he died, his heart filled up with water and the hospital recommended open-heart surgery. Post-operation, his children took turns taking care of him because Salome was now working long days as a housekeeper.

  “Why operate on his heart if he had at most six months to live?” she asks. “Medicine is a total mafia.”

  Harrison died in 2012. The cancer had spread to his throat and lungs. His blood was infected. He was forty-six years old.

  Salome knows the naturalist’s treatment didn’t cure him, but she thinks it gave him a better quality of life during his final three months. “We put faith in the natural,” Salome says. “We had to. Some people choose between the medical and the natural, but we didn’t have the funds for the medical. We could not even go to the hospital for his convulsions. So we chose the natural.” She lives alone now and does her best to keep busy. “When my husband died, I was low. I was in this country alone with four kids and little work. I thought about going back to Argentina. But I said, you know what, I’m not the first this has happened to and I’m not the last.” Every conversation with Salome ends the same way—with the metaphor of the sacrificial lamb. “Quite literally, my husband gave his life for his children so they could have a future,” she says. “My son promised him over his grave that he was going to study and get his degree, and now he’s working a part-time job and studying.”

  By the time I go to Miami the second time, she has obtained a green card through her citizen son. I notice her confidence immediately. I ask her if she feels differently. “Since getting my green card, I’m honestly more defiant. If a cop were to stop me, I’d ask, Why are you stopping me? If there is a car accident, I have insurance now, so I say, Call the cops if you want. Once, I got into a car accident back when I was undocumented, and my son had to rush over with four hundred dollars in cash so the other driver wouldn’t involve the police. I just have more confidence and better self-esteem now.”

  One night, we drive to a small Cuban bar in Little Havana that bills itself as home of the world’s most famous mojito. They serve it smoking and with a cane sugar straw. A band of Caribbean men in fedoras sing salsa by Rubén Blades and Héctor Lavoe. Salome orders a lime-green margarita with a tiny pink umbrella. I ask her how she’s doing, aside from the newfound security of her green card. “Well, I’m doing things I should have done at age twenty or twenty-five. I moved out of my dad’s house at age sixteen and then moved into my husband’s. But I have my own place now. What I didn’t live then, I live now,” she says. She tells me about her children, and cries a little because they miss their father. “Anyway, let’s go party,” she says. I think she’s joking, that she’s taking me back to my hotel, but she’s actually taking me to drive around Wynwood, a former warehouse district that’s become Miami’s hottest nightlife spot. We drive around the whole neighborhood multiple times, in circles, and she gasps and murmurs under her breath about how much she loves graffiti art, which covers the façades of all the nightclubs. She’s in ecstasy. At some point, I start stifling yawns because it’s almost midnight, and she scolds me for having surrendered to the life of an old woman when I am so young. She points out girls in high heels and tiny dresses in long lines by the bouncers. “Oh my god, they look amazing,” she says. She says she wants us to come back the following night, this time with Esme and a woman named Isadora, the current president of Mujeres en Solidaridad.

  Salome picks me up early the next evening. First stop, her dance studio. She wants me to meet Uriel, the instructor. He’s Cuban and there is an enormous portrait of him, bulging out of a tuxedo, showing off a gaudy gold watch and a hand tattoo, on the door of the studio. At the top of the stairs is a cluster of middle-aged women in leggings, flip-flops, and tank tops with the same logo, the image of pinups in bikinis, and they all greet Salome with a kiss on each cheek. “Half of us are older women,” Salome says. “We’re all women who have never done this before. I certainly didn’t do this when my husband was alive. Uriel tells us to leave our demons at the door, and that’s right where you’ll find mine. Dance class has become my church, my therapy.” I don’t meet Uriel, who is busy teaching simple salsa moves to a line of women, but I do meet his wife, who walks slowly on account of her recent liposuction. (On Mondays, everyone in the class wears tank tops with the logo of her cosmetic surgeon’s practice.) Uriel crossed the U.S.–Mexico border a couple of years ago and he was granted political asylum because he’s Cuban.

  Do you know about the “wet foot, dry foot policy”? Miami’s politics and demographics were forever changed by it. In 1995, Bill Clinton introduced a revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, the pillar of this new version being the wet foot, dry foot policy, which ordered that the American Coast Guard not intercept Cubans in the water midway between Cuba and the United States, but should anyone successfully arrive on solid land, they could remain in the United States and have expedited routes to permanent resident status and citizenship. This policy applied to entries on soil too. Sometimes Cuban émigrés took flights to Central America, then made their way to the U.S.–Mexican border. If they were detained in the crossing, they could show their Cuban passports and would then be separated from the Mexicans and Central Americans to be processed for asylum, which didn’t add to the general goodwill among other Latin American immigrants. Barack Obama ended the policy on January 12, 2017. “We were lucky,” Uriel’s wife tells me.

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p; “But we’re immigrants too. We’re all immigrants,” she adds.

  We’re on our way to pick up Esme in Hialeah when Salome tells me she and her husband were married twice. They were divorced for two years. “Marriages that come here split up unless the women don’t work,” she tells me. “And I worked, so it caused some problems. We split up, we divorced, we had separate apartments; I was really getting used to my life as a single woman. Then he calmed down, and said he missed me, and would serenade me with his guitar. We started living together again, and I was okay with that arrangement, but he wanted to get married again so we could be together forever.”

  We pick up Esme, who can’t contain her excitement when she gets in the car. We’re now on our way to pick up Isadora. It’s 9:00 P.M. Esme gets a call from her husband and son. “I’m with the girls. I left food on the stove for you,” she whispers.

  Isadora lives an hour away. Now it’s ten o’clock. Isadora gets in and excitedly tells us she wants to drive by some mansions that “belong to these sheikhs.” She is wearing a fuchsia top, silver hoop earrings so big they touch her shoulders, and hair teased up like Dolly’s. They marvel at the mansions, and Isadora says she takes long strolls in expensive neighborhoods whenever she feels depressed. “Oh god, not me,” says Esme. “I look at mansions and get stressed just seeing them because I think I’ll have to clean them.” Salome doesn’t like using the GPS and only Isadora knows this area, so I have no idea where they’re taking me. At some point, amid the chisme, it becomes clear we’re taking a long trip out of town to a casino. I tell them I have a five o’clock flight the following morning, and so they downgrade their ambitions for the night; Isadora gives us turn-by-turn directions to a nearby Fort Lauderdale tiki bar across from the beach.

  Isadora is interested in the punch bowl. I say it’s literally a fishbowl of rum and she gets a devilish look in her eye. While browsing the menu, as small talk, she tells me she was an international affairs lawyer in Bolivia, specializing in Russian relations. She lived in Russia for six years and is fluent in Russian. Now she has been here sixteen years and is a housekeeper. “It’s fine!” she says. “I knew what I was getting into.” Isadora and Salome want to try gator. “COCODRILO?” they ask. They cover their mouths and stifle screams. We decide to get mojitos that come in commemorative glasses. “That’s nice of them, but I was going to take the glass home anyway,” Esme says.

  Let’s talk shop. People think cleaning houses is easy, but it’s a dangerous job. None of them have been personally assaulted, but they all know women who have been groped or raped on the job, who have had their wages stolen, who have been psychologically abused and then forced into silence by employers who threatened to call ICE on them. One housekeeper put the wrong PIN in the security system to get into a house, the cops came, they alerted immigration, and she was deported. Housekeepers are exposed to so many temperature fluctuations between rooms, between jobs, between industrial freezers and industrial ovens, that some of them have facial paralysis. To clean an oven, you need to turn it on, and the chemicals smoke up. You try not to breathe in those fumes, but they sometimes get inside the paper masks anyway. Housekeepers suffer from migraines, from rashes. Salome tells the story of working for an elderly couple for fifteen years. After the wife dies, the husband remarries a woman with the early stages of dementia. She loses a ring her mother gave her, not even gold, costume jewelry, and she accuses Salome of having taken it. Salome comes to the house to help her look for it, and finds it undisturbed on the piano. “You planted it there!” the woman screams. “You stole it, and you put it back!” Her husband looks down on the floor, not doubting Salome but not wanting to upset his wife. Salome quits on the spot. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” she says. “Like I’d throw away my livelihood for a piece of costume jewelry.”

  I ask the women how often they have nightmares. This has become one of my favorite questions to ask.

  How many years have you spent in this country?

  How often do you have nightmares?

  Every night, they say. Esme dreams about concentration camps nightly, about having to hide people in her home, people who can’t make a sound. There was a time when she was so anxious that she could not fall asleep, so she would have a glass of wine, then another, then another, and before she knew it a whole bottle would be gone. “My dad was an alcoholic, so I shut that down,” she says. I tell them about my nightmares, about my mental issues, and say how grateful I am for my medication. “Couldn’t you just decide to not be a victim to those things?” Esme asks me. “Couldn’t you promise yourself you won’t succumb to your demons? I did that,” she says. “I’ve trained myself not to give in. The only thing that I can’t get rid of is that I take four showers a day, and I won’t touch food that belongs to certain categories I’ve created, but that’s all.”

  “That…sounds like OCD,” I say.

  “If they give us papers, psychiatrists will get rich because we’re all crazy,” Isadora says. We all laugh.

  “Sweet Home Alabama” comes on the bar radio.

  “I love this song,” Esme says. “I call it ‘Sweet Home Hialeah.’ ” She starts to sing at the top of her lungs. She may be tipsy. Some of the other patrons at the bar, white people, look at us, and it makes me nervous, and it makes me sad that it makes me nervous. I imagine one of them taking out an AK-47 and shooting us down, then walking over to our bodies, then shooting us in our heads, execution style, as we continue to sing the pretty redneck song, marveling at the mansions surrounding us, trying not to think of cleaning them, and then, as I feel those white stares on us, I pour a drink on my head. The girls cheer and I let out a bloodcurdling scream. My first ever.

  CHAPTER 4

  Flint

  I first visited Flint in 2017, a year after it made national headlines for having lead in its water and two months after a court charged five high-profile officials, including the director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Nick Lyon, and the chief medical executive for the department, Eden V. Wells, with involuntary manslaughter for their role in misleading the public about water safety. I wanted to see what it looks like when the state poisons its own people.

  Long before the water crisis, Flint had found itself in dire straits. Throughout the 1990s, General Motors, which once employed half of Flint, closed almost all of its factories in the city. By 2014, half of the population had left—autoworkers, their families, and the people who survived on feeding, clothing, and entertaining the autoworkers and their families. The people in Flint now are the people who did not leave, because they could not or did not want to. Fewer than one hundred thousand people live in the city today, down from its height of two hundred thousand in the 1960s. In 2016, 45 percent of Flint residents lived below the poverty line, the highest rate in the country for cities with more than sixty-five thousand residents.

  As the city got smaller and blacker and browner and poorer, public services crumbled. Firefighters and police have been cut, and arson is rampant. Garbage collection has been privatized. One out of nine houses in Flint is vacant. City residents have to pay astronomic water-bill prices to pay for services the city is providing, even though the water is still bad. For many families, backed-up bills run into the hundreds of dollars. Some churches try to help by writing checks.

  The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities. (There had reportedly been a raid at a grocery store the week before the news broke.) When President Obama declared a state of emergency, the National Guard was deployed to Flint, making undocumented people even less likely to open the door, since this time the canvassers we
re in uniform. Some undocumented Flint residents learned of the lead in their water only when family members from Mexico called them on the phone to ask about it. They had seen reports of the poisoned water on Univision.

  Laura Mugavero, leader of a local community organization that serves immigrants, picks me up from my hotel and we drive downtown to a homey hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant. Laura has ’80s-era curly hair dyed a coppery brown. Lady mags generally say that women must pick eyes or lips to emphasize but she has picked both—very dark eye shadow, very red lipstick. We order drinks. She sends back the salsa because it is too mild. The owner of the restaurant, whose husband knows Laura from her work in the community, comes over personally to say the restaurant is popular among white people and they are the reason the salsa is too mild. She then apologizes and brings over two hotter, spicier options.

  Laura was born in Mexico to a migrant worker father and a mother who eventually achieved legal status through the 1986 amnesty. She was nine years old when she crossed the border with her parents and her baby sister. She holds back tears as she remembers watching her mother fall into the Rio Grande before finding sturdier ground and making it across. They eventually made their way to Flint, where her father was hired by a GM auto plant on the spot. It was 1994, just a few years before GM closed its final car plants.