Article written by Jen Lawhorne
Jen Lawhorne is an independent media activist who lives in Richmond, Va. During a recent trip to Mexico, she visited the families of four Mexican kitchen workers she befriended while working at a local pizzeria. Jen reflects on her experience and examines some of the policies that force thousands of Mexicans to risk crossing into the U.S. to seek work each day.
For the past five years, I have intermittently worked at a restaurant slinging pizzas for an immigrant Italian family in Richmond, Va. Since the bosses are decent and the tips are good, most of the people that work there have been around for a while. A tight-knit group of people, we look out for each other, including the Latino immigrants working in the kitchen.
Slow hours at the restaurant would find me in the back, practicing my Spanish with the workers and learning slang. Although the staff of the kitchen usually evolved, there was always a cadre of steady workers: Teresa, her brother Gregorio, the chubby Cesar, and Francisco. The four friends had grown up together in the town of Ocotitlan, Mexico.
They worked twelve hours a day in a hot, sweaty kitchen, making the same food, standing in the same cramped space, dealing with the same routine. They busted out sandwiches, pasta dishes, and salads, and washed the consistent flow of dirty dishes from a busy restaurant. Only the mid-day doldrums offered them a two-hour respite from the kitchen.
I would walk into the restaurant as a waiter and hustle more money from a five-hour shift than they would make in twelve. Despite the monotony of their jobs, they always managed to laugh a lot, always joking and poking fun at the gringa waitress hanging out in the back with them.
They spoke little English and kept to themselves, making very few friends from the U.S. One U.S. woman worked with Francisco at the restaurant for four years and never bothered to learn his name. By and large, they existed in a city that cared little about their presence and did absolutely nothing to incorporate them into the community. Richmond’s Latino population has grown exponentially over the past five years, but in a city as slow and Southern as this place, no one has caught on to that fact.
The 2000 Census reported that the Latino population in Richmond was growing at five times the rate of the overall population in the city. About 20,000 people immigrated to Richmond during the last decade of the previous century.
My friends at the restaurant count themselves among the more than eleven million people residing inside the U.S. without papers. Most of them work in an economy that exploits their labor and live in a country that does not guarantee them rights. The mass media, the government and xenophobes call them illegal immigrants or aliens. To me, however, no one is illegal. I call my friends undocumented workers.
According to the U.S. Census, the U.S. received its largest number ever of immigrants during the 1990s. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics reported that of the 9.1 million documented immigrants that arrived between 1991 and 2000, 45.5% of that number was Mexican. The Pew Hispanic Center believes that of the 35.4 million foreign-born people currently residing in the U.S., roughly 11 million are undocumented. 81% of those people are Latin American, while 57% are Mexican alone.
Once coined “the quintessential American journey,” immigration is now a journey of alienation, fear and discrimination. With a post 9-11 climate of recession and war, people from other countries, and namely people of color, are shouldering the blame of a vengeful populace. As Mexicans compose an ever-larger portion of immigrants to the U.S. and the highest percentage of undocumented people living in the U.S., immigration is also a Mexican journey.
I would often wonder about the kinds of lives my friends led outside of work and what their lives used to be like back in Ocotitlan. I knew Teresa left her 2-year-old daughter Rosa behind when she left Mexico four years ago. I knew everyone was sending money back home to support their families; their reimittances help their loved ones to build houses, buy clothes and food, put their children through school, and possibly invest in a small store or business.
Earlier this year, as part of my five-month journey through Mexico, I visited the village of my restaurant friends. I labored on a small organic farm down the road from Ocotitlan, an hour outside of Mexico City in the state of Morelos. In the early evening, I would hitch a ride to the small village of 1,500 people, half of whom I felt I had befriended by the time I left.
Ocotitlan, “The Land of the Ocotes,” was named after the ocote trees that dominate the mountain range the village is nestled in. With a topography resembling the bottom of the ocean, pedestals of rust-colored rock poke out of the emerald green hills. Twenty years ago Ocotitlan received its first electrical lines; the road carrying me to the village was built a mere 25 years before that.
I passed many an evening in Ocotitlan with old women who loved to stuff me with tortillas, tamales and beans, and talk to me about their children. Usually seated around a fire with fresh tortillas cooking, Doña Francisca would always ask me about her oldest son, Cesar. “Is he still fat?” she asked.
“No, your son has slimmed down quite a bit with all of that work in the hot kitchen,” I said. At times, her eyes would tear up when we talked about Cesar, who left for the U.S. two years ago.
While visiting Don Pablo, I passed on pictures of his now pregnant daughter Teresa, and dressed-up son Gregorio. He studied the people in the photos as if they were ghosts. I showed a picture of Teresa to her six-year old daughter Rosa, who has no living memory of her mother. I ran into people on the street that had worked at the restaurant: Noel, Claudio, Celso, Tomas, Alejandro, Chimino and Francisco. To me, it seemed like at one point or another, all of the men of Ocotitlan had lived in Richmond.
I was invited into the homes of countless people who were so touched to have a person from the “other side” come to visit them. It is hard for them to imagine the drastically different reality that their children are living, but it becomes slightly easier when a person from that reality arrives to befriend them.
Many of their homes were constructed with the remittances that those working in the U.S. had sent home. Looking at his four-room cement house, I asked Don Pablo where he had lived before. He pointed to a nearby shack pieced together with wood and covered by a tin roof.
I spent a lot of time with Francisco, his partner Maricruz and their daughter Paula. Francisco left for the U.S. when Paula was two months old, and returned to see his daughter a 6 year-old going on twelve. After work in Richmond, Francisco was usually tied up on the payphone in the back of the restaurant. I never thought to ask Francisco if he had a family back in Mexico.
Maricruz explained to me how after Francisco left, Paula almost died while they were living in a wood shack. The walls were wood slats with spaces filled by bunched-up newspaper, and the floor was bare dirt. They were certainly not the best living conditions for an infant.
After World War II Mexico was growing as a developing country with a government-protected economy. The industrial and agricultural sectors were robust. By the 1980’s, Mexico was at the halfway point between Third World and First World status. But a slew of government follies and world economic crises, coupled with an astronomical debt, sent the economy into a backslide. The solution forced upon Mexico by U.S. government and World Bank economists took the form neo-liberal policies and structural adjustment programs.
The elites of Mexico, Canada and U.S. got together in the 1990s to craft the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). One ostensible goal of NAFTA was to deter migration and to create employment inside Mexico. The effects of the agreement were exactly the opposite. The American Immigration Legal Foundation said that from 1994 to 2002, the Mexican economy added about 500,000 export-oriented manufacturing jobs, but lost 1.3 million jobs in agriculture.
Thousands of Mexicans were left without a choice. The Mexican economy does not generate the 1.2 million jobs annually to satiate the demand of workers entering the job market. The jobs that exist don’t pay a livable wage. As such, many Mexicans are forced to choose between three options: enter the informal economy, become involved in crime, or take the risk of crossing illegally into the U.S. to seek work.
In 2004, Mexican workers sent home $16.7 billion dollars in remittances. These remittances are the largest source of income for the Mexican economy, more than both oil and tourism revenues. This figure speaks volumes about the utter lack of well-paying jobs available in Mexico. It is quite ironic that, 11 years after the implementation of NAFTA, the country’s greatest source of revenue comes from Mexicans working abroad, mainly in the U.S. And this revenue rushes into the country at a rate of $45 million per day.
In Ocotitlan, my friends told me about crossing the border with coyotes. They trekked through the desert for two to three days straight, taking short two-hour naps to power them through the dangerous journey. They laughed about the ordeal, making it sound easy; but I suspect it was done to ease the anxious ears of worried mothers who listened close by.
Once my time in Mexico drew to a close, I braved the 34-hour bus ride from Mexico City to the U.S.-Mexico border. I hooked up with Indymedia friends in Tucson and I spent a week in the desert on the border. In late July, temperatures were scorching hot, reaching 120 degrees. Ninety-eight people had died while crossing the border in July. I spent a few days at the camp set up by Arizona’s No More Deaths campaign. A desert outpost far removed from civilization, the camp is a grassroots response to the inhumane suffering experienced by people crossing the border. Camp volunteers go out on two patrols a day, looking for migrants in need of water, food, and socks for blistered feet. No More Death volunteers also provide medical help or evacuation for sick and injured migrants.
A two-hour afternoon patrol left my body destroyed. My brain felt fried, my lips constantly searched for water and slow steps carried me. I could hardly fathom hiking several days under these unbearable conditions.
The border is the closest thing to a war zone that I have ever visited. The area was buzzing with Border Patrol hunting down migrants, Blackhawk helicopters flying about, mobile watch stations with periscopes peering out fifty feet above, and huge stadium lights casting an eerie glow at night. Under Bill Clinton, U.S. border policy was changed to militarize traditional urban crossing areas and force people to cross in inhospitable desert areas. The government hoped that people dying while crossing would deter others from trying.
I am now finally at home in Virginia, where I’ve been sharing the hours of video I shot in Ocotitlan with my friends. During the time I was gone, Gregorio almost died in a car accident, Teresa gave birth to her son, Jesús, and Cesar gained back most of his weight. After five months of traveling, I am eager to practice the Mexican slang I’ve learned, and I find myself spending more time with Gregorio, Teresa and Cesar than with any of my other friends in Richmond.
I’m learning more about their experiences crossing the border. Teresa said she tried to cross six times before finally being successful. She said she was once buried under the sand in the desert with only her mouth exposed to hide from Border Patrol helicopters. Now after being away from Mexico for four years, Teresa is preparing to return to Ocotitlan to be reunited with her daughter Rosa, and to rejoin her family in the small house built with the remittances she’s sent back.
How is Teresa getting back to Mexico? She’s taking a flight from Richmond to Mexico City. Apparently, it’s easier to leave the U.S. than it is to enter.
