Alexandra Early
I first met Jose Naranjero* in a dusty little Mexican town called Naco, which lies just across the border wall from Bisbee, Arizona. I’d been working in Arizona for a few weeks as a volunteer for No More Deaths, a Tucson-based group that works to protect the lives and human rights of migrants. I was part of a team that left supplies of food and water in the Sonoran desert, where many border crossers have gotten lost and then perished from hunger, thirst, dehydration, and other causes.
In Naco, I retraced the steps of many, back to the door of an immigrant resource center, run by folks from Bisbee, which assists people dumped on the Mexican side after being collared by our Border Patrol. On my second day working in this tiny, crowded facility, two friends of Jose Naranjero showed up looking for him. All three men had tried to enter the U.S. two nights before but had the bad luck to run into “la migra.”
As Jose’s fellow travelers sipped the black coffee served to them by center volunteers, they spoke shyly, in a slow, stilted kind of Spanish. Coming from the distant Yucatan, their first language is Maya. They had last seen Jose while they were all still in custody at the Border Patrol detention center in Bisbee. They feared that their friend might be in more than the usual amount of trouble; he had been issued a black wristband, usually a sign that the wearer is suspected of being a convicted criminal or a documented repeat violator of US immigration laws. Jose was still sitting in a cell when they had been released, and they hadn’t heard from him since.
Within 24 hours the missing man had been found and Jose himself came into the center with his two friends the next day. The Border Patrol released him at midnight and, immediately, all three compañeros tried to slip into the U.S. again, with no more success than before. Like the others, Jose has wide brown face and a big smile. He was definitely the chief spokesman for the now reassembled delegation. Jose told me they were heading for my own adopted city, San Francisco, where he had been working as a line cook at an Italian restaurant before he decided to return to Mexico to see his family. Like many of the others who came to the center, he had mistakenly assumed it would be as easy to get back into the US as it was several years ago.
On each subsequent night that I spent in Naco, Jose and his friends tried to re-enter Arizona. And each time, they were caught in the desert, returned to Mexico by la migra, and back at the resource center in time for coffee and a hot cup of noodles the next morning, saying “Hola, Alexandra!” “Otra vez?” I would ask, and they would nod and we would all laugh at the absurdity of this daily cycle of activity. Jose taught me a few words in Maya. His friends decided to give up and go back to the Yucatan but Jose and I made a pact that if he did succeed in getting back to San Francisco, we would meet up again to exchange English lessons for continued tutoring in Maya. When I left Naco a few days later to catch my flight from Tucson to California, I seriously doubted that I would be seeing Jose anytime soon, if ever again.
Yet, two days after I arrived back home, I got a call on my cell phone and heard a familiar “Hola, Alexandra.” It was Jose. He was back in the Bay Area, but not without the scars and debts accumulated during his latest passage. He had fractured his foot, but nevertheless returned immediately to his chamba (Mexican slang for work) at the same Italian restaurant where he had cooked before. Only now, he owed five thousand dollars to the coyotes who had finally smuggled him across the border successfully and he was desperate to find a second full-time job so he could pay them off faster.
We met for his first English lesson, the focus of which was “vocabulary for the job seeker.” Jose had me write down what “Help Wanted” looked like in English. He asked me how to say, “ Are you hiring?” and, to assert with confidence: “I can cook pizza and salad, and clean”. We also reviewed key words that would help him better understand the barked commands and impatient questions of his current jefe–like “sweep the floor” and “are you done yet?” Jose attended ESL classes at S.F. City College at my suggestion, but he soon stopped so he could devote more time to finding that second job and the extra money he needed to send back home.
As he explained his primary mission in the U.S., there was little time for non-income producing distractions. “We are here for a short time, just to work,” he told me. “We want to get back to our families as soon as we can.” Jose asked about my family (in Massachusetts) all the time and was baffled that I chose to live so far away, when there was apparently no economic necessity for doing so.
One day on his way to work, a few months after his difficult return to San Francisco, Jose had an experience that truly spooked him. As he recounted it to me, he actually bumped into a woman he recognized as one of the Border Patrol agents who had caught him and his friends during the week of nightly border hopping when I first met him. He told me the woman stopped, right there on the sidewalk, and said, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” Jose gave her a mumbled, “No,” and tried to walk away. But the woman persisted: “I do know you. I caught you in Arizona… Well, I am happy to see you here. How are you doing? Are you working?”
Already scared and shaken by this bizarre encounter, Jose certainly didn’t tell her that he was working illegally in the kitchen of her neighborhood Italian restaurant. If this woman was so “happy” to see him in San Francisco, why did she and her co-workers make it so hard for him to get back here?
Jose’s run-in with this off-duty member of la migra reminded him of all the other times he has felt afraid in our country, like when he was riding a city bus and San Francisco police officers came aboard to check bus passes or remove rowdy passengers. We both vividly recalled the story told by one of the other Mexicans stuck in Naco. That man had been living in San Francisco with his family for 20 years when he was deported after being pulled over for a routine traffic violation. For this other unlucky border crosser, Jose, and many other undocumented workers, San Francisco is not always the “sanctuary city” it claims to be.
After months of searching, Jose called one day to report that he had finally found additional employment at a “restuarante de sushi.” A friend of a friend was already working there so Jose was happy to join a kitchen crew of “puro Mexicanos.” Now, he prepares pizza and salad six evenings a week in his original job and sushi rice and chicken teriyaki, five days a week, on a morning shift at his second job. He has very little time to sleep between jobs but he is grateful to be earning two paychecks. He now has no time to improve his English or have any kind of fun, and his experience of this great city is so different from the young people I know who have the time and resources to enjoy themselves, whether they are employed or unemployed.
I try to regard my now seven months of unemployment as a chance to use my free time to help people like Jose, even if I can’t get hired to do it. No More Deaths, ESL tutoring programs, and all the rest of the “non-profit” world are not exactly flush with “stimulus” money these days. Coming back from Arizona last summer and walking the streets of San Francisco since then, with resume in hand, I’ve come to believe more strongly than ever before that there is something wrong with an economic system where so many people, whether native- or foreign-born, have to struggle so hard just to make a living. For me, this struggle has meant subjecting myself to the scrutiny and then rejection of countless potential employers via the Internet and in face-to-face interviews, which often leaves me feeling anxious and worthless.
But at least I don’t have to watch my back every moment like Jose does. For Jose, the pursuit of “Help Wanted” ads in California has already taken him across a very hazardous stretch of an increasingly militarized international border, multiple times. He has left his family, risked his health and life, and willingly accepted the always arduous and precarious job conditions of the undocumented. The deeply flawed “labor markets” of both our respective countries have left both of us and millions of others in a place where we don’t want to be, either in an unemployment line or working illegally far from home.
* Not his real name
Alexandra Early is a 2007 graduate of Wesleyan University and a former local union representative for SEIU/United Healthcare Workers-West. She can be reached via her blog Help Wanted or by emailing her at earlyave@gmail.com.
Filed under: Immigrant Workers Tagged: | Immigrant Workers
