An Immigrant’s Story

Coming to Athens, Part 3

originally published September 19, 2007

Editor’s note: The story below concludes a first-person account by an Athens resident of coming to the United States illegally from Mexico. Read more in part one and part two.

The first night I slept on a hide-a-bed. It was like paradise, considering the hellish journey I had been through. Early in the morning, I got the surprise of my life: a little three-year-old boy who had been watching me while I was sleeping. He seemed very interested in how I slept. The first thing I saw in Athens was his tiny face: my grand-nephew’s face.

He was born here in Athens. That makes him a citizen. In recent months, he had big problems because of the new immigration laws, which denied Medicaid and PeachCare for him. For several months, he has not had medical insurance. This is the same situation facing a lot of children whose parents are undocumented. The law is confusing to the medical community, and so very often the children’s medical insurance is fouled up. These anti-immigrant laws are affecting our families, but especially our children. Citizens or not, the children are guilty of nothing, yet they are being penalized every day. Laws like SB 529 (before it was modified) included a proposition denying citizenship to children of the undocumented. Luckily, that part of the law was defeated. Children born here remain citizens, but their parents can still be deported without them. One example is the case of Elvira Arellano, who has been deported while her son remains in the United States. He has his life here, his friends and his school. Now they are fighting to get back together. I cannot imagine being separated from my daughter or my son. These laws are designed to particularly target children, children like my grand-nephew. Now they are citizens, but what would happen if they lost their citizenship?

A Place to Sleep

The second night, I moved to the place I would live in for the next several months. I left my nephew’s house and I moved in with my friend who was waiting for me. The apartment had two rooms. One had a space for a single bed. I had to sleep there on the floor, along with another guy, and someone else had the bed. It was June and there was no air conditioning in the apartment. It had broken long ago. The temperature in there was like 100 degrees. The problem was that no one there spoke English and no one knew that the landlord was responsible for repairing the air conditioner as well as the carpet, stove, windows, doors, and so on. Everything there needed repair. The first night, the three of us slept in a room designed for one. We had just one fan for the whole room. The fan was about five or six inches in diameter and pointed towards the guy on the bed, missing me completely. It was difficult to sleep, and it was very hot. Still, I was so tired from the trip that I slept anyway.

Suddenly something moved over me, waking me up. I opened my eyes, but it was dark and whatever it was moved really fast. Then I realized that it was a roach, the biggest roach I ever saw. I started to panic. I felt frightened. There I was with the biggest roach I ever saw in my life, crawling over my body, in a country that has a macro-economy, a macro-market and macro-roaches!

My friend and the other guy slept as if nothing happened. Now, it seems hard to believe how we fit in that little room, the three of us and the giant roaches.

When I took a look at the next room of the apartment, there were six people laying across the floor, while other apartments had more people, like 10 or 12 in one room and others sleeping in the living room, even the kitchen. It was cheap living like that, but you had to live with people you never knew before. But when I told a friend about my first nights in this country, he said, “That’s nothing compared to my first night.” But that is another story for another time…

First Days

From the first day here, everything was new to me: the food, the language, the culture. It is very difficult for an adult to learn another language. Whoever says that we do not like learning English is wrong. It is just that it is very difficult. Even children, who learn much faster, are in school six hours a day, and then it still takes them months or years to learn. As working adults, we attend churches or schools to learn English, but we come to these classes only after eight hours of hard work. Once I was sitting and listening to the teacher and I couldn’t help but keep blinking my eyes. It took great effort not to fall asleep, because after eight hours of digging holes or cutting chickens, the only thing you want to do is sleep.

What really made a mark on my first days in the country was my fear of everything, especially the police. I remember one day I was riding with a friend to visit another friend. At the entrance of the parking lot was a police car with its lights flashing. They had pulled over a Latino and had him handcuffed, ready to put him in the car. At first, when I saw the lights I felt my breath quicken, but when I saw that the side of the car said “state patrol,” my heart started to beat fast, too. I started to sweat all over; all the panic was because I associate the world “patrol” with the immigration service. And I had the idea that the immigration service was hunting and spying everywhere in the United States, which was what I had been warned about in Mexico: at any time the authorities could come and you would have to run.

Going to Work

I started working construction, making floors for big stores and doing other work. The pay was good. We drove every day to South Carolina. The guy who drove the truck drove very fast. Every day, this guy, a “gringo,” a tall white man, drove 90 miles an hour or more, listening to rock and roll. He had this machine to detect police on the highway, and always when we came back from the job, he snorted cocaine, drank beer and played “air guitar” or “air drums,” taking his hands off the wheel to do it! This was more like the America I’d seen in the movies…

One day, the bosses stopped us early. They took us out to the translator and said that Immigration was there. Someone had called Immigration on us, so it looked like they were going to check our IDs. I was in a panic, but there was nothing I could do. We waited, but no one came over to ask us anything. I lost that job right away.

I found other work with a company making holes for cable lines. It was the hardest job I have ever had in my life. I worked under the sun with a pick and shovel. I did this work for a week, but a guy disappeared with our checks. I did not see a single penny for that week of work! It happens every day to construction workers, especially to Latino day workers. Their employers cheat them. In most cases, nothing can be done. Usually these day laborers are not even given the names and addresses of their employers, and even if they have that information, they still have no rights.

Tenders

One day, I found a job in a poultry factory. It was hard from the first day. The first thing you noticed when you went in there was the smell; the next was the cold. It was cold no matter what month it was, or what the weather was like outside. You always had to wear a sweater.

The first day they trained me to cut tenders. The first 30 minutes standing and working was kind of hard. But after an hour of doing the same thing, standing was painful. Cutting 32 chickens per minute, 1920 per hour, the pain in my hands became unbearable. If you were to tell someone “This is a hard job,” most of the time they’d tell you, “Querías Norte” - “You wanted Norte, you got Norte” - which meant “Shut up and keep working.” Most of the time, no one would help you. Everybody had their own problems. The next few hours were very bad. I began to stand on one foot and when I felt tired, I had to switch to my other foot. During that shift, I noticed other people kept doing the same thing.

When I needed to go to the restroom, I had to wait an hour and keep working. It was bad, but it was worse for the pregnant women. They also had to wait for an hour. The women faced even more problems than the men did. Often they had to put up with sexual harassment from their superiors and sometimes from their coworkers. I heard a lot of stories there. Different types of people, not just the undocumented, suffer from these injustices. Even permanent residents. I met this woman from Honduras. She had been out sick for a week. She could not go to work, and talked to her manager about it over the telephone. But when she came back a week later, there was no work for her. They fired her for nothing. She got a lawyer, but the lawyer told her he could do nothing because the law in Georgia does not help workers. So they could fire her or anybody for just about any reason.

I worked there for more than a year. Every day, it was the same thing: I had to be there 10 minutes before my shift started to put on all this stuff, like fabric gloves, plastic gloves, a lab coat, and a plastic apron. I washed my hands and waited at the line to start, but at break time I had to run to the sink (there were two sinks and five faucets for over 30 hungry people), first taking off the plastic gloves, then the fabric gloves, then the plastic apron which we hung on a rack over the wall, and then finally I could wash my hands. Once I and the other Latino workers had washed up, we would dart over to the kitchen. I never liked the restaurant food much. We Latinos eat different stuff, and anyway it was much too expensive to eat there. So most of us brought our own food. The microwave area was very busy! Most of the time we had like 10 minutes to have our lunch and use the restroom because we had to return to our work stations five minutes before resuming work.

Silent Majority

Most of my coworkers there were Latinos and African Americans. The white people were only in the office or working security. We Latino workers were the majority. I saw a lot of people come to work for just a week and then quit. They might have found different jobs, maybe not paying as well, but probably not as hard as that one. Most of us couldn’t quit because it’s difficult find something else.

One day, I was telling the supervisor about the pain I was having in my hands. I was asking to change my work, to do something different. He took me to the office of the general supervisor. A translator had to help me to explain about the pain and how I couldn’t keep doing that work anymore. He told me about other work on a farm injecting vaccine into chickens. I thought, “Este gringo es a toda madre” (this guy is okay). But I was wrong. The next day, I had to be there first thing in the morning. When I got there they told me the work was to catch chickens - the hardest work in all of the poultry business. If you have a chance to see the hands of a person who does this kind of work, you will understand why I refused to do it. The supervisor was laughing at my refusal to do it. I quit. I cried over my powerlessness…

I am not able to do what I love most in my life: play saxophone. It is because of the pain in my hands and I don’t know whether I will able to play like I had played before. This was not my dream. It is not what I expected in the United States, the land of liberty, where dreams come true, where anything is possible. Maybe before September 11 we had some opportunity as immigrants, but not anymore. Now we are viewed as enemies, criminals, law-breakers, rats, pigs. We are no longer “wetbacks” as we were named years ago, or “Braceros” like we were from 1942 to 1964, when the United States needed workers and created the Bracero program to bring farm workers into the country from Mexico. In 1954, there was Operation Wetback, a massive deportation campaign expelling hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, because the feeling in this country about having them working here changed for a time. In a way, it is no different today.

Meanwhile, mine is just one story among millions…