The Working Poor (17 page)

Jung Hee Lee also felt trapped. A sinewy, diminutive woman with a wan smile, she arrived from South Korea with her husband in 1995; he was on a student visa to study computer science at UCLA. “We sold our house in Korea,” she explained. “We had planned in Korea that if we sold the house, that’s a lot of money, so we could come here and study for about three years comfortably. Both of us would study. We never imagined that I was going to work. It wasn’t in the plan. But when we got here, that money ran out quickly, in a year.” They were stunned by the cost of living. From a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Korea they descended to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. Their two children had beds; the parents slept on the floor.

She went from bank teller in Korea to waitress in Los Angeles, earning less than the minimum wage and spending hours delicately navigating the slippery floor tiles of a restaurant kitchen. One day, carrying a tray,
she lost her footing and fell. Crockery crashed to the floor, and dreams shattered. Her back was injured so seriously that she could not work for a year. Desperate for money, her husband had to drop out of school and get a job—and the college degree was relegated to a distant hope. Jung’s employer did not carry worker’s compensation; she had found a lawyer who had agreed to take only a contingency fee if a lawsuit were successful, a process that was likely to run for at least five years.

Here again, the family’s income was respectable enough, but the ambitions they brought with them to America had been extinguished. The husband, now a manager for a garment contractor, made about $2,000 a month, much better than most garment workers, and Jung was back waiting tables six nights a week in a Korean restaurant, where tips were often good enough to practically double her $8oo-a-month salary. Nevertheless, the money all disappeared, and they couldn’t save. Without health insurance, their medical bills were huge. The tension in their life ground at their emotions. They would have returned home, but they felt ashamed to do so in defeat.

“If you look at the wages earned, it’s not bad,” she said. “But the problem is you work long hours. Most of the time you’re at work, and who’s going to take care of the children? So you end up spending about $500 a month for child care, and I don’t have much time to spend with my family or husband. So it ends up, going to work, going home and sleeping, and coming out again. There’s no time to cook so they always have to go out and eat,” she said of her husband and children. That was expensive, and their diet and health suffered as a result.

“My husband is a salaried man, but he doesn’t have any social life. He has friends, but he can’t hang out with them. He has to come home and take care of the kids. So my husband and I have lots of trouble—arguments. He has no days off. … In Korea, we never argued. I’ve heard from other immigrants that the first five years of immigrant life you and your husband will argue, but if you can get past that you will be together.”

But “together” was a relative term. Her husband was out of the apartment by 7:30 or 8 a.m. and back about 8:30 p.m., when she was still at work. “I walk in the door around twelve or one o’clock, I open up the door and my husband’s snoring and everyone’s asleep, and I feel like, why am I living? I get very depressed. In Korea, at least we spent evenings together so we’d have things to talk about. But right now we have nothing to talk about with each other. There’s no time to talk, and there’s no content to
discuss.” In one respect Korean immigrants are becoming assimilated into America: Their divorce rate is about 50 percent.

The salvation of immigrants to the United States has almost always been deferred to the subsequent generations. If the parents cannot speak English, the children can. If the parents are confined by long hours and low wages, the children are freed to find a way up along the path of higher skills and education. It’s hard to make comparisons with earlier eras, but in today’s ethnic enclaves the assumptions are not completely intact, the confidence is not entirely unshaken that the next generation will succeed, advance, emerge into the shared sunlight of the country’s prosperity.

Indeed, when I asked Jung what she foresaw in her children’s lives, she answered curiously; she described how active she had become in campaigning through the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate to improve working conditions in Korean restaurants. That battle, if won, would make her children’s lives better, she believed. So, I asked, she expected them to be working in restaurants? “There’s no guarantee that they will not be working in a restaurant,” she said sadly. “Of course, I would love to have my children go to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, New York University, and become a doctor, a lawyer, but—right now my son’s dream is to become a police officer. My daughter’s is to become a teacher in elementary school. But in looking at their future employment, who knows? They could end up working in the restaurants.”

If the cinder-block barrack had been filled with migrant workers, the impression would have been less severe. We would have talked with the men and women, joked with them, listened to their stories. We would have been busy with their laughter and leathery faces and weary eyes, not focused so intensely on the crude dark rooms, the rusty bunk frames, the stained and stinking mattresses, the grimy kitchen sink, the torn screens, the row of toilets without partitions. The presence of people would have softened the stark conditions in which they lived. But this was December, and North Carolina’s growing season was over, cut short this year by a hurricane that flooded fields and ruined crops. A remnant of the last harvest—a small pile of dusty sweet potatoes—huddled against an outside wall. Late on a sunny Wednesday, the “camp” was vacant. In the emptiness, the echo of hardship reverberated.

Like most such camps, this one was way out of sight and hard to find.

Pastor Tony Rojas had brought us from Newton Grove in a van big enough to negotiate the merciless dirt road that twisted through deep ruts and puddles until it emerged at the edge of a vast field. There, in a weedy lot less than twenty feet from where Thanksgiving yams were grown, stood the building, as dismal as a neglected barn. Long and narrow with a peaked roof, its single story had many doors, each opening into an un-painted cinder-block room resembling a cell. Each cell smelled of mold, was lit by a bare bulb on the ceiling, and contained two or three bunks, not enough for the laborers who crowded in here. The pastor gave the workers clean sheets, he told me through my son Michael, who was interpreting from Spanish.

A sad scene from this building was hung like an icon of misery on the office wall of Father Tony, as he was known. It was a large color photograph of a young man sitting here on the floor among bunks with filthy mattresses. One day, visiting the office, the man was stunned to see himself depicted in such surroundings. He told the pastor that if his family saw the picture, they would never let him come here again. “The mattresses are nauseating,” Father Tony told us before we saw for ourselves. “They are sticky. They smell disgusting. It is horrible to be there. They prefer to sleep on the floor. They are afraid of getting a disease by sleeping on the mattresses.”

Father Tony was a native of Colombia in his fifties, a Catholic priest turned Episcopalian. He had a broad brown face that vividly registered all the pain, amusement, outrage, and inspiration that the migrants brought him as he tried to render help through the Episcopal Farmworkers Ministry. They were vulnerable and strong, adrift and steady. At the height of the picking season, he said, twelve to fourteen men were crammed into each twelve-by-fifteen-foot cell, fewer women in their respective cells. Summer was fiercely hot. There was no air conditioning, and not even a fan, unless a worker happened to bring one with him. But migrants travel light—a pair of shoes, two or three pairs of pants. Men and women are stuffed into a van or a pickup, moving with the seasons from the citrus groves of Florida to the North Carolina fields of cotton, tobacco, green vegetables, strawberries, and sweet potatoes, sometimes to the apple orchards of Pennsylvania and New York, and then back southward again. In late fall, some cut Christmas trees. You can hardly go through a day, much less observe a holiday, without the fruit of their labor in your life.

The farm owners usually provide housing for the migrants—either
barracks like this one, run-down trailers, or dilapidated wooden farmhouses that look like shipwrecks on a horizon of tilled earth. We turned off the main road past a neat subdivision of brick homes decorated for Christmas, and a rutted dirt road led to a pair of decaying houses that seemed abandoned. Screens were torn, doors were half off their hinges, the paint looked decades old; the inside was bare, dirty, gray, and dark. So many workers lived here, Father Tony said, that they slept in the hallways. Years ago someone climbed to the peak of one roof and installed a handmade sign reading, “Motel Six.”

“They smile every day,” Father Tony observed, even though across a field, behind trim white fences, they could see mahogany-colored horses gamboling before an ample house painted gleaming white.

Sometimes, as in the case of the cinder-block camp, the owner rents housing to a
contratista,
a contractor who collects, transports, and organizes the teams of farmhands. Some farmers charge their migrants rent; some don’t. Some pay them decently and co-sign loans for cars and trailers; some don’t. Some are simultaneously cruel and caring, ruthless and paternalistic.

Unlike the decrepit wooden houses, this barrack clearly had one function from its conception. Whoever owned it—Father Tony didn’t know his name—must have understood what he was doing when he designed this harsh building, for its configuration could have had no purpose other than to house workers—and to deprive them of their dignity. It was not an old structure, just chillingly efficient. The kitchen contained one gas stove and hookups for five others, which were supplied in season by the contractor. The common room, also used for dining, was furnished with two picnic tables and a bulletin board where the required notices were posted in Spanish and English on the minimum wage and the rights of migrant workers. Typed in English only was this warning:

MEN

Stay out of the women’s bathroom.

WOMEN

Stay out of the men’s bathroom.

If caught you
willbe
fined $30.00.

Everybody has there
[sic]
restroom so stay in your own place.

The men’s bathroom had one sink, four toilets in full view, and four showerheads in a stall too cramped for four people to shower at once. The women’s bathroom had the same arrangement, with two toilets and two showerheads. It looked as if nothing had ever been cleaned or repaired. There was no privacy, no comfort, not even the quiet sense of sparse simplicity that could be found in a primitive village. There, at least, human beings live. Here, they were kept, warehoused, stored like seed and fertilizer.

Father Tony knew to let us wander through the rooms in silence, as if we were visiting a memorial at the scene of a crime. Independently, Michael and I were suffused with the same recollection, which we learned later by comparing notes: of another kind of camp where the greatest crime occurred. And then we apologized to ourselves for feeling the parallel, which of course was no parallel at all. No injustice that happened here approached what happened there. And yet the sensation of standing where something terrible had taken place was not dissimilar. Even in the emptiness, you were somehow a witness.

Claudio and his eighteen-year-old wife had lived here. He was an unsmiling man of twenty-four, dressed in a sweater and camouflage fatigues. A mustache and a thin beard defined his narrow face, which looked gray in the pale December light. The previous summer, the young couple set out on their journey to a new life in America by agreeing to pay a coyote, a smuggler of humans, to sneak them across the border from Mexico near Laredo, Texas. The price was $1,300 for Claudio and $1,400 for his wife, rates that had doubled in the last decade. “He charges more for women; it’s more work,” Claudio explained.

They didn’t have the cash, so the fee was advanced as a loan to be repaid in three months by withholding installments from their paychecks. For collateral, Claudio’s father had to sign over his house and seven and a half acres of land in Mexico, putting Claudio and his wife into a modern form of indentured servitude. They could not fail to work, because they had no money; they could not fail to pay, because his father would lose his property. It was typical of the arrangements through which Mexicans cross illegally into the United States.

The journey can be difficult and dangerous, and has become more so as the U. S. Border Patrol has beefed up surveillance of the frontier, especially in urban areas. Deflected into remote regions of desert, immigrants
traveling with too little clothing or too little water have succumbed in rising numbers to the cold and the heat of the wilderness. In the five years following the introduction in 1993 of new technology and additional manpower to monitor the border, the number of deaths from exposure jumped from six to eighty-four. In the year from October 2004 to October 2005 alone, 473 people died.
¹
As small comfort, the numbers murdered by thieves or killed in road accidents have declined.
²

Claudio and his wife had the luck of a relatively easy trip. They hid from border agents in Texas during daylight and walked in darkness, but only for three nights and for short distances. At a predetermined location, a
contratista
met them with a van and drove them (for no extra charge, Claudio was pleased to say) to a farm in South Carolina to spend a month removing stakes and plastic sheeting from tomato fields. He was not quite sure how their wages were figured. “We never knew how they were paying us,” he admitted. “They didn’t tell us.” It wasn’t by the hour but by the row, he thought. All he knew was that it was a lot more than Mexican wages, and—as he was now learning—minuscule by American standards. He and his wife together, working the same rows, received about $250 for the two of them—but only every other week, really, because the contractor withheld half their earnings for the coyote: “One check for us and one for him,” Claudio said.