The Working Poor (21 page)

He had just had a go-round with the bureaucrats on behalf of Patty and Gloria, whose lack of English required them to take the tests in Spanish, as North Carolina law allowed. Two years before, an examiner in the Kenansville office flatly refused to use Spanish for the test on road signs, even though he had cards with translations sitting on his desk. Now, a more amenable woman, whom Father Paul had helped get the job, was on duty. But he decided to phone ahead anyway, just to be sure. He never identified himself when he called, because he wanted to know how the agency responded to everyone, not just to an activist priest. He found out. Not recognizing his voice, the examiner told him that while applicants could take the written test in Spanish, the signs test had to wait for an interpreter, available only on Fridays. Puzzled, Father Paul called the state capital in Raleigh to see if the rules had changed. They had not. A supervisor contacted the hapless examiner to ask why she had refused to give a test. Her nose was out of joint when the priest walked into her office with

Patty and Gloria. Would he please call her supervisor and get her off the hook? she asked. “I will,” he said to me, “but what she told me when I was there was different from her knee-jerk response before she knew who it was.”

The other bureaucracy that bothered Father Paul was the Roman Catholic Church: the officious parish priest, the inflexible diocese, the hierarchy that seemed indifferent to the special needs of the transient Hispanic faithful. The church, for its part, seemed barely to tolerate Father Paul, an itinerant priest without a parish, as he journeyed along the edges of society, rocking the boat.

“What I like most is people empowerment,” he declared. “I like to get organizations up and running to help address an unmet need, and a lot of that’s needed in the Catholic Church ’cause there are lots of unmet needs. But I’m always in trouble with my superiors as a result—not my Jesuit superiors, but the other ones. They don’t like waves. They don’t like change. It’s really amazing, the bureaucracy—no matter where it is, it’s the same. It resists any kind of innovation, any kind of change.”

Migrants who want to marry, for example, run into a six-month waiting period imposed by the diocese to make them stop and think. It sounds sensible, but six months is a whole growing season, and the bride, the groom, or their family members will probably be long gone by the end of it. Most of the marriages that don’t last have been arranged at age fifteen or sixteen, Father Paul argued, and he believed that devout Hispanic adults usually go solemnly enough into matrimony not to need the forced period of reflection. “When a Hispanic couple comes to you and says they want to get married in the church, you’re pretty sure they’re ready to make a lifetime commitment,” he insisted. “But these pastors who don’t work with Hispanics much are saying, ‘Well, number one, I don’t speak Spanish; number two, there’s a regulation. No.’ ” He gave an exasperated laugh. “Most of the priests around here who don’t work with Hispanics are very much by the book, and they won’t make any exceptions for anything. And they don’t ask questions; they just say no. So that’s driven a lot of people away.”

Those failed child marriages can present a problem, given the church’s opposition to divorce. A second marriage cannot be performed in a Catholic church unless the first is annulled, and that must be done by the diocese in which each individual resides—not so easy when the wife, for example, is back in Mexico or Honduras. “Our diocese did not have any
provision for handling annulments for couples unless both of the partners were living in this diocese,” Father Paul said, “and it requires a special appeal to Rome in order to change jurisdictions, and have this diocese take charge of annulments that properly belong to another diocese. So for two years I presented it to the people in charge of our tribunal: that it was an unjust situation because even if they could do the communication with the diocese in Latin America, most of the dioceses do not have a tribunal. They can’t afford to put three priests or two priests in an office to handle marriage cases. So they don’t have anything. Basically, then, it becomes impossible for the couple to be freed from a previous marriage bond and be able to marry again. So now they’ve given me permission to do that. They say, ‘Be sure to tell them it’s gonna take an extra year because we have to go to Rome and ask for a change of jurisdiction and then we have to start the process after we’ve gotten that.’ ”

Most of his time was occupied by secular issues, though, and they ran the gamut of farmworkers’ difficulties. One was the lack of community, intimacy, and trust, especially among young men traveling without families. “The kinds of problems that are exacerbated would be the ones that could be settled if the patriarchs were around—the
abuelos,
the grandparents,” he noted. “I’ll ask them after they’ve shared something profound with me, ‘Do you have any other … accountability partner, somebody they’d feel comfortable saying the same things to? Do you have anybody of confidence that you can talk to?’ And they’ll say no.”

So Father Paul tried to fill the void, both by offering good advice and by handing out narrow cards the size of a bookmark, produced on the computer in his cluttered yellow house. Migrants could carry the card, which bore an iconic image of the Virgin Mary and a prayer in Spanish appealing for help in abstaining from alcohol and drugs. Alcoholism was rampant, Father Paul observed. Cocaine and marijuana arrived with young workers, many of whom were addicts before they came, he said; some kicked the habit once they were here, though it was harder to make that happen in the absence of family and community. Health problems became severe, not only because of drugs, alcohol, and the denial of medical insurance, but also because farm work had a high incidence of accidents.

Father Paul was a fixer, an arranger, a middleman, a negotiator, a finder of dentists who would permit payments on an installment plan, doctors who would reduce their charges for uninsured workers, sometimes to zero. And he was a financial counselor, transcending cultures to explain
patiently to these folks that here in the United States it was better to pay a little on a bill periodically than to wait and pay nothing until you had it all. He taught them something about the country they served.

The migrants, so essential to America, journey along its edge, touching its wealth as tangents barely touch a circle, never penetrating, never looking out from inside. And so they do not see themselves the way they are seen, and they do not apply to themselves the measurements that America applies to their suffering.

When a migrant stops moving, however, he starts to enter America. He looks around. He settles in. Perhaps he opens a little store to sit incongruously on a North Carolina crossroads to stock jalapeños and other foods familiar to his countrymen. Perhaps, like Agustin Baltazar, he just keeps working year-round on the same farm, and he begins to wonder how to see himself.

Agustin was straddling the line, inside and outside. He and his wife and three children lived in a small white frame house, decorated with flashing lights and a lovely Christmas tree, owned by his boss, a chicken farmer who charged no rent. A handsome guy of thirty-three, Agustin had to spend every penny he earned. Nothing was ever left over. Yet he was not sure where to place himself in the hierarchy of classes.

“I cannot say that I’m poor, poor, because I have a car,” he explained. “The most important is that I have my children and my wife. I have a life that continues, so I can’t say that I’m so poor. I also recognize that I don’t have money. I have something to eat, and my children have their clothes and their shoes, and I feel good. If I say I’m poor, I don’t know, maybe. If I say I’m really poor, it would be bad before God, and if I say I’m rich it would be too proud. So I cannot classify myself.”

They were a tough bunch. They had survived crack wars, homelessness, and prison, but now they were venturing into truly frightening territory— the unfamiliar world of work. They were terrified.

The sixteen men were callused addicts, alcoholics, and ex-convicts who had done some hard living on the streets of Washington, D.C. All were black. On a Wednesday evening, they gathered for the weekly meeting of their support group in a halfway house within sight of the glowing dome of the United States Capitol. They filled the chairs around the edge of the room, sat on the floor, leaned against the walls, and began to confide in one another about their feelings.

Fear had been a taboo subject in their former lives, where “bad” was good, and the best defense was a threatening posture of aggression. To be safe, they had to look mean, act dangerous, and never admit to being scared. Mothers taught that lesson to their sons, brothers to their brothers.
Tonight, however, the men sat in a circle of security where they had discovered that candor could be therapeutic. They could talk comfortably here. Their treatment program required them to look for jobs, find work within a month, get apartments, and move out on their own. Each task seemed formidable, and they were nervous.

The job hunt is never pleasant, even for a white, middle-class college graduate with high credentials and a sense of ease in the workplace. But for these men, the workplace was like a foreign culture. They entered it burdened by their personal histories of repeated failure: failure to finish school, failure to resist drugs, failure to maintain loving relationships, failure to hold jobs. Nothing in their track records predicted success, and no brave promises could paper over their doubts about themselves. Their brash, streetwise armor seemed a thin veneer. Underneath, they were as tender as babies, deeply vulnerable. They admitted gently that they were afraid of making the phone call, of getting no reply, of filling out the application, of going to the interview. They waited tensely for the inevitable question about a police record—afraid of telling the truth, and afraid of lying. “You got to put down, have you been arrested? I always have a feeling I’m not gonna get hired here—sitting there looking at people’s faces and knowing I’m not gonna get hired,” said Wayne, his eyes lowered to the floor. “So I pick up little [jobs] here and there—McDonald’s. It’s a fear of rejection, and it’s holding me back.”

“Each step is an obstacle to me,” a tall, sinewy man confessed. “The interview is an obstacle. I’m kind of shaky with dealing with rejection. I know there’re gonna be some problems. I’m gonna run from it or deal with it. I still get feelings when I know I got a job and then I don’t get it. I still feel disappointed. There’s this worry with me in the way I feel and the way I perceive things. I still have to work on this. Thanks for letting me share.”

“Thanks for sharing,” the group replied in unison.

The room contained a smattering of successes. One man wore a dark blue uniform with a triangular red shoulder patch reading “Prince Security Incorporated.” Another had found work moving office furniture at $6.50 an hour. A third, however, had been turned down as an airport baggage handler because of his criminal record.

Even getting hired wouldn’t have ended the anxiety for some of the men in the halfway house. A couple of them were scared of success in being accepted, for they doubted that they were up to the job, whatever job. For at least one of them, though, work itself became therapy. “When I
got there I was afraid—oh, no, I can’t do this,” he admitted. “But every day it comes back a little more. Damn, I forgot I had this in me. It makes me feel good.”

Talking about fear took a lot of courage.

Across the continent, Camellia Woodruff carefully missed her orientation for a sales job in the jewelry department of Macy’s. She was a lithe black woman of twenty-six who moved like a self-conscious dancer through the yards of Imperial Courts, the Los Angeles housing project where she lived. Attempting a stylish look, she straightened her hair, twisted it into a bun, slicked it down, and pasted a lock at an angle across her forehead. She wore dangling gold earrings. Then she tried to ward off male attentions. Anxiety and anger were transmitted through all four limbs, constantly in motion, gracefully threatening, as if to say, “Get out of my face!” She gave her voice an edge as cold as a blade.

In her living room, she sat down briefly on a blond wooden TV stand—the only other piece of furniture was a white plastic lawn chair— but she could not stay still. As she talked, she fidgeted by mopping and sweeping, pacing and gesticulating. She turned sharply on a burly man who came to her door, cutting him with contempt: “I’m in the middle of an important conversation!” He scampered away.

Camellia had dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, then “started getting into street life,” fell into an abusive relationship, and saw her mother die of a drug overdose. She had not married, had no children yet, loved taking care of friends’ little kids, and had worked sporadically at low-wage jobs. She’d lasted at each one for quite a while, by her definition. “I’ve worked for a long time,” she boasted. “Four, five, six, seven, eight months.” Her horizon was not very far away; she had never considered where she wanted to be ten years out. “Getting up for work every morning seems hard,” she said. Her dream job? “I would love to work with kids, like a teacher’s assistant or child care.”

Isolated in the projects, many like Camellia lack the encouragement and connections to find decent work until a helping hand gives a push or opens a door. The help for Camellia came from Glenda Taylor, a caseworker at the project’s federally funded Jobs Plus program, which was designed to overcome the array of barriers to employment. Those obstacles, not always visible to an outsider, were clear to Glenda from her childhood just a few blocks away in this neighborhood of Watts. When she enrolled at San Diego State, she had become the only girl in her large
family to go directly from high school to college. Then, having escaped from Watts, she returned to help. Like a tracker with a keen eye, she could read the telltale signs of dysfunction among young people here, the inner anxieties that smothered initiative. “Fear.” That was the first barrier on her list. “A tendency not to want to go out there, because you’re scared, you’re afraid,” she said, then added frankly: “Another issue is, people are just plumb lazy.”