Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press

Author:Eyal Press [Press, Eyal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, political science, Labor & Industrial Relations, sociology, General
ISBN: 9780374714437
Google: gsj3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-08-17T00:21:42.824523+00:00

PART III

ON THE KILL FLOORS

6

Shadow People

In north-central Mexico, in the state of San Luis Potosí, Flor Martinez grew up with her grandparents in a small adobe house with no electricity and no running water. The house was in the hills, and the hills were beautiful, but Flor’s grandparents were poor, and her grandfather was a violent alcoholic. Whenever he got drunk, he would fly into a rage and threaten to kill Flor’s grandmother. As a little girl, Flor remembered racing through the house to hide the knives and guns from him. One time, when she was twelve, she crouched behind a chair and watched her uncle pin her grandfather onto a bed to prevent him from stabbing her grandmother.

That same night, Flor learned that her grandmother was leaving San Luis Potosí and that, in two weeks, she herself would be picked up and taken to another town by her mother. The news came as a shock to Flor, who, until this moment, had assumed that her grandmother was her mother. “No, no,” her grandmother told her, explaining how, shortly after Flor was born, her mother had gone to work as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family in another town, leaving her with no time to look after a child of her own. As Flor subsequently discovered, her mother had since started a new family with a man who would soon be taking them to yet another town—a place called Lampasas, in central Texas—to pursue a better life. In the months that followed, after her mother and stepfather departed for the United States, Flor’s own life was subsumed by the needs of her two- and four-year-old half brothers, who were left in her care until money could be saved to pay a smuggler to bring them along. To scrounge up food, she would wake at four in the morning, sneak onto a barge, and collect discarded provisions (rotted bananas, moldy tortillas) from a local garbage dump.

It was a perilous existence, but Flor did not feel sorry for herself, convinced her fortunes would eventually turn. Her optimism was tested in the next phase of her upbringing, which began just before she turned fifteen, when a coyote arrived to take her and her siblings to Texas. When they reached the border, Flor clung to a raft that the coyote maneuvered across the Rio Grande (she couldn’t swim). Then she heard the coyote holler, “¡La Migra! ¡La Migra!” as helicopters circled overhead, prompting them to turn around. After ducking behind some bushes, they crossed the river again, this time successfully, but the person who was supposed to pick them up and take them to Lampasas never appeared. Flor and her siblings were brought back to Mexico and discarded at a seedy boardinghouse teeming with drug dealers and prostitutes. One night, she ventured out to the bathroom and saw an addict shooting up. They stayed there for six weeks, holed up in a squalid room where they slept and ate all their meals until Flor’s mother sent more money to the smugglers, who, this time, brought them to Lampasas.

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