Clamor Magazine - January/February 2005
There's No José Here:
The Invisibility of Latino Immigrants

It happened over and over again:
"Hi, is José there?"
"Uh, there's no José here."
"Yes there is. Can you please ask someone if he's there now?"
"Let me see...ummm...I'm pretty sure we don't have a José."
"Do me a favor, just ask."
"Fine." Getting agitated now. "Hold on a second."
"Hello?"
"Hola José, soy yo, Gabriel."
"Oh, hola Gabriel. ¿Cómo estás?"

I met José, who asked that his last name not be used, through my job in Brooklyn as a tenant organizer. He has worked at a Manhattan company that produces low-end jewelry for eight years. Still, I was told repeatedly when I called that he wasn't there. I'd have to insist that whoever answered the phone inquire into the existence of a José in their shop. Eventually, they'd discover that—low and behold—a José did work at their company, and had in fact put in more than 24,000 irretrievable hours of his life there.

All day long, six days a week, José puts together pieces of jewelry, stringing beads onto bracelets and necklaces. On Sunday, his one day off, he often can be found watching Cruz Azul, his favorite Mexican soccer team, or fishing with his family and friends off Rockaway Beach in Queens. Though his 58-hour work week should give him 18 hours of overtime, it doesn't end up that way. Instead, his employer pays him a flat $350 each week, under the table. That works out to about $5.15 an hour, the current minimum wage in New York City. His yearly income, which supports himself, his wife Esther, and his five-year-old daughter Diana, is about $18,000. The minimum wage may be enough for a high-school student looking for some spending money—assuming a parent or two is around to cover everything else—but that's about it. Somehow, though, Jose and his family have learned to make it work, in one of the most expensive cities in our country. When times are good, they even send money to relatives in their hometown of Atlixco, about 90 miles southeast of Mexico City.

When José first heard about Bush's guest worker program on Spanish television, he was optimistic about the possibility of finally becoming a legal resident. But when he brought in some information about the program to his boss, the boss became angry. "He told me, of course you can't be in this program," José said. "We're not telling anyone that you're working here, so forget it. Just keep doing what you're doing." Though José has lived and worked in this country for more than a decade, he's become convinced that he'll never be able to become a legal resident.

"People seem to think that we're some sort of threat to this country," José said, reflecting on his situation. "On the contrary, every Mexican that I know is working all day, every day. We came here to work, and we're working hard. I guess it's just difficult for some people to see that."

There are currently 9.3 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, with 57 percent coming from Mexico and 23 percent from Latin America, according to an Urban Institute estimate. Each morning, six million undocumented immigrants wake up and go to work, making up five percent of the total labor force.

The work that they do is more dangerous, on average, than that of non-immigrants. In 2003, there were 519 Latino immigrants who died on the job, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. On average, Latinos—who tend to be concentrated in high-risk occupations like construction and agriculture—are twenty percent more likely to be killed while on the job than whites. They are also sixty percent more likely to suffer non-fatal injuries than whites, which can include everything from back spasms and occupational illness to loss of limbs and eyesight.

Despite engaging in dangerous work, Latino immigrants receive little compensation; nearly half earn less than twice the minimum wage. At home, Latino immigrants regularly raise families in hazardous conditions. Housing and Urban Development estimates that one of three farm workers in the U.S. lives in moderate to severely substandard housing. Among farm workers, 52 percent live in overcrowded conditions—ten times the national average. One study found, not surprisingly, that immigrants are more likely to live in units with code violations, units that are unaffordable, and units that are overcrowded.

For workers like José, substandard housing is often as big an issue as low wages or poor benefits. Like José's employer, the landlord of his six-unit building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, home to a large Mexican immigrant population, also can't seem to put any name to the family that lives in apartment 3-R. When it was discovered that José's home contained lead levels more than 400 times the federal safety threshold, I contacted the landlord and explained that he needed to take immediate action. It was slow going.

"Who is being the problem?" he asked me. "Who told this guy that he could do his own test for lead?"

"No one's being a problem," I replied. "There's lead in the apartment, and a small child. That's the problem. And our organization tested the home, which we have the right to do. Now it's your job to fix it."

"Fine, fine. I'll fix it. Which building?"

I gave him the address.

"Oh, that building. I don't know any of the tenants there. They're a bunch of Mexicans, right? I mean, you've seen how they live. Just very dirty. I can't control how they live in my buildings."

"Actually, you can. It's your job to make sure that there isn't any lead in there. So I'll fax you over the results, and then you need to get into José's apartment and fix it up. That's your responsibility."

"Fine, fine. I'll fix it, like I said. I don't know this José guy, but I'll fix it."

Three months later, the work still hadn't begun, and conditions were getting worse. Jose's sister-in-law, Lourdes, lived in the apartment below, and when she took her one-year-old daughter Stephanie in for a check up, the doctor said she was suffering from lead poisoning. Still, the landlord made no effort to fix either apartment. When I spoke to him about the two families, he still pretended to have no idea who I was talking about. "Lourdes? José? Who the hell are these people? Why do they keep bothering me?"

In 1962, Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, a book that exposed the widespread existence of poverty amid plenty. He wrote of slum dwellers in New York City, rural whites in Appalachia, and migrant farm workers in California. At the time, many in the United States had simply forgotten, or perhaps never known, that poverty was still a fact of life for a good portion of the country's residents—between 40 and 50 million of them. As Harrington wrote, "That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them."

Today, not only do we still have a growing divide between two Americas, but it seems that we also have a growing divide between "two Americans": English-speaking citizens and Spanish-speaking immigrants. And these other Americans still remain largely invisible, though we have to work hard to miss them, since they are usually right in front of us. Whether we're eating lunch in New York, California, or Minnesota, we're interacting with them everyday.

"Who the hell are these people?" Without intention, the landlord's brusque question exhibits more enlightenment than most Americans bring to the situation of Latin American immigrants. We usually can't be bothered to wonder who these people are that fill our water glasses, clear our tables, trim our lawns, or clean our homes. They are there. They do their job. They somehow survive.

In these daily, surface-skimming interactions, we seem to view immigrant laborers as little more than semi-skilled robots. When something needs to be done, they do it, and perhaps we nod in a brief display of gratitude. When they malfunction (usually when they can't understand our English commands), we call for a white foreman to come in and sort out the mess. When we leave the restaurant, or grocery store, or car wash, our thoughts do not linger on those that remain, day after day. Who among us can remember, on walking out the door of a restaurant, the face of the immigrant worker that brought the extra place setting for our table?

This ignorance reflects quite poorly on us non-immigrants, since people like José have become in many ways our enablers—making possible so much of what goes on in this country. When we come in to sparkling offices on Monday morning, buy produce at the grocery store, move into newly built apartments, and receive quality care for our infirm parents, we're being served up valuable benefits. The most conscientious might periodically pause for a moment to acknowledge this debt, but then we're off to something else.

With statistics showing that Latino immigrants are more likely to work in dangerous conditions, earn less than enough to live comfortably, and come home to hazardous housing, what might we owe them? How can we begin to repay such a debt?

I recently heard Barbara Ehrenreich speak to an audience on the Upper West Side of Manhattan about her best-selling book Nickle & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which details the hardships of low-income workers. During the talk she mentioned the dramatic effect that the book had on those that read it. Readers now gave more attention and respect to the waiters, retail clerks, and cleaners that served them. Fundamentally, they had finally begun to see the workers—and not just as workers but as complex people in their own right, with dignity and dreams as real as their own. Yet, in terms of concrete changes that they had made in their lives, readers identified only one item: they now left bigger tips.

Bigger tips, of course, do not a systemic change make; for that, we need a dramatic increase in the minimum wage, universal healthcare, renewed union relevance and militancy—the longtime aspirations of the Left. Yet, to speak glibly about these goals in today's environment feels empty, and to end a brief examination on the immigrant reality with romantic calls to revolution rings hollow. We can't begin to fight for solutions until we're fully recognized the realities that exist, and for Mexican and other Spanish-speaking immigrants we've got a lot of acknowledging to do. So let me make a far more limited suggestion, one that at least can be instantly implemented:

The next time you're sitting down in a restaurant, take a moment to notice the Spanish-speaking workers that are serving you. At least once during the meal, make eye contact, and say—no matter how terrible the accent—gracias. Then leave a massive tip.

It's a somewhat pathetic beginning, doing nothing in terms of systemic change, but we've got to start somewhere. And if we're a country full of middle- and upper-income Americans that don't even know that José has been working for eight years at our corporation, we're pretty pathetic ourselves. Think of it as a first step in repaying a massive debt.