Enrique and three friends from Mexico needed two days to cross the arid mountain passes from the spartan border city of Tecate into California late in 1995 in search of work, with the guidance of a coyote and some canned food.
Enrique had high hopes he could save enough to return home shortly after and make life a little easier for his wife and eight kids in the rough-and-tumble Mexico City neighborhood of Chalco.
Twelve years later and without any savings, Enrique, now 54, isn’t sure how much longer he can continue clinging to that hope.
Enrique and hundreds of other immigrant men of a widely divergent age range regularly stand in clusters on Western Queens street corners waiting to get picked up and taken to construction sites, but in the last year or so, fewer employers are coming around, most of the workers say.
“More people are coming here to work, and that makes it harder,” Enrique said. “If they [bosses] paid $80 before, they can pay $50 now.”
“I haven’t worked in a week and a half,” Enrique said in the deliberate, lilting Spanish of rural Mexico, while sitting at the kitchen table of the spare three-bedroom Sunnyside apartment he shares with eight other Mexican men. He spoke in a hushed voice in order not to awake some sleeping roommates who had been lucky enough to work the previous night.
“I can do anything … construction, demolition, painting, carpentry, pulling weeds … I’ve done it all, but they’re not coming around anymore,” he lamented. “Also, my legs aren’t strong enough anymore to work some jobs, like on scaffolding.”
An easy smile belies Enrique’s angst, even when his assessments are bleak.
“Sometimes I think about bringing my wife, but it’s bad for the kids,” he said. “They don’t learn respect here, and there are drugs.”
Enrique’s nine children, who range in age between 8 and 34, remain in and around Mexico City, with the exception of a 23-year-old son who lives nearby and does construction jobs. The 8-year-old, who remains at home with Enrique’s wife, was born shortly after Enrique arrived in Queens in 1998.
Enrique worked as a bricklayer and carpenter in Mexico City after moving from his native village in the southern state of Oaxaca with his wife in 1976.
After 20 years of living hand-to-mouth, he decided to try his luck north of the border, working first in northern California, then in Portland, Oregon for two years before being picked up by the INS and deported.
He came to Queens in 1998 on the advice of a friend, and has been here ever since. He has not
been back to Chalco to see the family since, fearing the usual difficulties he would face when returning to the U.S.
Enrique contemplates a theoretical dilemma — if he had $1,800, he could pay a month’s security and first month’s rent to get a studio apartment with his son. But, then again, he muses, if he had $1,800 he could simply return to his wife and children in Mexico once and for all, with some cash to help the household back home.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Enrique said. “In another six months or a year, I’m going back to Mexico, whether I have money or not. Some people are scared of being picked up and sent back, because they haven’t been here long. Me, I’ve been here long enough.”
