Chapter 17. Going Home

A very cold camp and a scary guy on the bridge

At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at. It was a Sunday afternoon in October when H-2A farmworker Arturo López sent me a video on WhatsApp. The slowly panning image appeared to be of the ground outside his camp, but it was covered in white. Snow? No, it was frost. Temperatures had dipped below freezing a few nights night before, and Arturo had shot this video the next morning. He sent it to me because I had just asked him what changes he would most like to see in the H-2A program.

“Tener calefacción para cuando hace frio,” he responded, just before sending the video. To have heat for when it is cold.

According to Arturo, there was no source of heat at Camp Cucumber. They had window air-conditioning units for when it got hot in the summer but nothing for when it got cold. Watching the video, I figured it could not have been more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit inside Arturo’s barracks, where the main source of heat may have been the bodies of shivering men. Arturo probably had no idea his employer was breaking the law.

North Carolina state law requires heated living quarters for migrant farmworkers. It’s right there on the inspection checklist, referencing section 95-225(2) of the statute:

1. adequate heating equipment if used during cold weather. Note: Any time the outside temperature falls below 50 degrees F., heaters must be provided.

And on the next line:

2. Heating equipment must be capable of heating the area to 65 degrees F.

Arturo’s camp had been inspected earlier in the year. Someone from the state Department of Labor, then, had placed checkmarks on both of those lines.

I wondered how many other camps were like this. How many H-2A farmworkers across North Carolina were shivering at night like Arturo and his coworkers when, as happens often this time of year, temperatures had fallen low enough to require indoor heating?

There was only one saving grace for Arturo. In less than forty-eight hours, he would be on a bus going home. Meanwhile, he and his roommate were firing up their new coffee maker, three times a day, trying to stay warm.

 

A few weeks before Arturo sent me his frosty video, a worker from a different camp had sent me a video as well. This one featured rather different content. A dozen or so workers were resting in a field after harvesting sweet potatoes, lying beside empty buckets, their faces registering a combination of fatigue and boredom. The mayordomo was speaking to them, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The audio wasn’t great. But then, words became unnecessary. The men all stood up and cheered. There’s only one bit of news that does that: They were done for the season and could go home. By their reaction, you might think he had told them they each won a luxury car of their choice or a hundred million pesos. Pure joy bounced from man to man, intensifying on each bounce. One of the workers ran to their boss, locked his beefy arms around the smaller man’s midriff, and hoisted him into the air. It must have tickled because the mayordomo was now giggling so hard he could not speak.

By the end of this day, the sweet potatoes these men were harvesting would be resting in a climate-controlled warehouse. There, they would sit until washing, separating, and packing by a different crew. And the tobacco they had nurtured from tiny seedlings to six-foot plants, each standing majestic in the Carolina sun with nothing but broad leaves of deep green, had all been cured, sorted, and baled. Their work this year was done. Some of these men would be offered a few more weeks of work on a Christmas tree farm in the mountains, a six-hour drive to the west, and a few of them would take it. But most of these men were going home.

 

Like any H-2A farmworker on contract with the NCGA, Arturo is required each spring to ride the association’s bus from Mexico to North Carolina. He is also entitled to travel home, after fulfilling his obligations under the contract, at no cost to himself, on a bus provided by the NCGA. But he is not required to. He can find his own way home if he wants to. According to the NCGA, only about half of their workers choose to go home on their bus. Arturo is in the other half.

The Tornado Bus Company has offices in close to fifty cities across the United States and Mexico, and hundreds of pickup and drop sites. One of these is the Circle K convenience store and gas station in Fayetteville, North Carolina. That’s where Arturo will gather with another eight or ten workers to wait for the giant yellow bus to stop and pick them up.

Arturo will pay $380 for his own trip home: $230 for a Tornado bus to Monterrey, and the equivalent of $150 (paid in pesos) for three additional bus rides on Mexican buses to get him home from Monterrey. He is entitled to reimbursement for the cost of the trip from Monterrey to home, but not for the leg from North Carolina to Monterrey.

The obvious disadvantage of taking a Tornado bus home is the cost. After reimbursement for the Mexico leg, Arturo will still have spent the equivalent of two days of earnings to get home this way. But he is quick to list several advantages. First, he can get home sooner. The NCGA buses to Monterrey only leave Vass on one or two days per week. By taking one of the Tornado buses, which run daily, a worker might get home days sooner. Flush with cash, parting with a few hundred dollars to make that happen might seem like a good deal.

Other advantages include the cost of excess baggage on a Tornado (they charge less than the NCGA bus, but they do have strict rules about TVs having to be less than thirty-two inches, and cardboard boxes and plastic coolers are forbidden) and the cost of converting US dollars to pesos at the border (according to Arturo, the NCGA bus stops only at a money exchange on the American side, where they charge more than a place on the Mexico side, where the Tornado stops). But those reasons are minor compared with the main reason workers like Arturo take a Tornado: to avoid a highly likely encounter with organized crime.

According to Arturo and two other workers at a different camp, workers riding the NCGA bus are routinely extorted at the border by men Arturo refers to as belonging to the mafia. Apparently, organized crime bosses in Mexico have figured out these buses chartered by the NCGA are filled with men flush with cash. They are easy marks. The two other workers corroborated Arturo’s story almost exactly, and none of the three knew I was asking any of the others about their trip home, lending credibility to their accounts.

Here’s how one worker described his extortion: After completing the US leg of the journey and just before the bus crosses the Rio Grande, the driver pulls the NCGA bus off the road and makes a phone call. Afterward, he might proceed immediately, or he might tell his passengers they must wait. Eventually, after some number of phone calls between the driver and another party, the bus gets on its way, but then stops again before entering customs on the Mexico side. At that point, a man boards the bus and tells the driver how much each passenger on the bus must pay to proceed, ostensibly to ward off any risk of robbery or assault on the Mexican leg of their journey to Monterrey. The driver directs one of the passengers to go seat by seat and collect la mordida, or bribe, ranging from $100 to $180 per passenger. After handing over the money, the driver then closes the door, and the bus is allowed to proceed through customs.

Arturo last rode the association bus in 2019 and paid $100 for protection money. At customs, he and the other workers had their bags inspected for items purchased in the United States, but nobody was asked to pay so much as a peso—presumably due to their payoff. According to Arturo, sometimes the bus is waved through as if empty, so passengers need not even step off the bus. Sometimes, however, even after paying the protection money, the customs agents will demand dubious fees and charges. There is no telling. Another worker reported having to pay more than $200 “al tipo aterrador en el puente.” To the scary guy on the bridge.

Of the workers who shared their extortion accounts with me, none were extorted on a Tornado bus. It has only happened, and always happens for these three workers, on the bus arranged by the NCGA. But the problem is not limited to the NCGA, nor even to workers in North Carolina. According to Mexico News Daily, returning migrant workers, frequently hailed as heroes due to the large quantities of money they send to their families in Mexico, have reported paying as much as $2,000 USD in bribes on their way back home.

 

Arturo would prefer not to take a bus at all. He’d much rather fly and is willing to pay for it. “Si me pudiera ir en avión, llegaría yo el mismo día por la tarde noche,” he told me. If I could go by plane, I would arrive the same day in the evening.

Instead, he’ll spend nearly three days on a bus. The problem with flying is that he, like many H-2A farmworkers, does not know when he’ll get to leave for home until one or two days before, when the cost of last-minute air travel can be exorbitant. This last-minute release can affect his bus travel planning as well. This year, Arturo’s last day of work was on a Friday. There was a Tornado bus leaving Monday, but by the time he tried to buy a ticket, that bus was sold out. He had to book the Tuesday bus instead and then spend all of Monday at camp doing nothing but waiting, one more agonizing and unpaid day, to begin his long trip home.

Customs is always a crap shoot for any international traveler bringing home things they purchased abroad. Will you get sent through the customs line? Will you need to pay a duty? In 2019, Arturo’s $100 payment to the mafia got him through customs with no more payment required. In 2020, riding the Tornado bus, the customs agent eyed Arturo’s purchases—clothing, shoes, chocolates, and other things for his wife and kids—and after estimating their value assessed a duty of 1500 pesos, or nearly $100 USD. Arturo challenged the valuation but had no receipts to back it up. So he paid it. The next year, the agent asked for 1,000 pesos. This time Arturo simply said he did not have that much money with him. Eyeing a brand-new Thermos, the agent said he would take that instead. Arturo told the agent the Thermos was a gift for his kids and begged to keep it so he might enjoy the smile on their faces when he placed it into their hands. The agent was either touched by the impromptu yarn or just tired of negotiating. He scribbled 500 on a form and demanded that Arturo pay it. Which he did.

The night before his departure this year, I wished Arturo a safe journey home. He boarded the bus at ten the next morning and settled in for a long ride. They would make only two stops on their first leg of the trip, one at Augusta, Georgia, and another in San Antonio, Texas, where they bought cookies, chips, coffee, and soft drinks. After changing buses in Houston, they headed to Laredo, Texas where they crossed the border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico just before 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday.

Their first stop in Mexico was at customs. As expected, the agent there quickly looked through all of Arturo’s purchases and assessed a duty of 1,000 pesos. But when Arturo pulled out receipts for everything—he had learned his lesson from years prior—and showed how the total value was within allowable bounds, the customs officer waved him through. On this trip home, he would pay not one peso to customs. Nor to the mafia.

 

Arturo arrived home at 6:00 p.m. on a Thursday. His wife and fifteen-year-old son were delighted to see him, and his two youngest were not just delighted but also surprised. Arturo and his wife had decided not to tell them Dad was on his way.

He had been on a bus since 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday for a total of fifty-six hours. I cannot imagine riding a bus for that long. And he does it twice a year, every year. For his first dinner home, Arturo enjoyed carnitas, rice, pico de gallo, and salsa verde on homemade tortillas. It was delicious and appreciated even more as he didn’t have to prepare it. The morning after his arrival, his two youngest kids bounded into their parents’ bedroom to wake him up, well earlier than he might have liked. Naturally, he didn’t mind a bit. That same day they all went to church together to celebrate the Feast of Saint Jude Thaddeaus, the patron saint of lost causes. Then they went to dinner at his sister’s house to celebrate his return, staying late into the night.

In the weeks that followed, Arturo and his family went on all manner of excursions together, including to their town’s Day of the Dead Festival. Mexico pulls all the stops out for their version of our Halloween, such as the remarkable street dance Arturo and his family went to. From the video he shared with me, the dancers seemed as professional as any I’ve ever seen, wearing masks so exquisite and effective it was impossible to tell who was behind them. At the end of the show, the dancers removed them to reveal their identities to the cheering audience.

I had presumed Arturo would not rush into finding a job in Mexico, deserving as he did his well-earned vacation. A few weeks after his return, he confirmed he was not yet working but for a reason I was not expecting.

“Estoy, pues, digamos que preparándome para casarme por la iglesia,” he wrote. I am, let’s say, preparing to be married in the church.

Huh? I replied that I had assumed he was married, only to then learn he and his wife had been in a union libre, or free union, or what we’d consider a common law marriage in the United States, for seventeen years. A few weeks later, he sent me their wedding photo, with Arturo in a snazzy suit and his wife in a flowing wedding gown, a grinning priest standing between them.

By the end of January, a happily married Arturo López had settled into a job as an albañil, or construction worker, building houses made of zinc-laminated cement. He was earning 300 pesos, or roughly 15 US dollars, per day. This is almost exactly what he had earned in North Carolina—per hour.