Chapter 14. Those Without Papers
Some agricultural workers outside the H-2A program
What’s the best way to get nearly a thousand ripe watermelons off their vines and into a vehicle? You could pick them up one at a time and lug them to a centrally parked truck—that’s what I might do. For at least one crew of H-2A farmworkers in Duplin County, however, there’s a much better way. It’s also fun to watch. The farmworker Sebastian Pérez is on that crew, and he thought so too. So he shot a video of his compañeros at work and shared it on WhatsApp.
Before the video began, workers had separated the melons from their vines and arranged them into an elongated pile that stretched for hundreds of feet. The collection vehicle was a retired yellow school bus with all its seats and windows removed, the roof held up by just a few remaining struts. Such vehicles are a common sight on the back roads of eastern North Carolina. Getting those piled-up melons into the repurposed bus required five workers. Worker #1 was hunched over the pile, lifting melons, then handing them up to standing worker #2, who tossed them to worker #3 as quickly as he could. Worker #3 tossed them to worker #4, planted inside the slowly moving bus, who deposited the melons onto a quickly growing pile. Worker #5 drove the bus, keeping it always moving at just the right speed.
The team moved very fast. In forty seconds of video, they had moved twenty-nine watermelons from field to vehicle through this conveyor belt of flying hands. That’s about 1.5 seconds per melon. They would have moved thirty, but one slipped out of worker three’s hands and onto the ground where it cracked in two, prompting a few laughs but not slowing things down even a bit.
I lost count of how many times I replayed this video, entertained by the workers’ ingenious choreography and smiling faces. It’s a joy to watch. I thanked Sebastian for posting it and struck up a dialog. But it did not take long for the topic of our exchange to change from joy to something quite the opposite.
“Quiero saber cómo va encontrar gente desaparecido en la frontera México,” Sebastian wrote. I want to know how to find people missing at the Mexican border.
“Hay muchos gente de mi pueblo está desaparecido,” he continued. There are many people in my village who are missing. His tiny village is in the Mexican state of Guerrero, in the far southern part of the country, east of Oaxaca.
One of the people who went missing, three years before, was his nephew Carlito Perez. Could I help? From what I gathered, his nephew and another villager traveled north to Tijuana by way of Escondido, where they crossed into the United States, without papers, intending to travel to Texas. But something went wrong. It was Carlito’s fourth crossing, or attempted crossing, as I’m not sure if the other tries were successful or not. In the past, Carlito never went more than three months without calling his family to check in. Now, it had been three years. And nobody in his village could find anyone to ask for help.
Sebastian sent me a social media posting from the traveling companion’s wife, with a photo of her husband and a plea for help in finding him. I also received a photo of Carlito’s passport. In it, a healthy and good-looking eighteen-year-old man stares serenely into the camera as if into my eyes. His age is midway between that of my own son and daughter. The photo, taken less than a year before his family lost him, haunts me.
I told Sebastian I would try to find someone to help. I shot off emails to everyone I could think of, and more emails to people they referred me to. I never heard back from those. I also sent Sebastian some places he might contact on his own, but I’m not sure if I ended up helping or not. I lost track of Sebastian late in the year, after he had returned to Mexico, so I may never know anything more.
Sebastian’s inquiry about his missing nephew reminded me of the ever-growing tragedy of los sin papeles, or those without papers, losing their lives at our border, trying to cross without authorization in their desperate search for work. A few months before Sebastian asked me for help, on a Monday in June 2022, everyone was reminded of this tragedy in the background of our national consciousness. That’s when Roberto Quintero, a city worker in San Antonio, Texas, happened upon a tractor-trailer parked on the side of the road. The rear door was open. The only person outside was a dehydrated girl of thirteen, banging her fist on the ground, begging in desperation for someone to help. For most of the sixty-seven men, women, and children in the back of that truck, all being smuggled into the United States, it was too late. Twenty-seven of those who died in one of the worst imaginable ways—locked in the hot box of a truck without enough water to keep them alive—were from Mexico, fourteen from Honduras, and two from El Salvador.
Most of the victims of this tragedy were from Mexico, but the overall number of unauthorized border crossings from that country has decreased in recent years, with more and more originating from Central America. One veteran H-2A farmworker told me that, nowadays, many Mexicans know better than to risk their lives crossing without authorization. They tell their adult kids not to risk it, to not pay a coyote upward of eight thousand dollars but to instead ir al norte por contrato, or to go north on contract. They’ll be away from loved ones, but never for more than a year, and they stand a much better chance of coming home alive.
For weeks, Spanish-language news outlets would report on El Tráilor de la Muerte, or The Trailer of Death. There were follow-up news items in US media outlets as well. But this was only the most horrific of the border crossing deaths this year, shocking enough to make headlines everywhere, searing images into our minds—for a brief time, anyway. And of course, it was not the only time this year that migrants died on their way here.
In September, on the very day I thanked Sebastian for posting his watermelon video, The New York Times ran the story of nine migrants drowning as they attempted to cross the Rio Grande. According to the local fire chief, drownings had become an everyday occurrence there, with one or more deaths reported every day. One recent drowning victim was a three-year-old boy.
The year 2022 would turn out to be the worst year yet for migrant deaths at our border, with 605 confirmed deaths, surpassing the previous record of 566. And this time, it didn’t even take the full year. The number of deaths broke the previous record in July.
My primary focus for this project was the H-2A farmworker, the annually authorized laborer who does farmwork in the United States. But I’ve also met undocumented agricultural workers, both seasonal workers who live here year round, and domestic migrant workers who travel from state to state. I’ve also spoken with several workers in the animal farms and poultry-processing plants of North Carolina—meat factories whose production has exploded in recent years. Many of these workers have stories far sadder, and situations more tenuous, than those of the H-2A farmworker.
Elena Aguilar is forty-eight. One night I accompanied Juan Carabaña of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry on camp outreach. A little past our usual cutoff time of 9:00 p.m., Juan decided to stop at Elena’s home, a nondescript trailer on the side of a highway. He wanted to just see how she was doing. A minute later, he was waving me out of the van and into her home. Elena was delighted, as always, to see Juan and wanted to give us some pupusas. Or so we thought. She wanted to make us pupusas, from scratch, while we sat at her kitchen table, talking. We were there until almost midnight.
As we gorged on plate after plate of pupusas, we learned Elena is from El Salvador. In 2005, she wanted desperately to flee the violence there and make a new home in the United States. But she had no money for the trip. Her brother made her a deal. He would pay to get her to the US, but she had to bring not her own children but his two kids. She accepted the deal, made the long trip, and was soon sending money back home, praying her own children could follow. Each of them in time would join her. One now has a green card, and another was granted asylum. The third was applying for authorization when her attorney died. Her new lawyer advised her that, by continuing the application process, immigration officials were likely to not only reject her case but also to have her deported. She stopped the application and has decided to live here undocumented ever since.
Nestor Martinez is forty-five. He too came to the United States in 2005, from Mexico. He told me he arrived at his camp, a collection of identical cinder block buildings, on May 9 of that year. “A las seis de la tarde,” he was quick to add. At six in the evening. I cannot begin to explain why, but several undocumented workers had recalled for me, without prompting, the exact date of their arrival. Nestor would also volunteer—seventeen years after the fact—the time. He and his wife nowadays work at a meat plant. They wake each day at four in the morning so they can be at their jobs by five, leaving their two children to take care of themselves, sometimes until ten at night. Their son is eleven; their daughter just turned six. The boy is remarkably mature for his age, taking care of his little sister most of the day, preparing meals, and getting them both to the school bus stop each morning. He loves school and especially loves writing. He showed me the journal he writes in every day. I would have loved to read his words but didn’t get to know him well enough to feel like asking. I did urge him to keep writing. I sure hope he does.
Raquel Diaz is forty-seven. She crossed the border 2001—on April 18, she volunteered—from Mexico where she was born. Her elderly parents, now ninety-eight and eighty-six, still depend on what money she can send home. She’s worked in meat plants, crop fields, and packing sheds. She also supports three children, one eighteen and the others, five and six. Fortunately, she has a car and can drive, but without a license. She had one until the state changed the law and took it away. Still, she drives.
A single mom since 2017 when her children’s father was deported back to Honduras, Raquel exudes remarkable energy and gets very little sleep. She was holding down two full time jobs when I last spoke with her, not getting to bed until 7:30 or 8:00 a.m., sleeping until her younger kids got hungry enough to wake her. She is an attractive woman who looks far younger than her age and has had to deal with what comes along with that. Once, when she was working crops, Raquel told me, a man sent her to a shed to get a shovel, only to follow her in, shut the door, and demand sex. By then, the shovel was in her hand, and she used it to fend him off.
Raquel has been at her current job for five years—a relatively long term of employment for her. When she started there, she applied using her real name. At some point, however, there was a crackdown, and her employer demanded proof of work authorization. When she could not provide it, she was fired. But within days she found a contractor who could get her back into the very same job, but she would need to pay $800 for a new name—a real one, belonging to the victim of identity theft—and a real Social Security number to go with it. She paid it. A couple of years later, there was another crackdown, her identification was deemed stolen, and again, she lost her job. She promptly paid another $800 for another new name and credentials and has been back at the job ever since.
There are countless stories like these, of men, women, and children doing the best they can to make life work in the United States, all the while lacking authorization to even be here. Such stories could easily fill a book of their own. Surprisingly, the undocumented agricultural worker may have a small number of advantages over the H-2A farmworker. First, many can lead their lives, lacking in privilege as they are, while living with their families. Second, they have the liberty to move around, to try something new, to go where they want.
“I may be undocumented,” one outreach worker recalled a woman telling her, reflecting on the constraints put on H-2A workers such as who they can work for. “But at least I’m free.”