Thread: Payday makes harrowing journey worth the risk to illegal lab

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/ne ... 107068.htm


Posted on Mon, Nov. 27, 2006
Payday makes harrowing journey worth the risk to illegal laborers
By Dianne Solis and Deborah Turner

The Dallas Morning News

(MCT)

CACTUS, Texas - Every day, twice a day - around 5:45 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. - workers on foot trudge west on Center Drive. Others in cars and vans line U.S. 287 on their way to the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.

This is where Tomas Cus tries to eke out an existence - packing meat into boxes for $13.30 an hour. Tomas is his real name. At the meatpacking plant, the young Guatemalan goes by a different moniker. He agreed to speak on condition that his work identity not be revealed.

The same goes for fellow Guatemalan Martin Tiniguar, who packs meat into boxes for $11.80 an hour; and Mario Lux, who takes gristle off meat carcasses for eight hours a day, five days a week, at $11.90 an hour.

The men are among the thousands of illegal immigrants who work under false identities in America's meatpacking industry - receiving a steady paycheck in exchange for constant and sometimes debilitating punishment to their bodies. Cus, a 23-year-old with broad cheekbones and full lips that seldom spread into a smile, paid a coyote $6,000 to guide him from the Quiche province in southeast Guatemala through the tropical terrain of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas - past gangs, border agents and to the banks at the Rio Bravo in Ciudad Juarez.

To raise the money, he went to a Guatemalan loan shark, who now charges his family 10 percent interest monthly.

"There are times when it is really hard, but you come here for necessity," said Cus, who left behind his parents, three brothers and four sisters.

He wants to buy his family a house back in Quiche province.

"We don't come here to rest," he said. "We come to send money back home."

To cut his expenses, he lives with five other men in an air-conditioned, single-wide trailer whose beige color nearly dissolves into the strip of dirt it sits on. Together, they pay $120 a week in rent. But only Cus agreed to be interviewed.

"We have six beds in there," said Cus.

His Spartan ways recently allowed him to send $1,000 home in one month - something he can do from any one of a handful of stores in town that cater to Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants.

Cus arrived in Cactus via North Carolina, where he spent 10 months working in the agriculture industry. But he left because there wasn't enough work, he said.

That hasn't been a problem in Cactus, where his existence pretty much revolves around his 3 p.m. shift at the plant. Recently, he left again - this time headed to Missouri.

"I work, I go home, cook, go to sleep, then do it all over again," he said of his job in Cactus.

The trip north for Lux (pronounced LOUsh) took him through the Sonoran Desert, into the Mexican town of Altar, a key staging point for migrants, about 60 miles south of the Arizona border.

He walked two days and one night through the Arizona desert, past sun-bleached skeletons and other remains.

"I didn't know where I was going but that it would pay $10 an hour at some meat plant," said Lux in an excited stream, as he relived his journey.

At the plant, the 26-year-old pulls on three pairs of gloves, including one with steel fibers to prevent the knife cuts from drawing his blood.

Not long ago, the mechanized line of carcasses started speeding up, he said.

His shoulders throb from the effort. But his thumbs hurt more. He's glad he's paid off his debt to a smuggler, but now must nip at the interest to the loan shark. He, too, pays a hefty 10 percent a month. The crushing rates are a fixture of Central American passage to the U.S. and a financial hit that Mexicans on the same illegal path seldom pay.

Such rates are illegal under Guatemalan law and affect the poorest migrants, said attorney Nazario Monzon in Guatemala.

Workers should be paying the bank rate of less than 3 percent on their loans. But many Guatemalans are too poor to own collateral, or their land isn't registered with clear title, he said. So they don't go to banks. And Monzon has never heard of a prosecution.

"It was a little hard," said Lux, who recently left his job at Swift for work elsewhere. "OK, it was more than a little hard. It was painful."

On the weekends, every empty patch of field in Cactus mutates into a cancha de futbol, a soccer field where the men release the stress of the week.

A few more join their fellow countrymen at band practice at one of the two churches.

From one church building comes an ironic chorus: "No estas lejos al reino de Dios," or "You are not far from the kingdom of God." A cumbia beat provides the melodic line. As the singing stops, the singers turn from the Spanish lyrics to religious homages in Quiche, the Mayan dialect of their home state that bears the same name.

Others find their home away from home in the little Baptist church on South Drive led by Pastor Jose Rosales - himself a transplant from the Mexican state of Durango.

Back at Rosales' church, a man prepares to tune his musical instruments.

Here, the men gather for more than worship.

Cus said he finds solace in singing with a gospel group that calls itself Cristo Salva - Christ Saves. He leads the group - made up of a trumpet player, two keyboardists, an electric guitarist and another conga-tambor player like himself.

Then, he takes to the microphone and looks out over his fellow Guatemalans.

"It is an honor to say the sweet name of God," Cus said.

On this particular weekend, as the workers tend to their pain - physical and spiritual - the Ku Klux Klan marches against illegal immigration through the streets of nearby Amarillo.

"Que K? (What's KKK?)" asks Rosales when he learns of the KKK, a leader who calls himself a "grand dragon" and city police stationed with shotguns on rooftops.

The pastor turns saucer-eyed in disbelief. Then, he shrugs his shoulders.

Life in this region is rough, he said. Laws are held in suspension. Falsified identities, boozing, drug trafficking and "the oldest profession in the world" proliferate here, he adds, in a commentary backed up by local police.

Rosales, 55, is more than just a pastor for his immigrant flock.

He's also the mailman, counselor and sometimes driver.

He gets their mail, delivered to the church's P.O. box.

He's gives them the occasional ride to the doctor's office. The closest doctor is 16 miles away in Dumas, and many of them don't have cars.

"Sometimes they will send them to the doctor to get their ears checked," Rosales said. "Sometimes I have time to do it. If not, my wife takes them, or one of my daughters."

And he stocks an assortment of employment applications - from various cattle and feedlot operations around the Panhandle.

"Many of them don't know how to write or read," Rosales said. "Sometimes they bring their applications. Sometimes they don't. But I have a bunch there. Every time I go, I'll pick up two or three ... from the (Swift) plant, from Guymon, Liberal ... wherever they want to go."

He even tried to start English lessons - at two different times a day to accommodate the workers' shifts at the plant. But attendance dropped off, he said.

"They started coming, but they're so tired when they get out of work," he said.

"If you could see the kind of work that they do at that plant. It is a job for animals," the preacher said. "And they suffer not just because of the work, but by the way they are treated."

Mario Barrientos agrees. He hails from the Mexican state of Chihuahua and works on the kill floor at the Swift plant.

"Guatemalans are very good workers," he said. "And they never complain."

He has no trouble listing the problems he sees at the plant, starting on the kill floor where "la matanza es horible," the slaughter is horrible.

But Barrientos said he has his documents, unlike many of the Guatemalan workers, who fear losing their jobs if they speak up.

Tiniguar left his village of Las Joyas de Zacualpa, Guatemala, to come work at Swift five years ago.

In his village, he fasted in a religious ritual for two days. The economy was in shambles from a 36-year-old civil war that ended in peace accords in 1996.

He pleaded with the higher beings that he survive the long trek to Texas, "to make sure that I stayed alive. In this world, there are all kinds of things that can happen to you."

His job at Swift allows him to send about $200 a month to his wife, Juana, to support the four children who live there.

A small, wiry man - he's all of 5-3 - Tiniguar is tired and worn. He looks much older than his 44 years.

The work can be painful, he acknowledges. But his 18-year-old son, Sebastian, who joined him two years ago, "knows how to work."

Like many of the younger men in Cactus who work at Swift, his son is a cutter, carving up 800-pound carcasses into steaks as they make their way down the conveyor belt at speeds some workers say are maddening.

A second son is trying to make his way up from Guatemala, as the cycle of migration continues.

This weekend, he's stuck in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville. Tiniguar's knowledge of the vast U.S.-Mexico border is so scant that he doesn't realize that Matamoros abuts the Rio Grande. He'll spend the next few days on a cellphone to his wife back in Las Joyas de Zacualpa.

Both are deep in worry about their son's chances of making it across the long diagonal from Matamoros to the Texas Panhandle.

"He's lost," said Tiniguar into a cellphone.

Behind him at 6 p.m., a full moon makes its ascent like a plump peach over a sky that is still a medium blue.


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Turner is a staff writer and photographer for Al Dia, The Dallas Morning News' Spanish-language newspaper.

""We don't come here to rest," he said. "We come to send money back home." "

My Plan: Who Could Disagree?

1. Tax them at, say an 85% tax rate making it cost prohibitive to come here and work.

2. Make it miserable for them in the US so they become the best form of advertisement as to why not come to the US. It should be so aweful in the US for them that they tell their friends back home, "Hey don't go, it's miserable there."

3. Free kite sailing as you here the big sucking sound as they all rush home.

"If you could see the kind of work that they do at that plant. It is a job for animals," the preacher said. "And they suffer not just because of the work, but by the way they are treated."

I don't ever remember such SYMPATHY for the AMERICANs who always did this job for ANIMALS...........have any of you?

It's damned hard work and it was always done by AMERICANS so what's so unusual now? So special now about these particular workers?

How offensive.

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