The Undocumented Americans

The first chapter centers on the day laborers of Staten Island, “New York’s richest, whitest, most suburban borough” (7). Every morning, anywhere from a few to several dozen people (mostly undocumented men) turn up on street corners to negotiate short-term labor contracts for construction gigs. The mainstream media demonizes the practice, calling it “idling” (9), but the hopefuls actually perform a “delicate choreography” (10), negotiating details of the short-term employment of their many skills. The system is incredibly exploitative. On jobsites, day laborers rarely receive standard safety equipment or time for meals or bathroom breaks. Villavicencio says that day laborers “have all experienced racist abuse and wage theft at the hand of their employers, are all owed thousands of dollars by white men who made them work for days, promised payment, then simply disappeared” (10).

Villavicencio began interviewing day laborers on Staten Island in 2017 by connecting with worker centers—hubs that aim to centralize and improve the informal labor industry by providing shelter, some basic provisions, and professional bilingual intermediaries and dispatchers. The reader meets some of the personnel at two of Staten Island’s work centers, like Santiago at Colectiva Por Fin, who is a master translator, and Pedro Ituralde at Nuestra Calle. Pedro opened Nuestra Calle, is beloved in his community, and advocates for LGBTQ people as an openly gay man. Villavicencio also recounts anecdotes from day laborers who describe lonely living conditions far removed from family, the extra work of learning English at libraries of community colleges (a nearly universal undertaking for immigrants, according to the author), and the perils of both border crossing and working on dangerous jobsites. The author devotes the last part of the chapter to talking about Hurricane Sandy in 2014. Day laborers performed most of the extensive cleanup on Staten Island and are proud of how they helped people, even though the larger community did very little to acknowledge, thank, or meaningfully compensate them for their labor.

The author also provides more detail about her family history and her parents. She says that her parents are Ecuadorian but would identify as New Yorkers if really pushed to say where they are from. She says, “My parents are New Yorkers to the core” (4). The author’s parents left Ecuador early in her life without her to move to and work in the United States to pay off debt. They relocated their daughter to the United States to provide her with access to a high-quality education, one she did indeed obtain through patronage (benefactors paid for private schooling).

This chapter centers on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center buildings in downtown Manhattan that killed nearly 3,000 people, shook Americans’ sense of public safety, and left a colossal toxic cleanup project where the twin towers collapsed. Many undocumented immigrants working as day laborers were members of cleanup crews at Ground Zero and developed long-term illnesses from their exposure to the site. One interviewee, Milton, got asthma and had to stop playing soccer (he had at one point played professionally in Colombia) (37). A woman, Paloma, suffered from “illnesses that are common to all of the cleanup workers—sleep apnea, PTSD, depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal issues” (45). Some of the afflicted received some monetary compensation through the Victim Compensation Fund, though that process entails paperwork from jobsites that few day laborers could obtain.

The 9/11 attack represented a major shift in US national security and the public perception of immigrants. Nationalist fears stoked anti-immigrant hate as many white Americans feared clandestine terrorist operations at work in the US among “foreigners.” As immigrants worked to clean up Ground Zero and aid the country in a time of deep tragedy, segments of the public responded with intensified discrimination and abuse. Of course, immigrants also died in the 9/11 attack. Villavicencio talks specifically about deliverymen who carried small catering orders. In the wake of the tragedy, survivors decorated a chained-up bike that had belonged to one of these deliverymen as a “makeshift memorial” (53).

Designated organizations worked to identify people who had gone missing during the attack, but undocumented Americans purposefully do not leave paper trails. Their contributions are underappreciated and their deaths are not properly mourned. The 9/11 attack was also the justification for new political entities that targeted immigrants, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When the author conducted her research in 2017, she said that “all anyone [could] talk about [was] deportation. […] Any of them could be deported at any time” (35). The very New Yorkers who experienced 9/11 firsthand and moved quickly to aid in the city’s recovery now were under constant threat of expulsion from their homes.

The author steadily provides information about her family. In this section, she specifically discusses her father. She gives a little background on his working life and demonstrates that they have a somewhat complicated relationship without providing much detail. She continues to discuss her family and her relationship to its members and history in ensuing chapters.