It’s always busy at the 7-11 on Horseblock Road in Farmingville, Long Island. Undocumented Mexican day laborers throng corners. As potential employers pull into the lot, their cars are swarmed with men looking for work. Every so often, the manager will emerge. He’ll tell them to buy something or keep it moving. Some will venture inside for another coffee but most will just move off the front curb to the side of the building where they wait in the cold. There is always more able-bodied men than work available.
Alberto “Beto” Rojo, a 22 year old with a cherubic face and warm eyes, isn’t going to 7-11 today. He knows better. This is seasonal work: homes aren’t being constructed and lawns aren’t being cut when it’s -10 degrees outside. “Everyday we go to the corner and come back, I watch TV, I hear music or I write,” he says, describing an average week. “I get picked up like once a week. I save money so during the winter I can survive. I get like $2000 in savings so I can survive.” Today, with his brother Juan having braved another five-day border crossing and a three-day van ride from Texas to return to Farmingville, he is spending the day indoors. They have some catching up to do.
In every culture, men come of age. In the United States, depending on one’s class, it can take place in a lecture hall, a foxhole in Iraq or a jail cell. But for an entire generation of young Mexican men, their coming of age ritual is the grinding multi-day crossing of “la frontera” – the United States – Mexican border. Beto’s day came two years back. “One day I tried to cross on the train but I failed,” he recalls, seated in kitchen of the Long Island house he shares with more than 30 other men. “I crossed the frontier from another place and it took me three days. Some people from Honduras kidnapped us. They tried to steal our money that we were going to pay the coyotes.” After his mother wired him money, he paid the bandits and made it to Farmingville.
Like most Farmingville day laborers, Beto resides in an illegally subdivided single family home with more than 30 other men. He pays $250 per month including utilities. His bedroom faces the street. There is a TV, a bunk bed, a dresser and three bedrolls on the floor. “This is my bed, on the floor,” he explains. Then he adds, laughing, “they don’t give me a discount for sleeping on the floor.”
A tight knit ex-pat community has formed in Farmingville. Beto kicks in $50 per week for groceries, which are spun into hearty meals by Tomassa Garcia, a spirited 24-year-old with a thriving business driving from residence to residence cooking for day laborers.
“There is a culture here,” Beto says fondly. “I am with all my countrymen and all my countrymen have culture.”
Mexicans, like most immigrants, move in groups: Chicago is filled with men from Michoacan; Brooklyn has become the adopted home of the sons of Puebla. For young men from Mixquiahuala, a town of 20, 000 in the state of Hidalgo, that destination is Farmingville, a working-class Long Island hamlet midway between New York City and the Hamptons. Young men from this agricultural town two hours from Mexico City began arriving in Farmingville a decade ago. “I think all the people [from Mixquiahuala] live in Farmingville,” he says. “Only little kids and old men [stay there].”
There is good reason for the exodus. A little past midway between the Hamptons and New York City, minutes from the Long Island Expressway, Farmingville is situated perfectly for the day laborers that congregate at 7-11’s at opposite ends of the hamlet. With the New York’s suburbs stretching eastward and the Hamptons spreading west, there is a building boom. In years past, Beto might have made his way north to one of the maquiladora factories in US border cities like Ciudad Juarez. But those factories trying to keep pace with China, where labor is a quarter of the price, have dropped their wages to just $5 per day. In the summer, Alberto routinely makes over $100 per day. One week he even made $1300, of which $1200 was sent home to his mom.
But this is the best-case scenario. In reality, there is no guarantee he will even get paid for his labor. “Sometimes they abandon you,” he explains. “You do the work and then they don’t pick you up.”
In comparison to other men from his hometown, Beto has been lucky. On Sept. 17 2000, day laborers Israel Perez and Magdalena Escamilla were picked up by two white supremacists posing as contractors, beaten and left for dead. They staggered to the highway, hailed a ride and narrowly survived. Almost three years later, four Farmingville teenagers, one of whom was the son NYPD officer, celebrated July 4, 2003 by torching a Mexican family’s home.
The local opposition, the Sachem Quality of Life, even accused the family of setting fire to their own residence. For the past few years, the SQL and their successor, the Greater Farmingville Community Association has fomented what long-time day laborer advocate Rev. Allan Ramirez describes as a “climate of hate.” Every Friday, the protestors bring signs and bullhorns to 7-11 to protest what GFCA head Ray Wysolmierski calls “an invasion.”
While Beto hasn’t had his life threatened, he and his friends have been assaulted with eggs and shot at with rubber bullets. His pal Gerardo Morales, an activist with the Workplace Project, was beaten up while leaving his job at a laundry. Beto frequently worries about his safety. “My mom is not aware of the reality we are in,” he admits. “My mom cannot imagine the racism. There is some racism in Mexico but it is not like here.”
Like many of his friends from Mixquiahuala, Beto is trapped by economics. “I had no dream to come here,” he says over a spaghetti lunch, cooked by Tomassa. “I came here because there was no work. I dreamed of becoming a painter.” Earlier in the day, his buddy Filiberto Perez stopped by with a painting for Beto to critique. The two are also responsible for murals at the Workplace Project. But he says, they don’t try to turn their painting skills into a business because “I don’t have papers and I don’t talk very much English.”
His escape, he says, is punk music with its themes of systemic overthrow. While he has designs on changing the world, for the time being, he just wants people in Farmingville to acknowledge his humanity. “I want people to know that immigrants like me, we also feel,” he says. “We also have problems, we also think. And we’re also people. We want people to know that.”
