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JASON CROSBY
"This is a hard job," most of the time they'd tell
you, "Querias Norte”—“You wanted Norte, you
got Norte”—which meant "Shut up and keep
working." Most of the time, no one would help
you. Everybody had their own problems. The next
few hours were very bad. I began to stand on
one foot and when I felt tired, I had to switch to
my other foot. During that shift, I noticed other
people kept doing the same thing.
When I needed to go to the restroom, I had
to wait an hour and keep working. It was bad,
but it was worse for the pregnant women. They
also had to wait for an hour. The women faced
even more problems than the men did. Often
they had to put up with sexual harassment from
their superiors and sometimes from their cowork
ers. I heard a lot of stories there. Different types
of people, not just the undocumented, suffer
from these injustices.
Even permanent resi
dents. I met this woman
from Honduras. She had
been out sick for a week.
She could not go to
work, and talked to her
manager about it over the telephone. But when
she came back a week later, there was no work
for her. They fired her for nothing. She got a law
yer, but the lawyer told her he could do nothing
because the law in Georgia does not help work
ers. So they could fire her or anybody for just
about any reason.
I worked there for more than a year. Every
day, it was the same thing: I had to be there
10 minutes before my shift started to put on all
this stuff, like fabric gloves, plastic gloves, a lab
coat, and a plastic apron. I washed my hands
and waited at the line to start, but at break time
I had to run to the sink (there were two sinks
and five faucets for over 30 hungry people), first
taking off the plastic gloves, then the fabric
gloves, then the plastic apron which we hung
on a rack over the wall, and then finally I could
wash my hands. Once I and the other Latino
workers had washed up, we would dart over to
the kitchen. I never liked the restaurant food
much. We Latinos eat different stuff, and anyway
it was much too expensive to eat there. So most
of us brought our own food. The microwave area
was very busy! Most of the time we had like 10
minutes to have our lunch and use the restroom
because we had to return to our work stations
five minutes before resuming work.
SILENT MAJORITY
Most or my coworkers there were Latinos and
African Americans. The white people were only in
the office or working security. We Latino workers
were the majority. I saw a lot of people come to
work for just a week and then quit. They might
have found different jobs, maybe not paying as
well, but probably not as hard as that one. Most
of us couldn't quit because it's difficult find
something else.
One day, I was telling the supervisor about
the pain I was having in my hands. I was asking
to change my work, to do something different.
He took me to the office of the general supervi
sor. A translator had to help me to explain about
the pain and how I couldn't keep doing that
work anymore. He told
me about other work on
a farm injecting vaccine
into chickens. I thought,
”Este gringo es a toda
madre" (this guy is
okay). But I was wrong.
The next day, I had to be there first thing in the
morning. They told me the work was to catch
chickens—the hardest work in all of the poultry
business. If you saw the hands of a person who
does this kind of work, you will understand why I
refused to do it. The supervisor was laughing at
me. I quit. I cried over my powerlessness...
I am not able to do what I love most: play
saxophone. It is because of the pain in my hands
and I don't know whether I will able to play like
I played before. This was not my dream. It is
not what I expected in the United States, where
dreams come true, where anything is possible.
Maybe before September 11 we had some op
portunities, but not anymore. Now we are viewed
as enemies, criminals, law-breakers, rats, pigs.
We are no longer "wetbacks" as we were named
years ago, or ”Braceros” like we were from 1942
to 1964, when the United States needed workers
and created the Bracero program to bring farm
workers into the country from Mexico. In 1954,
there was Operation Wetback, a massive deporta
tion campaign expelling hundreds of thousands
of Mexicans, because the feeling in this country
about having them working here changed for a
time. In a way, it is no different today.
Meanwhile, mine is just one story among mil
lions.
From the first day here, everything
was new to me: the food, the
language, the culture.
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