A father leaves his family to provide a better life for them.
In 2007 Leonardo was 24 years old living in a small town in Puebla, Mexico. He was married with two young sons and his wife was pregnant. He had a good job as a warehouse manager in a local construction company earning MXN 1,300 ($130 USD) a week. This was enough money for his family to get by, but not enough for them to get ahead. Leonardo had traditional views. He believed that “a man must work to take care of his family.” Since he had to work, he wanted to get paid as much as possible for his time and effort, so he decided to go to the U.S.
Leonardo was the oldest male in a family with eight siblings, and he was the first in his family to attempt the journey to the U.S. Unlike others, he had no uncles who had immigrated the generation before, no older siblings, and no older cousins. Without someone in this family in the U.S., he simply could not raise the money required to finance his trip, so he was stuck.
Then a solution presented itself. Gargiulo Produce was recruiting workers. Gargiulo Produce’s “goal since 1929 has been to supply our customers with the highest quality service, the freshest product, and the most competitive produce pricing.” In order to keep their produce prices competitive and their costs down, they did not recruit workers lawfully by using agents operating under the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers program. They recruited workers using coyotes.
Agents of Gargiulo Produce paid the coyotes $1,700 for each worker they could bring into the U.S. The workers then effectively became modern-day indentured servants. They could not leave Gargiulo Produce until they could pay off their debt. After an uneventful crossing from Sasabe, Sonora to Tucson, Arizona, Leonardo was transported to various farms in Georgia and Florida. Gargiulo Produce arranged for him to get a Social Security number from a third party. It cost $35. Gargiulo Produce then paid Leonardo by check after deducting the appropriate withholdings. Gargiulo Produce had obtained both plausible deniability and low-cost labor.
Leonardo, of course, was paying Social Security and Medicare taxes and federal and state withholdings to an account that was non-existent or that was associated with some other individual. As such, he would receive no retirement credits or tax refund from these withholdings.
He picked tomatoes, peppers, and sweet chilies. He was paid $0.50 for a container of tomatoes, $0.35 for a container of peppers, and $0.30 for a container of chilies. When you imagine a container, do not think of a small grocery container; think of a wooden box that holds 20 pounds of vegetables. He was paid by the 20-pound container. So, he had to hustle. At times he only cleared $80 to $100 per week. Gargiulo Produce deducted money from each week’s check to repay Leonardo’s $1,700 debt along with $50 for housing.
His living conditions were terrible. There were eight to ten men crowded into a two-room single-wide trailer that was really no more than an empty aluminum shell stripped of every amenity. He had no transportation and was in the countryside far from any town. He therefore had to buy food from his employer at inflated prices. He could not even buy tortillas and was forced to buy corn meal and oil and make his own. After four months he could not take it anymore. He still owed the company $600, but he begged his brother-in-law to send him the money so he and his brother who came with him could pay off their debt to Gargiulo Produce. He did, and Leonardo and his brother were then free to go.
Leonardo’s brother-in-law lived in New York, so he headed there.
After one month in New York, he was able to get a job working with a construction company. He worked there for fourteen years, with only a brief break in employment when he returned to Mexico to visit his family. He worked regular hours five days a week, Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm. He was doing interior remodeling for apartments and learned a great deal. He used this knowledge on the weekends as an unlicensed contractor, where he started doing remodeling for other immigrants in his community. With this work, he was able to easily repay his in-laws and regularly send money home to his family in Mexico.
In 2011 he returned to Mexico. He missed his family. His daughter was going to be four years old, and he had never seen her in person. He felt that “to be a man you also had to be a good husband and father.” His daughter was going to be baptized, and his two sons were going to have their First Holy Communion, events he did not want to miss.
However, in Mexico, he could not return to his old job as a warehouse manager, so instead he got a job in construction. He was only earning MXN 850 ($71 USD) a week. This was less than 10% of what he had been making in the United States at his full-time job, not counting his earnings for his weekend contracting work. After a few months he left and went back to the U.S. Since then, he has never been back to Mexico.
Leonardo believes that for him it was impossible to both “work to take care of my family” and “be a good husband and father.” He had to choose and then live with the consequences. He would communicate with his wife and children by telephone and then, later, by Facetime, but his children effectively grew up without a father. He said that Mexican women are supposed to wait for their husbands, but his wife got tired of waiting and started a relationship with someone else. Leonardo and his wife divorced. He still sends money to his children to support them.
He concluded his story by saying, “Men always have to work. It does not matter if they have to work here or in Mexico, but at least here we get paid.”