Immigration Blues
Like European indentured servants of the early 1900's, most illegal Latino immigrants come to New York already neck-deep in debt to the people who brought them here.
To get across the Mexican border, teenagers must pay coyotes, or people smugglers, as much as $8,000, which they then pay back in small installments while they work in America as busboys or dishwashers.
Just paying the coyote is no guarantee the young men will make it across the frontera. For Adan Zanes, 19, a teen from Puebla, Mexico, finding his way to Brooklyn four years ago was a challenge to rival Hercules' twelve labors.
The first time Zanes tried to cross the border, the coyotes sent him walking through the desert near Nogales, Arizona, and then abandoned his group without water. They were saved only because an American driver saw them and called the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"I cried and yelled in the desert, asking God to help all of us," says Zanes, who was 15 at the time.
Next, he tried to swim across a river on the border of California, but the current was so strong, he lost all his belongings and almost drowned. Later attempts took him through mountains and countryside, until finally on his ninth attempt in one month, Zanes finally made it Los Angeles, where he caught a plane to New York.
His hardships were only beginning. Friends who had come to New York before him had bragged about the easy life here, and showed him pictures taken in front of the Empire State Building on their days off. But now Zanes saw the truth: that New York meant 16-hour days washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, and sharing a two-bedroom apartment with 12 other immigrants.
"If I knew how it is here," Zanes says in Spanish, "I never would have crossed the border."
Outside, on the streets of the city's Mexican barrios, Zanes saw other teenagers who had already given up; who had left their grueling jobs behind to join Mexican gangs like the Niños Malos (Bad Boys), or the Pitufos (The Smurfs). The gang members robbed and intimidated other Mexicans like him, Zanes says, and sometimes would even kill each other.
"The gang problem
is the consequence of abuses they receive," says Jocelyn Solis, a
Professor of Education at Brooklyn College who works with Mexican youth.
"They are young, alone. They don't have a support system. It is easy
for them to fall into certain things, like violence."
Next: School Dreams
Solitos in New York
Immigration Blues
School Dreams
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The
Long Journey to New York
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| ILLUSTRATION: FRANZISKA BRUNER |