LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
Mexican workers encounter solidarity after racist
attacks
By Heather
Cottin
Farmingville, N.Y.
Firmin lives in a house with 14 other Mexicans from Hidalgo
state in Farmingville, N.Y., a predominantly white
working-class suburb in Suffolk County on Long Island. He is
"lucky." He has a permanent job with a contractor. His lodgings
cost him $200 a month, and he and the other men pay a couple to
come in and prepare food for them. A woman comes weekly to
teach English to the men.
Guadalupe is not so lucky. He can't work because a piece of
heavy equipment ran over his foot. Absolutely no medical care
is available for these workers, and all his boss offered him
was a pain pill and four days' earned back pay. His fellow
workers are taking care of Guadaloupe until his foot is healed
and he can go back to the "escina," the street corner where
Mexican and other Latino workers seek to find jobs in a
shapeup.
Esteban crossed the U.S. border at Tijuana and went through
the Arizona desert on his arduous voyage to Long Island from
the Mexican state of Hidalgo. Twenty-seven men live in his
house, which has only two bathrooms. Esteban makes $65 to $90
per day, the typical wage for undocumented workers in the New
York metropolitan area. The men in his house cook for
themselves. They are often robbed because people know the day
laborers don't use banks and that they carry all their money
with them.
Most of the men send their money home to their families.
Several hundred dollars goes a long way in rural Mexico.
Day laborers work at many jobs: landscaping, construction,
installing sprinklers and fences. They clean swimming pools,
dig basements and do masonry of all kinds, as well as
roofing.
The immigrants endure daily exploitation and reactionary
violence and hatred.
The workers are wary and distrustful. They face
extraordinary hardships. The work sites are dangerous. There is
no medical coverage if they are injured, as frequently
happens.
Often, they are left at distant work sites with no ride
home. Racists yell epithets and throw bottles at the
workers.
The bosses cheat these former cam pesinos who have come to
the United States because they can no longer feed their
families in Mexico. Often their paychecks bounce.
Exploitation and injuries are not all these workers face. In
Farmingville, as well as in other areas of Long Island, and in
fact throughout the United States, a campaign of intimidation
and violence against Mexican workers has been organized.
Intimidation and violence
Last September, Magdaleno Escamilla and Israel Perez were
lured to an abandoned building with the promise of work. There,
two white men attacked them with a crowbar, shovel and
knife.
They had been driven to the abandoned warehouse off Exit 68
of the Long Island Expressway in Suffolk County in the early
morning of Sept. 17, a Sunday. They were told to start digging.
Escamilla was then beaten unconscious.
He awoke to the screams of his friend, who had managed to
wrestle the knife from his attacker.
Reports about the attack focused attention on the increasing
racism and deplorable conditions faced by immigrant
workers.
On Long Island a racist group has organized; its leaders are
in contact with other fascists across the United States. This
group, called Sachem Quality of Life, is headed by Margaretann
Bianculli-Dyber, a New York City teacher who lives in
Farmingville. The group hosted a national conference Aug. 4 and
5 that attracted 100 people, plus 25 reporters. Leading
anti-immigrant bigots spoke, including California racist Glenn
Spencer, founder of the American Patrol, a Los Angeles-based
right-wing group.
The Sachem organization masquerades as a kind of community
support group, concerned about safety and health issues. But,
as one supporter of the immigrants said, "It's more like the
KKK than the PTA."
In late August Suffolk County legislator Michael D'Andre of
Smithtown was asked by Bianculli-Dyber to join the campaign
against the workers. His response was typically racist.
According to the Aug. 31 New York Times, he said: "You're
inundated with illegal aliens here. We need to help this
community save itself ... if Smithtown was attacked tomorrow
with the same thing, we'll be out there with baseball
bats."
D'Andre's response went unchallenged by the legislature and
the county executive.
In Farmingdale in Nassau County, the bigots have the support
of the mayor. They want immigration agents to prevent trucks
from picking up laborers. They want to demolish buildings where
workers live and build luxury apartments on the site.
Mayor John Trudden assured them, "Don't worry, this is part
of the plan we are working on, and it is under way, it's
already set that the buildings will be demolished and in their
place luxury ones will be built."
Solidarity with immigrants
These reactionaries have not gone unchallenged.
Almost two dozen groups have organized or converged on Long
Island to fight the xenophobes. Groups such as La Raza,
Brookhaven Citizens for a Peaceful Solution, Southern Poverty
Law Center, Central American Refugee Center and the Workplace
Project, as well as workers' organizations of the day laborers
themselves, have confronted the fascists.
Immigrant workers are organizing against the bigots in every
town and village where xenophobia has reared its ugly head. In
Nassau County, Freeport police in cars herded workers near the
train station, almost running them down--but when police
detained and interrogated a Latino organizer from the Workplace
Project who was handing out leaflets, and charged the workers
at that "escina" with soliciting and disorderly conduct, the
Workplace Project lawyers got the charges dropped.
Mexican workers have made a strong statement on their own
behalf. With the assistance of the Long Island Coalition in
Solidarity with Day Laborers, the United Day Laborers of Long
Island have put out a pamphlet on "Empowering the Workers."
"We the workers are the only voice that can represent
ourselves," they say. "We fight in order for our right to work
as human beings to be recognized. Work is a basic necessity for
all human beings and accordingly it is a right all human beings
should enjoy. We fight for the implementation of a community
center. The legal system of the United States fails to
recognize our right to work, and this is the third element of
our battle."
The root of this crisis is found in capitalist globalization
in the Americas.
Globalism and debt crisis
In 1982 Mexico was the first nation that couldn't service
its debt, causing the "debt crisis" that plunged workers and
farmers into dire poverty. According to the Mexican government,
42 million or half of all Mexicans lived in poverty in 1990,
and 18 million lived in conditions of extreme poverty. The
trade agreement NAFTA has made that reality worse.
When Mexico found itself unable to make payments on its
suffocating foreign debt, it found debt-restructuring loans
available from the International Monetary Fund only on
condition that it adopt the imperialist bankers' neoliberal
economic "restructuring" program. That meant privatization,
deregulation, government cutbacks, devaluation and a vicious
assault on labor.
These policies have created greater foreign debt,
unprecedented foreign ownership of the economy, tremendous
economic instability, staggering inequality, a domestic market
too weak to sustain economic growth, widespread poverty and
deep social unrest.
Mexicans and other Latino people have been forced by
economic and political pressures to migrate to the United
States. Since NAFTA, conditions in Mexico have
deteriorated.
Hidalgo state is losing people because--as even the "CIA
Factbook on Mexico" admits--"unemployment in the states of
Durango, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Mexico [has]
nearly doubled since NAFTA was implemented in 1994."
'Free trade' bankrupts
Mexican farmers
When "free trade" allowed Idaho potatoes to flood the state
of Hidalgo, Mexican farmers couldn't compete and lost their
farms. They were faced with emigrating to jobs in the United
States to feed their families.
President George W. Bush has made empty promises to grant
legal residency to the millions of Mexicans who have fled their
homelands to search for work in the United States. But he is
not serious. The racists in his party would not allow it. He is
speaking on behalf of the contractors, agribusinesses and
corporations that wish to exploit more Mexican workers. They
are pleased to see the working class riven by racism, which is
caused by globalism's reactionary anti-worker policies.
The jobs Mexicans get in New York's suburbs are poorly paid,
non-unionized and unwanted by local workers. This is true all
over the United States. In the construction industry, bosses
are hiring undocumented economic refugees from Mexico and other
Third World nations in an attempt to break the unions and
realize greater profit margins.
NAFTA was inaugurated in 1993. NAFTA and neoliberal economic
policies impoverish workers both in Mexico and in the United
States. NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank have produced
exploitation, violence and racism against Mexican workers in
both Mexico and the United States.
But when NAFTA was established, the agreement also was
witness to the birth of the Zapatistas, who declared in 1993:
"We have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing, no decent roof
over our heads, no land, no work, poor health, no food, no
education, no right to freely and democratically choose our
leaders, no independence from foreign interests, and no justice
for ourselves or our children. But we say enough is
enough!"
This battle has now spread to the United States. Workers
here must learn from the struggle of the Mexicans against
globalism, which is part of the worldwide movement against
imperialism and finance capital.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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