LONG ISLAND, N.Y.
Immigrant workers defy racist terror
By Heather Cottin
Freeport, L.I., N.Y.
On Long Island, contractors hire thousand of
Latino immigrants as day laborers. These workers face dangerous
conditions and severe exploitation. Now they are facing another
danger. Violent and cowardly racists are threatening the very
lives of these workers, especially the Mexican immigrants of
Farmingville, N.Y.
On July 5, in Farmingville, nightriders hurled firebombs
through a window at 41 Granny Rd., the home of Sergio Perez,
Marcia Garcia, their children Laura, 5, and Sergio, 1, and Hugo
Perez, the children's uncle. If a neighbor had not alerted the
sleeping family, they would all have perished in the blaze.
The house was completely destroyed. It was next door to one
from which two Mexican workers had been kidnapped and beaten
three years ago by two racists.
Farmingville is the headquarters of an anti-immigrant group
calling itself the Sachem Quality of Life. It is linked with
Glenn Spencer, a Californian whose national organization,
"American Patrol," is overtly anti-Mexican. Members of the
Farmingville group carry signs every Saturday calling for the
deportation of all "illegal aliens."
The Workplace Project, a Long Island organization that
supports Latin American workers, organized a vigil of over 400
people on July 19 in solidarity with the Mexican community.
Carlos Canales of the Workplace Project told Workers World that
the police did not call the incident a bias crime right
away.
Finally, 11 days after the fire, the police began to
investigate it as a crime of racial hatred. Canales explained
that day laborers in Farmingville, mostly from Mexico, and
their families "are not strangers to oppression. We understand
that the rich and powerful exploit us and oppress us at home.
But we are not used to racism.
"The Sachem Quality of Life organization is trying to
organize in other villages on Long Island. They threatened a
landlord who was going to rent us quarters for a hiring hall in
the village of Farmingdale in Nassau County. They went to
Freeport and recruited local racists there to try to do the
same thing, but they met strong opposition there and in Glen
Cove as well."
Day laborers in the New York metropolitan area perform
necessary work that few other workers are willing to do. A
group of four men can mow and weed 20 lawns per day.
Contractors pick up the workers at fast-food parking lots or
outside Home Depots throughout the metropolitan suburbs. While
the contractor charges homeowners $25 per lawn, each worker
makes only $80 for a day that goes from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. These
immigrant workers, mostly from Latin America, do backbreaking
work gardening, pouring cement and roofing. They also work in
chemical plants and restaurants.
This work is not only difficult, it is dangerous. As a
group, Latino immigrant workers have the highest percentage of
occupational deaths of any ethnic or racial group in the United
States. They face some of the worst safety and health problems
and are especially vulnerable to unsafe working conditions
because many are undocumented. "We do a lot of work with day
laborers who get hurt in construction and landscaping," said
Nadia Marin-Molinas, executive director of the Workplace
Project.
"The landscapers never let the workers turn off the power
mowers, and many are burned or injured when they are working on
these machines," said Canales.
Stories of immigrants facing harsh conditions while the
bosses profit are nothing new in the history of the United
States. Neither are attempts to separate workers by threats and
violence. "What's sad to see is that many of the people who are
against these workers are the grandchildren of Italian and
Irish immigrants who used to 'shape up' on the street corner
and faced the same problems," said Marin-Molinas.
"The Mexican workers are organizing, but the work goes
slowly, and an incident like this one makes it harder for the
day laborers to get together and struggle for better
conditions," said Canales. "We feel that the firebombing shows
that the racists are opening another cycle of violence, but we
see also that their numbers are diminishing, and that they are
facing strong opposition."
Reprinted from the July 31, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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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