A fiercely ambitious Mexican woman, Maria fights to improve the condition of her undocumented coworkers in New York.
By Gergana Koleva
Not only does Maria detest the word undocumented – she also distrusts its other half: immigrant. When an American friend once described her as an immigrant, she replied, “No, you are an immigrant. You come from England. I’m from Mexico. This is my continent.”
I met Maria one chilly November afternoon at the Tribeca offices of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a non-profit organization devoted to the rights of restaurant workers in the city. Maria, the only woman among the dozen or so people who attended the weekly labor law briefing, listened intently. As a student leader and labor organizer she refuses to fear reprisals as she works to improve the conditions of her compatriots in America.
Maria arrived in New York by airplane from Mexico City in 2000 with a freshly stamped student visa. Her younger brother remained in Mexico, as did her mother, who works as a caretaker for the elderly, and her father, a maintenance worker.
“I’d seen a lot of American movies in Mexico, and I liked them. Everything in them is easy and free. The life in them is supposed to be on a higher level, with smart people. In the movies, the Americans solve everything.”
Today Maria is nearly fluent in English. When she first came to America, she took an English course during her first year and learned the rest by osmosis. Soon after, she enrolled in City College to study electrical engineering, which had been her major years ago in Mexico. Shortly after she started college her visa expired and she continued as an undocumented student.
At 33, she is determined to finish her degree – even if it means putting up with insults from the boss at the restaurant where she works, and taking a semester off, as she has done this fall, to make ends meet. For now, she keeps her textbooks and that floating American dream from the movies locked in a single room that she rents at a Manhattan hostel for $520 a month.
“My life is not typical of the Mexican illegal immigrant. I don’t like the word ‘undocumented.’ It’s like a stereotype.”
Unlike many Mexican illegal immigrants hidden deep inside New York City’s restaurant kitchens, behind the ham-slicing machines of its delicatessen stores, and amidst the rinse cycles of its public laundromats, Maria has the attitude of someone on the threshold of deliverance from years of servitude.
Her small pearl earrings sparkle underneath her mane of long black hair and her pencil-thin eyebrows accent her words as she speaks.
“Before I used to work twelve hours a day, no day off, no lunch break. I would eat when the restaurant was slow, standing up. I work six hours a day now, five days a week. Sometimes when business is slow, we only make $20 or $30 in tips.” Maria shrugs it off as the price of extra freedom.
The restaurant where she has been employed the last four years, Taqueria y Fonda la Mexicana, on the affluent Upper West Side of Manhattan, serves authentic Mexican food. Rumor has it the fare is so outrageously delicious that one regular customer donated his fax machine so he could fax in his orders. Even so, workers are paid poorly and Maria, who is a waitress there, says she often makes less than $350 a week – scarcely a living wage. She believes this is because the majority of the kitchen staff, like her, are undocumented Mexican immigrants. But, she is weary of counting herself in the same category as her co-workers. “Those Mexicans are short and they come from La Puebla. I come from Mexico City,” she reasons.
Mainly Maria complains of her co-workers’ parochial views and lack of manners.
“My co-workers come from the mountains of Mexico and they have no education. They understand only when [the manager] yells or when he insults them. But they don’t say anything – they came to work, so if he yells to make them work, fine for them.”
The bigger problem for Maria is that her boss is a machista – a sexist – who often yells at her simply for being a woman, then goes to his male employees to crack jokes behind her back.
“My manager thinks that men are best at everything. He says a woman is only for decoration, like a condom – you use it and throw it away. When he says these things, he usually speaks with other workers. It’s funny for him, he means it like a joke.”
Then she adds, “In this country it’s no good if you’re from another country. And for a woman it’s no good. Sometimes we go to the bathroom and cry, we feel bad.”
But Maria refuses to bow her head in servitude. She knows how to counter the verbal attacks of her boss. She presides over the Asociacion Mexicana-Americana de Trabajadores, which has organized strikes in the past against tuition fee increases for undocumented students in CUNY, the citywide chain of public colleges in New York City. At the weekly meetings, where restaurant workers gather to share their stories, learn about their rights in the workplace, and plan trips to the state capital to demand raises to the minimum wage, there are some workers who are legal and some who aren’t, but no one is asked to reveal their status.
Maria is concerned that the Mexican students’ representation in all CUNY schools is less than 2 per cent, and has an uneasy explanation of why those students instinctually prefer to pay double tuition rather than protest a hike.
“In Mexico if you say ‘We’re going to have a rally,’ the police will come and beat people up. There’s no security, no peaceful protest, they’re very aggressive,” she says.
“It’s dangerous for me too because I try to help other people.”
Maria is acutely aware of the perceptions some Americans have of the Mexican immigrant as nothing more than a fruit-picker or dishwasher who toils for crumbs, but she insists that dismissive attitudes from Americans have no impact on her.
“If he has money, good for him. If I don’t have money and he counts that against me, I’m sorry for him,” she says of an imaginary American.
“If you go to Africa or the Buddhists, you see the value is inside their heart, inside their head. If you go to Macy’s or to a nice restaurant here, you look at them…look at their shoes,” Maria trails off, ducking her head under a desk to simulate the imaginary American’s interest in other people’s footwear.
According to Maria, not every Mexican immigrant woman in New York nurtures such awareness. Most stay home, get pregnant, and nurture babies. Their highest professional achievement often turns out to be working at the local laundromat.
But Maria feels at home in a world outside the hum of the dryer.
When strangers question her place in society, as some inevitably do, she replies:
“If somebody says I’m poor, I say ‘Excuse me? I’m rich!’”
Rich Girl, Poor Girl
By Gergana Koleva
