Like El Nariz himself, those in his handpicked crews were simple hardwork ing people. Almost all had fled the raw-dirt tin-shack squalor of the slums of Mexico City.
El Nariz-whose own formal education would be described as the School of Hard Knocks in a place like South Philly, where he now lived-had no idea about official census numbers. Moreover, he did not give a rat’s ass about them. He simply understood that what he had now was a helluva lot better than what he’d lived in in Mexico.
Had he even the slightest interest, however, Paco Esteban easily could have learned that Philadelphia, founded October 27, 1682, was the largest city in Pennsylvania. That in its 135 square miles the population numbered-officially, not including those such as El Nariz and his illegal immigrant crews, who wished to remain under the radar and therefore went uncounted-nearly 1.5 million, or roughly more than 11,000 people in every square mile, with about one in four in poverty. That Philadelphia was the fifth-largest city in the United States. And that its urban area, with some 5.3 million people, was the U.S.’s fourth largest.
Also with a cursory search, Paco Esteban could have as easily learned that Mexico City had nearly six times as many people (8.8 million) as Philly within an area only a little more than four times as large (573 square miles), or 15,400 people per square mile. And that Mexico City’s metro area swelled with nearly 20 million people-40 percent of whom lived in poverty with no better than a snowball’s chance in hell (or Mexico) of ever enjoying a finer quality of life.
But Paco Esteban didn’t need numbers to tell him what he already damn well knew: that life here, while not perfect, was far better than in Mexico. As it was of course for everyone in his crews. They had come to America via various routes-not a damn one of them legal-most planned and financed by El Nariz himself, as had been done for him seven years earlier.
Esteban had been twenty-two years old when he’d hopped across the U.S. border-literally, as his smuggler had led his group of four Mexican nationals to the flimsy rusty fencing that separated the two countries and showed them how to boost one another over it into Nogales, Arizona. The smuggler had announced that his amigo-like him, another “coyote,” so named because of their wily, evasive traits-waited on the other side to take them to a nearby drop house.
At the small four-bedroom ramshackle house, where coyotes armed with shotguns and pistols guarded doors leading to the outside, they had joined dozens of other illegal immigrants. These were almost all men, but some women and children, too. The majority were dark-skinned ones Esteban recognized as being from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, but there also were ones with much lighter skin who appeared to be European, Middle Eastern, and, clearly, because of their eyes, Asian, all keeping clustered to their own kind and very quiet.
While everyone so far had successfully evaded arrest by the various U.S. agencies policing the border-that alone, El Nariz quickly came to understand, was a significant accomplishment-they still were in danger. He saw that except for mostly moving during the night, not much effort was given to discreetly carrying out the smuggling; this was simply a numbers game to the coyotes, and the coyotes even warned them point-blank that not everyone was going to make it, so they damn well better give it their best shot.
Surveying the groups in the house, El Nariz had comforted himself with the thought: You don’t have to be the fastest-just not the slowest.
Cellular telephones-ones the smuggled immigrants had brought or ones provided by the drop house for an added fee-were being used by the immigrants to call their benefactors in the United States to wire payments of $1,500 to $2,100 via Western Union to the smugglers so that the immigrants could move on to the next leg of their journey.
Western Union promised, for a fee of about a hundred bucks, that anyone could “Send money in minutes by telephone, online, or from one of our 320,000 Western Union Agent locations worldwide! We accept cash, credit, and debit cards!”
Depending on their funds and desire to do so, the journey’s next leg could mean being taken in a car or a bus-or packed miserably in the back of an eighteen-wheeler trailer-on to California, New Mexico, Texas, or even far across the country.
Paco El Nariz Esteban had made his way, under a tire-topped tarp in the back of a Ford pickup with SMITTY’S ROADSIDE SERVICE, SERVING SOUTHERN ARIZONA SINCE 1979 painted on its doors, up Interstate Highway 19 the forty-odd miles to Tucson, Arizona. There he’d joined his uncle, himself a Mexican national illegally in the United States, and who’d floated El Nariz his smuggler’s fee of $1,700.
El Nariz began working at construction jobs. It was brutal, menial work in the Arizona sun, but in six months he’d scrimped together four grand, more than enough to repay his uncle. El Nariz then made contact again with his smugglers, and used the rest of his savings to bring up his wife from the Mexico City slums and, with a small loan from the uncle to cover the difference, his wife’s brother.
Not two weeks later, they were all celebrating the arrival of El Nariz’s wife and brother-in-law. And not quite nine months later, the reunion that El Nariz and his wife had enjoyed that night found them, courtesy of the Primeros Pasos Clinic at Saint John’s Hospital of Tucson, the parents of a newborn son.
And immediately upon his birth on American soil, Ricardo Alvarado Esteban, in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution-to wit: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside-had become a legal citizen of the United States of America.
When the proud papa, now twenty-three years old, was presented with the “First Steps” clinic’s bill for services rendered to Se?ora Esteban-said bill having been translated to Spanish for him by the bilingual aide from the hospital?
?s financial office-he could not begin to understand such an enormous dollar figure, never mind try to figure out how to repay it. If it had taken six months to save $4,000, he figured that was looking at five-plus years’ savings just for this one bill.
El Nariz decided his next steps after Primeros Pasos were to pack up the family and move to another state.
He felt bad about not paying the bill. But his uncle-a carpenter’s helper whose wisdom came from being three years older and in America for four more-helped him rationalize it by saying El Nariz should feel even worse about the laws of the United States that had caused him to have to risk his life and that of his family by sneaking into America as a criminal, then for little money sneaking around to do the difficult work that the gringos seemed more than happy to hire him to do.
The uncle rationalized that if they as immigrants were treated better-treated as El Nariz’s son would be as an American citizen-then they, too, could be better paid and more able to repay such debts.
“It is really the fault of the norteamericanos and their unfair laws,” El Nariz’s uncle concluded simply. “Comprendo? ”
The uncle then reminded El Nariz of other family he had in Pennsylvania-ones who’d helped with the uncle’s coming to America-and they were in a place outside Philadelphia that was friendly to immigrants. It was called Nor ristown, and, as in Tucson, there was an established community of Mexican immigrants, but unlike in Tucson, they were more or less left alone by la migra, the various authorities enforcing the laws of inmigraci?n.
And there was plenty of work up there, including construction. Perhaps best, there wasn’t a desert sun to suffer under as he toiled.
In Pennsylvania, El Nariz started out doing day laborer jobs. Then, through a family referral, he’d found work renovating a hotel in Philadelphia’s Center City. He secured the job of swinging an iron-headed sledgehammer to bust out each room’s old bathroom tiling because he agreed to the pay. He later learned that it was next to nothing that the other laborers were being paid, but he did not complain-it was far more than the four dollars a day that the minimum wage in Mexico City had paid, which damn sure was nothing.
The demolition job in the city had caused him to find nearby housing for his family-whom he’d then sent for, wife and son arriving a month later by bus at the Philadelphia Greyhound Terminal in Center City-and that turned out to be a South Philly three-bedroom row house, one in disrepair on Sears Street, between the Mexican markets on Ninth and the Delaware River.
They shared the house with two other illegal immigrant families from Mexico, subletting the place-no signed lease, cash only-from a relative of one of the families. He was a punk, all of twenty-one years old. But he had been born in the United States and thus had the appropriate papers to satisfy the owner-a tough Vietnamese, an immigrant himself who had become a proud nationalized American and who’d moved out near his two shopping-strip restaurants in the upscale suburb of King of Prussia-in order to sign the original lease.
While the living conditions-particularly the crime-of Philly’s run-down neighborhoods were hardly postcard perfect, the Estebans found them no worse than the rough Tucson barrio in which they had lived. And they were, of course, a vast improvement over the hopeless impoverishment of the third-world slum that they had fled. Just having reliable potable running water and sanitary sewer systems was a gift from God. And here there was the availability of free public schooling and, as they had found at Saint John’s in Tucson, medical care at clinics and hospitals.
During the renovation job, the hotel had reopened in stages, and well before its laundry room was complete, thus requiring that the sheets and towels and tablecloths and anything else in need of laundering be taken off site. Paco Esteban was offered-and quickly took, having tired of the pain from swinging a bone-rattling sledge-the job of collecting the large laundry bins, then loading and off-loading them when the trucks came.
In the year that Esteban’s family had been in Philadelphia, his wife’s brother also had arrived at the Filbert Street bus terminal, and they had pooled their savings and paid for the passage of more of his wife’s family members-a male cousin in his late twenties who escorted his two teenage nieces-up from Mexico City. For various reasons, the first of the other families in the row house had moved out, then the second, and Esteban’s extended family filled their spaces.