Not quite Americans

Sexual assault, enslavement, no medical care -- Peter Orner, author of an oral history of illegal immigrants, discusses the nightmares experienced by this vulnerable population.

By Whitney Joiner

Read more: Books, Slavery, Mexico, Interviews, Immigration, Immigrants, Authors, Books Interviews

June 11, 2008 | The small Texas town where I live, Marfa, is the home base of one of the largest U.S. Border Patrol sectors, covering 165,000 square miles and encompassing 25 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. From my house, I can hear the Border Patrol headquarters' intercom, alerting agents to calls on line two or line three; their green and white patrol cars are everywhere, around town and throughout far west Texas. It's a daily reminder that we are living on the edge of a line in the desert, a line that Homeland Security is vigilant about protecting -- keeping certain people in and certain people out. A line that migrants will spend thousands of dollars, countless days and untold psychological turmoil trying to cross in an attempt to make it into America.

So it's fitting that writer Peter Orner was recently working in Marfa as a writer-in-residence for the Lannan Foundation, a literature and arts foundation in Santa Fe, N.M., that offers a residency program here. While Orner is a celebrated novelist and short-story writer -- his novel "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" was a 2006 Salon Book Award winner -- his new book, "Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives," marks his departure from fiction. ("Underground America" is the third of the McSweeney's Publishing "Voice of Witness" books, a series dedicated to documenting social injustice through oral history.) Through 24 narratives, Orner, who edited the book and led a 22-person interviewing team, gives voice to a small handful of the millions who've illegally crossed into this country.

We hear about these migrants on the news: We watch pundits discussing immigration, we see videos of walls on the Mexican border, we know that they are here. But what do we know of their daily lives: Why they came to the United States? What they left behind in their home countries? In "Underground America," Orner and his co-interviewers attempt to answer those questions. The stories are heartbreaking and human. "My only crime was working hard," says "Diana," a 44-year-old Peruvian migrant working in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eventually caught by immigration officials who refused her access to a lawyer, she was detained in a prison, wearing shackles and chains, and allowed to shower only once a week. After struggling in poverty in Guatemala, 28-year-old "El Curita" came to the U.S. dreaming of a better life; he worked as a housepainter for an American woman who used his lack of legal papers to force him into domestic slavery.

Rather than discuss "Underground America" over coffee, Orner and I crossed the border into Mexico, an hour away, for lunch. In Presidio, Texas, we drove over the trickling Rio Grande -- where five miles of the border wall will soon appear on either side of the crossing -- to Ojinaga, Mexico. After a lunch of chicken fajitas, we drove back across the border. On the American side, we silently perched on a concrete bench while border officials searched my car. It was a strangely intimate moment to share with someone I hardly knew.

In the introduction to "Underground America," you write that there are 15 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. That's an incredibly large group.

Congress estimates that there are between 12 and 15 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., but the truth is that it's at least 20 million, we think. Every city, every little town in Iowa, all the meatpacking in this country, all the fruit picking -- it's all undocumented people.

So many of these stories are unbelievably nightmarish -- slave labor, sexual assault, riding in the back of a packed truck without bathroom access for days. Did everyone you interview have these kinds of experiences?

No. But everyone had some connection to the nightmare. To give you an example, one story that didn't make the book, that of a woman from the Hudson Valley in New York -- while we were interviewing her, she got a phone call. Her nephew had tried to cross over in the desert and was missing for five days. No one knew what happened to him. He was scheduled to arrive in Tucson or wherever at a certain date, and then he didn't show up. So you've got a missing nephew who may be dead in the desert, and you're on the phone in Hudson, N.Y.

So the issues are out there for most people in this situation. You're hard-pressed to find people who treat you wonderfully. There's this misnomer that they're here to steal our jobs and take our money. But the fact of the matter is, I didn't personally find any success stories.

Was it hard for your subjects to open up? You change their names, but there are a lot of details.

Right. The hardest thing, initially, was to gain people's trust. "Liso," the South African woman [who came to the U.S. on a missionary visa and mistakenly trusted the sponsors who promised to extend her status but instead let it lapse and forced her into domestic slavery] -- three of us interviewed her as a group. When we knocked on the door, she asked us 10 times if we were from Homeland Security. She asked in the middle of the interview, because she thought, Why are you asking all of these questions if you're not part of the government? She didn't trust us. Now she does. We went out, we had a meal, we spent a lot of time with her, and she started to trust us more. But there wasn't a reason to trust us at first.

The people we finally chose for the book were people who were very invested in having their story told publicly. They wanted to be heard in some way. And it should go without saying that we didn't pay anyone; it was all volunteer. In some cases, people did not want to talk. But I found, especially when there was an egregious human rights issue involved, people really did want to get that out, because they had no other way to tell that story.

They're frustrated by the injustice that they've already suffered. Like with "Olga" -- her daughter, who is also undocumented, is detained and is dying of AIDS. She has been chained to a bed, and the prison isn't giving her medicine. If you're "Olga," of course you want people to know that this is happening.

And these are people who live in the U.S., so they're accustomed to a society that has a relatively robust freedom of speech. So it's almost like, as I say in the book, what's more American than speaking? Ultimately, I think that's how they felt.

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