Ausencia Garza Will Make Things Better

On this monday morning in Immokalee, Ausencia Garza wakes up in one of three bedrooms in the trailer she feels blessed to have. Before the sun or her two children rise, she shuffles out to the faux-wainscoted kitchen in her nightshirt. From the fridge, Ausencia pulls a yellow plastic plate with patties of dough fanned out on it like sea biscuits. One by one, she rolls them out into tortillas and sets them on a squared iron skillet missing a handle. In a different pan, she breaks the casing of a chorizo sausage and begins frying it with thinly sliced potatoes. The smell of garlic and chili fills the home.

The AC unit sagging out of the living room window wheezes. It needs to be replaced, but there just isn’t money for it right now. Outside Ausencia’s kitchen, a cock—one of many that dart under and around the trailers of this mobile home park—announces impending daybreak, beating the first rays of dawn by half an hour.

The Garzas—Ausencia, her 11-year-old daughter, Crystal, and her 17-year old son, Primitivo—have a history that is much like that of the 27,000 other people who have made a permanent home of this agricultural outpost flanked by Florida swamp. Like so many people in town, Ausencia started her life in Mexico. And like most of the rest of the Mexicans, Guatemalans and Haitians who have set roots in Immokalee, she’s weathered a difficult journey so her family could have opportunities here. This is the story of a week in her life—and of those who live around her.

Around the same time Ausencia makes tortillas, some of Immokalee’s other immigrants sit in a parking lot outside La Fiesta No. 3, the third in a local chain of Mexican groceries. It’s one of many day labor pick-up spots in Immokalee where men and women begin to line up around 4 a.m. to fill the school buses headed to the fields. Planting season has just begun. The buses belong to contractors hired by growers to recruit day labor. They are painted red, green or white with farm and contractor names neatly lettered on the side: J Yazguire, D. Ramirez, R. Rodriguez, Famosa, A. Gonzalez & Sons.

"We’re waiting to work," says one man perched on a curb who refuses to give his name because he is not documented. "For whatever there is, wherever they take us." His face and chest have the dark thickness of skin that has spent a lifetime in the sun. "We came here without knowing anyone. We heard there was work." Three years ago the 42-year-old left the guerrilla-war-torn town of Huehuetenango, Guatemala. He traveled north by foot and bus along the great arc through Mexico, Texas, and south again to Immokalee.

"We had no work there," he says. "There was nothing to sustain our family. Not in Mexico, either." He sends money from his work in the fields back to the family he left in Guatemala. "It depends on what we can make," he says.

During winter and spring, the population of Immokalee nearly doubles as men like this come looking for work. They come to plant, maintain and eventually pick the tomatoes, chilies, melons and oranges that grow in the fields outside town.

From the open window of a passing car, the brassy horns of a mariachi song warble, distorted, through the morning mist. Nearby, a paunchy man with salt-and-pepper hair lowers himself carefully onto a parking barrier. He grabs a stiff right knee with both hands and bends it. By 6:30, the eastern sky glows cobalt and the last of the idling buses pull away from La Fiesta No. 3. The older man still sits in the lot.

Back at the Guadalupe Center, Ausencia pulls a mop out of a utility closet and talks about how she got here. She grew up in a small pueblo in Mexico where she had to quit school at seven when her father fell ill. She found work cleaning houses, cooking. As a teen-ager she got a green card and traveled north to find a better life. She settled in Texas, marrying a Mexican man she met there.

"He was good for four years," says Ausencia. But he changed. "He beat me when I was pregnant," she says.

She waited for things to improve, but the abuse grew more violent. The final assault happened one night around two in the morning. He hit her face. "I was covered in blood," she says. "And my face—I looked like a monster." He had broken her nose. Primitivo and Crystal, then small children, were in the room when it happened.

"I couldn’t let them see me like that," she says, beginning to cry. She says she prayed to God for help, for the strength to leave. She takes a deep breath and regains her composure. "I received support from Him to continue," she says, pointing up and managing a smile through the tears.

A brother in Plant City, Fla., sent for Ausencia and the two children. She was grateful to leave Texas, though she found there wasn’t much work for her in the new town.

"They told me they couldn’t hire me because I didn’t go to high school," she recalls. Years of domestic work left her with few employment skills and even less English. So Ausencia moved to Immokalee, where she lived with another brother and found work in the packing houses, packaging tomatoes during harvest season.

Soon Ausencia began suffering severe headaches. She went to a doctor at a local clinic. He told her to go to the hospital in Naples in an ambulance. There are two ambulances in all of Immokalee. "But I couldn’t afford it," she says. She asked a friend from church to take her. Before she left Immokalee, she blacked out. When she came to in a hospital room, she was disoriented and couldn’t remember anything. She had suffered a stroke. She was eventually moved to Tampa General Hospital because nowhere closer could take care of her.

At the time, Ausencia was in the 45 percent of Immokalee residents with no insurance coverage. That number is twice as high as most other parts of Collier County. And while Immokalee is home to less than a tenth of the county’s total population, the lack of access to primary care means it represents a disproportionate amount of preventable health problems—80 percent of lead poisonings, 46 percent of the hepatitis A cases, 47 percent of shigella (the bacteria that causes dysentery) infections, to name a few.

Doctors later told Ausencia the stroke was probably related to the years of head trauma from the beatings. Scared, alone, speaking almost no English, she prayed again.

"My kids took care of me, my family," she says. "I can work now." She smiles and wheels her yellow mop caddy out into a hallway where a line of preschoolers file into a classroom. Ausencia’s janitorial job provides stability and security she never had in agriculture. She hopes her children can do even better. "I want them to go to college." She works hard to take care of the Guadalupe Center facility, fully aware of the other options that draw so many migrants to Immokalee.

The fields of Immokalee lie just outside town in an area known as Devil’s Garden. Down one of the dirt paths off C.R. 846, a group of day laborers hook Styrofoam pallets of springy, green tomato seedlings to their waists. They move between mounded rows of dark, sandy dirt that have been covered in white tarps. Each column of plastic-capped dirt is punctured in two lines, like stitching from a sewing machine out of thread. In an hour, the small puddles of rain that have pooled on top of the tarp will disappear under the punishing sun. For now, the still-damp soil moves like wet snow underfoot.

Rosalia Morales, 24, pulls two seedlings out of her pallet—one in each hand—and plunks them down in two open tears on the row. She dunks them in with a little bouncing motion, ensuring the roots are covered in dirt. She steps left. Pulls two more seedlings. Sinks them in with a bounce. Step. Yank. Sink. Step, yank, sink. All the way down the 550-foot row.

The farm workers bend over like this all day without standing up straight, except to get another pallet. They do it for minimum wage and work irregular hours. During picking season, they earn an extra 40 cents for every bucket of tomatoes. A full bucket weighs 32 pounds.

Ovals of sweat appear on the backs and underarms of faded shirts. There are baseball caps—Angels, Braves. Some wear heavy work boots, some wear sneakers. All wear belts with hooks hanging off them to hang the foam grids of seedlings. They move like ants crawling down the rows, impossibly small against this expansive landscape.

To say that Immokalee’s migrant labor is undocumented is inexact. The labor itself is documented, though the laborers may not be. Fieldworkers are required to submit social security numbers with W-2 forms, even just for a day of piecework. They get paid by the day, and taxes are automatically deducted. If the Social Security Agency receives a bogus number from workers in the fields or anywhere else, the information is routed to a database called the Earnings Suspense File (ESF). The most recent data shows that $57.8 billion remains unclaimed in the ESF from the year 2003 alone. There’s no way to know what percent comes from migrant workers using false numbers, but the agriculture, service and restaurant industries account for the largest percentage of ESF filings. And unless someone claims the Social Security earnings from the ESF—which undocumented immigrants cannot do—the wages remain part of the Social Security fund.

In another season, the plants will be a few feet tall. After they’ve been picked clean of green fruit, the bare stalks will be uprooted, scooped up from the plastic beds, and the plants will be destroyed, the fields clear for the next year’s crops.

Ausencia and her children frequently spend evenings visiting other families in Immokalee. In the cinder-block home of her brother, Ausencia chats with the adults at the dining room table while Primitivo and Crystal play video games with their cousins. She listens to her sister-in-law, Delia Reyes, and her cousin, Dagoberto Martinez, discuss the future of Immokalee.

"I wish there was a big store; there are a lot of little places that take advantage of us," says Martinez. At the small Mexican groceries close to Immokalee’s trailer parks, a gallon of milk can be as much as $3.99. At the Wal-Mart on Tamiami Trail in Naples, a gallon of milk costs $3.12. To Immokalee’s fieldworkers, the difference is about 64 pounds of tomatoes. "Before it was cheaper, but we earned less," says Martinez, who has worked in the citrus groves since 1966. "If there was competition among the stores it would be good."

Reyes agrees. She wishes a Wal-Mart would open out here, adding jobs along with economic competition. "Here it’s all labor, farming," she says. "The only good thing we really have here is the education, the schools."

Primitivo is part of a Guadalupe Center initiative called Tutor Corps which employs high school students as mentors. It’s based on the notion that education is Immokalee’s best hope for breaking the cycle of poverty. Primitivo and 41 other tutors receive hourly pay to work with the kids at Pinecrest or with adults in vocational and English-as-a-second-language classes. The center also provides college counseling and $2,000 of scholarship money for each year a student tutors while in high school.

"I like it; it’s really fun," says Primitivo of tutoring the kids at Pinecrest. "A lot of them are getting better in math and reading. They have the simple stuff down; all they need is the details." He watches the progress of the children he tutors much like Ausencia watches his. "I’m just so proud of them," he says.

Primitivo is ranked second in his class and is in the middle of college searches right now. "I’m totally staying in Florida," he says. He wants to study Spanish, or world studies, or maybe environmental sciences. Whatever he does, he sees himself coming back to this place after college. "Immokalee needs a lot of help," he says. "I want to be here to help improve Immokalee."

Beyond Tutor Corps, other local groups like Redlands Christian Migrant Association offer daycare and before- and after-school programs, keeping kids out of the fields and in constructive environments. The Immokalee High School Migrant Center provides dental and vision screenings and extra mentoring to students who move with the crops. It helps kids like Crystal Garza who, after spending a summer with a farm-working family in Virginia, now receives personalized tutoring before school.

The goal of all these programs is to provide students the opportunity to focus on school so that they have future choices beyond agriculture. And many students are aware of the pressure.

"I want to prove people wrong," says 16-year-old Joane Pierre. "Just because you come from Haiti doesn’t mean you can’t go as far as people who have been in America a long time."

Pierre was a small child when her parents arrived from Port Au Prince with work visas. She taught herself English by watching American cartoons. Now Pierre is a sophomore at Immokalee High. She runs track and cross country, holding the school record for the two-mile race. She volunteers at the Guadalupe Center, plays soccer, roots with the pep squad and is a member of the Beta Club honor society.

"It was hard on my parents," says Pierre of her education. "They couldn’t help me out." Her mother works in the packing houses and her father works construction in Naples. He leaves around 4 a.m. to beat traffic, comes home around 5 p.m. and then starts work at his second job at the Immokalee air field. "When people say, ‘Go back to your country,’ or, ‘You don’t belong here,’" says Pierre, "most of the time, you’ll find me crying about it because I know what my parents went through to get here." Like so many of the immigrants who come to Immokalee, though, Pierre can put her parents’ grueling workload in the context of what they left behind. "Over here it’s better," she says. "You don’t have to worry about finding dead bodies in the street."

Culturally, Pierre is a model American teen-ager. She grew up here and barely remembers Haiti. But she is not legally a citizen, and she is the only member of her family still trying to get a Social Security number. Rites of passage like a drivers’ license or a high school job are largely out of reach. "There’s opportunities that come your way, but you can’t do it," says Pierre. While she continues fighting for firmer legal status, Pierre sees her education and a college degree as a way around those obstacles.

"I want to become a lawyer," says Pierre. "I believe in justice."

It’s a drizzly Wednesday night and no one else is coming to church.

Only the Garzas attend tonight’s bible study. They come once on Wednesday and twice on Sunday. Crystal disappears to a backroom to join the pastor’s wife and children. Down to Ausencia and Primitivo in the sanctuary, pastor Daniel Hernández stands at a microphone with a red electric guitar in hand and an amp at his side. Hernández’s post is mission work; the Baptist church brought him here from Mexico to minister to the community of Immokalee.

He plays a soft, folksy tune as the three sing a hymn:

Ausencia and Primitivo lean on each other in the pews. A few glittered, construction-paper snowflakes twist and swing on strings tied to ceiling tiles by an overhead AC vent.

After a few hymns they settle into a discussion of Kings 6:17—a passage in which the profit Elisha is surrounded by an army who would capture him and expel him from the land. Elisha’s servant is scared, but Elisha asks God, "Oh Lord, open his eyes so he may see." Suddenly, the servant sees divine chariots of fire surrounding them.

"He sees that there are problems, but he can see beyond that," explains the pastor.

"Así es," says Ausencia.