The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (29 page)

Utterly wedded to a rigid market ideology—to a belief system that holds that whatever outcomes the market, left to its own devices, generates must be right—the Social Darwinists of modern politics simply cannot fathom why a society would need to intervene to break cycles of poverty that, again by definition, are caused by
personal failings. Once upon a time, the absolute social mobility that they believed produced fair economic outcomes
might
have been the case for certain groups in society. Not for enslaved African Americans, clearly; not for Native Americans kicked off their land; not for women; almost certainly not for poor white sharecroppers. . . . But possibly for other non-share-cropping white males. Yet, even by the logic of that truncated definition of “society,” today clearly America is not a land that produces equal opportunities for all to excel. In fact, a slew of recent studies have found that Americans born into poverty move up the income ladder less frequently than their peers do in areas of the world such as Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Canada, France, and many other advanced industrial democracies; and that the incomes of children born into poverty end up more closely resembling their parents’ income than is the case elsewhere. The reports come not just from liberal academics and think tanks, but also from establishment institutions such as the Boston branch of the Federal Reserve, and government data-collecting agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On measure after measure, social mobility in the United States has fallen off from where it was in previous eras; and, as worrying, a host of other countries that used to trail America in terms of the opportunities they afforded the impoverished amongst their citizenry now stand out as providing increased levels of opportunity.
²⁵

For a country built on notions of self-improvement, home to millions of immigrants and their descendants—who came, and come, to a country they believe gives them opportunities to succeed that they would have nowhere else on earth—that curtailment of opportunity at the bottom of the economy is peculiarly devastating.

Today, the scale of inequality, and the concentrated nature of poverty, ossify rather than free up society. They lock huge numbers of people into place. And condemn cities such as Detroit, towns such as Caldwell, and numerous villages and informal settlements around the country to near-certain decline and economic depression.

LIVING LIKE KINGS

These days, many of the poorest workers are undocumented migrants, the tier of the population most despised by the broader community and most exploited by employers but, ironically, the part of the population one can argue has the most in common with the Horatio Alger types so celebrated by Santorum and others. After all, these are the men and women who decided economic conditions in their home countries were too desperate, and who made the decision to better themselves, albeit without legal documentation backing them up, by crossing over into America to look for work and prosperity. They come seeking pavements plated with gold; frequently, instead, they find base metal.

They are women such as Maria, who, as recounted earlier in the book, fled Mexico after one of her daughters was shot dead, and who ended up homeless in Albuquerque, going from house to house with her youngest surviving daughter, begging for food. Eventually, a local church took pity on them, and found them a family who would give them shelter in exchange for them looking after an elderly man who lived in the house. They gave her food, and, sometimes, a few dollars. But what they didn’t give—and she couldn’t ask for—was a salary. Years later, she was still working as a live-in home help, for another family. In theory she
was
now paid a salary, $8 an hour for thirty-three hours per week. In practice, however, she was on call twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week, putting her far below the hourly minimum wage.

Fifty-one years old, Maria had no savings, no bank account, no pension, no home of her own, nothing to call hers but a few outfits of clothing that she had picked up cheap from yard sales, or that employers had given to her once they had decided to no longer wear them.

Or they have stories similar to another woman named Maria, and her husband, a couple who had lived in Phoenix, Arizona, for years,
but who moved out of the state in 2010 following passage of the state’s SB 1070, one of the country’s harshest anti-illegal-immigrant laws. Fearing that they would be either harassed or deported, Maria’s husband, who had worked as an equipment operator on building sites before losing his job during the recession, packed their furniture into an old truck, and drove his family’s possessions to a small apartment in a run-down barrio in south Albuquerque. There the couple now lived with their two daughters. In a good month, he might make $800 painting houses and doing other casual work. Five hundred went straight away to pay the rent. They received $366 in food stamps for their daughters, who were born in the United States, and the children were on Medicaid. But for the adults, there was no aid, no medical care, no relief except for the charity food that Maria picked up on Thursdays from a local church.

As mentioned earlier in the book, the presence of millions of such workers in America has made discussions of anti-poverty programs more complicated than was the case during the 1960s, when far fewer undocumented immigrants beat the path to America. Absent a pathway to legality, absent a comprehensive immigration reform being implemented, these workers will continue to exist in the shadows. And, in those shadows, they will continue to be horrendously maltreated.

Half a mile south of El Paso’s old, brick-and-stone downtown, Ninth Avenue runs along the railway tracks that abut the Rio Grande. South of the river is Juarez, Mexico. The two international bridges that daily disgorge thousands of visitors, migrant workers, and would-be immigrants, do so onto Ninth Avenue. All along that street, in plain view of the barbed-wire-surrounded Department of Homeland Security compound, migrants sleep, their meager possessions hung in plastic bags from the low-hanging branches of trees planted into the sidewalk; and, come midnight, they wake up to seek out the street’s ubiquitous labor contractors. If they’re lucky, they get hired for the day, are put onto trucks at 3 A.M., and then are
driven to fields throughout south Texas and southern New Mexico. By daybreak, they are hard at work.

And so, it makes sense that it is on Ninth Avenue that Carlos Marentes, a onetime political cartoonist who migrated to the United States in the mid-1970s, runs a community center for impoverished farm laborers, some of them legal, many others in the country without documentation. There, they can get a free meal, a place to sleep, some hand-me-down clothes, and a bathroom. Evenings, before the midnight stampede, dozens of men, women, and children doze back-to-back in its halls and offices. Some of the migrants have lived out of the center for years.

“We provide services here,” said Marentes in a soft, gentle voice. “All kinds of services. From access to education, problems associated with becoming unemployed, and that the family has nothing to eat or they’re facing eviction. Referrals to other agencies and other services.”

For Marentes, the ongoing border wars, the brutality of the language surrounding the immigration debate, largely missed the point: His clients were doing work that others didn’t want to do, for wages others wouldn’t accept, and not only did they face ongoing hostility simply for being in the country, but, increasingly, they also found their wages bid down because so many agricultural jobs were now done by machines. “You have an oversupply of labor,” Marentes explained. “That is a condition the employers take advantage of. The result is the farm workers are the poorest of all the workers.”

Seasonal agricultural workers in the El Paso region, estimated Marentes, earned on average a mere $6,000 per year, putting them so deeply into poverty that merely reaching the federal poverty line was an all-but-impossible dream.

Septuagenarian Fidencio Fabela, who lived in Marentes’s community center for years, sleeping on whatever few square feet of floor space was available, before moving into a small apartment, and who still routinely got up in the middle of the night to hire himself
out to contractors, explained it this way: “I work in anything from the chili harvest to preparing the lettuce harvest, and in the cotton fields cleaning the rows of leaves.” A wizened, toothless, short-of-stature man, with the wrinkled face of someone who has spent decades working under the hot sun, speaking in Spanish he added that, “at this age, I don’t have steady work. I just get temporary jobs. I get $8 per hour. The work starts around six, and goes to two or three in the afternoon.” Onion harvests, he declared, were the hardest. “You’re bent over. People in that harvest don’t last. It gets so bad that after a little while you can’t sit down. There’s no remedy. Within a short time you experience a lot of back pain.”

Laurentino Loera, a large man in his late fifties, with a hangdog mustache and kindly, sympathetic eyes, had a similar story. A seasonal worker who grew up as a
campesino
in Mexico, he spent his evenings sleeping at the center—he had lived there on and off since it had first opened—and his days looking for work.

Autumn opportunities for Laurentino were few and far between. Some days before I met him, he had had to pawn his only possession, a small, portable, black-and-white television, in order to get money for food. And, when he did find work, picking chilis, Laurentino would bring in only about $30.

I lived in Juarez for a while. Then I lived in San Antonio. I’ve been here [at Sin Frontera] on and off since it’s been in existence, since 1994. We just sleep in the common areas—brothers. We all sleep there. I keep my possessions in the top room. Before, I used to have some things. At this point I don’t have any things. It’s been two years since I’ve been separated from my wife. I just exist. As far as clothes, I have a few, maybe six or eight changes of clothes. I have no savings. I’ll look for some work; I’ll find some work at some point. We try to figure out how to survive. Before, I used to travel north to look for work during this period of slowdown. I’ve gone through different states in between the harvests. Where I used to work, they’re not hiring Mexicans anymore—they mainly hire people from the U.S. now.
At this point, I’m waiting for the end of the year, for the next opportunity to work. I’m looking forward to work. In the meantime, I’ll make do.

How will you live if you survive long enough to reach retirement age? I asked him tentatively. He laughed, a deep, full-throated laugh. “Like a king,” Laurentino answered, and chuckled again at the naïveté of my question.

CONCLUSION

In early twenty-first-century America, increasingly the visual boundaries of poverty have blurred. A middle-class African American community might have beautiful homes but have been devastated by predatory lending. A suburb of Las Vegas might look like a commercial for a sunny tomorrow, but in fact be home to a calamitous concentration of downward mobility. An upper-middle-class widow, bankrupted by her dying husband’s healthcare bills, might be on food stamps. A church deacon, recently made unemployed, might be skipping meals as he tries to keep his home.

No longer constrained by boundaries of geographic region, ethnicity, urban neighborhood, or history, poverty—given free rein in large part by the housing collapse, by cascading unemployment and underemployment, and by the exorbitant cost of healthcare—is showing up around the country.

The older, more ingrained hardship described so vividly by Michael Harrington in 1962 is also still alive and well, in devastated urban centers and isolated rural communities, in the shabbily constructed, often illegal, colonias lived in by large numbers of undocumented migrants and in manufacturing regions left to sink in an era of outsourced jobs.

Taken as a whole, poverty now afflicts tens of millions of Americans. Too often their stories have been ignored. In the preceding pages, I have sought to present their voices, to bring out of the silent shadows
the experiences of these millions of men, women, and children. In the pages to come, I shall detail a set of policies intended to reverse the country’s shocking slide toward mass economic insecurity.

That a new societal assault on poverty, a War on Poverty Mark II, if you will, is needed has, I trust, been established by the stories in the first part of this book, as has the necessity of a concentrated effort against the political and economic conditions that generate chronic, mass insecurity. That such an undertaking can succeed will, I hope, now be shown.

PART TWO

Building a New and Better House

INTRODUCTION

WHY NOW?