Hard Landing
By Frank Clancy
Photo by Jonathan Barkat
(page 3 of 6)
Lole’s mother, Guadalupe, calls him mi muchachito, my little boy. Lole’s cousins and friends, she tells us, had beguiled him with tales of how wonderful life is in the United States. “When he arrived,” she says, “he found out it was not as simple as they told him. It was very difficult to find a job.”Guadalupe was seven months pregnant when Lole fell. “I was so worried I didn’t sleep for days and nights,” she tells Laura and me. “It was very difficult, and still is very difficult. We want him here.”
But they are also grateful. How could they not be? Their son was standing on a small platform alongside Juan Antonio when they fell. Juan died; Lole lived. “It’s a miracle that Lole’s alive,” Marcelo says.
“The people who leave, they’re not criminals,” he adds. “They want to work. My son is not a criminal. All he wanted to do was work. He wanted a better life.”
Guadalupe is proud of her son. “He really had to fight to get a job,” she says.
Juan Antonio Rangel and Mariana Mosqueda Barrón had been in love for about a year when she got pregnant, in the spring of 2003. She was 16 years old. In the colloquial language of Mexico, she “was stolen”; by custom, Juan Antonio went to visit her family to seek a blessing of sorts. Soon Mariana moved in with the Rangels in San José de la Luz. At 17, Juan Antonio was working as a truck driver, delivering construction supplies. The pay was decent—he was making about 1,200 pesos a week (approximately $110), Mariana recalls—but he worked 70 hours a week.
Mariana gave birth to their daughter, Marianita, in February 2004. She and Juan Antonio were married the following January, in a small church down the hill from the Rangel compound. They held the reception in Don Yeyo’s courtyard.
Mariana remembers the exact date Juan Antonio left for the United States: March 4, 2005. Like his mother, she did not want him to go. “We all cried,” Mariana recalls.
Juan Antonio was setting out to cross the border for the first time. His father, on the other hand, had tried numerous times, with little success. In Mexico, Nestor Rangel says, people tell stories about mistreatment and abuse by Border Patrol agents, but in his experience they’ve always been professional and even courteous. On several occasions, he’s had cordial conversations with agents, asking them, “Why don’t you just let me through? All I want is to work.”
“This is our work,” they respond. “Not to let you across.” It’s an answer Nestor Rangel respects.
Nestor and Juan Antonio took a bus to Ciudad Camargo, Mexico, Nestor says, across the river from Rio Grande City, Texas, where they stayed in a hotel, waiting for an opportunity to cross. On their first attempt, the Border Patrol came, and their coyote fled. They turned back without reaching the United States.
The second time, Nestor and Juan Antonio tried to cross near McAllen, Texas, 60 miles northwest of Brownsville. Once across the border, Nestor tells me, they walked for a couple of days, then hitchhiked to Houston. From there, they took a bus to Florida.
Mariana waited two weeks before hearing from her husband. When he called, Juan Antonio told her that he fell in the river while crossing; the coyote, she says, locked them in a room for three days without food and water. “He used to tell me he thought it was the end,” Mariana says. “He told me that it was very bad. He almost died.”
Nestor and Juan Antonio spent several months in Florida, working construction. By the time they paid for rent, food, and long-distance phone calls, there wasn’t much to send home. In Dallas, Lole, too, struggled. Then all three heard through relatives about work in Denver, installing warehouse shelves. When that job was nearly finished, the company said there was more work at a warehouse in Hopkins.
Supervalu’s distribution center in Hopkins is a sprawling complex that straddles Highway 169 just south of Excelsior Boulevard near downtown. The facility contains 1.67 million square feet of warehouse space—about 38 acres. It has about 200 loading docks.
With some 2,500 retail stores, including the Cub Foods chain, the Eden Prairie-based company is the third-largest food retailer in the United States. It reported net earnings of $206.2 million in fiscal 2006, on sales of $19.9 billion, a narrow 1.04 percent profit margin. With a profit margin like that, efficiency is crucial. That requires ample storage space and automated access. When Lole and the Rangels came to Minnesota in September 2005, Supervalu was in the process of expanding and upgrading 580,000 square feet of warehouse space, with plans to automate many functions. (A company spokesperson declined a request to tour the warehouse, citing company policy, safety, and competitive reasons.) but lole and the Rangels weren’t working for Supervalu. The grocer had hired Kraus-Anderson, the Minneapolis-based construction giant, as general contractor for the warehouse project. Kraus-Anderson had hired Witron, based in Arlington Heights, Illinois, to handle the remodeling. Witron hired Nedcon, a Dutch company with offices in Ohio, to design and supply a shelving system. Nedcon hired Carolina Installers, which is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, to install the shelves.
Founded in 1992, Carolina Installers inhabits an odd corner of American industry: it does nothing but install warehouse shelves for companies like Supervalu and Ikea. To owner Larry Hicks, though, “It’s like any other business. You need people to build houses. You need people to build roads. We just happen to build warehouse shelves.”
In 14 years of business, Hicks figures, the company has installed about 650 shelving systems in 30 states. He runs three to five crews at a time, with as many as 90 workers.
The Supervalu project was huge—the largest Carolina Installers had ever done. Hicks’s crew of about 30 men worked 60 hours a week for six months. Carolina built the “mini-load” part of the system, for smaller items rather than full-size pallets.
The work requires a certain amount of precision. But, Hicks says, “We’re not talking rocket science. We’re talking nuts and bolts.” Workers are, in essence, assembling giant erector sets.
Most of the crew came from Mexico and Costa Rica. It’s common for employees to move from job to job, city to city, Hicks says. They are a new type of migrant laborer, following the schedules of industry rather than the rhythm of harvests.
“I can’t find Americans to do the work,” claims Hicks. “The workforce in America—the labor workforce—is awful. It’s almost impossible to find people to do the work you need to do. We survive as a country because of the work immigrants do. It’s not a matter of pay. It’s a matter of doing the work.”
When he does hire Americans, Hicks says, they work for a short time and quit. Without immigrant labor, he figures he’d have to cut back to a 10-man operation, instead of hiring 40 or 50 at a time.
