She Made It to the U.S. Only to Face Another Border

Alejandra grabs a seat off the aisle and stares out a window as her MTA bus begins its rush up the tree-lined streets and past the stately homes of Old Pasadena. Soon the homes will give way to suburban strip malls, spacious parks and family restaurants, and then, as the bus begins to fill, the strip malls will give way to shuttered crack houses and cluttered pawnshops.

For Alejandra, the 80-minute midafternoon ride from the three-story house she cleans in the suburbs to the one-room apartment she shares just west of downtown covers less than 40 miles, but the two places are worlds apart. In Pasadena, the lawns are manicured, the streets are spotless and the silence is deafening. Along West Adams Boulevard, grass is just a rumor, even the dying trees are covered with graffiti, and the first sound you hear after stepping from the bus is the loud thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of a hovering police helicopter.

Alejandra (not her real name) is one of the tens of thousands of undocumented women who move quietly between the opulence of Southern California’s best neighborhoods and the destitution of its overcrowded, gang-infested urban slums. Wavy, shoulder-length black hair frames her unlined face, accenting fiery dark-brown eyes. The 31-year-old Nicaraguan smiles constantly, a habit that makes her seem 10 years younger. She also laughs easily, though often at the wrong time, like when retelling a painful anecdote or recalling a sad story.

Officially, Alejandra and others like her don’t exist. Driven north from Latin America by war, poverty or simply the hope for a better future, they pay exorbitant prices to be smuggled into the country, only to go underground once they arrive, using phony documents to survive in a political climate that has made it clear they are not welcome.

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Sometimes even the people who pay them seem ambivalent about their presence.

“A lot of this work just wouldn’t get done [without her],� says the woman who hired Alejandra. “She’s very efficient. But it’s a Catch-22. Then you start going off into other areas, where it concerns health benefits.�

Yet in truth, it’s these women’s work diapering babies, scrubbing bathrooms and ironing dress shirts at a fraction of the minimum wage that makes being rich affordable. But while, on one level, maids have become a symbol of wealth, like luxury cars and designer clothing, two-income families and single parents are also turning to domestic help to deal with the added pressures of long workdays.

“It’s vital to the well-being of the economy. It’s vital to the way Los Angeles works today,� says Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, a professor of sociology at USC and an expert on paid domestic workers. “It allows a lot of people to get to work and do what they have to do there. It’s a misconception to think only the rich use domestic help.�

For her part, Alejandra says the job is merely helping her mark time until she can live an open life. After all, a former army lieutenant who once carried a loaded pistol to work isn’t likely to find fulfillment squeezing bursts of tile cleaner at the stubborn mildew in someone else’s bathroom.

“My goal now--and I see the possibility of achieving it--is to study and prepare myself for a good job in Mexico. As a secretary or something that I like,� she says in Spanish. “If I don’t study, I’m always going to be doing this.�

Those goals have changed in the four years since Alejandra left her homeland for Los Angeles. At first, she planned to work days, study English at night, and save enough money to return home and buy a house. But the cost of living here soon outpaced her meager income and that of her boyfriend, Cipriano, an undocumented Mexican army veteran who, until recently, worked two full-time minimum-wage jobs in a cookie factory and for a distributor of Mexican food to keep the couple and their 2-year-old daughter out of debt.

“Everyone comes to struggle, to make money like us,� Alejandra says. “But to make money, it’s a tremendous struggle. You have to fight for it.�

Sometimes the fight is rather one-sided. Alejandra’s first U.S. job was in a clothing factory, but when payday came, the checks didn’t, she says. It’s a ruse commonly used on undocumented immigrants, who may risk deportation if they file a complaint against their employer. Bitter but wiser, through a friend she landed a job as a domestic a month later.

The couple she worked for not only took her into their house, but they took her into the family as well, driving her to and from English classes--where she met Cipriano--taking her on family trips and making sure she saw a doctor when she got sick. In exchange, however, Alejandra was paid just $250 a week to care for their two children 24 hours a day, seven days a week--that works out to an hourly wage of $1.48, less than a third of the minimum legal wage.

Nevertheless, Alejandra says, it was a positive experience. “I was treated well,� she says. “Marvelously well.�

But two years ago, Alejandra and the woman she worked for gave birth within months of one another, and the stress of having two infants in the same house quickly wore down both sides. So her employers asked her to leave, eventually helping place her with a neighbor, the wife of a businessman, for whom she works 7 1/2 hours each weekday cleaning and caring for three young girls.

The house is elegant and old, with hardwood floors and visible cracks in the ceiling from the 1994 Northridge earthquake. But the home is neat, well-apportioned and even from the second floor you can’t see the edge of the property, so dense is the forest of the trees that cover the backyard.

No one in the house speaks Spanish, and Alejandra, despite her fitful attempts at learning the language, struggles with anything more than basic commands in English. So she passes most days with little more than her thoughts to keep her company.

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There’s a mind-dulling routine to the job--Monday is spent scrubbing and picking up the weekend’s mess, Tuesday is laundry day--that makes it as much a mental challenge as a physical one. Still, after spending hours on the bathroom floor scrubbing and hours more each week negotiating the house’s steep staircases, by Friday Alejandra’s knees are often as sore as those of a major league catcher’s.

In exchange, she’s paid $200 a week. Subtract from that bus fare, which can run as high as $21 a week, and it’s no surprise that she says she can’t get by on that. Recently she asked for a raise or a shorter workweek, eventually accepting the latter, which she hopes will give her time to work a second job.

Where before she had the run of the house, now she packs a lunch of rice and beans, some tortillas or maybe a sandwich because the refrigerator is off-limits. Nevertheless, Alejandra is quick to call her treatment excellent.

Many undocumented domestics would have trouble making that claim. Alejandra has friends who tell her they’ve been denied food or forced to sleep in an unheated garage without a blanket; others are violated physically by their employers.

Then there’s the infamous case of the Orange County housekeeper who missed her bus after English class one cold winter night. After walking for miles, she arrived at the home where she lived and worked just minutes after her 10 p.m. curfew. The family she worked for refused to answer her knocks at the door, forcing her to sleep outside in the rain.

Similar abuses take place all the time, says Cristina Riegos of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, which has been working to organize domestics since 1995. “There’s a tremendous amount of exploitation. People get paid half the minimum wage. There’s no job security. The way the industry is structured, the employers really don’t like to see themselves . . . as employers. The women have very little leverage.�

Recent scandals linking public figures such as former U.S. Senate candidate Michael Huffington, Gov. Pete Wilson and U.S. attorney general nominees Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood to undocumented domestic employees focused some attention on the plight of such workers, but abuses persist mainly because many domestics are so desperate they willingly trade their legal rights for a steady job.

Count Alejandra among this group. Sweating as she scrubs an upstairs bathroom, she recites a litany of frustrations with her job but ends by admitting that, all things considered, she’s happy here.

“I probably shouldn’t say this,� she confesses, “but before I had to wear an army uniform to work every day. Now I can wear my own clothes. Before I couldn’t live like I wanted. Now I can. Before, in Nicaragua, I felt a lot of pressure because of the economic situation. I don’t feel that now. I’m very comfortable with my life now.�

In the rainy summer months, the unpaved streets of Managua’s western neighborhoods turn to mud, while in the hot dry winters, wind blows the dirt through unscreened windows, leaving a fine layer of dust on everything. It was among that mud and dust that Alejandra grew up, the second of five children born to a supermarket janitor.

Her father left home when she was 3, and Alejandra didn’t have a permanent address until she was 21, moving from one rented house to another in barrios with names such as Santa Ana, Monsenor Lezcano and Batahola Notre, some of the poorest neighborhoods in Managua, the poorest capital in Latin America.

When she was 6, a series of massive earthquakes leveled the city, killing 10,000 and leaving 300,000 homeless. Six years later, the country erupted in revolution, and some of the fiercest urban fighting of the 18-month-long war took place in the western part of the capital where her family lived.

Although the war deprived Alejandra of her final year of high school, her family, like most poor families, embraced the victorious peasant-led Sandinista rebels, and she soon joined the movement, becoming an army officer and wearing a uniform and sidearm to her clerical job in a government ministry. But by 1993, five-digit inflation and a shortage of affordable consumer goods had made her monthly paycheck of 500 cordobas (less than $80) practically worthless, inspiring a biting type of gallows humor in Managua.

“How many Nicaraguans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?� one popular joke asked. “There aren’t any lightbulbs,� came the reply.

“First there was an earthquake, then a war, then the currency devaluation. I didn’t see any future in Nicaragua,� Alejandra says.

Two months after she began saving for the trip north, a cousin in Los Angeles offered to pay her way. The journey by bus and by foot was slow, but eventful: At times, she stayed in roach-filled hotels and ate in unkept restaurants, waiting for the road north to clear; other times she slept outside and went days without food, hiding from Mexican police and immigration officials who prey on Central American migrants.

“It took a lot of time, but I wouldn’t say it was difficult,� she says of the monthlong trip, which cost about $1,250. “We climbed mountains and hills and walked through fields. We walked much of the way. It wasn’t dangerous, but I was still frightened. Everyone was always saying, ‘There’s the migra [immigration official].’ �

Two years later, Alejandra would pay $5,000--half of it money she saved, the rest money she borrowed--for her mother and sister to make the same journey.

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The one-room West Adams apartment Alejandra shares with Cipriano, her mother, daughter and sister is smaller than the master bedroom she cleans five days a week. A crib, two beds and a small color television crowd the room, leaving no space for a kitchen table. So breakfast--as well as lunch and dinner--in bed is a daily event, not one reserved for birthdays and anniversaries, and making the 15-foot trip from one end of the room to the other requires steady concentration and a fine sense of balance.

This is where Alejandra spends most of her free time. Although she has several friends and even a few relatives in L.A., she’s so afraid of immigration officials that she rarely leaves home for anything other than work, an occasional weekend visit to the beach or trips to the neighborhood market.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Alejandra’s mother, a tiny but powerful woman who hides behind glasses and a serious demeanor, is sitting on a broken plastic chair just outside the unscreened front door, hoping for a breeze. The temperatures will reach into the high 90s on this day, and it’s much hotter inside the apartment, which rents for less than $400 a month.

After checking on her sleeping daughter, Alejandra picks her way between the beds and steps outside to talk with a friend without acknowledging her mother’s presence. The two would sit within inches of one another for more than hour, yet never exchange a glance, much less a word.

Less than two weeks later, the mother left in a huff, taking her teenage daughter with her. Alejandra smiles nervously in recounting their final argument, just the latest in a series of family disasters that has followed her to the United States. She still keeps in touch with another younger sister in Nicaragua, calling and writing frequently. She had planned to support her family by sending regular checks home, but the remittances are fewer and smaller than she had hoped. She’s lost her hard Nicaraguan accent, speaking now in the lazy, singsong-y Spanish common in Mexico.

The falling-out with her mother began almost a year ago, Alejandra says, after her mother quit a succession of jobs and eventually refused to work. So while Cipriano worked more than 90 hours a week, Alejandra’s mother refused even to care for her granddaughter, leaving the girl with a neighbor who charges Alejandra 50 precious dollars--more than a day’s pay--to baby-sit each week.

One day Alejandra took her daughter to work with her but sensed the toddler wasn’t welcome. So now she brings the girl along only in her thoughts.

“It’s ugly taking care of other people’s kids and feeding them when you don’t even know if yours is eating,� she says. “It feels ugly caring for other people’s children when I could be caring for my own. But I can’t.�

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The industrial brown paint of Alejandra’s unkept two-story stucco apartment complex is peeling off in chunks under the blazing August sun. Loud banda music blares from an upstairs unit as screaming children dart around the baked-dirt courtyard, producing a cacophony of noise and confusion that only adds to the desperation of Alejandra’s circumstances. Her smile fades, and she fidgets nervously when the conversation turns to her uncertain future.

A cut-rate lawyer failed in his attempt to win Alejandra political asylum, and she’s been ordered deported, an order she’s so far managed to avoid by moving every few months to stay ahead of the Justice Department. It’s a game she’s resigned to lose eventually. Surprisingly, she agrees in part with those activists who blame many of California’s economic and social woes on illegal immigration.

“I think that’s true,� she says. “There are laws in this country and you have to respect them. Some people come just to destroy, to kill. If you watch the news, all you hear is ‘this Hispanic who did this’ or ‘the Hispanic who killed this guy’ or ‘the Hispanic who did I don’t know what.’

“But imagine: If we go back to our countries, what are we going to do? Nothing. There are people who are worthwhile, who come to struggle to make themselves and the country better. And they struggle to make themselves better.�

For Alejandra, however, the struggle has become too much. She plans to follow Cipriano back to his village in central Mexico, maybe this year, maybe next. When they find work there, the pay will undoubtedly be less, but then so will the cost of living. And the schools, she’s certain, will be better on the other side of the border.

“The future. That’s all I think about,� she says. “You know, what am I going to do? It’s going to be better for the baby in Mexico. She’ll be able to study. And we’ll live legally there because I’ll be married to a Mexican.�

Tomorrow morning, however, Alejandra will get up before the sun does and prepare to cross a border of another kind. And along the way, she’ll watch the pawnshops give way to strip malls and the airy parks yield to leafy estates.