UNDERGROUND EXISTENCE for immigrants working in U.S.
By Ned Glascock
(Raleigh, North Carolina) News & Observer
Time was running out. In the dusty yard outside her concrete-block home in an Otomí Indian village in the mountains of central Mexico, Cristina del Plan was openly suspicious of the two gringos asking so many questions about her dead son.
The sun was falling, the clouds were readying to cut loose with another rainy-season deluge and our little rental car with the golf cart tires didn’t look like it could make it back down the mountain to our base in the town of Pahuatlan once those steep, rutted roads had turned to mud.
Photographer Robert Miller and I were in Mexico for The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., reporting on the new immigration pipeline linking Latin America and North Carolina. The result: a newspaper series titled “Underground in Carolina.”
Trying to win over del Plan, Miller and I pulled out our N&O business cards, our reporters’ notebooks imprinted with the company name and eventually our passports, which she scrutinized far more closely than any customs official in Mexico City. No, we said, we are not government agents, we are journalists from the United States, from Carolina del Norte, where your son died. We want to write about him.
At last, with the help of a neighbor fluent in both Spanish and del Plan’s native language, Otomí, she relented. Her story — of a son’s quest to pull his family out of poverty, and of his mysterious death in North Carolina — played an important role in our two-day series.
In recent years, as fast-rising numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants have settled in North Carolina, The N&O has written small chunks of the broader immigration story: the rising need for classes in English as a second language; government agencies’ struggles to overcome the language barrier; and increasing crimes against immigrants, among others.
But the paper had never done the big-picture story. And by reporting only what was happening in the Tar Heel state, we were missing half the story.
A viable community
With “Underground in Carolina,” we set out to explain why a place like North Carolina, for generations dominated by whites and blacks, suddenly was attracting so many Hispanic immigrants.
Day One of the series showed the human side of immigration: how the desire to build a better life by chasing greenbacks in North Carolina tears at the fabric of family as well as entire communities in Mexico. At the same time, two places that had never known immigration — Mexico’s Pahuatlan region and Durham, N.C. — had suddenly become inexorably linked.
In Durham, we showed how the new immigrants have become an increasingly vital and visible part of the community, while paradoxically living an underground existence because so many are undocumented.
On day two, the series delved into the economic underpinnings of North Carolina’s increasing reliance on immigrant labor. The story explained how legal loopholes and weak enforcement by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allow employers using immigrant workers to avoid responsibility, in essence hiring undocumented immigrants with a sly wink.
In reporting the story, it quickly became evident that we couldn’t rely on the usual officials and data sources. Large-scale immigration to North Carolina was so new that official numbers were worthless. Anecdotal evidence — of entire neighborhoods becoming Hispanic seemingly overnight, of an explosion in Hispanic businesses — made U.S. Census Bureau statistics on Hispanic residents and INS estimates of illegal immigrants seem laughable.
That said, we did spend considerable time interviewing INS enforcement agents, immigration attorneys and political leaders. Also, we targeted business people who rely on immigrant labor; most wanted nothing to do with the article. In addition, we filed Freedom of Information Act requests on all INS workplace raids carried out in North Carolina (surprisingly few, as it turned out.)
The best sources, of course, turned out to be the immigrants themselves.
The first challenge was to decide how to identify undocumented immigrants in the newspaper. The N&O’s policy is to name names in all but the most unusual of circumstances.
The question was given careful consideration in light of the unintended consequences of a recent article by an N&O features writer, a well-written and moving profile of an undocumented Mexican immigrant. The article used his full name, photos and where he worked. Following publication, INS agents raided the store and deported the immigrant, along with several others.
For “Underground in Carolina,” N&O editors decided that winning the trust of undocumented immigrants was crucial to telling their stories — stories we almost certainly would not get if we insisted on printing complete names.
In some cases, we used only the first names of undocumented immigrants living in Durham. Of the dozens of people in the series, only three had made-up names, and they were identified as such. They were a husband and wife and a friend of the family, who grew so fearful of exposure that allowing them to invent names was the only way to keep them in the story.
In contrast to our photos from Mexico, all pictures of immigrants in Durham were shot in shadow, underscoring the theme of living an underground existence.
The next task was identifying immigrants to interview. Local Latino leaders were reluctant to help after the INS raid. Working independently, we wound up with a story that surprised even leaders with strong ties in the Hispanic community. Miller and I spent weeks in low-income Hispanic neighborhoods, building trust with immigrants, learning about their lives, their families in Mexico, their dreams.
It was an exercise in patience. The immigrants had come to Durham to work, and their schedules meant that Miller and I devoted many nights and weekends to the project. Frequently, people failed to show for interviews when an unexpected chance to work overtime arose, a friend got arrested or a beat-up car broke down. Most did not have telephones, so all arrangements were made in person.
Eventually, Miller and I settled on a group of immigrants from Pahuatlan, Mexico, a traditional small town northeast of Mexico City. Before leaving for Mexico, we collected the names of the men’s family members and directions to their homes in Pahuatlan (often involving footpaths crisscrossing the mountainside). And we asked them to write letters we could give to their loved ones.
Once in Pahuatlan, we simply tracked people down and did the interviews. Townspeople were surprised by this pair of Spanish-speaking gringos –— one white, one African-American – who knew all their relatives in North Carolina. They treated us like family. By the end of the trip, complete strangers – mothers, sisters and young wives – were running up to us in the cobblestone streets with letters to take back to their sons, brothers and husbands in Carolina del Norte.
Upon publication, policymakers, academic researchers, business leaders, Hispanic leaders and immigration activists of different persuasions called “Underground in Carolina” a groundbreaking effort to explain the consequences of immigration in North Carolina.
