BonnerSprings.com

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series on the experiences and views of two undocumented brothers from Mexico who came to the United States in June 2007 to improve the lives of themselves and their families through better-paying jobs than those available to them in their hometown of Mexico City.

The American Dream it ain’t.

The recent experiences and string of bad choices by Efrain and Saul have brought them a hair’s breadth from living on the streets.

After living in a Kansas City-area shelter run by a religious organization for just more than one year, Efrain and Saul got themselves kicked out last week.

On a whim, the brothers decided to go to a bar after work on June 23, and despite going more than a year without a drop of liquor, they stayed there later than the shelter’s 9 p.m. curfew, which spells automatic expulsion. They continued drinking for the next four days.

As of Monday, they were still staying with a woman Efrain met at that bar, in an apartment in an old, poor neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan.

On Thursday evening, when I visited the old apartment, Saul was sleeping on the floor, wearing his paint-spattered work clothes with his T-shirt inside out and backwards. Efrain met me at the door and appeared to have been drinking. We woke up Saul, who apologized repeatedly for his state and said he was “crudo,” or hung over. He’d been drinking rubbing alcohol, which apparently was the idea of an acquaintance, Pancho, who was also there at the apartment.

They were hanging out in the unlit living room, with 1980s hair-rock playing on the stereo. Pancho was another immigrant day laborer whom they’d met at the shelter. He wore a heavy-metal band T-shirt and offered me some of the rubbing-alcohol-and-cola drink from a large plastic cup. When I demurred he said the concoction was “punk,” and asked in English whether I liked to “rock out.”

Saul had gotten $100 stolen out of his wallet Monday night, he said, while sleeping in that same living room. He was largely incoherent, and neither brother could tell me what had prompted the jag.

The scene Thursday in that apartment would have confirmed the ugliest notions of the most racist, anti-immigrant zealot: children. A child of the woman whose apartment we were in, and another, who was her granddaughter about the age of 4, came in and out of the room while the adults drank and smoked and the stereo blared hard rock. The woman, who spoke little enough Spanish that the brothers and I could talk candidly in front of her, left after several minutes.

Saul and Efrain said they’d talked to their employer recently, for whom they’d been working construction on houses for the last couple of months. He’d told them they could keep their jobs if they showed up Friday and quit drinking. They hadn’t been working since the previous Monday.

They didn’t go to work Friday, but when I called Efrain on Monday this week, he sounded sober and said they did in fact have their jobs back, and were to start again Wednesday. As a condition of returning to work they would be attending regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he said, a few times a week. Efrain said Saul was better, and that they would find their own apartment and move out soon from where they’ve been staying

Post a comment

BonnerSprings.com doesn't necessarily condone the comments here, nor does it review every post.
Read our full policy. Also, read about banned accounts and harassing comments.

Requires free BonnerSprings.com registration.