Lupe is a twenty-six-year-old woman from Mexico City. She has lived in Red Hook, New York, since September 2001, when she crossed the border at Brownsville, Texas, and came north to join her husband, Gabriel. Lupe and Gabriel are part of a wave of recent immigrants to New York’s Hudson Valley, agricultural and service-sector workers who have settled in the city of Poughkeepsie and many smaller surrounding communities in the past ten to fifteen years. Lupe left three children behind in Mexico: Jasmín, who recently turned nine, Gabriel Jr., who is six, and Carlos, who is five. The children are in the care of Lupe’s mother, who is forty-two and recently had another child of her own. Lupe works with her husband in a pizzeria in Red Hook and lives, along with Gabriel and four other men, in an apartment owned by the restaurant’s owner. They work six days a week, from 10:00 a.m., when the boss comes to pick them up, to 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., when he brings them home. They have one thirtyminute break in this twelve- or thirteen-hour day. The pizza kitchen is unbearably hot, says Lupe, and the boss and his wife constantly yell at their workers. Lupe and Gabriel have watched as several fellow workers, all undocumented immigrants, have been handed their last week’s pay and asked not to come back — so they are careful not to complain. Gabriel makes $350 a week, Lupe makes $300. This is good money, they insist: with it they can wire a few hundred dollars home each month. This money has allowed the extended family to stay afloat, and Lupe and Gabriel have been able to begin construction on a small cinder-block house they hope to live in upon their return. They call home weekly to speak to the children and to her mother. Although she has missed her children terribly, Lupe felt until recently that their situation was tenable. Lately, however, things at home have become chaotic. Her mother, in poor health and caring for her own newborn, is at her wits’ end trying to handle the responsibility of her three grandchildren. There have been serious problems with the construction of the house, and for the moment work has stopped. Lupe feels the time has come for her to go home, but week after week there are more expenses — her mother’s hospital bills, among others — and she cannot save enough money for the plane ticket to Mexico. She tells me she is growing more desperate to reunite with her children as each day passes.
