Viva Mexico: What Working in a Kitchen Taught Me About Mexican Immigration

I walked in to my first professional kitchen at the tender age of thirty-five. I was six weeks in to culinary school when the record label I’d been working for had just gone out of business. I got a job as a prep-cook at a boutique catering company around the corner from my apartment in Carroll Gardens. When I arrived I was told to ask for Eduardo, the head chef. He looked to be about my age, spoke good English with a thick Mexican accent and I could tell that he was too busy to spend five minutes acclimating me to his kitchen. He was friendly, with a pronounced weariness about him and his body language told me he’d had this introductory conversation with eager/over-entitled culinary students about 1,345,745,323 times. “Go change your clothes in the bathroom and then go to the walk-in and find the big bucket of onions. Peel them all and then tell me when you’re done.”

I did as I was told. I stood at my assigned station, clad in my bright white Culinary School chef’s coat and toque, houndstooth chef’s pants and relatively expensive black slip-on Hush Puppies. I initially avoided buying Crocks, for fear that I’d look like that asshole wearing crocks. But, I soon learned that there is no greater friend to a kitchen worker’s feet than the humble Crock. I spent the entire morning peeling onions. It is exactly the kind of job a head chef gives to an inexperienced prep-cook on his/her first day in a kitchen. A job that has an upside (i.e. all of the onions are peeled and ready to be broken down in myriad ways), it will take a long time (so the head chef won’t have to converse or engage with this pleb again for a while), and carries almost no risk of failure.

The kitchen was electric with activity. Pots and pans littered the stove-top. A five gallon cauldron of soup simmered, vegetables were charring on a cast-iron grill while meats hissed and seared in a pan. A heavy set guy was assembling fruit platters, pecan short-bread cookies were cooling on parchment-lined sheet-pans and two guys were wheeling racks filled with food out of the kitchen and into a van. Rising above the din was the omnipresent sound of DJ Alex Sensation spinning Latin dance and pop hits on La Mega, New York’s most popular Spanglish radio station. I observed all of this while silently peeling onions.

After four hours or so, I was invited to eat a “family” meal with the rest of the kitchen staff. I’d been too nervous to tell anybody that I was vegetarian, so I prepared myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and made small talk with some of the guys. I immediately noticed that the crew was divided into two camps; Mexicans and gringos. The Mexicans comprised of Eduardo, Mateo and Orlando. Mateo had a young, kind, boyish face. I had seen him working next to Eduardo at the other end of the kitchen so assumed he was 2nd in command. Orlando was the mischievous dishwasher. He spoke no English at all, but I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was funny, keeping the other two hombres in a near constant state of laughter.

During my first couple of weeks on the job, I tended to spend most of my time chatting to the other gringos. The kitchen was aligned so that Eduardo, Mateo and Orlando worked together near the stove, oven and sink while the prep guys were stationed at the front near the walk-in refrigerator. I spoke to the guys in my immediate vicinity, we’d bullshit about food, music, sports and pop-culture. We worked long, hard hours on our feet and the chit-chat made the time pass quicker. At some point Mateo was moved to the pastry station immediately to my right. He had envious knife skills, was a gifted baker and possessed an artist’s eye for detail. Everything he made or plated looked beautiful. A simple garnish here, a clever splash of color there; subtle adjustments to the way the food was positioned on the plate would elevate a dish in seconds.

We hit it off quite quickly. I lacked his skill and experience but he could see I was trying hard and that I cared about my work. He would lend a hand when I needed it and was quick to dispense advice when called upon. I learned that he lived in Bay Ridge near where I had once lived. He was married with a baby at home. He was Eduardo’s nephew, though they were close enough in age to be more like brothers. The two of them had grown up together on a family farm in Puebla but when opportunities disappeared, they’d made their way to the US in an attempt to find work and make enough money to send home to their families.

I started eating lunch with Mateo, Eduardo and Orlando. Initially, Eduardo and I chatted mostly about the work that needed to be done. He had a lot of responsibility, received precious little respect or help from management and appreciated that I was willing to let him vent. I worked slower than he would have liked, but I always stayed until the job was done. My primary role became prepping and making huge batches of soup that the company sold to a handful of local markets. I was charged with cooking fifty gallons of soup a week. A gargantuan task for somebody with my lack of experience (imagine spending eight hours just peeling, dicing, slicing and chopping vegetables — let alone cooking anything). But Eduardo taught me how to work more efficiently, how to stay organized, how to carry five gallons of hot soup without spilling it, how to commit the taste of the recipes to memory so that I could make the soups taste exactly the same way every time.

We became close enough that he felt comfortable talking to me about how he’d crossed in to the US illegally, hidden in a truck with a large group of people (his wife among them) at the Arizona border. It was a terrifying ride followed by an even more terrifying walk through the desert. He made his way through the south, eventually landing in Brooklyn. He spoke no English, got a job as the dishwasher at the catering company he still worked at and managed to make his way up to head chef in ten years. He learned to speak English, had two kids and acclimated to life in New York as best he could. He told me that his existence had become unsustainable in Puebla. Work had dried up, there was no money to be made. Word came down that for a price, one could be smuggled across the border where opportunities were plentiful. He was accustomed to hard work for very little pay, so the prospect of working long hours was not daunting. He’d heard he could make as much in a day working in the US as he could in a week at home. So he made the journey. This was a year before 9/11, when traveling between the two countries was much easier, before the fear-mongers made boogie men out of hard working people like himself who were living in the States illegally.

Eduardo learned quickly how difficult life was in New York. While it was true that he made more money in a day than he could make in a week back home, the cost of living was so much higher that it made no difference. He had no money, a wife and two kids to support and no access to the services that most of us rely on. He couldn’t see a doctor or get a driver’s license. Moving out of New York (or even the apartment he had) was near impossible as he had no documentation. It was very hard to find somewhere to live with no references, no way to prove he was working or that he had an income. Once 9/11 happened, everything changed for the worse. He could no longer travel back and forth to Mexico, so hadn’t seen his parents or extended family in over a decade. He wanted to go back home, but his daughters, American citizens by birth, were getting a good education in New York and he didn’t want to disrupt their lives. He was faced with very difficult decisions, living in constant fear of being deported, all the while holding down a good job, working six long days a week.

I don’t mean to suggest that Eduardo didn’t invite these problems into his reality. He, Mateo and Orlando all entered the country illegally. And while they’re able to enjoy some of the privileges of living in New York City (free public schools for their kids, abundance of industries willing to pay undocumented workers in cash), they didn’t risk their lives crossing the US/Mexican Border because they wanted to engage in criminal behavior. People leave their homes, families and everything they’ve ever known because they feel they have no choice. They are no longer able to put food on the table so risking everything to try to right the ship feels like the only way forward.

This is a point that seems to get totally whitewashed from the media and political discussions around immigration. Donald Trump was born on third base. His father, Fred C. Trump (the C stands for Christ, no kidding), was a wealthy real estate developer who amassed an estimated fortune between $250 million and $300 million. Fred lent Donald money to get started on his own. His Manhattan real estate development aspirations were enabled by the “small loan” of a million dollars that his father gave to him. He has never had to worry about going hungry or not being able to find work. Opportunities have always been available to him because of his wealthy family.

All of us who were born or raised middle-class in the United States have won the genetics lottery. We are all extraordinarily fortunate to have been conceived and delivered in a country where food is plentiful, where plumbing, power, high-speed internet, cheap gasoline and cheap Chinese goods are abundant. The US has a surplus of natural resources coupled with the military and economic might to negotiate the best deals with countries who possess those resources we don’t grow or mine, but want access to. If America’s fortunes change, you can bet there will be a sudden rise in the availability of undocumented American immigrants washing dishes, busing tables and picking fruits and vegetables in Canada and Mexico. This is why humans occupy most of planet earth. For millennia we have traversed the globe in search of more food, more resources, more opportunities to work, hunt, mate and procreate.

Driving seventy-five miles-per-hour on the highway is against the law, but most of us do it. It doesn’t make us deviants or criminals. Climbing over a wall or driving incognito over an international border is surely a higher crime than speeding, but it doesn’t mean those doing so are criminals. In my experience, the opposite holds true. People in as vulnerable position as America’s undocumented workers are, are the least likely to draw attention to themselves. They work very long hours at very difficult jobs for very little pay in the hopes of moving up the ladder, making a decent living and either finding a way to become permanent citizens of the US or to be able to afford to move back to their homelands with enough money saved to start anew.

Mateo and Orlando both took the latter route. Mateo now lives in Mexico City and has his own business. Orlando returned home to reunite with his wife and children (who he had not seen in over five years) and began attending law school. Maybe, if the headlines weren’t so unfriendly and scary to guys like them, they’d park their sizable talents in the US and continue to contribute positively to American society.

Eduardo still works at the catering company. His kids are graduating high-school and he will have some important decisions to make in regards to staying in the US or moving back to Mexico.

The time I spent with those guys (and the other undocumented immigrants I’ve worked with in kitchens) was meaningful and eye-opening to me. But speak to anybody who works in an industry that employs undocumented workers in low-level jobs and they’ll tell you the same thing. Eduardo, Mateo and Orlando are the hardest working people I’ve ever met. They didn’t complain about the hours or the money or the long commutes they had to make from the outer-boroughs. They took great pride in their work and they freely dispensed advice and offered to pitch in when I (or anybody else) needed a hand.

I think about them every time I cook. I thought about them today when the Supreme Court’s deadlock upheld the decision of a lower appeals court, thus suspending the dreams of four to five million immigrants; replacing those dreams with the stale dread of deportation. And when I hear the avarice and iniquities spilling out of the mouth of that spoiled-brat son of a first generation American real-estate tycoon dad and immigrant mom, I think of them too. I think about their kids and their families back in Mexico and the palpable fear that must accompany the thought of a Trump presidency. They deserve better. We all do.

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