After 19 Years, a Bronx Family Was To Be Reunited. Then a Building Collapsed.
On August 27, Segundo Huerta, 46, left his brick row-house in the Soundview section of the Bronx. He greeted his younger brother Eduardo, who lived with his family in an adjoining house, and drove to work.
It was about 7:30 a.m., and the Ecuadorian immigrant wouldn’t get home until 8 or 9 p.m. He had spent the last few weeks building a four-story building in Norwood, heading to another jobsite late in the afternoon to clock in additional work.
He badly needed extra money.
Segundo’s 18-year-old daughter Mirian was being detained in an immigration processing center in Louisiana. She had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in June, and border patrol agents had been quick to arrest her. Now, Segundo and his wife, Maria-Juana Guazhco-Paguay, had to bail her out, on top of the $8,000 they’d already paid to have her smuggled from Central America.
“My husband did not care of being tired,” Maria-Juana said. “He would always say: ‘I’m gonna have the money to bail my daughter.’”
But Segundo never got to see Mirian on U.S. soil.
The undocumented worker died that day, when the third floor of the building he was working in on East 208th Street collapsed, burying him in construction material. A preliminary investigation by the city’s Department of Buildings, or DOB, found that it was overloaded with concrete masonry blocks.
The death of Segundo Huerta shed light on the plight of Latino workers in the state of New York. While they represented 10% of the state’s workforce in 2017, they made up close to 20% of worker fatalities, according to a report by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, or NYCOSH, an advocacy group. Undocumented workers in the construction industry are especially vulnerable.
Fearing retaliation, few dare complain about being exploited by unscrupulous companies, let alone try to form a union. Without regular status, they’re unlikely to be hired by unionized contractors, which provide the best-paying jobs and generally safer working conditions. As a result, they often find themselves stuck in small-scale residential construction, a hazardous work environment subject to little scrutiny. Eleven out of twelve construction workers who died in 2017 were nonunion, the NYCOSH report said.
The project in Norwood is currently under a full stop-order by the DOB, with the department still conducting an investigation. The contractor, Pioneer General Construction, did not respond to several requests for comments. A lawyer representing the Huerta family filed a lawsuit against the company, the family said.
Segundo had been with the same employer since 2002, his wife said. He often told her about the stress he endured at work. His employer routinely screamed at him and urged him to work faster, she said. Eduardo Huerta, Segundo’s 28-year-old brother, said he had once worked with him on a construction site in Brooklyn. The employer, he said, “was there pushing you, all the time rushing you.”
These conditions are not atypical, said Maria Figueroa, a researcher at Cornell University’s ILR School, who has heard similar stories from dozens of undocumented workers.
“The employer tells them: ‘You don’t like these conditions? Just leave. Are you losing all that time putting protective equipment? Just leave right now,’” she said in a phone interview.
In spite of the pressure, Segundo liked his job, his family said. He was working hard to buy his wife and five children a house. He dreamt of one day opening an Ecuadorian restaurant.
On a recent evening, members of the Huerta family gathered in Eduardo’s Bronx apartment. On a tablet, they looked at pictures of Segundo from his nephew’s baptism four years ago. He can be seen proudly standing next to his wife, dressed in a blue grey suit, smiling into the camera.
Shortly after Huerta’s death, an immigration lawyer in Texas arranged for Mirian to be released from ICE detention and flown to New York.
Now sitting on a large bed, she remembered the moment Segundo told her over the phone she could come to the U.S. She was elated. She, too, would go on family excursions in Harriman State Park, in nearby New Jersey. She would finally get to try her father’s chicken soup. She might even go fishing with him in City Island. In brief, she would meet her father for the first time.
Segundo had left Ecuador in 2000 to try his luck in the U.S. He and Maria-Juana had one daughter already, and she was pregnant with Mirian. They couldn’t raise a family on one income. “We didn’t even own our own house,” Maria-Juana recalled.
A year later, she too emigrated to the U.S., leaving her two daughters in the care of her stepparents. From then on, they lived separate lives, 3,000 miles apart.
But this was about to change. On June 1, Mirian flew to Panama with her sister Maria and Jorge, Maria’s husband. From there, they traveled through Mexico in trailers. On June 24, they crossed the Rio Grande and were arrested by border patrol agents. Maria, who was 4-months pregnant, was released with her husband.
Mirian, on the other hand, was taken to the border patrol’s Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas. About a month later, she was transferred to another facility in Louisiana. When her mother called to announce her father’s death, she collapsed, her family said, and had to be briefly hospitalized.
She arrived in New York City a week after her father died. His body had already been sent back to Ecuador for burial, with much of the cost paid for by a Bronx-based immigration rights organization.
On a recent Saturday, Maria-Juana was wearily pushing a cart stacked with laundry bags up Ward Avenue. Her twins, Jean Carlos and Joana, trailed along behind her.
She’s had to cut down on hours at the nail salon to take care of her children. She worries about being able to pay the rent, despite the help of her relatives.
“Right now, they’re supporting me, they’re helping me,” she said, wearily sitting on a row of blue chairs inside a nearby laundromat.
“But you never know what can happen in the future.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified one of Segundo Huerta’s daughters as Miriam. She is Mirian.
