Mayans' invisible struggle New Bedford arrivals find scant opportunity

NEW BEDFORD -- Three times a week, the teenager sorts mounds of frigid clam meat in a damp, windowless warehouse on the waterfront.

The work drains the feeling from his fingers and the optimism from his days. Sometimes, though he risked much to leave there, he is nostalgic for Guatemala.

''I don't have anything over here," said Diego, 19, who asked that his last name be withheld because he is an undocumented immigrant. ''When you're back there, you have this dream of coming over here, the thought of having a little bit of money, maybe work a couple of years and go back home so you can study. Sometimes, that dream is turning into a nightmare."

Diego is one of at least 3,000 young Mayans from Guatemala -- mostly men -- who have flocked to New Bedford over the past decade. They have gathered loans, walked for days, packed into freight containers, and wedged themselves into boxes hung under trucks to journey from their mostly rural Guatemalan towns, through Mexico, over the Arizona border, and, eventually, to this once-booming fishing city.

They came to New Bedford with the same hopes as earlier generations of immigrants -- hopes realized by Norwegian and Portuguese men who found an ocean teeming with fish, and whose wives found more work than they could handle in factories and fish houses and whose children found lives in the middle class.

The wide path worn by those earlier immigrants has greatly narrowed in recent years. New Bedford's fishing industry, once seemingly boundless, has been constricted by growing monopolies and by stringent fishing limits that knot the shrinking fleet to the wharves. And the road out of the city's lowest-paid jobs is choked because Diego, like thousands of newcomers, arrived illegally.

The Mayan community dominates the unskilled workforce in New Bedford's seafood houses and is nearly invisible outside them. The Mayans walk or ride bikes to the squat warehouses that line the waterfront, working fitful stretches sorting, cleaning, and packing seafood. They share bedrooms in triple-deckers in the city's North and South End. They send as much as they can to Guatemala to help their families or to repay the coyotes, the smugglers who guided them here.

They find work in the seafood houses mostly through temporary-worker agencies, which send them to employers with assurances that they are allowed to work. Although most make minimum wage, the Mayans earn far better money than they could in Guatemala, where some had worked in coffee and sugar plantations since they were children, for as little as $1.50 a day.

They keep a low profile, hoping to avoid trouble. But a few times over the past few years, the spotlight has found them despite their best efforts.

In 1998, Antonio Ajqui was crushed to death in a vat in one of the processing plants. The temporary worker, who had arrived in New Bedford two years earlier, was from Quiche, the inland province where most of the Mayans of New Bedford were born. That year, too, immigration agents raided the Mar-Lees Seafood plant and rounded up 12 Mayans. In 2000, a supervisor at Kyler's Seafood was accused of abusing Mayan workers, including drawing on their faces with a marker. The company denied the allegations, and few Mayan employees were willing to come forward to substantiate the initial complaints.

The Mayans are used to lying low. Caught between the military government and the insurgents in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, about 200,000 of the nation's Mayans -- descendants of the grand civilization that dominated the Yucatan Peninsula and the Central American isthmus from 200 BC to AD 1000 -- were massacred.

''In Guatemala, part of the survival mechanism of the Indians was to disappear, and in some ways this community is still invisible in New Bedford," said Tom Juravich, director of the Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who is writing a book on the Mayan fish-house workers. ''Because they're not publicly seen, it's harder for them to leverage social services."

Or to seek help when they get into trouble. Recent summers have seen a series of crimes against the Mayans, who have been attacked by criminals who tracked the hours they worked and their routes to and from work.

''Most of the community are hard workers, very humble, and they pretty much keep to themselves. Given that nature, a large number of the population were getting victimized," said Adonis Ferreira, cultural affairs coordinator for the City of New Bedford. ''Some of the perpetrators found out that the majority of those people were keeping their money at home, or on themselves."

The city has been trying to persuade the Guatemalans to report crimes, and to keep their money in bank accounts, Ferreira said, but without much success.

''In their own country, they have been victimized by the government and by the police, and so there isn't that trust," he said.

For many Mayans, the journey into anonymity in New Bedford starts with an escape from Guatemala, and an illegal border crossing.

Genaro, a 31-year-old who came to New Bedford in 1998, left his parents, five brothers, and six sisters in Quiche to work at a coffee plantation in southeastern Guatemala when he was 12. He remembers one of the men in the field showing off a picture of his son in Rhode Island, sitting on the hood of a red car.

Though he, like Diego, was interviewed through a Spanish translator, Genaro had English words for what he thought when he saw that picture.

''Oh, nice, beautiful," he said, laughing.

''The life we were living, it was all we could think about to keep our stomachs full," Genaro continued, in Spanish. ''And then to think about affording a pair of shoes, never mind a car -- think how incredible that would be."

But he knew he would never get permission to enter the United States legally.

''If I were to go to the embassy to petition for a visa, they'll ask me a question," said Genaro, who also requested that his last name be withheld. ''If I have a bank account. If I have any real estate. Until what grade did I study? If I'm a lawyer or engineer . . . I wouldn't qualify. So, you look for somebody who knows the road."

He borrowed about $6,000 to pay the coyote who guided him into the country. His traveled 16 hours in a box under a truck in Mexico and spent days walking: ''That's our airplane -- our feet," he said.

Genaro found his way to New Bedford because he had a friend here, and began working in a South End fish house, packing seafood and cleaning the floors. He also worked second shifts in a hat factory. A few years ago, he got sick, and dropped the fish house job. Now it's just the hat factory, where the work is hard, but dry.

Genaro has a family now -- a wife and three children younger than 5. He takes care of them and sends $200 or $300 to his family in Guatemala every few months. He has the same dreams now as when he arrived in America: to make a better living, become a legal resident, and go home. But those dreams are far more remote for him than they were for earlier immigrants to New Bedford, and Genaro knows it. Even if these were still the glory days of the fishing industry, Genaro's path would be blocked.

''It's everybody's idea that they want to improve their lives," he said. ''But because we're [undocumented] immigrants, we don't have the right to do that. . . . How am I going to look for a job that's maybe not a bad job? You would love the chance to just go and see your parents and come back, but you can't."

Genaro then put his face in his hands and cried. Sitting at a table outside the classroom where he takes English lessons twice a week, Genaro was surrounded by some friends. They bowed their heads, waiting silently for his tears to stop falling. ''It's an incredible suffering," Genaro said, finally.

Juravich, the UMass professor who has interviewed dozens of Mayans in New Bedford, has met none with ambitions higher than merely winning legal residency.

''It is all they want, and in some ways it prevents them from having broader dreams," he said.

''Undocumented workers have a real low ceiling to what they can both expect to earn and what their lives can expect to be."

Diego, a baby-faced loner in oversized jeans, has higher hopes than most in his circle in New Bedford, however. A native of Quetzaltenango, a mountain-ringed city in southwestern Guatemala, he has been on his own for most of his life. His father was murdered when he was 4, and his mother left to be with her second husband when he was 8. His aunt looked after him sometimes, but mostly, he took care of himself.

He made it over the Arizona border on his second try, after being jammed into a stifling freight container with 250 others other people and stranded in the Mexican wilderness for five days. He arrived here owing about $7,000 to the coyote who smuggled him to the United States because, unlike most who cross the border illegally, he did not pay his fee upfront. Added to that was $4,000 in interest that piled up in his first few months here, when Diego was looking for work. After a couple of years in construction in California, he arrived in New Bedford several months ago.

He lives with four people, who share three rooms in a South End triple-decker. When he is not working, he writes poems or reads a little, but he does not go out, unless it is to work. Few of the Guatemalans socialize outside their homes, save in the city's growing summer soccer leagues. He has no family to support, but it will take him years to pay off his debt to the coyote in Guatemala. Earning about $150 a week on average, he cannot pay anything, he said. He worries that the interest on his debt is mounting again, and that his aunt in Guatemala who put up her house as collateral, is vulnerable.

In the short term, he said, he needs to earn more money. Beyond that, Diego's ambitions are numerous and disparate. Once his debt is settled, he said, he will set about becoming an artist, or doing auto-body work, or learning to be a mechanical engineer.

''I have a dream to go to the university, to keep studying if it's possible," he said. ''God knows what is possible."

Pushed to map a possible path to his dreams, Diego thought for a bit, then seemed stumped.

''Maybe it's my head just thinking too much," he said.

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at abraham@globe.com.