The Hard Road

Photos
The Hard Road
Daniel Rodriguez snuck into the United States with simple goals. But his months working as a day laborer here have changed his life in ways he never anticipated.

The main problem with America, they agree, is that it is expensive. It is possible to save, unlike in their homelands -- but you must do nothing but work, says Ruben, a bashful man who carries a washed-out photo of his sons, two goofy, black-haired toddlers, in a wallet under his tool belt. It was taken just before he last saw them in Mexico. Now the boys are 8 and 6.

"Here, winter, summer, Saturday, Sunday -- it's the same as Monday and Tuesday," Daniel says. "It's work."

In Nicaragua, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti, Daniel earned about $100 a week selling vegetables in Sebaco's bustling street market. He was known for his carrots, which he bought from farmers, scrubbed at home and piled high on his stand. The money was enough for the dirt-floored, one-room house he shared with his wife, Nimia, and their three children -- Daniela, 14; Kevin, 11; and Darryll, 8. But it also had to support Danielsy, 8, and Juñior, 5, his two children born of an extramarital affair. There was never any money left over.

A few years ago, the business began to plummet. Customers had run up bad debts. The weekly payments for a truck he had bought were bleeding his earnings dry. When he came home empty-handed, Nimia would cross their unpaved street to her mother's house and ask for a handout. Daniel had to trade in the truck. "I'm just lucky I didn't turn to being a thief," Daniel says.

Daniel left for the United States with two friends in July 2004, tales of $12-an-hour jobs allá swirling through his mind. "I'm going to leave you alone, but not for a long time," Daniel recalls telling Kevin as the family said goodbye under a tall tree in the town square of Sebaco. He carried $230, cobbled together from savings and a sold television. He had his sights set on Virginia, where Cruz and Nimia's other brother, Blas "Ulises" Sosa, live, and planned to be gone one year.

Cruz wired him one-third of a Mexican smuggler's $4,600 fee; Daniel promised the smuggler he would pay the rest when he arrived in the States. After being pushed in an inflatable raft across the dark Rio Grande, Daniel was marched through Texas for three days. In Houston, he fled the coyote without paying, and Cruz came to pick him up.

Now Daniel lives with Ulises in the house Ulises owns in a tidy Dumfries development, where a sign promotes homes starting from the $400,000s. The bedroom he rents has cream carpet, cable and a picture window facing the back of a row of houses that all look alike.

Daniel is better off than many of his 7-Eleven cohort -- Cruz, a construction contractor, and Ulises, who is employed by one, often hire him. These days, Cruz has enough work for Daniel so that he goes to the 7-Eleven only on weekends.

Daniel had three goals when he arrived: Remodel his family's home. Buy a truck. Save about $8,000 to invest in a produce-delivery business. But after one year, only the remodeling -- which turned, at Nimia's insistence, into a $10,000 expansion -- was done. He has pushed his expected return date to this summer, an additional year.

Cruz is paying Daniel $1,000 every two weeks for his help framing the rowhouse, which is in a gentrifying neighborhood near RFK Stadium. Cruz, a legal resident, says no one at the development company that hired him asked whether his assistants had work permits. Legally, it is his responsibility to check.

Daniel has stopped sawing and stands in a cloud of dust. Outside, sunlight squeezes through a fissure in a mottled gray sky. "All these things, you achieve working daily," Daniel says, his goals on his mind.

"Daily," Ruben echoes, nodding as he squeezes the nail gun. Ruben has goals, too. He wants to return to Mexico and buy pigs and cattle.