Fito

I never knew his real name.

I simply knew him as Fito, a former coworker of mine. It was the summer of 2006 and I was heading into my senior year of college. For the past five summers, I had been a sports camp counselor but the camp closed down unexpectedly leaving nearly three dozen high school and college-aged kids seeking employment elsewhere. For myself, I had never not been a camp counselor so I was forced to enter the scary world of actually having to go out to local businesses, introduce myself, and ask the status of their current labor force. I was an education major who had not yet done his student teaching semester so there was no way to use my accumulated coursework to benefit me for the type of work I was seeking. In the end, after a handful of failed attempts, I finally found work at a local New Hampshire florist and plant nursery that offered me a minimum wage job for six-weeks to help accrue a bit of spending money before heading back to college.

During my first week on the job, I delivered flowers in the company vehicle as needed. I also received an overview on using all the equipment from the hoses needed to water the plants all the way up to using the Bobcat to load mulch into the landscaping trucks. By the second week, I was not only loading and delivering mulch to local homes and businesses but I was also working with others to deliver and plant various trees and shrubbery throughout the region. Knowing that I was fluent in Spanish, my supervisor put me on a team with a Guatemalan immigrant who everybody called Fito. I would drive the truck and then Fito and I would unload and plant whatever the customer had ordered. After some initial chit chat in broken Spanish (his Guatemalan dialect was much different from my Castellano I had studied) we finally began to establish a baseline for communication for not only work-related discussion but also interpersonal discussion as well. Through our various dialects, we were able to piece together enough conversation to begin to engage each other both during the car rides as well as our on-site lunch breaks and I began to learn Fito's backstory as we did more and more jobs together.

I came to learn that Fito was a seasonal worker from Guatemala who would work different jobs in different regions throughout the year. This was his first time working for this particular plant nursery but he had been recommended by one of his countrymates who was worked at the nursery the previous year. Fito came to the United States to support his wife and child back home and he would send them part of his paycheck each and every month. Fito did not have a license and when I asked him why he simply looked back at me and I knew the answer before he had to say it. Based on his background, his work history, and his inability to drive, I finally put it all together and realized that Fito (as well as several other workers at the plant nursery) did not have legal status in this country. This was the first time in my twenty-one years that I was knowingly working with someone like Fito.

I'd love to pretend that twenty-one-year-old Trevor was enlightened enough to take it in stride but the truth was I was a little bit unsure of what the whole situation meant. Did my employer know Fito was undocumented? Did I have to be extra careful when driving him around? If something happened to me, could he legally drive me somewhere? If ICE came to the nursery, did I have to say what I knew? What if I didn't implicate Fito? Would I be charged with a crime myself? And would that crime adversely affect my chances for future employment?

Looking back, I realize now that these questions were all a reflection of my privilege at the time. To assume that my employer didn't know is now laughable. He knew and he openly exploited people like Fito and others in Fito's situation. That's not to say that the work environment was dangerous, but I definitely saw workers like Fito go on multiple landscaping runs while I would go on a run and then go back and end up with a less taxing job like watering the plants later in the afternoon. My boss would also ask me to delegate, which I took to be a sign of trust in me but in actuality, it was a way for him to avoid talking to "the help" as he saw Fito and his peers. By sending me, a Spanish-speaking college kid, my boss could pass off the grunt work to me while he could personally work with the White employees in and around the nursery. In my boss's mind, this somehow made the exploitation of Fito and others acceptable as long as he wasn't the one directly exploiting them.

Despite my twenty-one-year-old naivety, I have to say that the overall experience of working with someone like Fito was quite transformative. For the first time in my life, I had a human face behind the undocumented immigrant story. Whereas the idea of seasonal work and remittances had previously been a paragraph in a textbook for me, it now took on a living, breathing form in Fito. Not only that but for the first time I was able to see the myth of unskilled labor. Yes, on the surface being a landscaper is not viewed as skilled work. But what I saw in Fito was skill; skill in digging holes, skill in lifting and planting trees, skill in trimming branches, skill in loading and unloading mulch. Fito had all of these skills down to a science, so much so that he made me look lazy in comparison and I can assure you that I was working up quite a sweat each and every day. Fito took pride in the work, more so than me and much more so than my boss. Not lost on me was the fact that this person who embodied the great American spirit of hard work and ingenuity was the same person that many people would willingly kick out of the country for being a "lazy freeloader". It was that image of Fito that would greatly shape my view of "unskilled laborers" for the rest of my life.

At the end of six weeks, I left that job and headed back to college. I said my goodbye to Fito and thanked him for his work and told him I enjoyed working with him. He smiled politely but I'm sure in me he saw another privileged White college kid, scoring some quick cash before heading back to his liberal arts college. If that had been his impression, he wouldn't have been wrong. But it was through my experience with Fito that opened my eyes for the first time to the plight of undocumented immigrants in this country. It was such an impactful experience, that in my parting words of wisdom to my fraternity brothers, I implored them to work with immigrants, to get a sense for how they work and how they live. A year later, when I started my first teaching job and learned that I had undocumented students in my classroom, I knew better than to stereotype these students and their families because I knew Fito and the work that he did. When one of my best and brightest students asked me after Obama was elected if she and her family would now be getting "papers" I knew exactly what she meant and where she was coming from.

There once was a time when I wished I learned Fito's real name. But the more I think of it, the more I realize it is better this way. Fito is not anonymous and yet his official identity remains hidden. Perhaps he wanted it this way. Who am I to judge? What I can say is that despite not knowing his true name, Fito left a lasting impact on me, an impact that continues to drive my work 14 years later. From teaching in predominantly Latino schools with undocumented students to working in nonprofit management in California to working on behalf of the Clinton campaign to now working as a community organizer fighting to immigrant justice, there is a piece of Fito in all the work that I have done. Had I not met Fito, I don't know what my career would have looked like. Perhaps I wouldn't have wanted to work in a predominantly Latino school. Perhaps I wouldn't have understood where my student was coming from when she asked about her family's "papers". Perhaps I wouldn't have joined a political campaign after being so enraged by a failed businessman from Queens calling all Mexicans rapists and thieves. I honestly don't know where my career would have landed. What I do know is that I ended up where I am today, because of the seed that Fito planted all the way back in the summer of 2006.

And like the skilled worker that he was, he knew exactly how to nurture the seed that he had planted, even if the results weren't immediately visible.