A view of "Underground America"

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Breaking the silence

A new project led by Dave Eggers is documenting the stories of people whose voices usually go unheard, finds Ruth Gidley

Wednesday June 25, 2008
The Guardian - London

History doesn't have to be told by the victor. Sometime the best accounts come from the mouths of ordinary people who've been at the sharp end of extraordinary events.

Like the undocumented Latino workers who did 25% of the reconstruction work after Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast in August 2005, only to find the authorities turn their back on them afterwards.

Polo, a 23-year-old Mexican, worked seven days a week clearing up after Katrina, sleeping in a guarded air hangar, then was told at gunpoint to leave by soldiers who said his employers had left town without paying him.

"My idea was to get to Mississippi, to start working, and to earn money to send to my family," Polo says in a new collection of interviews with undocumented workers in the United States. "I couldn't imagine this kind of humiliation."

Underground America is the latest in an oral history series published by the San-Francisco-based Voice of Witness project, started by author Dave Eggers.

"(This) is not a compendium of suffering. This is a collection of voices," insists editor Peter Orner, who's an asylum lawyer and a fiction writer.

The book focuses on undocumented workers from all around the world trying to make it in the United States - most of them separated from their families for years on end. Many suffer violence and injuries or end up doing forced labour, but few complain or seek medical attention because of the constant fear of deportation...
Polo's story represents thousands of others. Some 100,000 Latino workers relocated to the Gulf Coast after Katrina, and one in three of the undocumented reconstruction workers reported trouble getting paid for their work, according to a study by the Human Rights Centre at the University of California, Berkeley.

A month after the disaster - one of the worst in American history - US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it sent 725 officers to the Gulf to detain and remove undocumented workers...

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