fieldsmeyer.com
Senior Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School | Fmr: Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Harris at the White House | Work on civil rights, democracy, tech, and power. Nothing is inevitable.
Writing: amifieldsmeyer.substack.com
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At first, observers applauded them as they watched them work. They took pictures.
Then as the site began to crowd with cleanup workers, it was clear that most of them were Latinx. Some of the people observing them now started yelling, ‘Leave! Leave! Leave!’”
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When it was his turn, she had him sign his name on a blank sheet of paper and compared his signature to the signature on his Colombian pass-port. ‘They made all of us sign on blank paper, then compared the signature to any ID we had. Then they let us in,’ he says.
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An official of some kind—from where, he doesn't remember-overseeing the line walked over and asked him why he left the line. Milton fumbled. The truth is, I'm not here legally, he said. Get back in line, she said.
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The next day, he made his way back to the World Trade Center, now called Ground Zero. He found long lines of people waiting to enter the site. He wondered if he'd be asked to present his papers—the terrorists had been foreigners-and got out of line.
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Of Milton Vallejo, who’d been working as a night guard and had just left the WTC and stepped onto the subway platform when the news hit, Cornejo Villavicencio writes:
“He couldn't breathe. He raced home. He watched the news. He prayed to god. He had to help. It was his duty. Plus, work was work.
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Lucero tells me that almost immediately after 9/11, undocumented immigrants started getting phone calls ‘from a very underground kind of network of people who are undocumented and need work. They called at night.
They said, 'Tomorrow there is work, come work.’”
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Lucero Gómez is a social worker who runs informal group therapy sessions with mostly undocumented, all-Latinx former Ground Zero cleanup workers.