The Story of Juan Hernández |
Frozen chicken feet. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Many rivers to cross
And it’s only my will that keeps me alive
I’ve been licked, washed up for years
And I merely survive because of my pride
– Jimmy Cliff, Many Rivers to Cross
Juan Hernández is 52 years old. He came to the US with his father when he was eight. Two years later, Juan’s father was caught in an immigration sweep in California and deported back to Mexico. Juan remained, staying with relatives outside of Lodi, where he’d enrolled in school, began to learn English and worked as a farm laborer in the Central Valley, harvesting lettuce– grueling, back-breaking work– for less than $3 an hour.
When Juan was 12, the matriarch of the family that took him in was detained by Border Patrol after visiting her family in Mexico and deported. She’d lived in California for 15 years and had seven children, five of whom were US citizens, born in Fresno. “At that point, I was on my own,” Juan told me. “Moving from house to house, living mainly with people from our church.” He kept going to school. He played soccer and baseball in middle school. “Not great at either,” he confessed. Juan worked before school started and after school ended, mowing lawns, washing cars and scrubbing floors. He even maintained beehives in the vast fields of the valley.
His English improved, but his prospects didn’t. “I quit high school after my freshman year and went to work in a chicken killing factory in Stockton,” Juan told me. “The killing line was manned by Mexican guys, mostly a little older than me.” He worked the night shift, 10 PM to 6 AM. Six days a week. “That’s where I lost these,” Juan said, as he flashed me his hands, missing two fingers on the right and three on the left. “I probably would have lost them all if I’d stuck around, but that place gave me nightmares. The chicken feet gave me bad dreams. They looked like the hands of little babies. I quit that place and stopped eating chicken. Stopped eating meat, mostly. Which was hard for a Mexican kid like me.” Juan laughed, rubbing his knotty hands through his closely trimmed hair.
The week after he quit his job, Juan learned that his mother was ill and he bummed several rides down to Oaxaca to see her. But he arrived too late. She had died a few days earlier from ovarian cancer. “I was so mad–at myself, at the government,” he said. “Why do they make it so difficult? My dad, he warned me not to come back. ‘It’s too hard to return to the States. It’s a long way from San Lucas Oojitlán. Don’t risk it.’”
But after a few weeks, he did risk it. Juan’s father had hurt his back and couldn’t work. His mother had run a small restaurant and been the primary breadwinner. It was up to teenage Juan now to support the family: two sisters, a disabled brother and three grandparents. He’d been sending back a couple of hundred dollars a month for a year to help out, but now the Hernández family would subsist almost entirely on his remittances from “El Norte.”
I met Juan Hernández last month at a park outside the small town of Canby, Oregon. We had been introduced by a mutual friend who attends Juan’s church. “A Christian church,” Juan emphasized. “Not Catholic.” I knew all about the church. My friend is the musical director. It’s an ecstatic church. Lots of shouting and dancing with the spirit. It’s also a church without walls. A moveable church that goes out into the fields and housing units of the valley, spreading the Gospel and caring for people in need, nearly all of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Lots of........