Pedaling Uphill to Survive
Mexican youths eke out a living with deliveries on bikes



By Theresa Vargas.
Newsday, April 17, 2001

Just having turned 19 years old, Jesus Rodriguez has been hit by a car three times.

Wearing a special belt to ease his back pain from a recent accident, the soft-voiced bicycle messenger said he's like most Mexican immigrants his age: they work to survive.

Untold numbers of youngsters like Rodriguez, some with budding facial hair, spend their days delivering packages on beat-up bicycles, racing through New York City streets.

Life for Rodriguez and other young men in this trade is one filled with 12-hour workdays, stretching over six-day weeks with pay averaging less than minimum wage. Many youths like himself, Rodriguez said, traded education and a chance at a more secure future to enter a growing and hazardous occupation-delivery boy.

"Of all the jobs in New York City, it's the most dangerous," said Rodriguez, who came from Mexico when he was 10. "Every single time you get up at your house, go to work, and you don't know if you're going to come back."

Rodriguez, a round-faced teenager with clear caramel-colored skin, dropped out of school at 16. "Even the teacher said I should have continued because I got good grades," he said.

But school, for many Mexican youths, is not an option. With few English skills, no green card and a need to supplement their parents' income, many have to accept any job available.

In this city, delivery positions are in abundance. Jeff Weissenstein, a New York Department of Labor analyst, said the city has 11,800 such jobs, with a high turnover rate opening 3,000 positions a year. Twenty-five percent of messengers earn less than $5.72 an hour, he added.

The pay is even lower for the undocumented young, said Esperanza Chacon Morales of the Tepeyac Association of New York, a nonprofit organization that works to advance the rights of Mexican immigrants. Morales said that most of these youths earn $80-$100 a week, some simply working for tips. "They don't know their rights," she said.

Last December, 225 delivery workers won $3 million after Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, along with the National Employment Law Project, filed suit against Food Emporium and Shopwell supermarkets. Local 338 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union found many were earning as little as $1.10 an hour, working a minimum of 10 hours a day and forced to rent their own uniforms and carts.

While most of the victors were documented West Africans, Steve Pezenik of Local 338 said undocumented Mexicans are in a more difficult position.

"They live in fear every day that the boss will call the INS if they look at organizing," Pezenik said.

It is also a struggle to organize people who come from an area where unions have little power, Morales said. She added that most of these delivery teenagers travel from Mexico on their own. "They have to pay rent like everyone else," Morales said.

They also have to pay the "coyotes"-the people who smuggled them into the United States. Current fees range from $1,500 to $1,700.

Some pay an even steeper price.

When Jaime was 14, he came from Mexico to live with his brother Oscar. (They did not want their last names used since both are undocumented.) At first the stocky teenager balanced school with a job as a bicycle messenger, but within four months, Jaime dropped out to work full time.

The job was more dangerous than both expected. After a gang repeatedly beat Jaime, he bought a gun for protection and was soon arrested by police on weapon possession charges, said his attorney. Jaime has spent the past year in a secure juvenile detention center in Brooklyn. At first, he hoped to be released; now, he simply wants to be deported, said his brother Oscar.

"He told me it's really difficult," Oscar said. "He doesn't know what's going to happen to him."

But for some, the realities of staying in New York are more terrifying than returning to Mexico.

Once, while riding past a deserted parking lot near Canal Street at 7p.m., Rodriguez saw a car speeding toward him. Clenching the bicycle brakes, he went flying forward. His head hit the pavement, the bike slammed into his body, and he lay unconscious as the car continued toward him. At the sound of the front tire crushing Rodriguez's helmet, a passerby yelled for the driver to stop.

The tire inches from his face, Rodriguez said he believed his late uncle had come for him. Also a bicycle messenger, the 19-year-old died last year when a car hit him during a delivery. "I was crying, talking to him, looking at the sky. 'Why are you going to take me now? Don't take me now. I don't want to go."'

Morales said it's possible for these boys to die and for families to never know. Some families don't have phones, and employers rarely keep this information anyway, she said.

The Mexican Consulate said there is no way to tell how many of the bodies of these boys go unclaimed each year.

Rosa Madrigal, who supervises a Mexican youth group in the South Bronx, said hazardous jobs are a reality for boys who have high dreams and low skills.

Madrigal said that many Mexican youths want to attend college, but without a green card or citizenship, they do not qualify for scholarships or financial aid. "They come with the American dream so they think there is a good future for them," she said. "Now, most of them work in dangerous jobs."

With two deformed bones in his back, a bad leg and a failing liver that he thinks was damaged in the last accident, Rodriguez was recently off from work for a month. But he took up messengering again at a Brooklyn company-only this time he rides in a van.

"That's the life here," he said. "You have to work."