Story by Katy George
Photo Illustrations by Courtney Hendricks
Seven a.m. The sun is cresting over the hills, filling the stable yard with soft light. The green grass in the quaintly fenced pastures is idyllic and inviting. Sparrows trill noisily from the eaves, but inside the barn the horses are quiet. Felipe*, a short but solidly built Hispanic man with close-cropped hair and kind eyes, glances briefly toward the grass as he crosses the gravel parking lot. He smiles, crows’ feet furrowing as he reveals crooked but bright white teeth. Felipe doesn’t stop walking; there’s no time to fully appreciate the perfect spring morning. He is focused on the seemingly endless list of chores he must squeeze into the ten-hour workday ahead. The prospect doesn’t faze him. While the work is challenging, Felipe loves the horses.
“You need a lot of discipline, and I enjoy that,” he says in rapid-fire Spanish. “Sometimes they don’t want to do what you ask. I like to try to figure out what they’re thinking.”
Felipe hasn’t been around horses for long, but he has little trouble understanding them. He learns quickly and works hard. To the immigration office where Felipe has applied for work permits regularly since 1999, he is an ideal candidate. But his spotless records fail to show that originally, Felipe entered the U.S. without documentation.
“It was hard,” Felipe says, “but I couldn’t stay in Mexico.” Michoacán, Felipe’s home state, has the sixth lowest GDP per capita in the country. The work opportunities, he says, were few. Like many of his countrymen, Felipe saw the greener pastures al otro lado – on the other side of Mexico’s border with the U.S. “The reason I left was, more than anything, to secure myself a better future,” he says.
Felipe seems to have done just that. He currently works with the horses at a well-known show barn in the Northwest, a job description he shares with millions of Hispanic immigrants across the U.S. The vast majority of barn workers are from Spanish-speaking countries. A 2006 study by a racetrack industry student from the University of Arizona claims 94 percent of grooms at racing barns are of Hispanic origin, and 70 percent were born in Mexico.
Felipe confirms the trend. “All of my friends who work at barns are Mexican,” he says. The reason? Felipe shrugs, rocking back on his heels as he looks up at the brim of his visor. “Maybe it’s because we Hispanics don’t usually have a set career, so often we can’t choose a job. The job chooses us.” If there’s work to be had, he says, immigrants will take it.
Whether by chance or pure grit, Felipe has thrived as the head groom of his barn. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in on site housing, a small but comfortable home with a lovely view of the pastures. He has legal status, as does his wife, and his daughter is a U.S. citizen. Still, he continues to worry about immigration.
The immigration office “can deny your visa application for anything,” he explains matter-of-factly. “If they spot something suspicious, you’re out.” The safest way to go about renewing the Employment Authorization Document, which is what Felipe has, is to meet with a lawyer, but Felipe says that’s too expensive. He is forced to rely only on the advice of those who have renewed in the past. Felipe’s current permit expires in 2012. Though he has successfully applied for at least ten work permits since his first, the uncertainty of the process weighs on him. If he is denied, his whole family will have to return to Mexico.
On this particular morning, work takes precedence over such fears. Felipe rolls back the gargantuan metal door and a horse whinnies in greeting. The rest of the stable picks up the chorus, voicing their collective hunger. Felipe shushes them as he and his coworker Julio* overfill wheelbarrows with sweet-smelling green hay. Their movements seem almost choreographed, no time wasted, no overlap in their actions. They eyeball portions from the cart and toss them into each stall. The routine is second nature, carried out with brisk familiarity.
Slowly, the horses quiet until the only sound left is soft munching. With the hay down, Julio goes to work cleaning the rows of stalls. Felipe
begins the turnout rounds, leading one horse after another to pasture, his quick, industrious stride making up for shorter legs.
Back and forth, up and down, the two men pass the morning filling water buckets, tending wounds, and sweeping aisles. Minutes slip into hours, but nobody stops to count. The day is measured in tangible tasks completed: six horses sent outside to enjoy the rare sunny day. Thirty-five stalls cleaned, with new shavings spread out in fluffy masses. Garden tended. Four sets of wraps retrieved from the laundry and rolled neatly. All turned out horses returned to stalls to finish their breakfast. The items on their to-do list get crossed off quickly, but by noon they will be barely halfway through.
“We always have work,” Felipe laughs. “Painting, helping [the head trainer] if she needs it, cutting the lawn — there’s always a job to be done.”
But Julio, who likes the variety, adds that the work is “very practical. We’re always learning something, which is wonderful.”
For both men, the learning curve has been steep. Felipe especially has made incredible strides as a groom. When he first arrived in the U.S. he spoke no English and had never worked with horses before. “My family [in Mexico] had horses, but they were very different from the ones here,” he says. Caballos de cerro, he calls them, indicating they were free roaming rather than trained. He never had plans to work at a barn in the U.S. He simply took what work he could find, including a job at a factory where they taught him serviceable English that has since blossomed to near-fluency. Eventually, after work at the factory dried up, he stumbled upon a job at a stable in Washington. He learned the basics of grooming there, but the trainer was less than helpful. Intimidating, he calls her. So when he heard about his current job through his friends in the business, he needed little encouragement to leave.
“Mostly I wanted to find a job that gave me a bigger house,” Felipe says. His previous job gave him housing, but it was too small. “Everything was in one place – the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom. I wanted to take care of my daughter, and to find a better place for my wife.”
His life in Oregon has been good so far. Felipe likes the trainer at this barn, and he says the people are nicer here than other places he has lived, such as North Carolina. “There’s a lot more racism there,” he says carefully, “but it’s not just against Hispanics. White, black, Asian – people had problems with everyone.”
Julio, who is Guatemalan and does not speak English, agrees with Felipe’s view of Oregonians. “I haven’t faced prejudice [at this barn] before,” he chimes in. “Everyone’s very agreeable.”
Felipe and Julio are lucky in this regard. While not all the riders at the barn make an effort to get to know them, the ones who do appear to have a good relationship with the grooms. All too often a slightly uncomfortable feeling manifests itself between Hispanic grooms and the generally Caucasian barn clients. Overt racism is uncommon, but so is outright friendliness.
Melissa Borgel, who rides at both a barn in Eugene and one outside of Denver, says she has never even seen the grooms at the Oregon stable, where she has ridden since November. “I don’t know if that’s because I just don’t notice them or if the owners try to keep them out of sight,” she says, running her hands through her blonde hair slightly awkwardly. Borgel rides during some of the busiest times at the stable, but she hasn’t seen any other clients interacting with the grooms either. “It’s not like I’m trying to ignore them. They’re just never around when I am.”
At her Denver barn, however, Borgel does not feel as separated from the workers. Like her Eugene barn and the one Felipe works at, it’s a hunter-jumper barn, but there’s also an extensive polo program. The polo players feel less of a division between rider and worker. Borgel says the grooms and stable hands are still just as likely to be Mexican immigrants, but the sport is dominated by rich Latino men, especially Argentines. Because so many polo players speak Spanish, she thinks the grooms are more likely to be included in the fold. “I’m friends with a lot of them,” she says. “We mess around, go out to dinner, drink together. It’s more relaxed.”
The hunter-jumper riders, however, are the same in Colorado as they are in Oregon, Borgel says: a little less likely to be chatty with the grooms. “A lot of the riders are middle-aged women from the suburbs,” she explains with a crooked smile and just a hint of an eye roll. “They don’t really know how to deal with a non-white dude, so they think it’s more polite to ignore him than to be friendly.”
For Felipe, however, there are more important problems than quiet barriers between stable client and worker. The mood amongst the grooms at his barn is tense in the wake of Arizona’s new immigration law that, among other things, requires police to inspect the paperwork of anyone they suspect to be in the country illegally. Any conversation between coworkers is rushed and quiet, almost whispered, as they go about cleaning the stalls. Their silence fills the building to the timbered ceiling; even the radio, wailing Mexican love songs, does little to mask their nerves. They’re afraid, Felipe explains, of what might happen next. He says tempers are flaring — even here in Oregon.
“I was in Wal-Mart the other day with my family,” Felipe says in English, voice lowered and a little strained. “A man stopped me and started yelling, calling me names and saying I was stealing jobs from Americans.” The episode shook him; he hopes it was an isolated incident, but fears it was not.
While unsettling, the confrontation was nothing compared to what Felipe’s friends face in Arizona. They are undocumented, and as such are at risk for jail time. “They have to sell their house and move,” he says sadly. “They can’t stay . . . It’s too risky.”
To Felipe, the law is little more than state-sanctioned racism. The police will stop all Hispanics, not just the undocumented, he says, because “How can they tell the difference?” It is impossible, Felipe says, to tell at first glance if someone is in the country legally or illegally, and he feels for those who might be wrongly targeted. “I would feel bad if they stopped me, if they thought I was illegal,” he says in careful, precise English, “but I could deal with it. But if they stopped my family, my wife or my daughter,” Felipe shakes his head, his expression dark as he twists his pitchfork in his hands. “I would go crazy. I would take them right back to Mexico.”
Arizona’s new law has changed something in Felipe, who had previously been somewhat dismissive of the idea of racism against Hispanics in the U.S. The image of his daughter, a natural-born citizen, being questioned by police based on her ethnicity has etched itself in his mind, leaving him uneasy. His words are angry, but his tone and expression convey more of a weary disappointment, as though he had expected better from this country.
Still, Felipe has not given up hope; even in this dark moment he retains a shadow of his inherent optimism. There are ways to combat the sort of attitude that encourages legislation like Arizona’s, which he believes stems from misunderstanding. “If a person has a bad experience with a Hispanic immigrant, they might think we’re all bad,” he says with characteristic sensitivity. “Sometimes we are, yes. But mostly we’re just people.” If everyone knew an immigrant personally, Felipe says, people might be a little more compassionate. But as things stand, empathy can be hard to find.
“I just want to tell them, we’re human, too,” Felipe says quietly, leaning against a stall door. “It’s important to show people that. I didn’t come here because I’m lazy or greedy or anything. I came because I had to.” He pauses, tapping his toe against the doorframe meditatively. “Maybe if someone hears my story they’ll understand.”
*Editor’s note: The workers’ names have been changed to protect their identity.
