Immigrant women arriving in Colorado (USA) in search of employment face low-paying jobs and prostitution

Immigrant women who come to Colorado (USA) to seek a future in search of employment face a harsh reality. They are often trapped between low-paying jobs and prostitution, with a very low rate of opportunities to escape this cycle of exploitation and precariousness.

These immigrant women, many of them from contexts of extreme poverty and violence, arrive excited about fulfilling “their American dream” in the United States with the hope of finding a better life, but they quickly discover that this “American dream” can be a bit elusive and cruel.

Read the story presented in a Telemundo report. The protagonist is Sofía Roca:

In Aurora (Colorado), East Colfax Avenue was the best place to find work. That’s what everyone told Sofía Roca. The drug use on the street, the prostitutes and the groups of immigrant women parading along the sidewalks asking for work in the same Mexican restaurants and bakeries didn’t matter.

On East Colfax, bosses and customers spoke Spanish and were willing to hire someone like Roca, a 49-year-old Colombian immigrant without legal permission to work. That was why she returned there every morning despite her lack of success.

“Do you know how to cook Mexican food?” a woman asked as she sliced ​​lemons when Roca applied for the kitchen job advertised on the door. Her accent revealed she was not Mexican.

“I can learn,” Roca replied, but she received a conclusive answer: “We are not hiring.”

A record number of South Americans have crossed the southern border in recent months in search of economic opportunity, many arriving in communities unprepared to receive them and where people were sometimes hostile to them. Some were also unprepared for the realities of their new home.

She said the flow of migrants puts a city to the test.

The women left Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Colombia to escape hunger and violence, support their children and seek medical care. They are among more than 42,000 migrants who have arrived in the Denver area in two years. Many didn’t know anyone in Denver. But it was the closest city to which Texas offered free bus rides, both to ease pressure on its cities and to send a message to liberal-leaning cities about the impact of immigration at the border.

From Denver, untold numbers headed to the neighboring suburb of Aurora, drawn by cheaper rents and an abundance of Spanish speakers. But finding work and affordable housing hasn’t been easy, and the women face their own challenges.

Last year, nearly 900,000 women and girls tried to cross the southern border, more than five times the number recorded in the past decade, according to Customs and Border Protection. Like many of them, Roca came to help her children. Her adult daughter, who is in Colombia, suffers from lupus and can’t afford “the good medicine.”

Colombia’s economy never recovered from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and Roca heard from people he knew who said he could make $1,000 a week in the United States. “That’s a lot of money in Colombia,” he said. In my country, “with a dollar you can buy breakfast for your whole family,” he said.

Roca left for the United States with an uncle. He was detained in Mexico but managed to cross the border in Juarez and told U.S. agents he was applying for asylum. In El Paso, a shelter worker told him Denver offered free housing for migrants and that Texas would pay for his transportation costs.

Roca arrived in November and stayed for two weeks in a hotel-turned-shelter that was paid for by the city of Denver. When he went looking for work in front of Home Depot and along East Colfax, he noticed his application was met with a cold reception from locals. “They were saying horrible things about Venezuelans,” he said.

He didn’t know that the benefits many recent immigrants have received — specifically, a path to a temporary work visa and, with it, better-paying jobs — were causing resentment among Aurora’s large Mexican community. Many have loved ones in the country who came illegally or who have lived here for years without legal permission to work.

As chaos and economic collapse brought more migrants to the border, the administration of Democrat Joe Biden created and expanded legal pathways to enter the United States, including the possibility of applying for work permits. But in June it temporarily suspended asylum for new immigrants who cross illegally, ending one of the main avenues to legal work.

Roca was never eligible for a work permit, but Aurora’s Mexican residents continue to associate her with the many migrants who do. Resentment toward the newcomers was also growing in another corner of Aurora: City Hall. In February, Aurora officials warned other communities against housing immigrants, saying they would not spend city money to help them.

This summer, Aurora’s mayor repeated a landlord’s claim that a notorious Venezuelan criminal gang, the Tren de Aragua, had taken control of an apartment building, and said he would investigate how so many Venezuelans had ended up living in Aurora. Although police say the gangs did not take over the building, former President Donald Trump has taken up the claim, mentioning it at his campaign rallies. Last month, the mayor walked back some of his comments.

Roca never made a deliberate choice to settle in Aurora. It wasn’t clear to her where Denver ended and Aurora began, or that Denver was any more willing to help immigrants arriving in the area.

So when her time at the Denver shelter ran out, she did the only thing she knows how to do: She headed to East Colfax in Aurora.

She walked up and down the sidewalks, dodging people who have taken over bus stops to shoot up drugs or smoke fentanyl and who sell shoplifted toiletries on the sidewalks. She approached immigrants holding cardboard signs and begging for money outside Walmart, asking if they knew of any jobs or a place to stay.

A man standing by his truck parked in front of a thrift store caught her eye. He was singing rap in Spanish. He seemed happy, she thought. He seemed like a nice guy.

He said he could help her and her cousin, who arrived a few weeks earlier. But not in Colorado. She could go back to Kentucky with him and his family. To tide her over in the short term, the man — El Cubano, as she calls him — gave her $10 and invited her out for ice cream.

After more than a week of staying with the family in Kentucky and cooking and eating together, Roca learned that El Cubano’s wife was working in the business. There isn’t much work in Kentucky, so she made a living doing sex work, she told Roca, while her children played a few feet away.

A few days later, as they were preparing dinner together in the couple’s trailer, a Mexican man in his 30s showed up in a pickup truck.

He had seen a picture of Roca and liked it. The woman said she would pay $1,000 for two nights with Roca. Roca would keep $600 and the couple would keep $400. Roca would have to pay her $6 for each round trip to her house.

Roca stopped chopping the onion and looked at her cousin. Don’t go with that man, the cousin told her. You don’t know him, she warned.

Roca thought of all the jobs she had done in her life. Caring for Alzheimer’s patients as a home health aide. Answering phones at a call center. Selling beauty products on the street in Mexico.

In her month in the United States, she had quickly realized that she would have to make sacrifices in this country. That the reports she had heard in Colombia about earning $1,000 a week were probably hyperbole. That she would have to push her body to the limit doing manual labor. She would have to accept subpar wages until she got a work permit, if she got one at all. She would have to stay in someone’s living room with other newcomers and give up her privacy.

But submitting to the whims of a stranger in such an intimate and vulnerable way? “No,” she told the woman. “I’m not going anywhere with anyone.” And she told the man to leave. The insults began immediately.

“How are you going to make money, girl?” the woman asked. “You’re not going to live here for free. The food here is good, right? But it’s not free,” she added.

Roca didn’t know what to expect — maybe violence. She and her cousin had no money and no transportation. They were trapped. But a few days later, Roca left as El Cubano shouted insults from his trailer. A Venezuelan woman she met at Home Depot found someone who helped them get out of Kentucky.

Where did they want to go? Somewhere where she knew people, she remembers thinking. Somewhere with other immigrants. She decided to return to Aurora.

Back in Aurora, Roca approached a Venezuelan woman she had briefly met asking for money outside the Walmart on Colfax. She soon set up shop in the woman’s living room, sharing a queen-sized air mattress with the woman’s teenage son.

Roca found work on weekends helping a man set up and take down his stall at an open-air market. She shouldered large sacks of used clothing, laid out the clothes on display and talked to customers. All for $10 an hour. “It’s an outrageous wage,” she said, “but it’s a job.”

She tried standing outside Home Depot, but found that many people propositioned her for sex or didn’t pay her after doing legitimate work. She gave up standing outside a day labor center in Aurora when she didn’t feel safe trying to compete for work with dozens of men, who pushed her and jumped into moving trucks that picked up workers.

Most days she walked down Colfax Avenue, Roca said, men asked her for sex, holding up their fingers to indicate how many hundreds of dollars they were willing to pay.

While looking for work in March, she came across what looked like an old motel, a place she didn’t know. “Is it a hotel or a motel? I don’t know,” she said, as she opened the heavy metal door: “Let’s see.”

In the small lobby was a 1970s-era cigarette vending machine. An elderly man waited behind a sliding Plexiglas window. There were no openings, but he encouraged her to try the bar in the back. “They’re always looking for girls,” he told her.

Roca walked to the back of the building and recognized the name of the bar. “I know this place,” he said.

In some Mexican cantinas in Aurora and Denver, women are paid to talk and drink with men. Ficheras, as the women are known in Spanish, sell beers at a significant premium to men and pocket the profits. It can be a quick way to make money, but also a route to sex trafficking or drug dealing.

When visiting these establishments, some of these women can be seen sporting government ankle bracelets with their sky-high heels. The ankle bracelets were given to them by federal immigration officials to monitor their movements while waiting to attend immigration hearings.

“I don’t think I have to do it yet,” Roca said, “but this street only offers prostitution.”

Since returning to Aurora, Roca has found she has few options for establishing legal residency or working legally in the United States. She told Border Patrol agents that she plans to ask for asylum at her deportation hearing next year, but she doubts she will be granted it.

Ironically, what happened to her in Kentucky could help her get a visa. The government grants special visas to victims of sex trafficking in this country, but Roca has never wanted to report the Cuban couple for fear of their revenge.

She had contacted a Colombian high school friend through Facebook who has been living in the northeastern United States for a year. “She told me she can get me a job at a hotel and that I can stay with her,” she said. “What would you do in my place?” she asked the reporter. “Would you leave?”

The idea of ​​learning her way around a new city exhausted Roca. But without more work, there was not much keeping her in Aurora. Her roommates were to be evicted the following week. She didn’t know where she would go if they lost the apartment.

Two days later, with about $80 in her pocket, Roca boarded a Greyhound bus paid for by the city of Denver. She arrived in a new city — one that hasn’t received busloads of immigrants from Texas — and reunited with her high school friend. (The Associated Press is not identifying her new location, as Roca fears the Cuban couple might seek her out after she talked about them in the media.)

Roca’s friend kept her promises, allowing her to live with her and recommending her for a job cleaning hotel rooms. Roca has since changed jobs and found one she likes better. She walks around the city easily and anonymously.

“It’s a big difference from my life in Denver,” she says, “There’s less chaos and no one has disrespected me. It’s been a great refuge.”

She’s not sure how long she’ll stay. But Sofia Roca won’t be moving back to Aurora.

Source: Telemundo

Immigrant women arriving in Colorado (USA) in search of employment face low-paying jobs and prostitution