Events at Olsson's Bookstores - April 3, 2002
Text © 2002 Azar Attura
"Syndicated newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin discusses his new book The Short Sweet Life of Eduardo Gutiérrez, an expose of the life and tragic death of an illegal immigrant worker at a Brooklyn construction site in November, 1999 -- and the broader issue of America's deadly "border" policy. The story behind Gutiérrez 's death is one of municipal corruption, bad politics and indifference to people whose lives are perceived not to matter."
A hard-boiled journalist, tough as nails, but with a soft side and a good eye for the warp and woof of daily life and politics, Jimmy Breslin stood at the makeshift podium at Olsson's tonight and transfixed and perhaps transformed his spell-bound audience. Eyes flashing, invectives flying, his rhetoric interspersed with personal and political asides, Mr. Breslin read select passages from the pages of his new book and punctuated his reading with the narratives and observations that come with the territory known as investigative journalism.
The book, The Short Sweet Life of Eduardo Gutiérrez, based on real-life characters, provides a glimpse into the ever-present world of the illegal immigrant and the hardships endured in the country of origin, plus the very real hardships encountered in trying to reach "the land of plenty" ("the bleached bones of those who did not make it can be found in the desert"), where the rules are "go to work, go home, be invisible and don't let them catch you", and where even a trip to a doctor can get you deported.
The life and loves of Eduardo Gutiérrez and others like him are portrayed by Mr. Breslin in a sensitive but realistic way -- leaving his girlfriend behind in Mexico, living with ten of his countrymen in an apartment in Brooklyn with one bathroom, being lured into the promise of a day job, but in reality being lured into an ambush, working for $60 a day but being injured on the job and sent home with $30 "because you didn't do a full day's work", and being terrified of going to see the doctor, even though you have barbed wire embedded in your back.
Eduardo Gutiérrez never got the chance to go home alive to his girlfriend. Working on a construction site in Brooklyn, on the third floor of an unsafe scaffolding, working for a man whose well-known record of construction violations was deplorable (and who usually escaped sentencing with a slap on the wrist) -- Eduardo Gutiérrez fell when the inadequate scaffolding, the improperly shored-up walls of the building and the flimsy structural supports collapsed -- he drowned in 3 feet of cement.
To understand the ripple effect created by these incidents and to all involved, Mr. Breslin traveled to Eduardo Gutiérrez 's home town. He traveled to the hospital in Texas where two Mexican children had been taken when their mother was abandoned by her fellow travelers in the desert to die -- the children were forced to travel on their own to seek help. He traveled to see those deserts, the hidden tunnels, the oppressively hot stretches of land where the "coyotes" take their paying travelers to cross illegally into America, and to hear the stories of the mothers whose sons' remains were found in these deserts and brought back to them in crematory urns.
The book is small, a little more than 208 pages, but is a concentrated form of stark realism and fury. (Read more about it on amazon.com)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609608274/qid=1017940931/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_67_1/102-3104636-1840163
Nothing can bring back Eduardo Gutierrez, but perhaps this book will have an impact on the building code's "Buddy-isms" and "Look the Other Way"-isms, and perhaps it will waken us and influence us to respond to the more-often-than-not grim circumstances of cheap labor and cheap treatment of human beings whose lives are deemed inferior.
The audience, very receptive to this evening's program, peppered Mr Breslin with questions. I discussed with him the most recent scaffolding collapse, the one on October 26th 2001, near Gramercy Park, Manhattan, NY -- in that one, a 14 STORY high scaffolding, which was discovered to have been improperly secured, collapsed killing about 19 illegal immigrant workers. In fact, the firefighters and EMT's responding to that scene said the carnage and twisted wreckage reminded them of 9/11 all over again.
We left Olsson's Bookstore that night with a greater and more sober awareness of the ever-present and nation-wide problem of illegal immigrants working for peanuts while being treated as disposable commodities. Mr Breslin hits the nail square on the head again.
On a different (and what eventually proved to be a lighter) note, I also discussed one of his columns in "NewsDay" which really touched my heart. He wrote (and I will ad-lib to some extent) about leaving the Reebok Health Club in NY City in the very early hours of the morning, to go home. Every day, coming in the opposite direction, was a sweet small, very shy young lady who not only ignored him when he said hello, but seemed so frail and shy that in order not "to scare her", Mr. Breslin would sometimes cross to the other side of the street when he saw her coming. This went on for weeks, in the pre-dawn darkness. Finally one September morning, the shy young lady gave him a smile as they passed one another. The next day was September 11, and he never saw her again after that. "She fit the profile of someone who would've worked in those buildings", said Breslin, sadly.
I read that article with a heavy heart, and took the opportunity to talk with Mr Breslin about it. His face crinkled into a grin and grimace at the same time, as he told me how he decided to make a short film about the young lady, and enlisted the aid of a famous photographer "who had just finished a major shoot in Africa, so (tongue-in-cheek) he didn't need any money" -- he did it for free. Casting directors and other well-experienced film producers and actors joined Mr Breslin's project, some of them doing this work gratis. The film was almost completed, when Mr. Breslin, walking the familiar pre-dawn route home from the Reebok Gym one morning, was suddenly confronted by the very real appearance of : The Shy Young Lady. "Where the H*ll have you been?!" He yelled to her, in a way that only a typical New Yorker would understand. "I was worried SICK about you!", he added. Her story was short and simple. She worked for a firm that was headquartered in the Twin Towers -- but she worked in their creative division, and so, worked in another building on the East Side. However, she lost two friends who worked in the Towers, and, in her words "I could not go outside for a very long time." Jimmy was so happy to see her that he happily informed the film crew. "You mean I did all this work for nothing!?" screamed the famous photographer. "Take it easy" said Jimmy -- "we'll change the ending!" And that is what they are doing right now. "We got a dead-ringer for the girl!", he proudly said to us. This will be coming to a theater near you some day soon, as part of a film festival.
A happy ending to an otherwise sobering night!
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