It was in the first warm week of summer that the toilet stopped flushing. For two weeks in 2023, Jaime and the other eleven men sharing the one-bedroom cottage were forced to go next door to do their business, twenty-four men to one bathroom. The bosses took their time hiring a plumber. Jaime is from a small town in Western Mexico, but this incident occurred thousands of miles away from home, in Flemington, New Jersey, Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler explain.
A year later, Jaime spends half the year at a worksite in the middle of nowhere, a placid expanse of green lawns and gothic white Victorian homes, on a seasonal H-2A worker visa, where he tends to flowers, mainly to be sold at big box retailers like Home Depot and Walmart. Jaime is forty-three, with buzzed salt and pepper hair and a stubbled mustache. He has the outgoing demeanor of a natural leader and …