Their thoughts were of home, knowing that families and extended kin in Mexico or Guatemala might go hungry that week for lack of a remittance. Mike explained how these largely undocumented workers would make their way to 5am modern-day ‘shape-ups’, week after week, often returning empty-handed to their cramped living quarters. They would be taken to various job sites, paid off the books a minimal wage for a day of drudgery, hauling, heaving, hammering or handling whatever they found themselves tasked to work with. He took me to corners where dozens of Latino men gathered, shoulders hunched in the chilly autumn air, waiting for vans to pull to the curb, size up the muscle available, and direct a chosen few labourers to cram themselves into what space was left inside. footnote 1 I spent an early morning being chauffeured around small Long Island towns by Mike Davis. S uffolk county, new york, October 2000 was my introduction to the brutalizing racist blood sport of ‘beaner-hopping’. Mike Davis, ‘Remembering a Friend’ (2017) One of the kindest, one of the most tempestuous one of the wryest, one of the most serious. He was, as they say, an ‘incompressible algorithm’, one of the most complex people that I’ve ever known.
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