White Walled Garden: Billy’s Best Blog

In September 2016, after I sold my house that I lived in for 18 years, I had no place to live, so I surfed on the sofa. Then I got an offer from a friend to spend the winter at a family holiday home in Hampton, a family holiday home in Hampton, a beach town on the Atlantic coast of Long Island outside New York City. I was happy to accept the invitation and moved into a large house with many bedrooms and many bathrooms, a thousand square feet of deck overlooking the water, a pool and a hot tub and manicured grounds. I live alone in a mansion surrounded by a dense mansion, all empty mansions. The town is mostly unoccupied during the cold season. The only person I see often are Latino men.

As the swimming weather ended, a Latino man carrying English arrived at the house with his Spanish-speaking crew and placed the pool on the bed this season. Three young men worked for hours, clearing debris from the pool, covering it, emptying the arrangement of flowers and potted plants that could not survive in the winter, and then sweeping over the deck and stairs. They laughed and stumbled as I watched them clean up the terrace furniture from the window, then stored it in the basement, brought all the pool toys, rolled the hose, closed the gears, and closed the door as they left.

A few days later, the first frost glowed on the morning lawn, another English-speaking Latino man emanated from a pickup truck, with a crew of a Spanish-speaking young man bringing the garden into winter. They took out the autumn manatee herd along the driveway and pruned the bushes. One guy mows the grass while the other guy throws the leaves in the grass. They pruned low branches on the trees and used carry-on tools to clean up the hedges around the pool. They then used a blower to bypass the entire property and captured all the wrong flora until the yard was original as a golf course. They wrapped all the yard garbage and carried it with them before they left. A few days later, they returned with a large pile of bark coverings, spreading around the borders of each garden and driveway. They move steadily, polite and friendly, and do a little work.

The Hamptons property with sea views is one of the most luxurious homes anywhere, a few hours drive from New York City to covet white sand beaches. But they are not really homes. There are no swings in the yard, or dogs barking at the postman. They are modern fortresses protected by surveillance gadgets and managed like luxury hotels. The people who own their jets are not there most of the time. During the Atlantic Ocean winter, 30 million dollars houses occupy unmanned space along the beach. As I drove past them, I felt like the most expensive ghost town in the world.

The seasonal variation from winter to spring is a busy season for real estate managers and construction workers in Hampton. Houses that are very common in this super-rich enclave are for sale and demolished, so a new, higher status house can be built in its location. The best architects and the most elite designers have made plans. But the Latinos built the house. I saw this process and didn’t realize what I was witnessing. People who have the ability to pay high dollars for real estate and famous artists to conceive their own currency castles, paying less than the market wages for Latino men who place pipes and cut wood and hammer their nails.

After working on a farm on a dead-end gravel road for 18 years in 2017, I was not considered Latino as a construction labor. But I did see them on farms in Western Massachusetts neighborhoods. Latino man working in cow milk cow. They also worked in the restaurant kitchen. I know this, but I don’t see it as part of a larger system of exploiting immigrant labor. Of course, I know the immigrant agricultural workforce in California and Florida, but I think Latino people working in my own community are different. I thought they were better. I don’t see it as structural racism. I mean whether a person is recorded or what that means. I don’t realize these issues as I do today, and I have a different vocabulary. I’m very naive.

In the spring of 2017, when the construction season began in Hampton, I drove along the main roads on the island early in the morning and saw dozens of young Latino men standing in the corner of the main intersection. They are waiting for the crew boss and the truck to pick up the workers needed for the day. At that time, this kind of work was organized. Every morning, workers were waiting around the corner in their worn clothes and boots. Later that day, I saw them on their work website. I was alone just from one town to the town, passing through the neighborhood of vacant luxury homes for nine months of the year. It seems that Latino men are workers, making Hampton a garden of white walls.

In the spring, when the ground melts, the Latino pool guys return to the house I live in and do their routine in reverse. They took the terrace furniture out of the basement, filled the pots with tropical plants, found the swimming pool, and swept the debris. Then the guy from the garden came back, replanted the Autumn Sea vegetables along the driveway, raked the dry leaves of the dry lawn, swept the porch and deck, and stroked the hedge and pulled the dead wood out of the tree. By the time they were finished, the house and the ground looked perfect again. I smiled and waved my moral gamble. They went to their next job.

Now, I’m reflecting on what it means. About a decade later, workers’ wages still depend on their skin color and national origin. It seems we squeeze out jobs from immigrant workers, pay as little as possible, and keep them undocumented so they don’t fight back, as cheap labor reduces production costs and increases profits. We provide trackers for kids, phone companies all know where we have been, we have GPS grand, facial recognition, pet microchips, and barcode tags for our suitcases, but over the past few decades, our government has lost track of millions of immigrant workers, and now we blame them here. But we don’t blame their employers. This is a curious thing.