The Story of Juan Hernández

Many rivers to cross
And it’s only my will that keeps me alive
I’ve been licked, washed up for years
And I merely survive because of my pride

– Jimmy Cliff, Many Rivers to Cross

Juan Hernández is 52 years old. He came to the US with his father when he was eight. Two years later, Juan’s father was caught in an immigration sweep in California and deported back to Mexico. Juan remained, staying with relatives outside of Lodi, where he’d enrolled in school, began to learn English and worked as a farm laborer in the Central Valley, harvesting lettuce– grueling, back-breaking work– for less than $3 an hour.

When Juan was 12, the matriarch of the family that took him in was detained by Border Patrol after visiting her family in Mexico and deported. She’d lived in California for 15 years and had seven children, five of whom were US citizens, born in Fresno. “At that point, I was on my own,” Juan told me. “Moving from house to house, living mainly with people from our church.” He kept going to school. He played soccer and baseball in middle school. “Not great at either,” he confessed. Juan worked before school started and after school ended, mowing lawns, washing cars and scrubbing floors. He even maintained beehives in the vast fields of the valley.

His English improved, but his prospects didn’t. “I quit high school after my freshman year and went to work in a chicken killing factory in Stockton,” Juan told me. “The killing line was manned by Mexican guys, mostly a little older than me.” He worked the night shift, 10 PM to 6 AM. Six days a week. “That’s where I lost these,” Juan said, as he flashed me his hands, missing two fingers on the right and three on the left. “I probably would have lost them all if I’d stuck around, but that place gave me nightmares. The chicken feet gave me bad dreams. They looked like the hands of little babies. I quit that place and stopped eating chicken. Stopped eating meat, mostly. Which was hard for a Mexican kid like me.” Juan laughed, rubbing his knotty hands through his closely trimmed hair.

The week after he quit his job, Juan learned that his mother was ill and he bummed several rides down to Oaxaca to see her. But he arrived too late. She had died a few days earlier from ovarian cancer. “I was so mad–at myself, at the government,” he said. “Why do they make it so difficult? My dad, he warned me not to come back. ‘It’s too hard to return to the States. It’s a long way from San Lucas Oojitlán. Don’t risk it.’”

But after a few weeks, he did risk it. Juan’s father had hurt his back and couldn’t work. His mother had run a small restaurant and been the primary breadwinner. It was up to teenage Juan now to support the family: two sisters, a disabled brother and three grandparents. He’d been sending back a couple of hundred dollars a month for a year to help out, but now the Hernández family would subsist almost entirely on his remittances from “El Norte.”

I met Juan Hernández last month at a park outside the small town of Canby, Oregon. We had been introduced by a mutual friend who attends Juan’s church. “A Christian church,” Juan emphasized. “Not Catholic.” I knew all about the church. My friend is the musical director.  It’s an ecstatic church. Lots of shouting and dancing with the spirit. It’s also a church without walls. A moveable church that goes out into the fields and housing units of the valley, spreading the Gospel and caring for people in need, nearly all of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Lots of them are undocumented.  It’s a church that provides refuge for the needy.

“Yes, they hoot and shake and talk in tongues,” Juan said of his church, “I don’t make much of that, except maybe it means the language you speak doesn’t matter. We’re all basically the same, just trying to get by.” His accent is heavy, but he speaks these words in precise English in full sentences. There was no question about his fluency with the language, which, with its odd sentence structures and nonsensical grammatical rules, is not an easy language to learn.

Juan is about my height, but lithe and wiry.  He had strong, tensile arms, the dark skin fissured with scars. He noticed me looking at them. “Trees bite back,” he said. For the last three decades, Juan has worked as a tree-trimmer, though that understates his skills. He’s an arborist, really, working on trees from suburban subdivisions to orchards, clearing limbs from power lines or sculpting shade trees in business parks. “The trees called me to Oregon,” he said. “It didn’t come without a price, though.” And that price was more than the scars on his arms.

Juan Hernández is not Juan Hernández’s real name. He didn’t ask me to use a pseudonym for him, but it seemed prudent. Juan is a grandfather now, with two grandsons and one granddaughter. They live with Juan and his wife of 28 years, Maria, because their father, Jorge, was deported to Guatemala two years ago under Biden. Jorge had been living in the US for 12 years. Working. Paying taxes. Not getting into any trouble. Then, he was pulled over in a traffic stop in Salem, Oregon, on his way to Safeway, detained, sent to Texas, and deported. “It happened so fast,” Juan said. “He was vanished almost before we knew he was missing. Just ripped from our daughter and his children’s lives in an instant. Just gone.” There’s a void in the Hernández house and it’s not the only one.

Juan and his family now live outside Woodburn, Oregon, one of the largest immigrant communities in the Northwest, consisting largely of farm and vineyard workers in the fertile (though increasingly less so) fields of the Willamette Valley. But Juan has left the strenuous labor of the fields for the more surgical work of trimming trees. “I found that even these claw-like hands of mine could handle a chainsaw or an orchard saw pretty well,” he said. “I don’t like cutting them down, especially the old ones. Trees store a lot of knowledge. I try to cut them so they don’t have to be taken down. I like to find a way for them to live without intruding on the people who might get pissed off at them for dropping their leaves or branches in a windstorm.”

For the past 20 years, Juan has run his own tree-trimming company. He has his own crew. He pays them more than minimum wage and provides insurance. He knows from experience that many of them have obligations that extend back to Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, family members and loved ones, living on the margins amid the daily depredations of gangs and paramilitaries, who depend on them.

Juan Hernández arrived in Oregon in 1994, after sneaking back into the States in a refrigerated truck of fruit and vegetables from Mexico. “I nearly froze to death in the stalled line to cross the border,” he recalled. He hitched a ride up I-5 from a black truck driver, hauling appliances from the Port of Los Angeles to Seattle.  “I was fortunate,” Juan said. “Mexicans and Blacks, we don’t have too much luck hitchhiking.”

Juan jumped off in Salem, about 45 miles south of Portland and began looking for work. “I harvested everything growing in the Valley,” Juan said, shaking his head at the memory. “Hops, hazelnuts, grapes, sunflowers, irises, tulips.” He made just enough money to rent a small apartment with two other Mexican laborers and send half of his pay back home. “There wasn’t much left over for beer.” He tried day labor in the winter months: tearing down and replacing roofing, landscaping, and putting up drywall. He got a driver’s license and a Social Security card. “I’ve been paying social security for 30 years and won’t see any of it,” he said. “But that’s alright. At least, they can’t say I cheated anyone. They cheated me, maybe.”

Later that year, Juan met Maria, who worked as a maid at a $50-a-night motel on I-5, did other people’s laundry and made tamales for sale at lunch carts in the fields outside of town. Maria is a couple of years younger than Juan.  Like Juan, Marie entered the United States as a child. She was only two when her parents left Ciudad Juárez for El Paso. They moved every couple of years, looking for better work, eventually landing in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her father was a plumber, and her mother took care of other people’s children. Marie went to school. Learned to read and write in English. Sang and played the piano at church. Maria’s father was arrested for a DUI when she was a freshman in high school. The arrest led to a deportation order and he was eventually picked up by CPB and sent back to Mexico, crippling the family financially. Maria quit school and worked two jobs to help support her mother and younger siblings. There’s little margin for error in undocumented America and few places to turn for help.

Maria turned to her church and that’s where she first encountered Juan. “I wasn’t a regular in those days,” Juan chuckled. “To be honest, I mainly went to check out the new girls.” A few months later, they were married and Maria was pregnant with their first child. Four more babies would follow over the next five years. Maria quit her jobs to care for the kids. Then she started taking in other children. She taught the young migrant kids English. She gave them clothes for the dismal Oregon winters. She helped get them checkups and vaccinations at the local clinic. Eventually, she became a vital resource for migrant mothers up and down the valley.

By then, Juan had found his career as a tree-trimmer. “These hands don’t look like much, but they could hold a chainsaw and work a pruning saw,” Juan said. The pay was good, better than picking marionberries and gathering hazelnuts, anyway. And he was a quick learner. He learned by watching and doing. Experiential learning in a dangerous occupation. But five years later, Juan had his own battered truck and his own company. But he still worked to perfect his craft by taking classes on the care of fruit and ornamental trees at a local community college, which is where he first came into contact with the immigrant rights movement in Oregon. “The trees and the movement changed the course of my life,” he said. “Gave it a new purpose.”

Juan took on apprentices. All of his workers were either young migrants themselves or the children of migrants. He takes the time to teach each of them his craft, which is an art, really: how to scale trees, how to trim limbs, how to prune fruit and nut-bearing trees. “I also teach them how to listen,” Juan said. “They talk, you know. Well, they communicate. Mainly with each other. But you can still hear them. They tell you what they need.”

Hernández has about 20 workers now, doing jobs from Albany, 20 miles south of Salem, to Troutdale, at the entrance to the Columbia River Gorge, east of Portland. Two of his workers have been detained and released by ICE in the last three months. “They carry more documents proving who they are than you need to get on a plane,” Juan joked bitterly.

We talked about the recent Border Patrol shooting in Portland, where a Venezuelan couple was pulled over and shot in their car, only a day after the murder of Renee Good. Both the man and the woman were immediately smeared as gang members by DHS without any evidence to back up the claim, because, as we now know, no evidence exists. Neither was there any evidence that the young couple tried to run over the Border Patrol agents who had surrounded them with guns drawn and later dubiously claimed that’s why they shot them.

“The people who come here have run out of choices,” Juan said. No one really wants to leave their home and make that journey. There’s so much that can happen, most of it bad. This is the only choice left, not a good choice, the only choice.”

As successful as Juan’s business has become, by the end of the month, there’s not much left of Juan and Maria’s income. What there is, he gives to the church. “Our church is there to help,” Juan told me. “That’s the ministry. We’re not there to hear your confession or dunk you in the river or make you proclaim your faith or to take your money. We can do most of that if you really need it, but we want to help you survive in this strange new place.” How to find shelter, where to find food and work. How to get your kids into school or daycare and what to do if ICE shows up and who your family can turn to if you get detained.

Hernández supposes his “church-on-wheels” has a base congregation of 250 people. In the last year, at least 15 of them have been seized by ICE. “And they haven’t really started yet,” he said. “There’s bad stuff coming our way and people need to be ready.”

Last week, Juan’s oldest, Luis, was grabbed by two ICE agents while he was filling his car with gas on the way to work in Newberg, Oregon. Luis was born just a few miles away in Salem. Despite his protestations that he was a US citizen, ICE agents cuffed him and jammed him into the back of a black SUV. They took his wallet and his phone and left the keys and gas pump hose inserted in the car. They held him for about 20 minutes after they had confirmed his identity, before they cut off the Plasticuffs and let him go. “No apologies,” said Juan, shaking his head. “Those guys didn’t even think Luis’s REAL ID was real.”

The suspicion, the harassment, the arrests don’t end when you become a citizen. They don’t end even if you’re born here. You’re not treated like one of us. You’re one of them. Brown skin is all the probable cause ICE needs to treat you like a suspect, like someone they could disappear without question.

Finally, I asked him about the risk that he’s taking in helping people who have targets on their backs. “You can be arrested for doing nothing these days,” Juan said. “So why not risk being arrested for doing something good, for helping desperate people?” It was a sentiment that had echoes from the Catholic Workers’ and Central American Solidarity movements of the 1980s.

As Juan Hernández got up to leave, he scanned the tall Doug-firs that sheltered us from a late January drizzle and said, “I still think about those chickens, you know, those little feet. How callously they were treated and those who the bosses got to do the killing for them. Here one minute and gone the next. The chickens and the people.”

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