A Walled Garden for White People

In September 2016, after I sold the house I had lived in for eighteen years, I didn’t have a place to live, so I was couch surfing. Then I got an offer from a friend to spend the winter in his family vacation house in the Hamptons, a stretch of beach towns on the Atlantic shore of Long Island, outside New York City. I gladly accepted the invitation and moved into a big house with many bedrooms and many bathrooms, a thousand-square-foot deck overlooking the water, a swimming pool and a hot tub, and manicured grounds. I was living alone in a mansion surrounded by similarly glamorous mansions in a dense suburb of mansions, all vacant. The town was mostly unoccupied for the cold season. The only people I regularly saw were the Latino men. 

As swimming weather ended, a Latino man in a pick-up truck who spoke English arrived at the house with his Spanish-speaking crew to put the swimming pool to bed for the season. Three young men worked for a couple hours to clean debris from the pool and cover it, empty the flower arrangements and potted plants that wouldn’t survive the winter, and sweep the deck and stairs. They laughed and talked while they worked as I watched them from the window clean the patio furniture and stow it in the basement and bring in all the pool toys, coil up the hoses, shut off the spigots, and close the gates as they left.

Days later the first frosts sparkled on the morning lawn, and another English speaking Latino man in a pick-up truck came with a crew of young Spanish-speaking men to put the gardens to bed for winter. They took out the begonias planted along the driveway and pruned the shrubs. One guy mowed the lawn while another guy raked up the leaves and sticks in the grass. They trimmed the low branches on the trees and cleaned up the hedge around the pool using tools they brought with them. Then they went around the whole property with a blower and captured every bit of errant flora until the yard was pristine as a golf course. Before they left they bagged up all the yard waste and took it with them. A couple days later they were back with a load of bark mulch to spread around the borders of each garden and the driveway. They moved steadily, were polite and friendly, and did meticulous work.

Properties with an ocean view in the Hamptons are among the most opulent homes anywhere, coveted for their white sand beaches a couple hours’ drive from New York City. But they aren’t really homes. There are no swing sets in the yard or dogs barking at the mailman. They’re modern fortresses guarded by surveillance gadgets and managed like deluxe hotels. The jet-setting people who own them are not there most of the time. In the windy Atlantic winters, thirty million dollar homes stand all in a row along the beach, unoccupied. On some days as I drove past them, I felt like I was in the most expensive ghost town in the world.

The season change from winter to spring is the busy season for property managers and construction crews in the Hamptons. It’s common in this ultra wealthy enclave for a house to be sold and demolished so a new higher status house can be built in its place. The best architects and the most elite designers make the plans. But the Latinos construct the house. I saw the process without realizing what I was witnessing. People who could afford to pay top dollar for real estate and renown artists to conceive their gillion dollar castle were paying below market wages for the Latino men who laid the pipe and cut the wood and hammered the nails. 

In 2017, after eighteen years on a farm on a dead end gravel road, I was not tuned into Latinos as construction labor. But I did see them on the farms in my western Massachusetts community. Latino men worked in the dairy barns milking cows. They also worked in the restaurant kitchens. I knew that, but I didn’t see it as part of a larger system of exploiting immigrant labor. Of course, I knew about immigrant farm labor in California and Florida, but I thought Latino people working in my own community were different. I thought they were better off. I didn’t see it as structural racism. I didn’t think too much about if a person was documented or what that meant. I wasn’t as conscious of these issues as I am today, and my vocabulary was different. I was naive.

When construction season started up in the Hamptons in spring of 2017, I drove early in the morning along the island’s main road and saw dozens of young Latino men standing together on the corners of the main intersections. They were waiting for crew bosses to come with their trucks and pick up the workers they needed for the day. That’s when it finally sank into my brain that this kind of employment was organized exploitation. Every morning the workers waited on the corner in frayed clothes and worn boots. Later in the day I saw them on their job sites. I was all by myself just driving around from town to town through neighborhoods of vacant luxury houses depopulated for nine months out of the year. It seemed Latino men were the workers that made it possible for the Hamptons to exist as a walled garden for White people.

In the spring when the ground thawed, the Latino swimming pool guys came back to the house where I was living and did their routine in reverse. They got the patio furniture out of the basement, and filled the flowerpots with tropical plants, and uncovered the pool, and swept up the debris. Then the garden guys came back and replanted the begonias along the driveway and raked up the dried leaves that besmirched the sod lawn, and swept the porches and the deck, and touched up the hedge, and pulled dead wood out of the trees. And by the time they were done, the house and grounds looked perfect again. I smiled and waved goodbye. They went to their next job.

Now I’m reflecting on what all that meant. Almost ten years later, a worker’s wages still depend upon the color of their skin and their national origins. It appears we squeeze the work out of immigrant laborers, pay them as little as possible, and keep them undocumented so they can’t fight back because cheap labor reduces the cost of production and increases profits. We have trackers for our children, and the phone company knows where we are all the time, and we have GPS galore, and face recognition, and microchips for our pets, and barcode tags for our luggage but over the past few decades our government has lost track of millions of immigrant laborers and now we blame them for being here. But we don’t blame their employers. It’s a curious thing.