At Marvel, Working for the System
José Lozano was twenty-six years old, an ordinary man from Mexico. The town where he lived was controlled by tangled forces. Young people either joined gangs and died in some shootout, or entered factories and worked themselves to the bone for barely enough to survive.
José was not afraid of hardship. What he feared was seeing no hope ahead.
One day, Evan, a childhood friend who had left town, returned. He had been a skinny kid... and was still skinny, but now he drove a nice car and wore a gold chain as thick as a thumb around his neck. Evan told José that the United States was full of opportunities and gold, that the moon was rounder there and the air was sweeter.
Evan smiled and asked, "Want to go out there and take a chance?"
José was not someone who worshipped foreign countries. The United States really was better than Mexico, but he also knew that the rich found Heaven everywhere, while the poor struggled wherever they went.
Evan's words could not be fully trusted.
Evan only said one thing to José. "Could it get any worse than this?"
There were far more people who wanted to go to the United States to fulfill their dreams than Evan had imagined. José was hardly unique.
That sentence finally moved José. Could things really get any worse?
José gave Evan the savings he had accumulated over the past few years and bought himself a "ticket."
But José had been wrong about one thing.
There was no worst—only worse... First, they were blindfolded and stuffed onto a bus, then taken to the border between the two countries and led through a tunnel across the border. After that, they were crammed into a refrigerated truck.
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