People throughout this Mexican port city tell stories of fathers, sons and husbands who went to America to make their fortunes.
The stories vary, but their essence is the same: There's a shadowy border crossing, the purchase of phony work papers, then gritty, grueling jobs that pay glorious amounts of money that almost immediately begins flowing back to this industrial region of 600,000 people.
But darker tales are also common: stories of men who came home battered and broken from doing America's dirty work. Men with no money, unable to work as they once did. Men who are burdens to the families they set out to support.
Hispanic and foreign-born workers are hurt and killed in the American workplace at rates higher than other groups largely because so many of them work in dangerous industries that are hungry for cheap labor.
U.S. workers' compensation laws require most American companies to pay for injured workers' medical treatment, lost wages, disabilities and deaths, even if the employees are working illegally. But some unprincipled employers abandon their immigrant laborers. And many of their workers, unaware of their rights and unwilling to fight for benefits for fear of being deported, go home to their families to heal their injuries.
Francisco Ruiz is a Tampico native who decided to stay in America and fight.
He was partially paralyzed and brain damaged when he fell 30 feet at a construction site near Charlotte, N.C. His employer, the Belk Masonry Co., and its insurer refused to pay injury benefits because Ruiz was an ``illegal alien.''
But Ruiz wouldn't go home disabled, with no money and no way to earn it, to a wife and three children who depended on him.
RAISING A FAMILY
Francisco Ruiz never expected to leave Tampico.
The son of a tailor, he quit school in the eighth grade to drive a taxi, sell tacos and keep the grounds at a cemetery.
At 19, he married and did well enough driving a truck to build a home for his family.
But when the Mexican economy stalled in the mid-1990s, Ruiz lost his job.
He was 36 on the day in July 1997 when he woke up thinking: ``There isn't enough for the children.''
When he got to North Carolina, Ruiz bought a Social Security card for $10. Soon, he was washing dishes at a sports bar, living with a friend and wiring money home.
Ruiz also sent home photos of himself looking thin but fit. On the back of one, he wrote to his 8-year-old daughter, Laura: ``To my little girl, the most tiny and beautiful and pretty and exquisite and cute and endearing and darling baby . . . I love you so much.''
On Aug. 21, 1997, Ruiz got a second job. The Belk Masonry Co. offered him $300 a week to work as a laborer for a masonry crew. The boss checked his work papers but didn't call Social Security to verify his number.
Ruiz worked 12 hours a day, from 8 to 5 in construction, then from 7 to 11 washing dishes and cooking.
The routine lasted six weeks.
Ruiz still remembers nothing about Oct. 7, 1997.
30-FOOT FALL
The insurer said a crane hoisting Ruiz along with a load of bricks collapsed. He plunged at least 30 feet onto a concrete floor and was pelted with falling bricks.
He broke a rib and injured a kidney, and his right lung collapsed. He also hit his head on the floor, severely injuring his brain's frontal lobe, which controls language, memory and motor function.
Ruiz was in a coma, able to breathe only with a ventilator.
His younger brother, Jose, left his wife, two young children and his job in Mexico and rushed to Charlotte.
Ruiz's wife followed, with a temporary pass to enter the country, leaving her three children behind. When she arrived at Carolinas Medical Center, she found the Virgin of Guadalupe medal in her husband's hand.
Nurses were hoping for a miracle, but at Belk Masonry, a counterattack had begun.
The Companion Property & Casualty Insurance Co. paid his initial medical bills, but adjusters wanted to know all about Francisco Ruiz. When they discovered his illegal work status, they rejected his claim.
The law in North Carolina, as in most states, says that undocumented immigrants who are hurt on the job are entitled to compensation. Companies, the law says, must pay injury benefits to ``every person engaged in employment . . . including aliens, and also minors, whether lawfully or unlawfully employed.''
But officials at Companion Property & Casualty questioned the law's intent. Why should they pay an alien who lied about his immigration status to get his job?
Ruiz woke up after 14 days. He couldn't speak, walk or use the bathroom. He didn't recognize his wife or remember that he had children. His wife and the therapists began telling him stories, showing him photos and moving his muscles.
UNABLE TO WORK
After two months in hospitals, doctors released Ruiz with orders for round-the-clock supervision. His wife had to return to their children in Tampico. So with his brother as his caretaker, Ruiz moved into a cramped apartment in Charlotte and began the most difficult stretch of his life.
Four months after his fall, Charlotte physician James McDeavitt declared that Francisco Ruiz had reached ''maximum medical improvement.'' He was permanently disabled and wasn't employable.
The state ordered Companion Property & Casualty to pay Ruiz two-thirds of his salary -- $200 a week -- while he was out of work and the dispute made its way to court.
For the next four years, Ruiz and his family survived on his $800 a month. Ruiz kept $100 for himself, paid his lawyer $200 and sent the rest home.
FIVE-YEAR WAIT
It took five years for the dispute to reach North Carolina's highest court.
Companion Property & Casualty lost the first round in 1999 and was ordered to pay Ruiz $200 a week for the remainder of his life, plus medical bills, plus the big-ticket cost of a caretaker earning at least $128 a day.
It would be ''repugnant,'' the court said, for a company that benefited from a worker's labor not to pay him for an injury. Whether the worker was illegal didn't matter.
Companion appealed.
A year passed.
Companion lost the second round in 2000, when the North Carolina Industrial Commission upheld the initial order.
The company appealed again.
Companion lost Round Three, too. The North Carolina Court of Appeals rejected the company's argument that federal law prohibiting undocumented immigrants from working in the United States nullified state laws that allow those workers to collect injury benefits.
The purpose of workers' compensation, the court said, ``is to compel industry to take care of its own wreckage.''
Companion appealed to the state Supreme Court. In 2002 -- five years after his battle began -- the court refused to review the appeals court's decision.
Ruiz had won.
It took another year to settle the case.
In the end, Ruiz got $438,000.
The company was disappointed, but not surprised, by the ruling.
''We're always viewed as the deep pocket,'' Companion's Potok said. ``If you're talking about paying somebody or cutting someone off cold, we typically lose.''
