Cascading Lives

Agustín: Somewhere in the middle, not fully belonging anywhere

Agustín was born in Colombia, in a village outside the city of Medellin. His mother and father had a small farm and during school breaks, Agustín and his five siblings worked in the sugarcane and coffee fields alongside their parents. “The farm was hard work and it only allowed us to have the most basic things, like housing and food. It was nothing fancy, just enough to survive. It was a simple life and we were content.” He feels his parents taught them what is truly important in life – devotion to family and a strong work ethic.

As a child, Agustín was a bookworm who enjoyed school and dreamt of becoming a journalist. His mother, who had a high school education, encouraged his aspirations. With the support of his parents, Agustín entered a public university in Medellin after high school to study business administration, the program into which he received admission.

Living in the city, away from his family, was a difficult transition for Agustín. He went to classes and found part-time jobs to pay for his living expenses. The business administration program required students to do an internship and Agustín was placed in a government office at the department of motor vehicles. When the internship was over, Agustín’s supervisor asked him to stay on as an employee. Agustín immediately accepted, although it meant putting off the completion of his degree. It was a relatively well-paid job that would allow him to fulfill his most important priority – supporting his family.

Agustín had been working at the motor vehicles office for several years when his younger sister suggested that he come to the U.S. She had recently moved there after being unable to find a job in Colombia, despite having a degree in cosmetology. She told him that jobs were plentiful in the U.S. and that he could make more money there than what he was making in Colombia. Eventually, Agustín decided to take her advice. He had become disillusioned with his government job as he saw how those with political connections advanced into higher positions, regardless of merit. As a gay man, he also thought he would find more acceptance for his sexual identity in the U.S.

Since coming to the U.S, Agustín has been working in the restaurant industry. When he first arrived, he had little experience in food preparation, but he has gradually built up his skills and qualifications over time. For the past nine years, Agustín has been employed as a line cook at a sports bar. The job can be stressful during times of high traffic, but he enjoys a sense of camaraderie with other long-time co-workers. “What I like the most, and what has kept me in it, are the people who have also been working there for a long time. We get to know one another really well. It is like a family.”

Agustín lives with his sister and two nieces in an immigrant neighborhood. In the absence of their biological father, he has been a father figure for his nieces, now in their teens. He and his sister have teamed up to take care of them over the years, coordinating work schedules to make sure that one of them is at home for them after school.

As it did for others in the restaurant industry, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 brought on a period of hardship for Agustín. He found himself at home with no income when the restaurant where he worked closed for several months due to the lockdown. Since his father’s death years ago, Agustín had been financially maintaining his mother as well as his widowed sister and children in Colombia. By drawing on his savings he was able to continue sending remittances to them. He and his sister scraped by, somehow managing to keep up with household expenses. Whenever possible they took advantage of food donations from community centers and the restaurant where Agustín worked.

In the late summer of 2020, pandemic restrictions on public life in Boston eased slightly. There was a resumption of indoor dining services with strict protection measures in place. However, at the restaurant where Agustín was employed, as with so many other establishments, the flow of customers was down to a trickle and the management soon decided to let many employees go. Agustín kept his job, but with sharply reduced hours -- barely ten percent of the hours he had been working before. His income was a small fraction of what it had been before the pandemic.

In the spring of 2021, as COVID-19 vaccinations became available to the public, the restaurant business picked up and Agustín’s hours gradually rose. Agustín found himself in a difficult situation. He and a small group of co-workers were overloaded, responsible for an array of tasks that at one time had been done by a full staff team in the pre-pandemic days. The problems started with the reluctance of the managers to hire more staff. “They got used to one or two people doing the work of three or four. They’d justify it by saying, look, we’re still in a pandemic. People then started to quit because they were overloaded.”

Frustrated with the situation, Agustín threatened to quit. The manager persuaded him to stay, offering a pay raise and promising to reduce the workload. By this time, however, the manager found it difficult to recruit staff. By the summer of 2021, restaurants around the country were facing severe labor shortages. Agustín found himself constantly training new workers in the kitchen. “It’s just chaos in the restaurant industry now, because workers don’t have to stay in a job, or they stay for only three days, saying I don’t like this job, they’ll pay me more someplace else. It is really challenging to run a restaurant.”

Agustín used to think of a future in which he eventually returned to Colombia with the savings to start a small business there. Now he is not so sure about that vision. He feels like a person in limbo, with strong ties to both the place where he was born and the place where he has lived for so many years. He longs to spend time with family in Colombia and yet he does not want to be separated from his nieces in Boston, who embrace him as a father. “I feel like I’m from neither here nor there. I’m somewhere in the middle, not fully belonging anywhere.”