Slavery Survivor Honored for Work at Statue of Liberty

Jose Gutierrez is living his American dream. He has a good job working at a place he dreamed of as a boy, the Statue of Liberty. He has a wife and daughter who he adores. And most of all, he has his freedom. But to get where his is today, Jose overcame deafness, cultural and language barriers, and an adolescence spent in slavery.

Jose was the second youngest child of a large family in Mexico, and the only one who was deaf. When he was 15, a family friend told him there were opportunities for deaf people to work in the U.S. So he embarked on a trip to New York, fluent only in Mexican sign language, and hoping for a better life. But the work which was available turned out to be far worse than Jose's life in Mexico.

Jose was enslaved with 56 other people, most of whom were also deaf. For 12 to 16 hours a day, they were forced to peddle trinkets like key chains and novelty baseballs on the subway, at the airport, and in tourist hot spots around New York. The traffickers gave them cards written in English explaining that the peddlers were deaf, to hand out along with the items. Each night, they were forced to turn over all their earnings to their traffickers, who laundered it through casinos and back into Mexico. Because most of the victims only knew Mexican sign language, it was almost impossible for them to communicate what was happening to them to the police or anyone else.

Finally, in 1997, two of the enslaved men managed to write a letter explaining their situation, with help from a couple they met at the airport. They brought the letter to the police department. It took a lot of interpretation, but the police eventually understood what was happening, and were able to find and arrest the traffickers. At this time, however, there was no anti-trafficking law in the U.S. which allowed foreign victims in the country without documentation to be spared deportation. But then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani stepped in and offered the victims the chance to stay in America. Jose and 39 others took it.

And so after two years of surviving slavery, Jose Gutierrez finally set to work on his dreams. He went to school and fell in love. He got a job cleaning at the Statue of Liberty at which he works diligently. He married his high school sweetheart and had a daughter. And this week, he was honored not for his past in slavery, but for his present dedication to his company. He was honored for his work in preserving one of the great symbols of America, which announces that liberty belongs to all those who enter our great land.

Photo credit: Esparta