Roger Medina's alarm clock rings just as many people are about to go to sleep. It's midnight, he jumps out of bed, drinks a coffee and runs to the border, while his wife and 11-month-old daughter are still asleep.
He is one of the thousands of Mexican peasants who daily cross the border into the United States to work.
Medina, 23, lives in Mexicali and works in Calexico, on the US side. He must arrive early at the migration control to avoid two to three hour-long queues before beginning his hard day of work collecting lettuces for a well-known brand in California's Imperial Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.
He works as a collector of fruits and vegetables, a mechanical and tedious job that is often done under extreme temperatures and for which he gets paid $11.5 dollars an hour.
There are practically only Mexicans in the plantations, a group of people the new US president, Donald Trump, has called bad men, criminals, and "rapists", and whom he has accused of stealing the work of Americans.
"A gringo can't stand this," said the young man between laughs. "This work isn't living," he said seriously, adding that he was disgusted by the president's speech.
"If Trump wants to close the border, let him come and reap. I don't think the president knows who we are, the work there is in the salad he eats," said José Luis Carrillo, 35, while collecting lettuce with a speed that only his 17 years of experience grants him.
"Racist but not dumb"
According to the border authority, almost 55,000 people, just like Medina, cross between these sister cities, mostly to work in the Imperial Valley. However, there are no official statistics on how many people go to the countryside.
Medina can rest a little at the home of his mother, Patricia, who lives in Calexico and also works as a day laborer. Others do not have the same luck, they cross very early and sleep on a bench in the square while waiting for the bus to take them to the fields.
In this region, unlike many other rural areas, most workers have documents, whether a work-permit or a Mexican-American nationality. Otherwise, they would be unable to cross the border every day.
A metal fence already divides Calexico and Mexicali. Trump has ordered the construction of a wall on the 3,200 km frontier with Mexico, which he says Mexico will pay for, and wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
"He is a racist, but he is not stupid. He needs us to maintain agriculture, to fulfill his promise of improving the economy," said Antonio Hernandez, 50, while harvesting celery.
"The people who work the fields are very valued, without them our producers could not harvest," said Linsey Dale, executive director of the Imperial County Farmers' Association, which had a production valued at $1.925 billion dollars in 2015.
Some 540,000 Mexicans work in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. It is unclear how many of them are undocumented.
"Until God allows it"
A radio in the field where Medina works plays songs in Spanish to brighten the day.
The work requires absolute coordination in the production line. It is a choreography in which one person cuts the lettuce, another one bags it, yet another one puts a seal on it and places it in the box. Once a box is filled it is sent to a truck to a refrigerator for quality control - over and over, again, and again, and again.
Lunch arrives after three hours and Medina sits down to eat with his mother, who is still not 50. She takes off a white handkerchief that protects her face and takes out of an ice cream tortilla and meat. It's like soldier food, jokes her son, who began work at 17.
"He didn't want to go to school," says Mrs. Medina, and now this boy has no other plan other than to continue getting up at midnight, working all day, and returning to his wife and daughter with a hurting back, just to repeat the same routine the next day.
Mexico is not an option. Workers get US $3.5 per hour, much less than the guaranteed US $10.5 that they'll earn in the United States. And since he has a residence, "I'll work here as long as God allows me to," he says, lying on the bus, eating.
Source: gestion.pe