Invisible Riders

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

'I haven't seen them in nearly 20 years,' Francisco says. 'I miss them so much.' There's an admonition on his green card, written in letters larger than his birth date, or name, or anything else: 'Not valid for re-entry.'

Francisco can't leave. The family he misses, the family he loves, needs the money he can provide only from this country. Thanks to his bike.

The men who pedal the streets at daybreak with Francisco are invisible in so many ways. Some are here without permission and must hide from the official world. They are not noticed by the cars and buses that roar past, sometimes to tragic effect. They're not even seen by those of us who claim to love cycling. We'll pick out a sleek Italian racing bike from across an intersection, but a dozen day laborers on Huffys dissolve into the streets.

I live near downtown Los Angeles. South and east of me are the city's most densely populated neighborhoods-not Hollywood and Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which all of America has heard of, but Boyle Heights and Pico Rivera, the only places in California where the number of people per square mile approaches that found in New York, Chicago, or Mexico City. The millions of Spanish speakers who live in these neighborhoods provide the region's muscle and backbone. The bicycle is the blood of this invisible body of labor, as it is all across the United States in a diverse swath of humanity. You and I have seen the bikes everywhere-cheap department-store rigs chained to fences and signposts outside car washes, lumberyards, budget chain restaurants. But we've never seen the riders, not really.

'There are more of them than us,' says Aaron Salinger, a public school teacher and bicycle-only commuter who also volunteers as a mechanic for local riders in his Los Angeles neighborhood. The 'us' Salinger is talking about is recreational riders, dedicated fitness cyclists, people who commute on two wheels by choice. For several weeks in June, Salinger and I rode among the unseen. The veil was hard to lift. Many riders were afraid to talk to us; some thought we were immigration officers and pedaled quickly away.

Neighborhood after neighborhood revealed surprises. The invisible riders, for instance, log far more hours than most 'serious' cyclists. They do so on equipment most of us wouldn't touch and under the most adverse conditions: at the height of rush hour on the busiest thoroughfares. Workers without documentation have no vacation or sick days, so they keep a grueling schedule.

Riders like me want to believe we're doing our part for the environment. We want to believe that having the best equipment is an expression of commitment. But I don't know a single rider who commutes more than the people I met for this story, who do it purely out of necessity, and who do it on bikes that, while they're fashioned to look like high-end mountain bikes, are stripped of so many essential engineering details that we'd consider them unreliable, unsafe, and certainly unenjoyable.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print