MEXICO CITY (CN) — Originally from Mexico City, Carlos Castañeda crossed into the United States with his family when he was 16.
He spent 10 years in Los Angeles, then 20 in Arkansas. He built himself a quiet life there, surrounded by nature in a big house with a pool. But he was deported in 2003 after a traffic stop, then again in 2015.
Before his second deportation, authorities gave Castañeda a 12-month prison sentence — and a warning.
“The judge told me, ‘Don’t come back. Next time, I’m giving you five years,’’’ the now 54-year-old recalled in a recent interview.
Back in Mexico City, Castañeda found work at call centers.
He now works for the company TTEC, formerly known as TeleTech. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company employs 60,000 people at call centers worldwide.
“There's tons of them around the country: around Mexico City, on the border in Tijuana [and] down to Polanco,” said Castañeda, who has worked at several over the years. "There's good ones and bad ones. It's kind of like: The less questions they ask, the lower you get paid. The more questions they ask, the higher you may get paid. It depends on the call center and the person.”
In Mexico, many deportees end up at call centers like this. A symbiotic if sometimes difficult relationship, one might call it the deportee-to-call-center pipeline.
Call centers often don't inquire about employee backgrounds and are open to paying people under the table — two important factors for people with uncertain residency, possible legal trouble and lack of enrollment in Mexico’s Tax Administration Service, the country’s equivalent of the IRS. Deportees like the community and higher-than-average wages, while call centers seem to like that many deportees speak conversational American English.
Mexican call centers can be fly-by-night operations, but TTEC represents the more established side of the spectrum. The company offers phone-based customer service for major brands like Kaiser Permanente, Verizon, Dish Network, Best Buy and Bank of America. It has two locations in the country: one in Guadalajara and another in Mexico City. Its sleek Mexico City office, near the Art Deco Monument to the Revolution, employs around 2,000 people, including Castañeda.
TTEC did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In an email, a spokesperson told Courthouse News that the company was “respectfully declining the opportunity to participate.”
Perhaps the image of hiring deportees clashes with the company’s hip and polished brand. And yet, deportees say call centers can be a lifeline for people in difficult circumstances. One deportee and former call center employee, Francisco Banda, argued companies like TTEC should lean in.
"I think it would be a lot more powerful if they admitted that there's lots of deportees working for them and kind of owned that,” Banda said. “It would be a really cool thing to say, ‘Yeah, we do hire deportees, and they're good people and they work hard handling your problems.’”
Ariel Avendaño was born in Stockton, California.
He moved to Mexico at age 8, when his parents were deported. Now 22, he has been working at TTEC’s Mexico City call center for a year and a half.
In an interview, Avendaño said working with people with similar life stories helped him accept and embrace his Chicano identity, a term for people of Mexican descent who were born in the United States or have spent significant time there.
"In the States, you're not American,” Avendaño explained during a work break, speaking about the Chicano experience. “I mean, your last name and your face, like, everything about you looks Mexican. So, you're not American.”
