Immigrant Women In A Hazardous Industry

In To The Bone, an exquisitely acted and splendidly directed new play by Lisa Ramirez that’s part of the Theater:Village Festival, Reina greets her niece Carmen, who is newly arrived from Honduras, with the news that she is going to try to get her a job in the local poultry plant. “Why would you send your niece to work there?” Olga, Reina’s housemate, says to her with contempt. “Olga, stay out of this,” Reina spits. “I wouldn’t send my daughter to work there,” Olga says. But Olga herself works there, as does Reina, and the other woman in the household, Juana, who is so stressed-out that she has the disturbing habit of sleepwalking, accompanied by zombie-like utterances such as “Go back, go back” and “Dirt like smoke.” They are Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan women, documented or undocumented, who feel they have no choice but to work at a job they hate, with an abusive boss. They are among the many immigrant women in the United States who work in the meatpacking industry, which the United States Department of Labor has classified as one of the nation’s most hazardous industries, with the highest rate of injuries. Over the past decade, poultry processing plants in Sullivan County, about 100 miles north of New York City in upstate New York, have replaced the chopped liver and comedy that once thrived in the now-defunct Catskills resorts of “the Borscht Belt.”