On a cool desert morning in November 2012, Prasanna Rao walked out of the La Quinta Inn in El Paso, Texas where he had spent the night. A black Chevy Tahoe was waiting: his first ride into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
“It looked like a regular Tahoe until I tried to open the door. I could not move it,” he said. The driver explained to him that the door contained a steel plate several inches thick.
Once he got the door open, Rao climbed in and they drove off toward the Bridge of the Americas. The SUV’s engine stayed around 4,000 to 5,000 RPM because of the weight. The windows, which could not be lowered, were bulletproof plexiglass. The driver was friendly, but Rao was more focused on the gun on the driver’s hip.
“That Glock made me super uncomfortable to sit right next to him, because in India we are not allowed to own guns,” he said.
At 22 years old, Rao had moved from southern India to Tennessee to study engineering: a rewarding opportunity and the time of his life. But post-graduation, he found working in the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan more nerve-wracking than risking kidnapping by cartels in Mexico. During his first five years in the country, Rao embarked on a roller coaster ride of U.S. education, borders and white supremacy.
Rao describes experiences that thrilled him soon after he moved to the United States and others that terrified him. (Photo/Daniel Hart)
Now 37, Rao has a lot to say, unsurprising considering all he has experienced. He answers questions wearing a blue Patagonia jacket; he likes to get outside as often as he can. He grew up in Andhra Pradesh, a state in southeastern India. In 2008, after he earned his Bachelor’s, his good grades made obtaining a U.S. student visa easy. He spent one semester at the New York Institute of Technology, then received admission and a scholarship to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, an R1 school. He didn’t hesitate to accept. The transfer took him into the heartland of the United States for the first time.
“It was in the middle of nowhere. I had never seen that much trees in my life before,” he said.
Learning curve
The University was founded on the banks of the Tennessee River, downstream from the Great Smoky Mountains, in 1794, two years before Tennessee became a state. During the Civil War, several of its buildings lodged wounded Confederate soldiers until the Union Army captured Knoxville. In August 2008, Rao found the University a wealth of resources for his research and personal life.
“University was one of the best times I ever had in my life,” he said.
Despite the University’s high research activity, Rao said not many people moved to Tennessee for education, leaving a surplus of funding. About $900 a month enabled him to pay tuition, buy a used car and share a two-bedroom house with two other students. He felt rich.
He was also surprised at the University’s cosmopolitan environment, despite its rural, landlocked location. Among the large international student population, he made friends from India, China, Thailand and Latin America. He met friends from the U.S. too, who introduced him to hiking, camping and backpacking in the Great Smoky Mountains.
As he pursued his Master’s in industrial and systems engineering, he began to excel academically. One of his research projects was for the U.S. Army, creating simulations to test how quickly its supply chain could move from dormant to active in a wartime scenario. He appreciated the chance to apply what he was learning to the mechanics of a real organization.
“That was my most enjoyable part, apart from all the partying,” he said.
Rao studied hard Monday through Thursday; after that, the time between Thursday night and Saturday night was an exhilarating, alcohol-soaked blur.
In 2012, the good times came to a close. Rao graduated with his Master’s and found a job with Magneti Marelli, an Italian subsidiary of Fiat that manufactures auto parts. The company was opening a plant in Pulaski, Tennessee, a town of 8,000 people 20 minutes from the Alabama border. His job would require travel, Rao knew, but Pulaski would be his base. He started searching for housing on Craigslist.
When he found an ad for a beautiful two-bedroom farmhouse with a yard and a garden for less than $500 a month, he quickly scheduled a tour. After driving 250 miles west from Knoxville, he entered Pulaski city limits. A driveway led him several hundred feet off the road. The owner, who Rao described as a sweet old lady, met him at the door. She showed him around the house but didn’t ask if he had any questions.
“When we came outside to the car, she said, ‘It’s a beautiful property, but you probably don’t want to live here,’” Rao said. He felt offended. He assured her he liked the house and could pay the rent.
“‘When you exit the driveway, do make sure to check who your neighbors are,’” she told him. Confused, Rao got into his car and drove back toward the road. When he got there, he looked over and spotted a sign next door for the European American Heritage Festival.
Pulaski, as Rao soon learned, was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The organization was founded by former Confederate officers in 1865. The Festival, which has been held in Pulaski since the 1980s until at least 2016, has been sponsored by several groups with ties to the Klan.
As he thought about it, Rao decided he would have said the same thing in the farmhouse owner’s position. He rented an apartment on the opposite side of town.
There was a bright spot: As soon as he was hired, he learned he would spend one week of every month far from Pulaski.
“Back then, I just wanted a job. I would go anywhere you want,” he said.
Inside man
Magneti Marelli, it turned out, wanted him to travel via El Paso to Juárez every month. The company operated a plant there, about three miles from the border crossing at the Bridge of the Americas. Rao was tasked with learning their processes and bringing them back to implement at the Pulaski plant.
On his first day in Juárez, ignorance was bliss.
“I was in a very jolly mood. I was the least nervous person of everybody,” he said. Riding to work in an armored car felt like a privilege.
Once across the Bridge of the Americas, the armored Tahoe passed between fences topped with barbed wire into the plant’s parking lot. All vehicles were backed into their spaces so they could leave quickly in an emergency. Entering and exiting the building required an airport-style security check; the company wanted to prevent weapons from coming into the plant and stolen parts from leaving. The office windows were made of bulletproof glass. Rao and his American coworkers were not supposed to leave the campus; food would be brought to the office.
By the time winter rolled into the spring of 2013, Rao had made friends with some of the local engineers. Hundreds of Mexican employees worked at the plant. Most of them had grown up in Juárez; they were used to the presence of violence. One day, Rao decided to sneak out with the other engineers to get beer and food. The tacos were much better than anything from Taco Bell.
“I did see a lot of evidence of the end of the drug war,” he said.
Houses were surrounded by spiked fences or walls topped with broken glass. Sometimes during Rao’s outings, police passed at high speeds in American F-150s with machine guns mounted in the beds. His coworkers pointed out the unfinished construction site of a high-end apartment complex. They told him the cartel had demanded a bribe from the builder, who refused to pay. That night, the silence had been shattered by gunfire. In the morning, passersby could see bullet holes riddling the walls. After that, no one would work for the builder.
In 2013, violence in Juárez was declining. Still, Rao was shocked by the contrast between El Paso, where he could walk at night without fear, and the battleground just across the border. He recalled beautiful hikes in the hills above El Paso. From high points, the view across the wall and the Rio Grande into Juárez was striking; in the neighborhoods closest to the border, blocks of shacks stretched on for miles.
Many of Rao’s Mexican coworkers hoped to get their family across the border to El Paso.
“They don’t want to live in a place where they find heads in the dumpsters and people getting skinned alive,” he said.
One day, Rao’s director caught him sneaking out with the other engineers. She warned him that if he was kidnapped outside the plant, the company wouldn’t pay his ransom. Rao had signed a lot of hiring paperwork without reading all of it. Until his director confronted him, he didn’t realize one of the documents had been for kidnapping insurance. Suddenly, the risk felt personal.
Another manager described to Rao his experience venturing outside the plant to drink at a bar. When the bill came, the total was several thousand dollars. The manager told the server the amount was wrong. Then he noticed the men with machetes standing by the exits. The server pointed him to an ATM. The manager slid his card into the machine and found that the maximum amount it would withdraw was the exact number on the bill. He gave the server the cash and walked out unharmed. The company wouldn’t reimburse him, and Rao’s director warned him that he too would be on his own if taking unnecessary risks got him into trouble.
Eventually, Rao noticed something else: As far as he knew, of the employees who drove in from the United States, he was the only non-citizen. But the others were all Hispanic.
“They really didn’t want anybody like, blonde hair, blue eyes,” he said.
White Americans were more likely to stand out as kidnapping targets, so the company hired Rao instead.
Heritage
However, it wasn’t the threat of abduction in Mexico that led him to seek work elsewhere.
“It’s like you’re camping in the woods and you know there’s bears and there’s mountain lions, but you follow the rules, nothing’s gonna happen to you, right? So you still take the risk and you go,” he said. In his late twenties at the time, he found working in Juárez thrilling.
Pulaski, on the other hand, was anything but. The only friends Rao made were at work, and if they had a high-paying job, they lived at least an hour outside of town. During his weeks in Pulaski, Rao would work until Friday, and then drive four hours to his friends in Knoxville. On Monday, he would get up well before dawn and drive straight back to work. A year after leaving the party life in Knoxville, his mental health reached an all-time low.
Until he graduated, he had little experience of xenophobia or racism in Tennessee. He had often seen the Confederate flag but didn’t know its history. In 2013, a passing truck driver yelled the n-word at Rao’s Indian friend who was barhopping in Knoxville. Meanwhile, in Pulaski, Rao remembers being followed in WalMart and getting a lot of stares.
One Saturday morning in October, he woke up early, drank his morning coffee and left to meet friends about an hour away in Nashville. He had to drive through Pulaski to reach the highway. He was surprised to see first one police officer, then another and another all over the normally quiet town, including some from neighboring counties. Rounding a corner, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a crowd. He had driven straight into the middle of the 2013 European American Heritage Festival parade. Participants carried Confederate flags on all sides of his car. Those he had seen before. The bigger shock was the white hoods worn by some of the marchers.
“That was a very scary moment for me, because I did not know if something was gonna happen,” he said.
A police officer approached and began clearing a path for him. After about ten minutes, Rao made it clear of the parade.
This experience was the final straw. Rao wanted out of Pulaski. His goal is to work hard and contribute wherever he goes, but he has learned that’s not possible everywhere.
“When you know the history of those people and what they represent, you really can’t feel safe or comfortable,” he said.
The following month, he found a job with Amazon as an area manager in Nashville, Tennessee, leaving Magneti Marelli behind. He worked there for a year and a half. In May 2015, he took the first engineering job he could find within the company, which brought him to Seattle. Both cities offered significantly better opportunities for a social life. Nashville’s food, natural beauty, music and diversity still draw Rao back for visits. But his wife adores Seattle, and he has made many good friends there.
Rao’s experience of American realities has deepened over time: present and past, welcoming and hostile, legacies of both opportunity and violence. If Juárez was a wilderness with bears, mountain lions and an essential list of survival rules, fifteen years have taught Rao a few things about navigating the United States’ unique threats. Soon, he may have the opportunity to pass along what he’s learned. He has started thinking about having kids, and by extension, where they would thrive. Seattle feels like the kind of cultural environment he wants for them. This train of thought takes him back to his time in Pulaski.
“Do I really want my next generation to experience any of those things? Probably not,” he said.
Still, he said, if his kids received the necessary funding, he would have no qualms about sending them to college in Knoxville. If their experience of Tennessee - and the United States - is anything like his, they may find the freshest prospects mixed in with the oldest dangers.
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