I asked Pollo about the “wash alley,” the department where he worked, told him I’d never seen the kinds of machines he works on. He described the tunnel washers in the plant, using his arms to gesture. As long as a bus, he said. He described moving bags of linen from the soil-sort area to the wash department, explaining that the heavy, full bags are hooked to a system of rails overhead. The wash workers push them through the air, along the tracks, to the wash conveyor. Pollo is short, about my height, five foot three, so when he demonstrated reaching up to loosen the pull string on the bags, he rose to his tiptoes. He said, The soiled linen, still full of asquerosidad—foulness, a word I wrote down in my notebook when we got to the car and looked up later—falls onto the belt, which runs it up and into the mouth of the tunnel washer. He told us that he sometimes has to crawl into the tunnel, through hot, bleachy water that leaches the foulness from the linen, in order to clear jams. He said that the supervisors don’t cut power to the machines when he’s inside like they are supposed to. He made eye contact for the first time when he said this, angry about having to go into the tunnel in this way. He knew how dangerous it was, climbing inside the machine without following the lockout/tagout and confined-space standards required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which get skirted by some companies because they are costly in terms of time and production. I make $7.80 an hour, he said.