One call center is called “homieland,” for the deportees from the U.S. who staff it. Illustration by David Plunkert

Eddie Anzora was sitting in his cubicle at a call center in El Salvador one day a couple of years ago, making a hotel reservation for an impatient American customer, when he spotted someone he knew from a past life. The man, who was part of a group of new employees on a tour of the office, was tall, with a tattoo of a rose on the back of his neck. His loping stride caught Anzora’s attention. Salvadorans didn’t walk like that.

“Where you from?” Anzora asked, when the man reached his desk.

“Sunland Park,” he replied. It was a neighborhood in Los Angeles, more than two thousand miles away, but Anzora knew it. A decade earlier, when the two men belonged to rival street crews, they had got into a fistfight there. Now they were both deportees, sizing each other up in a country they barely knew.

Anzora, who is thirty-nine, is thick-armed and barrel-chested; his hair is trimmed to a fade. He was born in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, but he lived in California between the ages of two and twenty-nine, when he was deported for drug possession. “I got real American-culturized from the beginning,” he told me recently.

By the time Anzora returned to El Salvador, in 2007, it had become one of the most dangerous countries in the world, gripped by an intractable gang war. On the plane, Anzora had been handcuffed, his legs shackled. Once he stepped outside, police officers inspected him to see if he had any tattoos that suggested gang ties. Anzora’s Spanish was “all beat up,” he said, a second language that he spoke with a Chicano accent. A cousin he knew from L.A., who had been deported a year earlier, picked him up from the San Salvador airport and let him stay in his apartment while he figured out what to do. Over dinner that night, Anzora’s cousin told him about a company called Sykes, which ran one of the two largest call centers in San Salvador. Sykes, which is based in Florida, has call centers in twenty countries and employs about three thousand Salvadorans, who provide customer service and technical support to American businesses. In El Salvador, Sykes came to be known, in English, as “homieland,” because so many of its employees were deportees from the United States.

Drawn by low operating costs, generous tax incentives, and proximity to the U.S., more than ten major call-center firms now operate in El Salvador, employing some twenty thousand people. Deportations from the U.S. have fuelled the industry by bringing an influx of English-speaking job-seekers. Anzora was one of twenty thousand Salvadorans deported in 2007. Since President Obama took office, in 2009, the U.S. has deported 2.7 million people, more than during any previous Administration. A hundred and fifty-two thousand of them are Salvadoran, and roughly twenty per cent have spent at least five years in the U.S. They generally speak fluent and idiomatic English—the most crucial requirement for call-center work. Their next most important quality is their desperation. Deportees are “very loyal,” a recruiter for a call center told the news service McClatchy. “They know they won’t get another shot.” At one call center I visited, more than half the employees had been deported from the U.S. Recruiters show up at an isolated hangar of the San Salvador airport to intercept deportees as they get off small jets flown in by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A month after Anzora arrived, he began working at Sykes. Instructors drilled him on the language of customer service: “sir” instead of “dude,” “you’re welcome” instead of “it’s cool.” Anzora is charismatic and smooth-talking, a natural salesman, and he was soon assigned to take calls. He handled the account for Hotels.com, “upselling” customers on more expensive rooms. He also performed technical support for Kodak: when callers complained about their printers, he read from a list of basic troubleshooting techniques.

Cliques formed at Sykes based on where employees had lived before returning to El Salvador—the West Coast, Texas, the tri-state area. They listened to the American accents that others used while answering calls, and introduced themselves during breaks. “Everybody meets each other at a call center,” Anzora said. In Spanish, the word for “deportee” is deportado, but the call-center employees preferred to call themselves deportistas—“athletes.” The deportistas’ lives revolved around the groups that formed in the office.

At Sykes, Anzora made close to a hundred and fifty dollars a week, which amounted to three times the Salvadoran minimum wage, and within two months he was able to move into an apartment of his own, around the corner from the office. But San Salvador remained a foreign city to him. “I’m the only one here,” Anzora told me. He has the animated manner of a raconteur who has long been starved of listeners. “All my family is in the United States. There’s nobody to reminisce with.” He and the man from Sunland Park started attending church on Sundays. At work, calls from familiar area codes were almost therapeutic. “It felt good speaking to Americans, especially when these guys live close to where you used to hang out,” he said. The feeling lasted only as long as the phone calls. Then, he said, “you’re back in El Salvador.”

In 1981, after a protracted political crisis, a leftist guerrilla army attacked El Salvador’s military, setting off eleven years of fighting, in which seventy-five thousand people were killed. Fearing a Communist contagion in Latin America, the U.S. backed the military, despite its abysmal human-rights record, providing some six billion dollars in aid and sending advisers to help Salvadoran troops. But the U.S. support served mainly to prolong the war. About a quarter of the country’s population of five million fled to the U.S., where they sought asylum. All but two per cent of the applications were denied, so most people ended up staying illegally. Eventually, two million Salvadorans came to live in the U.S. The Salvadoran population in Los Angeles, the largest enclave, increased tenfold during the nineteen-eighties, to approximately three hundred thousand.

Anzora left El Salvador with his mother and younger brother just as the civil war began, and the family landed in Los Angeles. Like most Salvadoran immigrants there, they settled in South Central, an inner-city area that was controlled by the Bloods, a black street gang. At the time, black and Mexican gangs dominated the city, and they brutalized the Salvadorans who showed up in their neighborhoods.

Upstart Salvadoran gangs gradually began to appear, and attempted to take territory. When Anzora was nine years old, he was throwing a football with friends one day when a group of teen-agers spilled out of a car and cocked their guns. A few seconds later, another car pulled up, and a bunch of boys emerged carrying baseball bats and long knives. In the first car was a group of Mexicans, dressed in oversized khaki pants and flannel shirts; in the second were Salvadorans who resembled goth rockers, with black T-shirts and long, unwashed hair. A gunshot scattered most of the fighters, but a few of them stayed behind to play football.

“Everybody was jumping into a gang,” Anzora told me. “You go to school, and you’re hanging out with your friends, and, next thing you know, one of your friends is throwing a gang sign.” He ran with a more low-key group of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Asian hustlers, who were known as taggers, for their graffiti, and mostly avoided violence.