Maria Videla has not seen her family since she left Guatemala twenty years ago. She left behind three children and a husband. Her youngest daughter was seven years old. Videla has spent nine of those years as an employee of an eating club, where she mops up after the debauchery of Princeton students. Videla earns $14.15 an hour washing beer, piss, and vomit off the floors. She shows up every morning at 6am, three or four hours after the last student has drunkenly stumbled out onto Prospect Avenue.

In the late 19th century Princeton University was incapable of providing meals to its growing student body. In response students formed dining associations, groups where students with shared interests could gather to take meals. Eventually these societies, aided by wealthy alumni, bought and leased property in the vicinity of campus.

Today ten mansions are strung up in a row along Prospect Avenue at Campus’s east end. These century-old dinosaurs come fully equipped with chefs and libraries, foyers and dining rooms, dance floors and beer taps. They have evolved over time and in 2014 students continue to eat, study and drink at the clubs.

The bones of the clubs, the Doric columns, the red brick facades, the stone arches, assert an elitist white male identity. Yet the blood of these clubs runs hot with Central American immigrant labor. Without exception, all 10 clubs hire immigrant laborers, some legal, most not. They saved up for months and years in order to make the trek north. They undertook a staggering journey on buses, on trains and on foot.

When the clubs are “on tap” kegs of beer flow liberally. Princeton students run amok up and down through the hallowed hallways and foyers. On Saturday night throngs of drunken students push and shove their way to get into some clubs before they go “members only”. Two roman columns frame the heavy front door, yet two muscled bouncers block passage. Impatiently, they demand identification from the pasteled mob. Some turn away in frustration, others stand, holding out hope on their iPhones and blackberries. A few step inside into a scene of drunken chaos. Laughter and music echo off the walls, cups litter the floor. Walk downstairs and a throbbing mass of humanity greets you, bumping and grinding to top 40 hits. The room to your left is a taproom equipped with eight taps, where kegs of “beast” (Milwaukee’s Best Light) flow endlessly. Figures behind the taps launch beers at the pulsing crowd, showering indiscriminately. You’re more likely to get beer on your shirt than in your mouth.

It is after these nights that Videla’s job is particularly daunting. Just before dawn, Videla scutters in through a service door on the side of the building. Concepción Ortiz, a fellow Guatemalan cleaning lady employed by the club, joins her. The two women begin where the damage is worst: the taproom.

“Mucha cerveza, mucha cerveza,” mutters Videla.

Videla’s leathered face bears the wear of time. Lines branch out from her eyes, wrinkles wrap around her forehead. Her nose sits prominently; it bulges like a green pepper. At 53, Videla has missed watching her daughter and two sons grow into a woman and two men. Both legally and financially, she cannot afford to travel back.

“When I first come to America twenty years ago, it cost $300 to cross the border. Now you must pay $7,000. Too expensive. Too expensive,” Videla said.

Resolutely, the two begin by filling yellow plastic buckets with scalding hot water. The buckets are on wheels and resemble go-carts. They squeeze packets of soap into the water. The packets are labeled “Spic and Span”, but underneath in letters just as bold the packaging reads “Limpiador Para Pisos”. Videla warns me not to empty the entire packet, lest the bubbles overflow.

Products have Spanish labels because the prevalence of Latino immigrants extends far beyond the University’s eating clubs. The quaint town of Princeton itself is a hotbed of immigration. The food service industry here is kept afloat by immigrant labor. Only a few miles from the gothic structures of campus immigrants coagulate in run down housing communities.

Statewide, New Jersey has the sixth most illegal immigrants of any of the nation’s states. In a state of 8.6 million, there are close to an estimated four hundred thousand illegal immigrants. They are drawn here by the prospect of jobs and by stories heard from friends and relatives. Videla came to New Jersey when her cousin told her of the demand for labor in the services industry. She arrived in Princeton more than a decade ago and considers her run of employment here to be extremely fortunate.

Back in the basement, the two women lead their makeshift go-carts into the taproom. “Stinky in here everything!” Videla exclaims. Videla grabs a beer pitcher, dips it into the water, and then hurls its soapy contents all over the floor, bar and walls. The water splatters against the wood with a steamy hiss. Their throwing motion mimics exactly the antics of the partiers the night before. Ortiz and Videla then grab their mops and begin coaxing the soupy liquid into the drain.

Directly two floors above where the women work, stained glass windows usher you into an ornate library. The shelves are lined with books published in the nineteenth century. One of these books, a worn 1901 edition of With the World’s Great Travelers heralds the bravery of American explorers. Yet even the brave early frontiersman would have been daunted by the journey underwent by Maria Videla to arrive in this place. The distance between Guatemala and Princeton is over 3,000 miles.

Ortiz made the trek from Guatemala more recently. Her worn hands and eyes suggest a woman much older than her 21 years. When I guessed 23 she frowned and then laughed. Ortiz traveled to the United States when she was only 16, having saved up for years to make the trip. It was an investment on the entire family’s part.

Ortiz’s trip North took three weeks. She traveled north mostly on buses but also on trains, where many migrants lose limbs and lives. She feared for her life for most of the trip. Why did she do it? She holds up her hand and rubs here index finger and thumb together, back and forth, back and forth.

The most dangerous part of the trip cannot be undertaken on a train or a bus. In order to illegally cross into the United States one must be guided through the desert on foot by the coyotes. The trek across the Sonoran desert took three days and nights. Ortiz and her band of thirty only walked at night, when it was cooler and when they were safe from the border patrol and the other forms of vigilancia. During the day the band would lay low and hide, waiting for the cover of darkness. The coyotes know the routes through the deserts, and carry all the foodstuffs in their backpacks. They hold all the keys. If threatened, the coyotes have been known to abandon their followers, with grisly results. Since 2001, more than 2,100 migrants are known to have died beneath the Arizona sun.

The two women move onto the dance floor, where smashed bottles have been shoved into corners and cups lay split open like fallen soldiers. More often than not some odd piece of furniture sits shamefully broken, a victim of the “beast” consumed the night before. Today it is a mirror.

Videla is most disturbed by the wastefulness. In a world where so many have so little she doesn’t understand how some can use so much. On a typical night, the club will go through 3–4,000 plastic cups and 15 kegs of beer. At $32 per keg one night of beer costs more than Videla will make in a week. Much of that beer will end up on floor, mopped up the next morning. Videla says in Guatemala that they wish they could drink that much but,

“No way! Too much money!” she says.

She is shocked by what is thrown away. Full bottles of beer, unopened packages of cups, articles of clothing.

“All in the trash. All in the trash.” Videla mutters.

Videla is bewildered by the wastefulness and empty-mindedness. She often finds winter coats worth hundreds of dollars littered on the fireplace. Occasionally a student will come by the next morning to look for something they’ve lost the night before. This is the only direct contact Videla has with Princetonians.

The students often exclaim indignantly, “But I left it right there!” Her attempt at an American accent is highly amusing. She tells me matter-of-factly that if they really had left it there, she would have found it. “They get so drunk, then they don’t know what they are doing!” Videla says.

A heavyset man makes his way downstairs and shouts out jokingly,

“A little less talking a little more working!”

It’s Bill, el jefe. Videla says her job is tough, but Bill is a good man. It’s for this reason she’s stayed at the club for nine years.

Bill Sikorsky is a tried and true American. He was born in New Brunswick and loves New York Giant football. He has a goatee on his chin the size of a fist, and wears a bandana cowboy-style to ornament his white chef garb. Sikorsky is unique at the club. Of the thirteen kitchen staff, Sikorsky is the only one who was born in America. The twelve others are all immigrants, “some legal, some not”, admits Sikorsky. “I don’t even ask,” admits Sikorsky. Most, like Ortiz and Videla, hail from Central America, though the sous chef, is Greek.

When it comes to papers, Sikorsky says he has no idea how he would differentiate between legitimate papers and forged ones.

“There’s no way to check if someone’s papers are real. I don’t have the authority to do backgrounds,” Sikorsky added.

The legal status of his employees aside, Sikorsky’s main criteria in hiring the migrant workers is their language skills.

“The only thing I ask is how well they speak English, and there’s enough immigrants out there that I have a choice.” Sikorsky said.

Sikorsky first strikes you as a defender of all things American, and yet one will quickly notice how compassionate and reasonable he is with his employees. He claims to strike a hard line in the kitchen over the language issue, barking orders in English and demanding that his employees understand. The reality is that Bill tends to pickup more Spanish from them than they English from him.

“I know pretty good kitchen Spanish,” Bill admits.

Sikorsky has been at the club for a decade. Not once has Sikorsky had an American-born person inquire after a job.

“They wouldn’t be willing to take it,” Sikorsky says.

Sikorsky left home at 19 for Coast Guard culinary school, and has been in the food service industry ever since. He says,

“The onslaught of Latino workers has been going on for the better part of 20 years”.

Videla, who has worked with Bill for nine of those ten years, was part of the first wave of immigrants to brave the Arizona desert-crossing. Before heading north, she once held a job in Santa Monica; her eyes glitter as she describes the beaches and the sunlight to an earnestly listening Ortiz.

But poor wages in California forced her to come to the east coast. “There are places you work at the house where they attend to the dogs better than they attend to you,” Videla said. She relayed a story of a household with eight bathrooms whom she worked for from 5am till midnight earning only $150 a week.

Workers are often ultimately drawn away from the border towns and the golden hills of California because they hear work is easier to find here on the east coast.

Once they find steady work, as Videla has, many of the workers send money back to their families. These remittances are now helping to support the Central American economy. Videla makes a little under $500 a week, and she sends what she can back home. Usually she mails away half her paycheck down to Guatemala. Eventually Videla hopes to return to her family, but she will stay here as long as she is making good money.

The two women have finished cleaning for the day and are taking their lunch in the dining room. They sit at the far end of the far table, insulated from the chatter and world of the students just yards away. The students are shouting about grades and exams, and one exclaims how drunk he will get the night after his test.

The young Princetonians laugh and grin, oblivious to the two dark women with wrinkled hands huddling in the corner.