From Wired, July 18:
She came to the US with a dream. Using platforms like Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash, she built a business empire up from nothing. There was just one problem.
To understand Priscila Barbosa—the pluck, the ambition, the sheer balls—we should start at the airport. We should start at the precise moment on April 24, 2018, when she concluded, I’m fucked.
Barbosa was just outside customs at New York’s JFK International Airport, 5-foot-1, archetypally pretty even without her favorite Instagram filter. She was flanked by two rolling suitcases stuffed with clothes and Brazilian bikinis and not much else. The acquaintance who had invited her to come from Brazil on a tourist visa, who was going to drive her to Boston? The one who promised to help her get settled, saying that she could make good money like he did, driving for Uber and Lyft?
He’s not answering her texts.
Barbosa was stranded. She cried. She took stock of her belongings: the suitcases, her iPhone, 117 bucks not just in her wallet, but total. She called her mom back in Brazil, but she already knew that her family couldn’t pay for a ticket home. No way was she asking her friends, who had doubted this plan all along; one said she was too old to start over in a new country and, with a whiff of class judgment, insinuated that immigrating was not something their social circle really did.
What now?
Well, Barbosa has a phoenix tattooed on her back. She radiates a game sense of What can I say yes to today? The type of person who, when she and a pal don’t want to splurge on a fancy hotel during a girls trip, swipes right on every guy on Tinder until one joins their bar-crawl and invites them to sleep on his boat. (Says a friend: “Priscila is craaaazy.”) The US government would one day put it more grandly, speaking of Barbosa’s “unique social talents,” calling her “hard-working,” “productive,” and “very organized.”
She knew there was no going back to Brazil but also, deep down, that she didn’t want to, that opportunity was here. “I loved this place”—the US—from nearly the moment she stepped off the plane, she declares. She was 32 years old, college educated, and spoke decent English. She had no choice but to work her way out of this mess.
Barbosa couldn’t have predicted where her striving would end: that she’d become the heavy in a web of fraud. That she’d expose the gig economy’s embarrassing blind spot. That, one day, multibillion-dollar companies like Uber and DoorDash would cry victim. Her victim. Or that she’d fall so far, or that her relationship with Uncle Sam would grow so deeply twisted and codependent.
She did know, that day at JFK Airport, that her doubters back in Brazil would only see one plotline on Instagram: Priscila’s march to victory. Taking a $10 Lyft to a bus station, eyes still puffy from her airport cry, Barbosa aimed her iPhone at the traffic speeding across the Throgs Neck Bridge on a clear spring day. She labeled the video “New York, New York,” and uploaded it onto her Story, ripe with the promise that she was heading somewhere big.
In real life, Barbosa is candid (“I’m a bad liar”). She drops self-deprecating jokes and lets loose big, jagged laughs that sound like a car trying to start. She grew up in Sorocaba, an industrial city of 723,000 people about two hours west of São Paolo. Her dad was an electrician, mom a postal worker. They set their eldest daughter on a path “to be a very educated and polite person”—English lessons and ballet classes. Barbosa loved to mess around on computers. As a teen, she kitted out her home PC with a terabyte of memory and an Nvidia processor so she could play Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft. She also hung out at a local cyber café, where she and a few other gamers formed a tournament team called the BR Girls (“BR” for Brazil). Offscreen, high school was miserable. She was bullied for being a teacher’s pet, for being “chunky,” for being terrible at sports. When a few boys showed romantic interest in her, she turned them down for fear it was a prank.
Barbosa studied IT at a local college, taught computer skills at elementary schools, and digitized records at the city health department. She also became a gym rat (“I’ve had to fight for the perfect body my whole life”) and started cooking healthy recipes. In 2013, she spun this hobby into a part-time hustle, a delivery service for her ready-made meals. When orders exploded, Barbosa ramped up to full-time in 2015, calling her business Fit Express. She hired nine employees and was featured in the local press. She was making enough to travel to Walt Disney World, party at music festivals, and buy and trade bitcoin. She happily imagined opening franchises and gaining a solid footing in the upper-middle class.
But Brazil was in the middle of a recession, and after a few years, her customers started disappearing. Trying to stay afloat, Barbosa cashed out her bitcoin and, when that wasn’t enough, took out high-interest loans (“What a stupid idea, by the way”). She closed Fit Express. Her younger sister had just graduated from college, and her parents had lost their bakery, their retirement gig. Barbosa felt it was up to her to pull everyone out.
She texted that Boston-area acquaintance about her desperation, and he answered: Why didn’t she move to the US and drive for Uber and Lyft? He sent her screenshots of what he was making—$250 a day, better than attorney-level money in Brazil. He said undocumented people could live like normal citizens. She already had a tourist visa. With her family broke and her job search going nowhere, “I couldn't see any other option,” she says.
A one-way ticket to JFK cost nearly $900. She sold a ring from her grandpa for $1,000. At the airport, her father tried to cut through the family’s gloom, saying, “Rock out, and get a Mustang for Dad!”
A flight across the equator later, and the momentary meltdown at JFK shaken off, Barbosa hurtled north from New York City to Boston on a Peter Pan bus, fervidly scrolling through Facebook groups dedicated to Massachusetts' large Brazilian community, tapping out DMs and dialing numbers. A Brazilian pizzeria owner told her to come in for a try-out the next day. A Brazilian landlord, who had a tiny room in a flophouse in the western burb of Framingham, said he would take the $400 rent once Barbosa got paid. A shot-in-the-dark call: a Brazilian guy from Boston whom she’d met years before on vacation in Miami. Miraculously, he not only answered but met her at South Station, let her stay the night, and ferried her the next morning to the pizzeria, where she aced the cooking test.
The first night at the flophouse, Barbosa slept on the floor. The second, a Walmart air mattress. She shoved magazines below the door to keep out the rats (“Disgusting!”). Without a car, she walked an hour to the pizza joint, past strip malls and Brazilian bakeries. On the way, she’d stop at Planet Fitness to lift weights and use the shower. (She welcomed the side effect of all the survival schlepping: “The most skinny I ever got!”)
Barbosa was earning about $800 in cash a week at the pizzeria. Aiming to pay down her debts and build her new life quickly, she looked for a second part-time job. One restaurant manager said he needed her to have a Social Security number, and handed her the number of a guy who could make her fake work documents, but Barbosa didn’t dare call. “When you first get here,” she explains, “you think ICE is going to be waiting for you on every single corner.” She tried cleaning houses but lasted exactly two days, loathing every second. Then the pizzeria got slow for the summer and laid her off. Scrolling Facebook in bed one morning, she saw a post in a Brazilian group asking: Do you want to work for Uber/ Lyft and be your own boss?
Barbosa quite enjoyed being her own boss. Working for other people since arriving in the States had felt like a necessary but major downgrade. She also finally had a car, having financed a used Jeep Liberty after a couple months of work. When she called the listed number in the ad, the guy who answered told her that, for $250 a week, she could rent an Uber driver account. It would have Barbosa’s photo, her car, and her bank account, but would use another name. Barbosa didn’t ask any questions. She says she didn’t know exactly how she was skipping right over the app’s onboarding requirements: a US driver’s license, a year of driving experience in the US, a Social Security number, and a background check. She did know that she cleared $2,000 in her first week, enough to stop worrying about another job....
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