In the aftermath of the flooding in Erwin, Tennessee, Manuel Cordero joined a search for victims that found three people who were beyond saving.
“You couldn’t recognize them,” he told the Daily Beast on Wednesday.
The three bodies, he later learned, were all those of people he knew. He was also told that the other victims included 56-year-old Bertha Mendoza, whose baking made her the go-to person for special occasions in the town.
“She made a lot of cakes,” Cordero, also 56, said. “Very good cakes.”
But however many delicious cakes she had been making since her journey from Michoacan, Mexico, ended in Erwin in 1998, Mendoza still needed to keep her day job at Impact Plastics on Riverview Road. The factory was open on Friday morning despite a flash flood warning and Mendoza was working the early shift along with her sister, when the nearby Nolichucky River overflowed its banks.
Eleven workers sought to escape the rising water by clambering onto a flatbed truck in the parking lot. Mendoza reportedly called her husband of 38 years, Elias Mendoza, to say she loved him. She asked him to tell her four children that she loved them.
The family would later establish a GoFundMe page that told how Mendoza was “separated from her sister while trying to stay afloat on the rushing current.”
“She was last seen on 9/27/24 and later found and identified on 9/29/24.” the page said.
The tragedy is one of dozens in the Appalachian communities battered by Hurricane Helene. In politically ruby red Erwin—77% voted for Trump in 2020—a 90% white town is home to a community of the immigrants the former president and his running mate JD Vance disparage. They destroy American lives, Trump and Vance rant. But in Erwin, it was the immigrants’ lives who were lost as they did what they came here to do: work.
Cordero was one of three people who immediately contributed $1,000 towards Mendoza’s funeral expenses. He did so as someone who had swam across another river, the Rio Grande, three decades ago. He then walked 150 miles to San Antonio. He there found work framing houses, at the same time making a better future in the way so many other immigrants have, whether they be from south of the border or via Ellis Island.
“We start from the bottom,” he said. “Labor.”
After 14 years, Cordero had become a subcontractor. He had a family who settled in Irwin. He would seek out Mendoza when he needed a cake to celebrate milestones in his new life. He did not regularly socialize with her or others in the town.
“I don’t go out much, because I work Monday to Saturday,” he told the Daily Beast. “And Sunday, I stay with my family.”
But on hearing of the fund for Mendoza, Cordero immediately became one of the three top contributors to the fund. Another Erwin resident who also contributed $1,000 said he is the father of a young coworker of Mendoza’s, but declined to be interviewed because “I’m not interested in notoriety.” The third $1,000 contributor was Joan Halcomb, whose daughter, Winter, was best friends with Mendoza’s daughter, American-born Clarissa.
Halcomb told the Daily Beast that the girls had grown up together and remained close through Unicorn County High School.
“I sent both her daughter and my daughter to Disney [World] for their high school graduation,” Halcomb added.
Halcomb describes Mendoza as ”just a super sweet, quiet, lovely woman.”
And then there was Mendoza’s baking.
Flood damage along the Broad River in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Chimney Rock, North Carolina. The death toll has topped 140 people across the southeastern U.S. due to the storm.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
“That cake that she makes just melts in your mouth,” Halcomb said.
At Christmas, Mendoza would make tamales that Halcomb’s husband loved.
“I would always get tamales at Christmas, and then I would make baklava,” Halcomb recalled.
With the $1,000 from the three top contributors, and lesser amounts from 88 others, the total came to $22,845 as of Wednesday night.
One of Mendoza’s co-workers had been confirmed dead. Four others remain missing. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says it is investigating reports from several survivors that the workers at Impact Plastic were not permitted to leave until after the power was out and water had begun to flood the parking lot. The company said in a statement that most of its workers had safely departed, but some “remained on or near the premises for unknown reasons.”
From 4 to 6 p.m. on Monday, Mendoza’s family will be receiving friends at First Baptist Church in Erwin, where her son, Elijasa Mendoza, is associate pastor. The funeral will follow at 6 p.m. and Cordero plans to attend.
On Tuesday, Cordero will be back at work, just as he and all those others who cross that other river down south do every day.
In Cordero, we have the spirit that brings us together, be it after the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 or in the wake of Hurricane Helene last week.
There is another spirit on the move in this country now, led by Trump and Vance. Perhaps they should stop to listen to a man who knows about the value of hard work, family and community, and who rushed to a flooded American river to try to save lives.
“Help people,” Cordero said on Wednesday. “I think everybody should be doing the same thing.”
