A Tale of Two Workers

Puede ver este articulo en Español.

Ignacio Páramo held the large plastic bear above his head as
60 men crowded into a tight circle around him. He shook the bear and
the blue tickets inside its clear belly tumbled around. “Blow in it for
luck!” he said in quick Spanish, pushing the bear toward the day
laborer next to him. The man blew, the tickets swirled, and
Páramo drew one out. “Dos treinta y cuatro!” he shouted
and a worker’s arm shot up, lucky ticket in hand. He had won the chance
to work that day.

A Place for Jornaleros

This raffle occurs every time a contractor shows up at Portland’s
new day laborer hiring site on NE Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
After months of heated debate and a $200,000 grant from the mayor’s
office, Portland immigrant worker rights group VOZ opened the center
last Monday, June 16. It’s a modest space, just a chain-link fence
encircling a parking lot outfitted with a trailer office and Honey
Buckets on the corner of a broad and busy street. But for day laborers,
or jornaleros, the site is a major step toward improving their
image and everyday lives.

During the early morning in this Northeast Portland neighborhood,
groups of Spanish-speaking men usually cluster on street corners while
waiting for landscapers or construction site managers to drive by and
offer them under-the-table work. Nearby businesses have complained that
the men left trash and drugs on the curbs, that their presence
intimidated customers.

“Nobody knows what they’re doing here—they just see a big
group and don’t know if they’re drug dealers or what’s going on,” says
VOZ Director Romeo Sosa, who himself was a day laborer decades ago.
Now, Sosa is hoping jornaleros will register at the VOZ hiring
site, where they are hired via orderly raffle rather than clambering
into trucks. The site is about solving the practical problems of
jornaleros: the lack of sanitation and safety of the corners and
their chaotic scramble for jobs. But these small improvements, VOZ
hopes, will eventually make big changes in the way other Portlanders
view the men. Portland’s Latino population has increased 34.5 percent
between 2000 and 2006, according to census data, with an estimated
38,634 people in Portland now speaking Spanish at home. Sosa estimates
that between 100 and 300 of those people work as day laborers, but for
some Portlanders, day laborers’ street-corner presence makes them the
most visible portion of the population.

Sosa and VOZ hope Portland will see immigrant day laborers as
people, not just workers, people with opinions, ideas, and histories
like all American citizens. Among the crowd holding raffle tickets at
the VOZ site during the first week of its opening were both legal and
illegal Americans.

A Man from Honduras

René talked in a low, calm voice as he stood in the shade of
a tree growing from the gritty pavement at the VOZ day labor site. He
is 23 now and remembers the exact day he arrived in Portland: February
28, 2006. The city reminded him of the one he’d left behind a few weeks
earlier, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, except for the Northwest’s rain and
the funny drinking fountains.

René grew up around San Pedro Sula, where his family made 100
pesos (about $5) a day working on farms. This was enough for what the
family spent, living in a small two-room house and feeding six kids.
René dropped out of school in sixth grade to work full time in
the fields. It was hard to get ahead on those kinds of wages, though,
so when he turned 20, René and a few friends decided to head
north. The friends rode a bus from Honduras up through Mexico. At the
border, they hired a “coyote” (a person who smuggles people across the
border) who guided them through the Texas desert for four days. There
they split up and René headed to Portland, where he had a place
to stay with friends in a four-room house in Gresham.

“Life here is more calm, it’s better,” René said. Since
arriving, René and his Gresham housemates have found work by
waiting on street corners around inner East Burnside, jumping into
bosses’ trucks when one pulls up. “You can have fun because you’re with
the same guys every day, making jokes,” he said.

But standing on the street corners can also be dangerous and
frustrating.

“There’s a lot of people hanging around who are up to no good,”
René says. René and his friends can’t be sure the
contractors will pay them what they promise—if at all. Plus, he
says, “There’s people who wander around drunk and make a bad impression
on business owners.” When the police show up to deal with the drunks,
sometimes they write jornaleros tickets, too—those who
don’t scatter at the sight of cops. “Because of one person, we all
pay,” says René. “All the Hispanics.”

When René gets back from the street corner or from roofing
someone’s house, he watches TV or plays guitar for a couple hours,
falls asleep and wakes up at dawn to catch the bus back to MLK. As
other Americans enjoy the weekend, René heads back to the
corner—Saturday is the most reliable workday of the week. He
takes Sunday off, though, and goes to church. Every month, he sends
$300 to his family in Honduras.

The going rate at the corner is the same as at the day labor center:
$10 an hour for unskilled labor like digging ditches or cleaning up a
construction site. Though if a boss offers them less and René
needs the work, sometimes he’ll take a job for less.

“It’s not worth it to fight for two dollars,” he says, shrugging his
shoulders. As it is, work can be sporadic. Some days he stands on the
street corner from sunrise ’til afternoon, returning home empty-handed.
He doesn’t mind the random raffling of work at the center. “Sometimes
you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not,” he says.

René shrugs when asked about his future plans. Someday maybe
he can get papers and a steady job. Someday maybe he will find a way
back to Honduras, to buy a home and see his family.

“God willing, I’ll be here for a year or two and then go back home,”
he says. “You never know.”

A Man from Montana

The man with no front teeth introduced himself as Montana. His home
state became his nickname when he started living on the streets here in
Portland. While he’s an English-speaking American, Montana is a migrant
like René, looking for a job in his new city and lacking proper
papers.

Like René, Montana grew up working in the fields. His parents
worked on a sugar beet farm outside Billings, so Montana harvested
sugar beets during the summers and full time after he dropped out of
10th grade.

“I smoked too much pot. I thought I knew it all,” he says. Since
then his life has been colored by addiction, rehab, and instability.
The potential for a steady paycheck drew Montana to Portland two years
ago. He worked as a prep cook for a restaurant downtown, but soon got
into heroin and then started stealing.

Now, the only form of ID Montana has is a flimsy inmate
identification card from Clackamas County Jail, where he served a month
for theft. Above the sallow-faced photo on the card is Montana’s full
legal name, but showing potential employers an inmate ID is not the
ideal way to secure a job. So Montana finds under-the-table work by
standing on street corners. At night, he sleeps outside his methadone
clinic.

“My methadone is 300 bucks a month, but it’s a lot cheaper than
heroin!” he says, smiling broadly. Montana is a perky guy, upbeat and
optimistic. “I didn’t think I’d be able to handle the city, but the
people are really nice around here. They’re like Montanans,” he says,
grinning as he talks about finding odd jobs around town. “I’d stand on
the corner just down the street from here,” he says, pointing past
VOZ’s chain-link fence to the I-84 overpass. “I thought I’d try coming
here [to the center] a couple days.”

Two weeks ago Montana roofed a church steeple with an incline so
dangerous and protective gear so minimal that most guys walked off the
job. Montana didn’t care, he said, and in a few days made enough money
to pay off his entire month’s methadone bill. Next he cheerfully
recalled the time a semi-truck hauling some kind of industrial waste
(maybe lye, he thought, since it was chalky and acidic) flipped over on
the highway right next to the overpass. He and the other guys worked
for an entire day and even received facemasks for safety. These are the
kinds of jobs and health risks day laborers work with every day.

Montana and the other white English-speakers stand near each other
at the VOZ day labor site until the raffle, when they crowd around the
plastic bear with the rest of the guys and shout “American!” and
“English!” as the organizers read the chosen tickets aloud in
Spanish.

“We definitely are the minority down here,” says Montana, looking
around the site at his 60 or so Latino companions. Like René,
Montana plans to send some of his wages back home to his family. He
left a 14-year-old daughter back in Billings with her mother. He hopes
he’ll find work, stay clean, and start paying child support again.
Montana stared at the cars rushing past on MLK, waiting for his number
to turn up.

“I just pray I get to go out.”

Big Picture, Small Picture

The debates leading up to the public funding for the day labor site
touched on several big issues revolving around the
jornaleros—like immigration, class, and America’s changing
demographics.

“The day labor issue is very complex,” says VOZ’s Sosa. He wants to
keep the discussion about the day labor site simple: It’s not meant to
be a solution to the nation’s large questions about immigration.
Instead, it’s a practical solution to neighborhood problems and the
mutual desire for clean streets, low crime, and stable livelihoods.
“Those problems,” he says, “can be solved together.”

Montana, René, and the men filling the VOZ site whistled at
every flatbed truck driving past, hoping to catch the attention of
potential employers. One contractor pulled in to find experienced
concrete workers who can fill out a work crew that’s behind schedule. A
gray-haired man in a button-down shirt came looking for a landscaper.
Only one contractor refused to give the required name and phone number
to VOZ, leaving without any laborers.

Twenty workers went out on jobs that day. Montana and René
were not among them. However, both workers will be back
tomorrow—because that’s what they do.

Translation help from Ben Cohn.