Hard Labor

Crossing the line

Copyright © Photo by Ara Oshagan '88

Jornaleros take great personal and financial risks to enter the United States. Patrolling along the U.S.-Mexico border has intensified greatly in recent years, forcing coyotes, or human-traffickers, to guide migrants along ever more remote and dangerous routes. The Border Patrol estimates that a typical migrant pays coyotes anywhere from $150 to $3,500 as a fee, but many jornaleros pay a lot more.

Avelina, a 30-year-old Guatemalan, and her 27-year-old husband, Nerso, each paid coyotes 37,000 quetzals, about $4,900, to slip across the border last November. The funds were borrowed from a money lender back home. The couple now live in a small rented apartment in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino with Avelina’s sister, who has been working as an undocumented housemaid since emigrating a year ago.

On most mornings, the couple rides a bus to a day-labor center in the city of Glendale. Located across the street from the local Home Depot store, the center serves scores of laborers daily by distributing work through a lottery system and providing them with toilet facilities, food, television and recreational games.

Not many women frequent the Glendale center, and Avelina hasn’t had much luck finding work — she gets hired to clean houses only about once a week. Her husband hasn’t fared much better — he’s been without work for as long as 15 days. But the couple dare not return home because, as Avelina puts it, “we have to repay the loan — even if it takes five years.”

It’s going to be a tough haul for them. According to the study, only one in four laborers continues to work in this market for more than three years — and the longer they do so, the higher the chances they will suffer some sort of abuse from employers, merchants, security guards or police.

Following the trail

Copyright © Photo by Ara Oshagan '88

Abel Valenzuela became academically interested in the lives of immigrants as a doctoral student at MIT in the early 1990s. By 1996, he was doing interviews with jornaleros at 87 hiring sites in Los Angeles — research that culminated three years later in the first findings about day laborers in the metropolis.

Valenzuela concedes that his study won’t stop the hullabaloo over the highly charged issue of securing the border. In fact, he says, “there are some concerns among folks in the day-labor community that our estimate of their numbers is smaller than what’s out there.” Another concern, adds Valenzuela, is the fallout, if any, of releasing a figure about undocumented workers, which places them in an even more vulnerable position.

Back at the worker center near the Home Depot in Burbank, meanwhile, they’re still talking — and waiting for work.

Published Apr 1, 2006 8:00 AM