Thread: Guatemalans tops at filling area roof jobs

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Guatemalans tops at filling area roof jobs

Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
May. 31, 2005 12:00 AM

MARICOPA - High atop the roofs of new housing developments across the Valley, the face of Latino immigrants is changing: Guatemalans and other Central Americans are replacing Mexicans.

A decade ago, Mexican immigrants dominated the roofing trade here. They toiled at one of the lowest rungs of the construction industry ladder doing the arduous, dangerous work shunned by most Americans, especially in Arizona where triple-digit summer temperatures make roofing especially hellish.

But as earlier waves of Mexican immigrants become more established, they, too, are thumbing their noses at roofing jobs. When they move on to better paying, less dangerous construction work, their old jobs are going to newly arrived immigrants from poor Central American countries.
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The demographic shift was evident one recent morning at a new development in this booming community south of Phoenix. Of the 11 workers on three roofing crews, five were Guatemalan immigrants. Another was from Honduras. Five were Mexican.

"Day by day, many Guatemalans are coming," said Alberto Menchu, 27, one of the Guatemalan workers.

Menchu said he paid a smuggler $2,000 in 1994 to help him get from Guatemala to Phoenix, where he landed a job as a roofer within three days. In Guatemala, Menchu earned as little as $8 a week cutting sugar cane. Now he earns nearly twice that amount in a single hour of roofing work.

"If it wasn't for (immigrant workers), the industry would be severely curtailed," said Dan Cohen, executive director of the Arizona Roofing Contractors Association. The association represents 330 of the state's 868 licensed roofing contractors employing some 13,000 roofers.

A larger trend

The labor shift in the roofing industry reflects a larger trend beginning to sweep across the Valley. Although the vast majority of Latino immigrants coming to Arizona are from Mexico - there are at least 500,000 Mexican immigrants living in the state - tens of thousands of Central Americans have settled here in the past 15 years.

Guatemalans are leading the way. With as many as 35,000 Guatemalans already living in the Valley, the Guatemalan government plans to open a consulate in Phoenix this year.

Eventually, the size of the Guatemalan population here could rival that of Los Angeles, said Cecilia Menjivar, a sociology professor at Arizona State University who studies Central American communities. The Guatemalan government estimates there are between 500,000 and 600,000 Guatemalans in Los Angeles.

Menjivar said the increase is the result of burgeoning networks between Central America and Phoenix. Immigrants from Central America typically travel 2,000 miles on boxcars, buses and trucks across several international borders before arriving in Phoenix.

Soon they send word about jobs in Phoenix to relatives and friends back home, spurring even more migration.

"It has a multiplying effect. That's how networks work among immigrants," Menjivar said. "It happens by word of mouth."

Lost in debate

The influx of Central American immigrants has been lost in the escalating debate over immigration reform. Until now, the debate has focused primarily on immigrants from Mexico, said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

The growth can be measured by U.S. Border Patrol arrests. While overall migrant arrests since last Oct. 1 are down 5 percent, from 311,310 to 294,776, arrests of undocumented immigrants from Central America are up 116 percent, from 2,292 to 4,941, according to Agent Jose Garza, spokesman for the Border Patrol's Tucson sector.

Most of the Guatemalans entering Arizona illegally come from the same region, Quetzaltenango and Huehuetenango, said Milton Alvarez, vice consul for the Consul General of Guatemala in Los Angeles. He interviews Guatemalans before they are deported.

"It's one of the poorest areas in Guatemala," Alvarez said. "It's an agricultural area in the highlands bordering Mexico where many indigenous people live."

Moving on

Besides Guatemalans, who now make up the majority of roofers at most construction sites, it's also common to find roofers from El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica toiling in the Arizona heat, and to a lesser extent from Cuba, Colombia and other Latin American countries.

They are filling jobs Mexican immigrants are leaving behind, said Carlos Duarte of Laveen. A doctoral candidate in the social anthropology program at Arizona State University and lead organizer for Roofers Local Union No. 135, Duarte has interviewed hundreds of roofers in Phoenix.

"I know several Mexicans who left the roofers to go and work as plumbers and pipe fitters, and they are making way more money than they were as roofers," Duarte said.

Others have gone on to work in the cement and stucco trades or have opened restaurants or other businesses, Duarte said.

Central American immigrants tend to cling onto roofing jobs longer than Mexican immigrants. That's because they took bigger risks getting to the United States, Duarte said.

"Once they get a job, they don't want to loose it for anything because they have more of an investment in getting here," he said.

Duarte said he believes the majority of immigrants working in the roofing trade are undocumented.

But Cohen, the executive director of the Arizona Roofing Contractors Association, said the proportion is impossible to know because undocumented workers often use fake documents to get jobs.

Tough, risky job

Roofing is among the lowest paying construction jobs. It's also grueling, dangerous work. The relatively low pay and harsh conditions add up to high turnover, creating job opportunities for newly arrived immigrants, who see roofing as a stepping stone into the Valley's construction industry, said Terri Brown, secretary/treasurer of Roofers Local Union No. 135 in Phoenix.

Out of every 100 roofers, about 14 were injured on the job, compared with about 8 for the construction field in general, according to a 2002 report by The Industrial Commission of Arizona, the most recent statistics available.

The dangers were evident one recent morning at the new housing development in Maricopa.

Under a blazing sun, three roofers prepared to tackle a two-story stucco house. It was 9 a.m., and they'd already been working since 5. The men, all Guatemalan immigrants, strapped on leather tool belts and stuffed handfuls of nails into bags hanging from their waists. Soon, saws slicing concrete tile shattered the air, enveloping the men in clouds of white dust as they placed freshly cut tiles in neat rows.

"This is really hard work," Eber Monzon, 24, said in Spanish before climbing a ladder, a saw slung over one shoulder. "The heat is brutal, and there is also the danger of falling," he said.

Falls top the list of hazards, followed by cuts, eye injuries and breathing silica dust, said Darin Perkins, director of the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health. And then there is Arizona's heat.

"It takes a physical toll," he said.

The average roofer in the Phoenix metropolitan area earns $13.83 an hour, compared with $10.84 for window glaziers, the lowest paid construction job, and $20.23 for boilermakers, the highest, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Pedro Antonio Lopez, 35, was one of the first arrivals from Guatemala. He lives in a complex in west Phoenix full of Guatemalans and shares an apartment with two other roofers from Costa Cuca, Genova, his hometown in Quetzaltenango.

One roofer's story

One of 15 children, Lopez was 18 when he came to the United States in 1991. Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war, which ended in 1996, was still raging. The Guatemalan economy was in shambles. To pay for the journey, which took six weeks,he borrowed $200 from his father, a farmer. To save money, Lopez hitched rides through Mexico in compartments beneath the undercarriage of trucks.

He and four friends crossed the border illegally near Nogales.

With fake documents he bought on the street, Lopez quickly scored a landscaping job earning $3.25 an hour. But a month later, a Guatemalan immigrant he met at a party told him about a roofing job. That paid $4.50 an hour.



After working his way up from laborer to foreman, he now earns $500 a week working for a large roofing company in Phoenix. Despite three falls, including one that injured his back and forced him to miss six monthsof work, Lopez has no plans to quit the roofing trade. In fact, he has helped at least seven other friends from his hometown get roofing jobs in Phoenix.

"We are maybe 10,000 people from Genova here in Phoenix," Lopez said. "That shows how it happens. It's like a human chain."



Reach the reporter at daniel.gonzalez@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8312.

The average roofer in the Phoenix metropolitan area earns $13.83 an hour, compared with $10.84 for window glaziers, the lowest paid construction job, and $20.23 for boilermakers, the highest, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Boilermaking is a construction job?

I guess it's a good thing all these illegal immigrants are doing roofing, since no one else will do it.

All you have to do is look at all those roofless structures built thirty or more years ago to see how far we've progressed.

I know lots of out of work people that would have no problems putting on roofing.

Just think.

If we hadn't had all those illegal immigrants back in the 30's, that dangerous, low pay work of building Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge would never have gotten done either.

At least, that what the media would have you believe.