Work, Then Play
Day Laborers at Night, Blurring The Border Between Life and Art

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 6, 2007; C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01597.html

Thin and frenetic, banging on his guitar in a Silver Spring union hall, Omar León is like a dream of labor balladeer Joe Hill, singing out in Spanish.

"¡La voz, la voz, también es un arma,

"La voz, la voz, también es un arma!"

The voice, the voice also is a weapon! he chants, while a couple hundred day laborers, organizers and allies dance and sing along.

Not too many years ago, León, 31, was a guy from Mexico in a ball cap waiting for work outside a Home Depot in Hollywood. Now he's a professional organizer and amateur troubadour. His group -- Los Jornaleros, or the Day Laborers -- has two self-published CDs out.

But León is just one voice. While Congress, critics of illegal immigration, employers and neighbors push and pull over this spreading yet still somewhat inscrutable population, day laborers are fashioning a culture. In the immigration wars, they have been defined two ways -- by the work they do, and by the way many entered the country. Now they would define themselves another way: through theater, painting, poetry -- and especially music.

Budding day laborer culture was on display Saturday into the early hours of yesterday morning at the National Labor College on New Hampshire Avenue next to the Beltway.

More than 200 workers and organizers from the Washington area and nationwide were attending a four-day convention to lobby for change and to attend workshops. This was the party after the politicking.

"When a people celebrates its struggle for work, for life and for rights, through song, poetry and painting, then art and culture become tools of resistance and liberation," Pablo Alvarado, director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network, says in Spanish to open the program.

This is homemade, outsider art, tinged with homesickness and longing, fired by hope and defiance. The photographs on the walls show men in vacant lots waiting to be hired, the lucky ones at construction sites. Paintings depict a stylized mythic river dividing two realities: on one side, shacks and hunger; on the other, fields, factories and skyscrapers.

Most of the artists decline to disclose their individual immigration status in a newspaper story, even as their art portrays a common lot as hardworking people whose only "crime" was to come seeking work.

"That question bothers me," says Victor Galicia, 40, a poet and house painter from Portland, Ore., who recited his sentimental sonnet against injustice, "La Reina de las Flores." "That's what the bosses ask."

"We believe everyone has the right to work," Leon says.

On Friday night conference participants marched in Herndon to protest a proposal to limit the day labor center there to legal residents. That battle is unfolding just as Prince William and Loudoun counties are considering withholding some services from illegal immigrants.

Alvarado says he can understand that some think it's wrong for people to sneak across the border. But "it is honorable for a father and a mother to say, 'I want to do my best for my family,' " he argues, when, for example, children are living in harsh conditions. If history were different, and Latin America were the prosperous side of the border, North Americans would do the same, he says.

Suddenly bursting into the middle of the hall, a cast of a dozen day laborers presents scenes from a play called "Los Illegals," which was performed to the public in Los Angeles in June. It is set near a Home Depot, where a Minuteman character protests and the manager complains that too many laborers are congregating in the parking lot.

"We want people to know who we are and give a face to those invisible human beings," says Juan Jose Mangandi, the lead actor, who says he left three daughters in El Salvador. "We want to break the mistrust."

Most of all, every movement needs a soundtrack. Music is the emotional engine through which people united in a struggle tell stories to each other, recruit new members, educate the wider public and, ultimately, leave a record of their journey. The union labor movement had Hill ("There Is Power in a Union") and his followers. The civil rights movement took inspiration from gospel and spirituals ("We Shall Overcome"), while the anti-Vietnam War movement borrowed pieces of black and white folk traditions ("Blowing in the Wind").

Alvarado dates the birth of day laborer music to March 1996, in a vacant lot outside Los Angeles. Day laborers were lined up at a mobile health clinic to receive AIDS testing when suddenly immigration agents raided the site. One of the day laborers who got away went home and wrote a ballad about what happened. He played it for his fellow workers on a guitar he had salvaged from the trash. The first verse, translated:

I'm going to sing to you friends

Something that comes with passion

One day in front of the Kmart,

Upon us pounced Immigration."

Out of that inspiration, Los Jornaleros was formed. Now Alvarado says day laborer bands are active in suburban New York and Phoenix, and a group in Maryland called La Nueva Cosecha (the New Harvest) sometimes includes day laborers.

Leon wrote all the songs on the Los Jornaleros' recently released disc, "¡Únete Pueblo!" -- "Unite, People!" One is an amused account of the plight of a day laborer who can't get a driver's license (because in many states they are denied to undocumented immigrants). Another is an ode to a domestic worker named Juana, an unrecognized heroine who conducts a veritable "concert of cleaning" with all her tools, and when she scrubs the floor she sees her own reflection, bathed in sweat.

Leon says he writes his songs not just to cheerlead for day laborers. "If you're outside a supermarket singing about people's lives, someone will listen to you," he says. "I start singing my songs and people ask me about the lyrics. Some people who are not familiar with the immigrant's struggle get very interested, and they want to hear more about our stories."

But this is a night to rally the rank and file. The day laborers' reality, rendered into art, can become a buffer and balm from that very reality.

At the conclusion of the play, when the characters have just demonstrated the value of solidarity, Leon jumps onstage to perform a day laborer cumbia, which gets the actors dancing. More performers take turns onstage. A thin young man dedicates his performance to his dad -- then sings a mournful a cappella about a son who bids his father, a farmer, goodbye in Mexico, only to return after the old man's death.

A trio with traditional Mexican eight- and four-string guitar-like instruments sings "El Barrio," written by Marco Amador, an organizer with the day laborer network. A translation:

Every day the sun comes up

And the people go to work

With their arms and their backs

To wait on the corner.

Before the music fades by 2 a.m., Leon is back onstage jamming with the rest of the musicians, striving to give those people on the corner a voice.