Thread: Mayor Nagin Might Want to Learn Spanish

This is a story that was posted on my cities forum site and thought I'd share it with everyone..

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 29, 2006 — At a New Orleans construction site, the breakfast of choice is no longer coffee and beignets but coffee and tortillas.

Hurricane Katrina, as devastating as it was, has created great opportunities for many. After all, somebody has to tear down, clean up and rebuild this city. And by and large, the people doing the dirty, dangerous work are not native New Orleanians but Hispanics who have flocked in to fill the void left by hundreds of thousands who fled the storm.

Carpenter Gustavo Ruiz makes $15 an hour resurrecting a house, more than 10 times what he earned back in Honduras.

"There's a lot of work," he says, "and we can make a lot of money for our families."

Unfair?

But union carpenters complain that Hispanics, willing to work for far less than the union rate, are pricing them out of jobs.

"I see a lot of Hispanics eating the jobs up, basically," says Duane Gardner, a union carpenter. "I mean, you know, hell, you gotta be a blind man not to see that."

What's more, locals point out, many Hispanics are here illegally. Although immigration enforcement is clearly not a priority now, some unscrupulous contractors are taking advantage of them, believing they will not report abuses for fear of being deported.

A group of roofers, like many others ABC News encountered, went unpaid for weeks after they first arrived in town.

"You working so hard, and one person come, like, 'Wow, I don't want to pay,' " says one of the roofers, Santos Lagos. "You know, and working all day. So why I'm working if they don't want to pay?"

Others have been put to work without proper protective gear, and all seem to be living in what can at best be described as difficult conditions.


Latin Music on Bourbon Street

Nobody knows how many Hispanics are working in New Orleans, but there are enough that some people are starting to wonder if they will permanently change the complexion and character of this city.

On Bourbon Street, historically a mecca for jazz and blues, Latin music can now be heard.

At a Mexican restaurant, diners have doubled since the storm. And KGLA, a tiny Spanish-language AM-radio station, is flooded with new advertisers.

"Companies like TJ Maxx, Western Union, now they looking into this station to advertise because they want to capture all the money that all these Latinos are [bringing] here," said Ernesto Schweikert, KGLA's owner.

But the workers' money is not all being spent in New Orleans. Every Friday night, Latin laborers, flush with more money than most of them have ever made before, line up at a Western Union in the French Quarter and wire most of it home to their families.

ABC News' Geoff Morrell and Felicia Biberica originally reported this story for "World News Tonight" on Jan. 21, 2006.

Mayor Nagin Might Want to Learn Spanish

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"Schoolbus" Nagin can barely speak English.