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In the wake of Katrina, thousands of Spanish-speaking people are migrating to New Orleans, drawn by the dream of a better life.

Sunday, October 08, 2006
By Mark Waller
Staff writer%%par%%Daniel Flores, a native Honduran and newcomer to the New Orleans area, leaves the grousing about the
100,000 newcomers

A U.S. Census Bureau survey of hurricane-affected Gulf Coast communities suggested an influx of almost 100,000 Hispanics in the four months after Katrina. The survey also found a slight rise in Hispanics in New Orleans and surrounding parishes, to just above 6 percent.

"In some ways, New Orleans is just catching up with a trend that's happening in every other city in the country," said Elizabeth Fussell, a Tulane sociologist. "Katrina has put us on the national map."

Construction jobs are the primary mode of entry for immigrants throughout the country, Fussell said. New Orleans is suddenly producing a profusion of such jobs.

Like all aspects of the fluid and hard-to-measure post-storm population, definitive numbers are elusive, but the evidence that Hispanic laborers have become a fact of life at construction sites across the city is irrefutable.

Other sectors of the economy are also responding to the Hispanic wave, as attested by a demand for bilingual employees, said Darlene Kattan, executive director of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana. Spanish is appearing on more signs. Food markets and restaurants are adjusting their selections for a growing Hispanic clientele. Stores with money-wiring services bustle with immigrants sending earnings home to their families.

Almost all the advertisers are back on Spanish-speaking KGLA AM-1540, Radio Tropicale Caliente, and the station is seeking to air more ads to reach a growing customer base, station owner Ernesto Schweikert said.

Jefferson Parish public schools report a 200-student increase in Hispanic enrollment since Katrina, double the total enrollment of Hispanic students reported by the 17 Orleans Parish schools comprising the state-run Recovery School District. Much of Jefferson's enrollment uptick is in the Kenner area, a city with a long-standing Hispanic community.

"We are growing amazingly," said Gonzalo Rodriguez, senior pastor at El Buen Pastor Baptist Church in Metairie, which primarily serves Hispanics and has boosted attendance at Sunday services above 500 from a pre-storm congregation that hovered around 450. "We have so many people on Sunday who came here to help rebuild. A lot have decided to stay."

Karla Sikaffy, director of the Hispanic Business Resources and Technology Center at Roosevelt Middle School in Kenner, which opened in March to provide business counseling, English classes and other services, said many patrons ask about local schools, churches and banks, a sure sign they are settling here.

Kattan said she thinks many will stay for the long haul.

She cited past Latino influxes: the Hondurans working for United Fruit Co.; the Cubans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans who fled political strife in the 1960s and 1980s. Those groups formed small but lasting communities, such as the cluster in Kenner that made up almost 14 percent of the city's population before the hurricane.

"Every time we've had a migration of people in here, they have stayed," Kattan said. "They're going to stay. That's what we think."


'I like everything'

Following the same expectation, Mexican Consul General Carlos Gonzalez Magallon, in Houston, said the Mexican government is seriously considering reopening its New Orleans consulate, closed four years ago in a round of budget cuts.

The office could help migrant workers from Mexico when they encounter workplace abuses, he said. It also could serve Mexican businesses wanting a piece of the hurricane recovery.

He said the richness of New Orleans' culture and history is reason enough for Mexico to maintain a consulate in the city, but the increased presence of Mexican nationals also looks as though it will endure.

So an influx that seemed temporary in the early days after Katrina is now taking hold for perhaps thousands of people, including Flores.

"I will stay a long time, because right now I have work for five or 10 years," Flores said. "I like everything. I like the atmosphere. I like the city. I like it."

Flores said he enjoys fishing in Lake Pontchartrain and playing soccer in Lafreniere Park. He said his family, which previously lived in Hickory, N.C., near Charlotte, already has switched its football allegiance from the Carolina Panthers to the Saints.

He lives with his wife and daughter in a Metairie apartment and sends his daughter to Ella Dolhonde Elementary School. His wife also works in painting and other home restoration jobs. He said he is applying for permanent residency in the United States.

Despite his experience with Mitch in 1998, Flores said hurricanes don't worry him. He will evacuate with his family if one threatens. In a wealthy country like this, he said, he expects housing, levees and other infrastructure will be fixed eventually.


'A lot of progress'

Others in the Hispanic influx share his optimism.

Jobs are so plentiful in the New Orleans area for José Echavarria's flooring, cabinets and countertops business that he decided several months into the Katrina aftermath to move here permanently from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His wife and baby daughter came several months later in July. After renting a house in Kenner, they bought one and moved in over Labor Day weekend.

Echavarria, 43, originally from the Dominican Republic, speaks fluent English, has lived in the United States for 20 years and became a citizen in 1990.

He and an employee recently laid bright new tile floors and installed fresh kitchen cabinets and countertops in an eastern New Orleans house once spoiled by floodwater. The hollow houses and FEMA trailers in the neighborhood were testament to struggles that persist, but to Echavarria they were harbingers of a resurgence.

"For the folks that had been here before Katrina, it seems like it's stayed the same, but it has had a lot of progress," Echavarria said. "There's so many people working and fixing houses, you know it's going to go back to normal. When all this is said and done, there will be more people living here than before, I believe."

He first came to New Orleans in October 2005 with trucks and a crew eager to help in the initial cleanup.

"Right after the damage was done, we saw it on TV," Echavarria said, recalling the coverage of Katrina that he watched in Florida. "We decided to come here and help."

He and his crew found lodging during that time of scarcity by promising to help repair a gutted house in Kenner in exchange for the owner letting them stay there. They had electricity and water but only plastic sheeting for bathroom privacy.

Soon they ran into trouble with a company that failed to pay them for thousands of dollars worth of debris hauling, Echavarria said.

Disillusioned, some of his co-workers left the area. But Echavarria remained, ended his brief foray into the cleanup business and began seeking the kind of renovation work that is his specialty.

He remembered Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the South Florida rebuilding boom that followed. The vastness of Katrina's devastation promised an even bigger recovery. By December, he said, it was clear he would have work for years. So despite the early hardships, he decided to relocate.


Eager for the work

Along with him came Oscar Mazariegos, 58, originally from Guatemala, and his son Oscar Mazariegos Jr., 20, who joined Echavarria in the debris hauling enterprise shortly after the storm. The Mazariegoses also have been in the country many years, living in California and Florida, but they have bought a house in Kenner and started a small home repair business, expecting to stay a while and perhaps bring more family members.

As he waited for jobs in a crowd of day laborers at the Lowe's Home Improvement store on Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans, Hugo Lima said he's staying because the pay is higher than he could make in Houston, where he was a lifelong resident before coming to New Orleans.

The store is such a hub that vendor trucks line the street, selling tacos and other Hispanic cuisine to the workers while they wait for contractors to pick them up. Gatherings of laborers making themselves available for hire, while unfamiliar to New Orleanians before Katrina, are a familiar sight in many parts of Latin America. Even skilled tradesmen -- plumbers, electricians and the like -- gather in public squares each morning, where those in need of their services know to find them. Lima, 50, said he routinely shows up at the Lowe's parking lot seeking construction jobs that pay about $150 a day.

His wife and four children have followed him here from Houston. The six of them now live in an apartment in Metairie. Lima said he expects to stay several years because the work opportunities seem limitless.

Many of the men waiting in groups in that lot and around Lee Circle in New Orleans and the Lowe's store on Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Metairie on recent mornings, some of them documented and some not, echoed Lima's commitment to stay as long as the work holds out.


Getting shortchanged

How long they succeed in that ambition pivots to some degree on their legal status. The Tulane-Berkeley study found documented workers more likely than undocumented workers to commit long-term to the New Orleans area. Fifty-four percent of the Hispanic workers in that survey were undocumented immigrants, and they viewed their fates as largely hinging on the whim of an unpredictable job market, the study found.

As he waited for contractors at Howard Avenue and Carondelet Street near Lee Circle in August, Manuel Contreras, 47, said he might leave New Orleans, depending on the work.

Contreras, originally from Honduras, lived in Houston for more than two years before coming to New Orleans about a month after Katrina, chasing reports that he could make $200 to $300 a day.

"That absolutely gets your enthusiasm going," Contreras said through a translator. "Right after the storm, I did manage to do that."

The pay since dropped to $200 or $300 a week, which he said was barely enough to cover his expenses.

He worked cleanup, demolition and painting jobs and sent about $100 or $200 to his wife and four children in Honduras every two or three weeks. If he could make $2,500 a month, he said, he would try to bring his family here and stay longer, but he wasn't getting enough jobs for that.

Elio Molina, 28, came to the New Orleans area in November, just two weeks after arriving in Houston from his native Guatemala. He has often waited for work with about 20 other men in front of the Metairie Lowe's.

His move to the United States, he said, was prompted by barely livable wages he received for masonry work at home. He has a wife and three children whom he would like to bring to this country. He expects to remain in the New Orleans area for at least a year.

Contreras and Molina have experienced several of the commonly reported hardships of migrant workers in New Orleans. The Tulane-Berkeley study and another study by the Advancement Project, an advocacy group in Washington, said laborers in New Orleans often report poor health and safety conditions at work, substandard housing and getting stiffed on wages promised by employers.

One contractor who owed him $200 for two days work disappeared, Contreras said. Another left without paying $120 for a 12-hour day. Sometimes employers don't give him water, lunch breaks or safety gear, he said.

Molina said one contractor ditched him without paying $900 he had earned for six days of work. That followed a previous incident, months earlier, in which another contractor jilted him out of $480 in promised wages.

Since launching a Workplace Justice Clinic for the laborers in January, the Loyola University Law Clinic has seen dozens of workers. The cases are often tough to crack, said clinical law professor Luz Molina, because of the wiliness of unscrupulous contractors.

"Contractors are really smart, and workers don't always know who they're working for," Molina said. "It breaks your heart when you see these people working hard all day and not get paid. I've seen one worker crying."

Undocumented workers are the most vulnerable, the researchers found.

"They are so afraid they are undocumented that they are the first ones who don't believe they have any recourse whatsoever," said Magallon, the Mexican consul general in Houston. "You believe that you don't have any recourse to an office of the U.S. (government). They come to us unafraid."


Health concerns

Failure by contractors to carry workers' compensation insurance is another problem, Luz Molina said. Immigrants rarely have their own health insurance.

On one job, Contreras was standing on an overturned trash can piled with concrete blocks as he tried to break through a ceiling to reach a damaged water pipe. He fell and cut his arm on a sheet of tin. A carpenter at the site bandaged him using a first-aid kit.

On another job, he strained his back and elbows lifting bathtubs. He said he felt stiffness for months. His only treatment was a massage from the Latino Outreach program of the Common Ground Health Clinic in Algiers, which visits Lee Circle weekly.

"We need to have better medical care," Contreras said. "The city is destroyed, and you have workers coming into the city to help, and you need better medical care."

Ravi Vadlamudi, an assistant professor at Tulane's School of Medicine who also serves as medical director of the Algiers Common Ground clinic, said he has treated several workers with repetitive stress injuries and respiratory conditions from hours in moldy and dusty houses.

"It doesn't look like a lot of precautions are being used" at work sites, he said. "Most places you see, it's just guys in jeans and a T-shirt."

The language barrier also impedes health care, said Peter DeBlieux, director of the Charity Hospital Emergency Services Unit that now operates out of the empty Lord and Taylor department store on Poydras Street.

DeBlieux said paramedics once picked up a man lying on the side of a street and brought him to the unit. The language barrier slowed their diagnosis, but staff eventually determined he had fallen off a roof, three stories high, breaking his legs. He was rushed to the trauma center in Elmwood.

"Before, we'd see maybe one of out of 300 patients, Spanish speaking-only," when Charity Hospital was operating, DeBlieux said. "Now we see Spanish speaking-only in one of 50. There's not a shift that goes by where Spanish isn't spoken."


Hard to find housing

High rents and housing shortages also create hardships for workers.

Contreras lived with a transitory group of fellow laborers in a large Uptown house.

A roofing company originally rented the house for workers. When that deal expired, the landlord agreed to allow some workers to remain for an indefinite period if they made repairs, Contreras said. Worried about the uncertainty of his housing, Contreras retreated to Houston in late summer, but with an appreciation of New Orleans' construction job prospects still tantalizingly in mind. He said he plans to return and give the city another try, he said.

Day laborer José Cruz, 20, from Honduras via Houston and California, said he lived in a two-bedroom Uptown apartment with 10 other people. Francis Castenedea, 23, from Honduras via Virginia, said he lived with seven other people in a Metairie apartment.

Some workers find their way to places such as Monte de los Olivos Lutheran Church in Kenner, where they can sleep on cots lining the Bible study rooms, cook meals and shower in a tent in the yard with a garden hose.

The Rev. Jésus Gonzales said he has never seen so many itinerant laborers -- or so grave a housing shortage. He never expected to use the church as a shelter, certainly not for so long.

"When there's an emergency, you adapt," Gonzales said.

One group of Hispanic workers recently has been squatting in a vacant warehouse in Central City, cooking over open fires, washing clothes in buckets and sleeping on blankets and mattresses on the concrete.

The Advancement Project report, which found inequities in treatment of low-wage Hispanic workers after interviewing hundreds of laborers, calls for federal agencies, state and local governments to better monitor their treatment.

"They all are trying to make a better life for themselves and are finding anything but that," said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the group. "While we're trying to rebuild the city, we have a lack of government infrastructure to make sure there's a just reconstruction."

Sweeps by immigration officials seeking to identify undocumented workers also are a source of continuing anxiety. Contreras said he has no papers validating his presence in the United States, and he worries every day about getting caught and going to jail.

Several workers said they think about crackdowns but feel they have good odds of avoiding capture, imprisonment and deportation.


Immigration debate

The influx of Hispanic workers and their families gives New Orleans a growing stake in the national debate about immigration. Some argue laws must be enforced to expel workers; others say the workers fill urgent needs and should be better accommodated.

"Who knows where we would be if those people had not come in to help us," said Martin Gutierrez, director of the Hispanic Apostolate of the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. "The only people you saw out working were Hispanic people."

Thousands of Hispanics marched and rallied in New Orleans over the immigration issue in May.

Two months before that protest, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweep at Lee Circle jailed 40 workers.

Temple Black, a spokesman for the agency, said 400 to 500 immigrants have been picked up since February, when the latest round of operations began.

Black said he doesn't have pre-Katrina numbers, but that activity has increased since the hurricane. He said the agency focuses on calls about large gatherings or disturbances from local law enforcement and primarily looks for illegal immigrants with criminal histories.

"We have to prioritize the assets that we have," Black said.

Patrick Vinck, a research associate at Tulane and co-author of the Tulane-Berkeley study, said the New Orleans area must face the realities of the Hispanic influx.

"A decision has to be made whether we want these people," Vinck said. "You can't just have it in-between, kind of laissez-faire, where people come in and are not taken care of."


Building for the future

Some of the newcomers, though, are making their own decisions.

Flores came to the United States in 2001 at age 20 partly because his mother already lived in Los Angeles and partly so he could earn higher wages than the $45 a week he made as an automobile mechanic in Honduras.

Then he moved to North Carolina seeking better jobs than what he found in Los Angeles. His wife, Marisol Avila, and 7-year-old daughter, Katherine Avila, joined him there in 2002.

"The pay is even better here than in North Carolina," at about $15 an hour, he said. "Everything's positive."

Helping him feel comfortable, he said, is a Honduran population in the New Orleans area said to be the largest such group outside Honduras.

"There's a lot of people coming back," he said. "A lot of Hispanics coming here."

Echavarria, his wife, Adriana, originally from Colombia, and their Florida-born 6-month-old, Isabella, lived mostly out of boxes and suitcases in a sparsely decorated rental house before moving to their new home in Kenner's Chateau Estates subdivision.

Kenner appealed to them partly because of its Hispanic population and the attendant stores and restaurants catering to that group. Proximity to Louis Armstrong International Airport was also important. Echavarria still travels to Florida frequently, tending to remaining renovation work there and a vacation rental business.

But last month he and his family unpacked for good and settled into Kenner, hoping to embark on a promising future in metropolitan New Orleans.

"What gives me confidence is that I'm behind about a month of work," Echavarria said. "There's nothing but more work coming all the time."

Flores and Echavarria said moving here also provides a greater sense of satisfaction and purpose in joining what they believe will be a momentous reconstruction.

"Helping people has given me a lot of pleasure," Echavarria said. "Putting someone in their home was a great feeling."


. . . . . . .

Vivian Hernandez and Manuel Torres assisted as translators.


Mark Waller can be reached at mwaller@timespicayune.com or (504) 883-7056.