Grocer Promises to Help Men Who Picketed Him : Labor: Saying he once worked as an illegal alien, Fernando Esquivia gives $1,000 to a group helping workers collect their wages.

A Granada Hills man whose home was picketed last week by Central American laborers who claimed he had cheated them out of $1,600 in pay called a news conference Monday to promise he would join the workers picketing the Los Angeles store owner they worked for.

Recalling his years as an undocumented worker, Fernando Esquivia also said he was donating $1,000 to Proyecto Pastoral, an agency helping the laborers collect their wages.

With his pregnant wife, Estela, beside him in his lawyer’s office, Esquivia also reiterated that he did not owe the men money and said he merely tried to find them work with a friend.

A short time after the press conference, however, Esquivia’s version was challenged by Father Tom Smolich, a Jesuit priest who is executive director of Proyecto Pastoral.

“He says he did not hire them,” Smolich said by phone. “I think the $1,000 says something else. . . . While this was framed as a donation to Proyecto Pastoral, I understand it to be partial payment of money owed and I will treat it as such.

“I’m sure if we had not marched on Thursday he would not have given $1,000 today. . . . I think the men are interested in gaining the $580 still owed them and we will help them do that.”

And in Los Angeles, pharmacist and grocery-store owner Adediji Soremekun said he had paid the men for the work in his new Los Angeles market. The work had been arranged by Esquivia.

Soremekun said he paid the men $360 for building a partition Jan. 17-19 and handed Esquivia a $360 check to pay the men for cleaning shelves Jan. 21 and 22.

The men--Enrique Javiel, 27, Silvano Pacheco, 41, and Gonzalo Guevara, 54, all of Guatemala, and Victor Galdamez, 35 of El Salvador--picketed Esquivia’s two-story residence on a quiet hilltop street Thursday.

Accompanied by reporters and representatives from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, they carried placards bearing messages in Spanish saying “No more abuse for undocumented workers” and “We are not animals. Exercise social justice for undocumented workers.”

Javiel told reporters that Esquivia contracted for the men to perform jobs at several locations in Los Angeles between Jan. 17 and Feb. 6.

“He has not paid us half of what he said he was going to pay us,” Javiel said. “We know he has the money to pay us. But he doesn’t want to give us anything. We would like this type of abuse to stop.”

No one answered when the marchers knocked on Esquivia’s door. But later Esquivia called the men liars and denied owing them money. He said he heard from the men’s landlord that they needed work and gave them a day’s labor at his Hollywood grocery store before arranging for them to work for his friend Soremekun.

In his lawyer’s office after the news conference Monday, Esquivia said he had repeatedly asked Soremekun to pay the men. “I talked to the guy for the last three weeks,” Esquivia said. “I begged the guy for the money.”

Esquivia said he understood the men’s plight because 22 years ago he spent two years as an undocumented welder in Chicago and as a restaurant worker in New York.

A short time later he became a legal resident and eventually acquired a 1,200-square-foot market at Victory Boulevard and Hazeltine Avenue in 1979. He sold the market five years later to purchase one in Hollywood five times that size.