Volunteers Step In to Help Day Laborers : Topanga Canyon: In response to efforts to roust the homeless, a group is providing food, transportation, steadier work and shelter.

Fog lifted from the mountains as steam rose from the large pot of chili, warming the faces and hands of several dozen day laborers. The morning air was still chilled in Topanga Canyon, and the men lined up eagerly as volunteers handed out hot soup, slices of bread and fruit for their breakfast.

Suddenly, the quiet scene was interrupted by shouts from a passing truck. Although the driver’s words weren’t entirely clear as he sped by on Topanga Canyon Road, his angry tone and the word “them” were readily discernible. Volunteers Marg Starbuck and Susan Lovell looked at each other, shook their heads and continued passing out food.

“If we wait for government to take care of them, we’ll wait forever,” said Lovell, a movement therapist who has lived in the canyon on and off since 1965. Lovell recently joined a group known as PATCH--People Assisting Topanga Canyon’s Homeless--which was formed several months ago to help day laborers.

As the presence of day laborers persists in Topanga Canyon, residents remain divided on whether to embrace, shun or simply tolerate them. In recent weeks, however, after a year of stepped-up sheriff’s patrols and immigration raids that defied the community’s bohemian reputation, Topanga seems to have shifted back to its liberal roots.

One group of volunteers cooks and serves soup every morning, Monday through Friday. Another holds English classes twice a week in a local church. Another is seeking bus service for the isolated canyon, so day laborers will have transportation to and from their jobs. Still another is hoping to establish a hiring center and talking about low-income housing.

Most are working under the auspices of PATCH. Several PATCH members said they formed the group in response to town meetings and letters in the canyon newspaper, The Messenger, in which residents urged each other not to hire day laborers and to turn them in to authorities.

“This outraged me because I didn’t think this was the way to treat people,” said journalist Flavia Potenza. “The articles I was reading for five or six months seemed more like a ploy for the Sheriff’s Department and the INS.”

Maryana Kuretski, a family therapist, said: “All of us feel very strongly that these people are a part of our community. We are using them. There are a lot of jobs up here, mainly in construction, and it is our obligation to integrate them into our community.”

For Potenza, who moved to Topanga 15 years ago from New York City, the day-laborer debate also signifies the canyon’s gentrification as property values increase, and a more conventional crowd moves in. About 9,000 people live in the canyon, according to Town Council President Marty Brastow.

“People just don’t yell at you about your dogs anymore. They sue you,” Potenza said. “The funkiness of the canyon has gotten cleaned up. It just seems that people are into looking good more than being good. But the miracle of it all is that the spirit of Topanga still abides, and that’s what came forth in this whole process.”

Before organizing its programs, PATCH members sought out day laborers camping in hills and creeks and asked them in an informal survey what they needed most. Food, transportation, steadier work and shelter were the answers in order of priority, said Kuretski and Starbuck.

For the last six weeks or so, every weekday morning, as many as 50 men gather near the corner of Topanga Canyon and Old Topanga Canyon roads for the homemade soup. Starbuck, an artist, picks up groceries donated by Topanga and Santa Monica markets and passes them out to a network of cooks, who take turns serving their creations from the backs of the trucks and vans.

The food is served between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m. on the theory that those who have gotten work for the day have already been picked up. “These are the ones who probably won’t work, so they get fed,” Starbuck said.

On a recent morning--as they ate Starbuck’s chili and fresh grapefruit donated by a local store--the men told stories about their trips from Central America, their frightening experiences at the hands of armed bandits in Mexico and the hardships in often hostile Los Angeles neighborhoods. Several said Topanga Canyon is popular among day laborers because of generous wages--$5 or $6 an hour compared with an average of $4 an hour elsewhere in the city--in addition to its friendly residents and, now, its soup kitchen.

“For me, it’s real helpful, and demonstrates that the American people--as I’ve always believed and been told--are very humanitarian,” said farmer Thomas Carnales, 42, who said he left El Salvador after his 16-year-old son was killed by guerrillas.

“You can ask for a favor and these women will do it for you,” Carnales said.

But some canyon homeowners, for reasons that vary from worries about property values to fire danger, are concerned about the generous reputation PATCH is fostering for Topanga.

“This is a Godforsaken place for an impoverished Guatemalan to take a night class in English,” said filmmaker David Gottlieb, a Topanga-Las Virgenes Resource Conservation District board member who specializes in fire prevention. “What I fear is that it’s going to encourage them to live in the brush in Topanga.”

Christina Johnson, a fashion designer who ignited the controversy last year after she and her husband Howard discovered several encampments next to their property, said a fear of fire was her main objection to the day laborers.

“The campsites we saw were quite volatile with open fire pits and all sorts of debris. That truly alarmed us,” said Johnson, who said her family lost its home in the 1961 Bel-Air fire, in which scores of hillside houses were destroyed. “I know what it’s like to be a child and go to school one day with having a normal household and come home and have ashes on the ground.”

In response to calls from residents, sheriff’s deputies cleared away many campsites and established a satellite station within the canyon. Immigration patrols increased too, leading to the arrest of 41 illegal workers in Malibu and Topanga last November.

Some outdoor camps still exist, and several day laborers acknowledged that they often spend the night in the canyon rather than return by hitchhiking and bus to inner-city Los Angeles. But Brastow and Dorland said the worst of the fire danger and littering seems to be over.

“Sure, some of my concern is property values. Why wouldn’t there be?” said Dorland, who objected to day laborers who drank, littered and “caroused” under a bridge near his home. “If you moved into a place you thought was paradise and all of a sudden someone put a dump in front of you, you wouldn’t be very happy. I’m happy that property values in Topanga Canyon have gone up, and I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t say that.”

But even Dorland, who said he had been branded the “David Duke of Topanga,” credited PATCH with warning day laborers of the dangers of garbage and open fires.

“Amazingly enough, through numerous cleanups by the sheriffs, INS and education by PATCH, if they’re still under the bridge, they’re now cleaning their garbage up,” he said.

“The problem I had is totally disappeared.”