Southland Drywall Hangers Hold Out in Hopes of Nailing Down Union : Construction: The workers, many of them bound by a common Mexican heritage, are striking in efforts to halt a slide in wages.

Four hundred years ago, buccaneers roamed the Spanish Main, plundering galleons heavy with silver spewed out by the mines of Mexico’s Guanajuato state. But now Guanajuato exports something entirely different: men.

Over the last three decades, hundreds of men from one small village alone--El Maguey--have taken the 1,300-mile road north from central Mexico. Nearly every one finds the same job: Nailing up drywall for Southern California’s housing industry.

Many of them are related. This blood link is a major reason why most of the drywall installers in Orange and San Diego counties have walked off the job these days, crippling the building industry. And these few hundred men are at the core of a thousand or so drywall hangers who walked off the job more than a month ago.

The men of El Maguey have organized this protest themselves; they don’t even have a union. In fact, getting a union is one of their demands, so they can ensure wages don’t slip any further. Right now, they make about $300 a week. Ten years ago, when the business was still unionized, drywall workers made twice that and more.

Most remain Mexican citizens to this day. But the struggle for a union shows that the men of El Maguey have learned the ways of the United States, just as earlier waves of Irish, Italian and German immigrants beat the system that exploited them by joining trade unions or running for public office or getting an education.

“When the first generation no longer fantasizes about going back to Mexico, that’s the dividing line,” says Marcelo Suarez Orozco, an anthropologist at UC San Diego who has studied emigration from Mexico.

“After a while, these men begin to compare themselves to American workers; they begin to think of themselves as ‘hyphenated’ Americans--as Mexican-Americans.”

Most of the Mexican workers in the United States come from three states in central Mexico: Jalisco, Michoacan and Guanajuato.

El Maguey is a village of several thousand people nestled in one of the many valleys of Guanajuato, a state of mile-high mountains and deep ravines a couple of states north and west of Mexico City. El Maguey is named for a plant with long, spiky leaves that grows around the town, a plant from which tequila is made.

There isn’t much work in Mexico’s rural villages. So it begins this way: A young man goes north, finds work, sends some money home, and soon more men join him. When they have a little money, they return to the village to find a wife and take her north. So strong is the lure of the north that villages like El Maguey are virtually devoid of young men.

In 1963, Juan Valadez came from El Maguey to Orange County and found work hanging drywall. Home builders were knocking houses together as fast as they could in the sunny days when California exploded with growth.

After a while, Valadez’s three brothers joined him. The business back then was unionized, and the money was good, sometimes $350 a week if you worked from dawn to dusk. That was up to $18,000 a year when a little ranch house cost $24,000 and a new Chevy Impala would set you back $3,500. It was enough to let you live a middle-class life and, as Valadez did, even put a couple of kids through Stanford.

A lot of the money went back to El Maguey; suddenly there were new houses all over the village and people wearing American clothes.

Hanging drywall is one of the hardest, hottest jobs in construction. Drywall makes up the interior walls of a house; it usually comes in half-inch thick slabs of paper and plaster four feet tall by 12 feet long and weighing more than 100 pounds.

Drywall hangers wrestle the slabs into position and nail them onto the house’s wooden frame. Seams are later taped and the sheets are painted.

Hangers are paid a piece rate; that is, a man’s wages depend on how many square feet of drywall he can hang. A skilled man could race through a house back then, nailing up drywall as he went. It was easier and simpler because most houses were square, blocky affairs the old-timers called “dingbats,” with none of the features found today to slow you down--cathedral ceilings, for example, or tricky arches, what’s called a “cut-up” house.

Wages were high because the drywall companies all had unions and, with the housing market booming, the demand for skilled labor was brisk.

But during the last recession in the early 1980s, that began to change. Hard times meant that the home builders and their drywall subcontractors suddenly had a reason to bust the carpenters’ unions, which represented the drywall hangers.

A flood of cheap labor from Mexico assured the drywall companies of plenty of people hungry enough to replace the union men. In just a few years, the residential drywall business had no unions at all.

Wages began to drop; the Anglo workers who had once dominated the industry when it was unionized left in droves, and the subcontractors replaced them with more men from El Maguey and elsewhere in Mexico who were more than willing to work for less. When drywall workers were unionized, one in four was Mexican; afterward it was nine out of 10.

Roy Navarro is typical of the men who came after 1982. Now 31, he was washing dishes and cooking in Chicago a decade ago, just as his father had done.

When Navarro came to Orange County to work drywall in the early 1980s, he made enough to support his own family in Fullerton and send money to his widowed mother and three sisters in El Maguey.

Navarro and the other men--few of them high school graduates, some of them illiterate--also managed to earn enough money to donate to the construction of a grand new church in the village, although as wages dropped in the last few years, a lot less money has been going back to Mexico.

It’s a hot, muggy weekday, and Navarro--one of the leaders of the current walkout--is parked in an Anaheim Hills shopping center scouting one of Southern California’s hundreds of construction sites for signs of drywall being hung inside. If he sees anybody working, he’ll go make a phone call and pickets will suddenly roll up in battered pickup trucks and begin chanting their slogan: “Si, se puede!”-- “Yes, it can be done!”

Across the street, a large apartment building is under construction. There’s another one behind it.

“I did that one,” he nods at the finished building. “It was four or five years ago, and I got paid twice what these guys are making now for the same work.

“We’re being squeezed to death,” he says. “A guy I know, his wife left him when the money started drying up. Pretty soon we won’t even be able to support our wives and kids.”

As the housing market went off a cliff in 1989, the home builders began to pinch the subcontractors, who turned around and pinched wages so hard that even the low-paid Mexican workers began to complain.

It was their own people, some of them from El Maguey even, who helped exploit them. The new non-union system created a group of labor brokers--or, as some people call them, “labor barons”--who rounded up Mexican workers and supplied them to the subcontractors.

The labor barons acted as go-betweens for the companies and the men. Often, the men say, the barons cheated them. And the barons often paid in cash, cheating the government out of income taxes, Social Security and workers’ compensation payments too. The men had no benefits, no health insurance, no vacations, while the barons drove Mercedes-Benzes and lived in big homes.

“These guys control your shop,” says Joe Sayatovich of Sayatovich Drywall Interiors in the San Diego County town of Lakeside, who says his company doesn’t use any barons. “The guy says who works and who doesn’t. He runs the whole show.”

Construction--and the drywall business in particular--are notorious for paying cash.

“Cash pay is rampant, particularly in construction,” said a 1989 report by the Orange County Human Relations Commission on the underground economy titled “Zero Dollars Per Hour.”

Cash pay means unscrupulous contractors can edge out their law-abiding competitors in bidding for jobs; it leaves workers with no insurance or pension; and it diverts as much as $2 billion in income taxes alone from government coffers, the report estimates.

When there were still many Anglo workers in the business, drywall installers were a hard-drinking, hard-partying bunch, and it was common for them to be paid not only in cash but in drugs, such as cocaine, the Human Relations Commission report said.

The state Employment Development Department and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service launched with great fanfare an investigation of cash payments in the drywall industry in Southern California in 1989. But little came of it.

“We’ve never been able to get the support of the industry to clean this problem up,” says Loren Ferguson, an administrator in the tax enforcement section.

“And short of auditing everybody, getting some support is the only way we’re going to be able to do it.”

There’s another irony in all this: With the drywallers’ walkout more than a month old, the subcontractors are bringing onto their job sites still more Mexicans. These are men who have been washing dishes for even less money than drywall hanging pays and who have never hung drywall in their life. The subcontractors also say they are recruiting experienced drywall hangers from Northern California and other states.

As the strike wears on into its second month, the sides remain far apart, circling warily to see who will cave in first. The drywall companies adamantly refuse to recognize a union again, and the men refuse to return to work without one.

Without a contract, the men say, the companies would soon take back any wage gains they might offer to lure the men back to work. The contractors have done that twice before, the men say, the last time during a walkout in 1987.

Even though they began saving money and storing food weeks before the strike began June 1, those meager stockpiles are dwindling. At a borrowed union hall in Orange, donated beans and potatoes pour in from the local Latino community, and the men make beans and tortillas for each other at lunch each day to save money. In frustration, some of them have turned to trashing drywall and breaking windows in half-finished homes.

They won’t, they say, go back to the old way.

“These men finally realize they have to get out of the underground economy,” says Jesus Gomez, another El Maguey man and a leader of the walkout. He started this whole affair last November, he says, when he got fed up with the system after a labor baron cheated him out of $60.

“There may be fewer jobs when all this is over, but at least they’ll be decent ones,” he says.

As for the man who really started it all by being the first from El Maguey to get a job in the drywall industry, 54-year-old Juan Valadez has been running his own small drywall company in Fullerton for the last five years.

“Why would I go back to Mexico now?” he asks. “All my kids are here. This is where I live.”