FIRST PERSON : A Ride With Drywallers in Land of Plenty

“Do you speak English?” the cop asks me as he peers into the passenger side of the pickup truck.

I’m a little flustered by the question. “Me?” I ask. I’m wearing a tie and a sport coat. I’m clutching a bright-yellow reporter’s notebook. I’m the only Anglo in the truck. “Do I speak English? Yeah.”

“Talk to the officer, please,” he nods across the driver’s seat at another cop who’s talking to the driver.

“OK,” I say, although why the other cop would want me to talk to him is beyond me. He looks fairly busy checking out Nicolas Munoz’s driver’s license. Munoz is taking me and 10 Mexican guys, crowded into the back of his battered Chevy pickup, over to picket a new housing tract in Tustin.

Munoz’s cop, meanwhile, is scrupulously polite. But he’s assumed that “don’t even think of forgetting who’s in charge here” tone that cops get when they’re talking to people they’ve stopped.

“We’re not going to have any trouble like they had in Chino Hills, are we?” he asks Munoz.

Earlier on this warm day in late June, striking Latino laborers busted up sheets of drywall at a tract in San Bernardino County, and reports are coming in from all over Southern California of busted heads and broken windows on job sites.

A few days later, some of these same guys I’m riding with will be arrested in a mass bust of 150 men for allegedly conspiring to kidnap six workers off a job site in Mission Viejo, charges later to be dropped in favor of less serious charges of trespassing.

Munoz looks at the cop wearily. “No,” he says. “No trouble.” He starts the truck.

Munoz and the rest of these guys, most of them in their 20s, say they make no more than $300 a week. After taxes, some earn less than the maximum $230 that unemployment pays. It’s not easy to support a family on that, as many of these guys do.

So far, more than six weeks after the men walked off their jobs, the drywall companies and the builders--who are just as adamant about not being unionized--have yet to capitulate; drywall is still getting put up around Southern California; and the men are exhausting their meager savings. Some of them are getting desperate.

Granted, that’s no excuse for the vandalism in Chino Hills. Or Victorville. Or for the two drywall hangers who--their boss says--got punched out when they refused to walk off a job in Aliso Viejo, or the guy in Colton who looked up to see a lunch box-size rock shattering the window of his pickup.

It wasn’t always this way. When these men first came up from Mexico, there was pretty good money in hanging drywall. It was hot, hard, heavy work hefting slabs that weigh more than a hundred pounds and nailing them into place to make the interior walls of houses. But you could earn as much as $500 a week--not much by American standards, maybe, but enough to send hundreds of dollars home to your family. So eager were they for work that these men were used by the building industry to break the drywall union. Today, 10 years later, a lot of bitterness persists against them from unionized Anglo workers displaced from the business.

Then, three years ago, the housing industry went off a cliff. Wages plunged. And so now these men, too, want a union.

Now we’re on a broad stretch of Jamboree Road, and on every little side road into the Irvine Co.’s huge Tustin Ranch there are a couple of black-and-white Tustin police cruisers blocking the way onto what are presumably public streets.

Munoz finally stops at another entrance where the men are already picketing. We pile out of several pickup trucks until there are 85 men out there under the hot sun in jeans and T-shirts and scuffed work boots, yelling “We Want a Union!” and waving placards.

From the line of Tustin cops behind a yellow police tape, somebody says: “They ought to just back up the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) bus.” I turn to see who said it; the cops stare stonily. A plainclothes cop videotapes the men as they march.

As you may have gathered, this is not exactly a hotbed of pro-union sentiment. Tustin is one of the most conservative towns in a county that’s a byword for conservatism.

Today, we’re in the prosperous newer half, where the tracts of new homes have names such as San Marino and San Rafael: Big stucco houses crouch behind tall walls on a sun-baked stretch of land behind the Tustin Hills. The American Dream lives there behind those walls.

Across the street, a fountain sprays at the Tustin Ranch Golf Club. Men in pastel clothes halt their game, a few in mid-stroke, to watch the picketers for a moment, then go about their business.

The irony, of course, is that these workers in their battered construction boots and worn jeans will never be able to buy one of those big, comfortable houses they’ve helped build.

Later, Tustin City Manager William A. Huston terms the cops’ crack about the INS as “off the wall” and “inappropriate” when I ask him about it.

As for stopping the pickup truck I was in, the city manager says it was the cops’ way of keeping things under control after reports that some strikers were scaling the walls to get into Tustin Ranch construction sites.

As for the dozens of police cruisers that patrolled the neighborhood and the hundred or so cops in riot gear from all over the county who turned out, it’s an “appropriate” response, given the vandalism in San Bernardino, Huston says.

“The police,” he says, “are always caught in the middle.

“One side may say they’re only helping the developers, but if they don’t intervene, you could have a violent, dangerous situation out there.”

On this day, after 45 minutes or so, the men decide to call it a day. We pile back into Munoz’s truck and lurch back up Jamboree Road. Despite his troubles, Munoz is in a good mood; we stop at a traffic light and, across the street, there are a couple of cops lounging on their patrol cars. Munoz calls out brashly: “See you tomorrow!”

No response. Then one of the cops touches a hand to the brim of his cap in ironic salute. His reflector sunglasses wink once in the bright afternoon light. And then we’re gone.