Anxiously Looking South : NAFTA: Many U.S. garment workers and others left Mexico in search of a better life. Now they fear that a vote for the pact will send their jobs back below the border.

She wears her blue collar like velvet.

Where other people see a sweatshop, Maria Escobar sees $8 an hour. Where they see 12-hour days, she sees overtime. Where they see one more little one-bedroom house in South-Central Los Angeles, she sees a mansion.

“It is beautiful, most beautiful. To me,” she says.

Her home was not just some hazy dream when she left Mexico City 15 years ago--a dream is a thing you may never get, no matter how hard you labor. This house was something she could earn as long as her fingers danced around the stabbing needle of her sewing machine.

The 41-year-old garment worker is an American success story, if success is measured from where a person begins. Now, she fears that this thing called NAFTA, this international issue discussed in the abstract by powerful men in expensive suits, will send her whole world tumbling south.

In the abstract, the North American Free Trade Agreement, to be voted on Wednesday in Congress, will phase out tariffs with Canada and Mexico and open markets for exports. But blue-collar workers fear that it will drain even more low-wage jobs to Mexico, because business owners will make a bigger profit than ever by manufacturing goods south of the border.

Government analysts generally do not foresee a mass exodus of businesses. They believe that more jobs ultimately will be created if the agreement passes. But while the reality of job loss is still debated, the fear is most real among people who already have seen jobs just like theirs drift down to Mexico.

For some Latino families in California, who came over the border in desperation and did work no one wanted just to be here, the irony that they might lose their livelihood to Mexico is like a cruel joke.

Unbelievingly, they watch Latino politicians support NAFTA. They are told that jobs lost to Mexico are poor jobs destined to be lost in the new global economy. But to workers like Alicia Gamboa, $5.50 an hour is the price of her self-respect. For Macario Camorlinga, a mechanic’s job means his family doesn’t have to share space with two others in a tumbledown house.

As President Clinton woos undecided legislators with golf games and dinner parties at the White House, the 41-year-old Escobar works a weekend shift to pay bills. She absorbs cuts in pay and benefits with a sinking heart and a frozen smile, and holds on.

She knows it would take only the gentlest nudge to tumble her job to Mexico. She would get a job--she always has--but is afraid it may not be one that pays enough to own her own house. All the Christmas dinners and birthday cakes and graduation pictures would evaporate with it, as if the four walls held up the future as well as the roof.

“My back yard at my house didn’t have any grass in it when I got it, so I (planted) some grass,” she said. “I got a little fence. All my life I have wanted a house like this for my daughters. They grew up. Now, I want the house for the five grandchildren.

“But I am scared.”

She is like a lot of other women who sew for a living in Los Angeles’ garment district, women with still-young faces and old hands. Many are divorced, separated or just plain abandoned, and fiercely independent. They will quickly tell you they don’t need some old man to take care of their family, just work.

The work is everything.

In Mexico, there is a comedian called La India Maria. She plays a character who crosses the border to find work. When she gets there, she finds that the United States is not the promised land.

Her punch line is: “Where is the exit?” Where is my way out?

Maria Escobar and other workers in the garment district laugh at that so hard they want to cry.

*

The coat on the wall hangs over Ronnie Shapiro’s office like a buzzard, a bleak promise for the garment industry. A tag inside the lapel reads: Made in Slovakia.

Where in the hell, Shapiro wonders, is Slovakia?

“I guess they’d make coats on Mars,” he said, “if they could do it a little cheaper.”

Shapiro’s family has been making coats in Los Angeles for three generations. In 1950, there were 125 coat manufacturers here. Now there are three, largely because of cheap labor in Mexico.

“I am doing business by default,” said Shapiro.

Shapiro competes with manufacturers who pay workers $5 a day or less. NAFTA might make it impossible to compete. His business would head south, and the livelihoods of 300 workers would go with it.

“I would have to,” he said.

It is an old cliche: Business is not in business to make jobs. Business is in business to make money.

*

Something happens to a man, sometimes, when he starts to wear a tie.

He scrubs the grease out from under his nails and slicks back his hair and, before you know it, he is a jefe . If the boss remembers what it was like to bust his knuckles, drive nails or sweat for a living, it doesn’t show under the dark suit.

Union workers in East Los Angeles said that is what happened to Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente), a union man and assembly-line worker who owes his political life to blue-collar people. Torres, who once spoke out against NAFTA, has changed his position.

That incenses people like mechanic Macario Camorlinga, who came north because he knew that if he got a chance, he could work his family out of poverty. Last year, he bought one daughter a bicycle and another a Nintendo for Christmas.

But his company makes aluminum wheels, one of the high-risk businesses if NAFTA passes. Like others, Camorlinga has relied on leaders like Torres to stand between his family and the threat of losing his job.

With more than 100 angry, shouting union people last week, Camorlinga picketed a restaurant where Torres was having breakfast. Any other time the two men might have shared a cup of coffee, but NAFTA is like a spike between them.

“I never thought I would see it all go south,” Camorlinga said. “Never.”

Torres, who was jailed in Latin America because of union activities there, agreed to NAFTA only because he believes that it includes protections for workers. But workers have little faith that the cash-strapped federal government can do much to protect them when the work goes south.

“Hell, I trained them to walk that picket line,” said Torres. “It felt strange to be on the inside looking out. . . . I am not insensitive to their fears. But they can’t live in that world. . . . They have to live in the real world. I believe this (NAFTA) is the future.”

The vote is expected to be close. Opponents on Capitol Hill say they already have enough votes to kill teh agreement, but their number has dwindled.

Vice President Al Gore sees NAFTA as a choice between “the politics of fear and the politics of hope.”

Alicia Gamboa, who sews for a living, knows about fear and hope. Hope is what you have when you work through the weekend, binding a life together out of scraps of cloth.

Fear is what you have when the door is chained at your shop, and the next, and the one after that.

*

For $5.50 an hour, Gamboa will try to get two children into college. She is 42, with an 18-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son.

It is the same tale, told the same way by blue-collar people for as long as anyone can remember. This one just happens to be in Spanish:

“Your pride puts you to work. Hunger will do it, too, but it’s mostly pride. I want my children to have a chance at the better life. Not like me. I do not want them killing themselves in the garment shop, killing themselves on a sewing machine for nothing. I have to give them that chance.”

She doesn’t have time to ponder all of the international ramifications of NAFTA, but common sense tells her that the agreement will hurt her.

In her neighborhood, there are no unimportant jobs. If she really believed that she could retrain as a computer programmer or some other fancy job, and that a paycheck--not a promise--would result, she would do it.

But she is afraid that what is left for people like her will be little or nothing.

“I will fight for it,” she said. “No one will see me cry.”

She has seen that world before. She remembers working all week for a few dollars, living in squalor, fighting with the other desperate people for the scraps of a living.

That was in Mexico. She wonders if it will be that way again, in Los Angeles County.