Community Clashes With Day Workers : Neighborhoods: Ladera Heights residents say the immigrant laborers are too aggressive and unruly. The job-seekers say they are only trying to survive.

To Fausto Dubon and his colleagues, it is a question of survival: Seeking employment on the sidewalk sustains these men and their families.

“We all have a right to work in this world,” said Dubon as he and a score of other men, all Latin American immigrants, solicited jobs from passing motorists on a recent morning. “We’re not on welfare. And we’re not bothering anyone.”

To Willa Hector and other area residents, the issue touches on a fundamental theme: the survival of a tranquil community that they say is under siege from unwanted and unruly outsiders--Dubon and the other 50 or so job-seeking immigrants who daily congregate at a neighborhood shopping center.

“This has to do with maintaining our neighborhood as a desirable place for us to live,” said Hector, who has lived in the area for 17 years. “We don’t want to let it be ruined by a lot of people who do not have any stake in the community.”

Thus are the battle lines drawn in Ladera Heights, an upper-middle-class enclave of rolling hills, comfortable houses and tree-lined streets north of Inglewood. This quiet community has emerged as the flash point of the moment in homeowners’ recurrent efforts to ban or restrict curbside hiring.

Unlike the mostly white suburban communities usually up in arms about immigrant day laborers, Ladera Heights is a racially mixed, predominantly African American community.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider an ordinance that would prohibit day laborers in Ladera Heights and other unincorporated areas of the county from seeking jobs near homes, schools, playgrounds or places of worship, as well as in some commercial parking lots.

But on the eve of the vote, there is some optimism that a less restrictive measure will emerge to resolve the often racially tinged clash, which in Ladera Heights has been building for more than a year. The compromise proposal would attempt to confine job-soliciting activities in the area to a corner of the parking lot adjacent to the HomeBase shopping center at Slauson and Fairfax avenues. As part of the package, immigrant advocates have agreed to pay for the installation of portable toilets in the lot.

“It hasn’t been a good combination, having large numbers of men standing all day in a residential area,” said Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who represents the district and authored the restrictive legislation but now advocates a less-stringent approach. “This (compromise) situation should help a lot.”

Whatever emerges, the struggle has left a legacy of ill will in the community, where divisions between immigrant day laborers and residents run deep. The dispute illustrates the irritants that have frequently ratcheted up neighborhood tensions throughout Southern California in recent years, as new immigrants have drastically altered the region’s demographics.

“What happened in Ladera Heights is symptomatic of what is happening throughout the country to a large degree as immigration and diversification take a larger hand in determining who’s here, and who’s part of society,” said Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.

The African American civil rights group has joined immigrant organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Roman Catholic archdiocese in defending the laborers.

“These men are participating in a time-honored American tradition: finding work,” Hicks said. “We should be celebrating that instead of attempting to criminalize it.”

In Ladera Heights, an ugly, black-versus-brown racial undercurrent has emerged in a neighborhood that prides itself on its multiethnic character. Two decades ago, immigrant advocates point out with irony, long-entrenched white homeowners in Ladera Heights resisted the arrival of African Americans.

“We understand that black people in the United States felt humiliated when they had to sit on the back of the bus, but now we’re the ones being humiliated,” said Adolfo Barrios, a Guatemalan who is a corner regular.

Nancy Cervantes, who coordinates worker issues for the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles, said: “I think there are elements of immigrant-bashing, along with people who don’t like to see brown men on the streets looking for work.”

Homeowners and Burke, the board’s only African American supervisor, strenuously deny racial motivations. Rather, they blame the immigrants and their aggressive tactics--the workers typically swarm toward the vehicles of prospective employers--for a host of woes: creating traffic hazards, loitering, trespassing, stealing, harassing women and urinating and defecating on public and private property.

“If they were black I wouldn’t want them there, and if they were white I wouldn’t want them there,” said Don Lopez, a Mexican American businessman who moved to Ladera Heights 16 years ago from the Eastside and is one of the most adamant opponents of the day laborers’ presence.

To Lopez and many other Ladera Heights residents, anything short of ousting the men from the street corners is insufficient.

“Do we not have any say in what we want for our community?” asked Shirley Miles, a 10-year resident who is a personnel executive. “Or do we just let people who do not live in our community come in and take over?”

She was among a group of Ladera Heights homeowners, all longtime residents, who gathered in the rear of a sheriff’s substation one evening last week to explain their opposition.

“We have a good neighborhood where folks care and look after each other,” said Hector, a computer systems designer, extolling the district’s low crime rate, family atmosphere and accessibility. “Even though we certainly empathize with people who are out of work, and we have no ax to grind with these people as individuals, the practice of curbside employment is not something we want to encourage or condone or even tolerate.”

Residents say they have been unfairly typecast as bigots.

“I would say this is a color-blind area,” said June Ikoma, a Japanese American who has lived in Ladera Heights for 24 years and says she and her college-age daughter avoid taking walks because of the workers.

As in other neighborhoods, some residents view the laborers’ presence as an unsettling portent.

“It’s spreading all over town,” said Helen Kasparian, a retired schoolteacher and 30-year resident. Some women, she said, are afraid to visit her church, St. James Armenian. “(They) drive up and see all these Mexicans standing around and it’s frightening.”

From the workers’ perspective, such talk is hypocritical at best, racist at worst. The area’s residents, they note, are their primary employers.

“If people didn’t give us work, we wouldn’t come here,” said Dubon, 37, originally from Honduras.

In response to complaints, the men say they have largely confined their job solicitation efforts to the vicinity of a shopping center driveway. They have also developed rules designed to cut down or eliminate littering, drinking and other misbehavior.

The job-hunters--typically commuters residing in Los Angeles or Inglewood--are mostly Central American or Mexican nationals who have acquired permanent or temporary legal U.S. residence. Unlike denizens of some corners, they seem tight-knit: Recently, they pooled funds to help support a Salvadoran colleague who broke his leg in a traffic mishap.

In this fickle employment bazaar, cash earnings can range from less than $100 weekly to, on occasion, near $1,000, depending on one’s skills, dedication--and, of course, luck. Roofers, brick workers, plumbers, tile men and other specialists do best.

Although most corner job-seekers have limited educations, Barrios, 27, is part of the university-educated minority. A stage actor in Guatemala City, his thespian inclinations got him into trouble there four years ago when his troupe’s repertoire touched on politics, a sensitive subject in a nation riven by three decades of civil war. He fled north, leaving three children behind.

“Now they want to blame immigrants for everything that goes wrong in this country,” said Barrios, who lost his apartment manager’s job in January’s earthquake. “It’s a good thing the earthquake was an act of nature or they would have blamed us for that too.”