Where Survival Drive Intersects With Peaceful Street

As Jeronimo Road passes through Irvine, it takes you past those high-tech companies with the futuristic names that almost convince you the past is dead and buried. How ironic, then, that just a few more miles down Jeronimo in Lake Forest is an intersection where cultures clash in a way that’s as old as the hills.

The area around Jeronimo and Cherry and Orange avenues in Lake Forest is prototypical suburban. Nice residential developments on one side of the street, small businesses on the other, even a big golf driving range at Jeronimo and Cherry.

Neat, quiet, nondescript--just the way they like it in 2 1/2-year-old Lake Forest.

Except that this happens to be where a group of Latino day laborers have congregated in recent years. In Lake Forest, this site has developed because tree nursery and building supply businesses are there. People who need those kinds of supplies need these kinds of workers. It makes eminent sense for job-seeking workers to have found the place. And once the word got out that employers showed up, it ensured that laborers did too.

The city of Lake Forest is getting increasingly cool to the idea, however. Sparked by complaints of local merchants and neighbors, the city is citing people who hire the workers from their cars. The argument is that the situation causes traffic havoc either because the workers work the streets to hawk their services or the employers slow traffic to negotiate the deal. Merchants also are not thrilled by having clusters of men hanging around their parking lots and storefronts.

A few of the laborers, sitting outside a liquor store in the heat of midday this week, made it clear they feel the heat in more ways than one.

“What I want to say to you is let us work,” said one young man wearing a USC baseball cap and who appeared to be in his late teens or early 20s. He didn’t want to give his name and he seemed to grow increasingly suspicious as I took notes. How about a first name? I asked.

“Pancho Villa,” another man said, laughing.

“You’re not going to say anything bad about us?” the young man asked.

His impression, he says, is that the locals “don’t want Mexicans around here” but that he and the other men need the work. “Just let us work,” he says. “We promise not to do anything bad against anyone or their property. Let us go to work and come back and go home. If we’re lucky, we’ll get steady jobs and we won’t have to come back here anymore.”

Typically, he said, the laborers are hoping to parlay temporary jobs into permanent work, as their English improves and they develop relationships with employers. The standard jobs are as construction workers, painters, landscapers or janitors, he said.

He lamented that the group gets stereotyped by actions of individuals. “Sometimes we pay for those guys,” he said, “and the only thing we’re doing is looking for jobs. If they do something wrong, they should go to jail, or whatever. But not everybody is like that.”

Jim Sill is a 49-year-old self-employed businessman who lives in Modjeska Canyon. He knows this cultural intersection quite well, having recently gotten a ticket for hiring two day laborers. He said he’s probably hired dozens of day laborers at the site in recent years and never had a problem with any of them.

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He thinks the city discriminates against the laborers. “They’re businessmen too,” Sill said. “They’re entrepreneurs, selling the only thing they have, and that is labor.”

Sill has a two-acre property and hires men “to clear weeds, cut branches, that sort of thing.” He pays $5 an hour, plus lunch, plus usually a $5 bonus, “because typically they work real hard.”

I asked Sill about objections to the men’s presence on street corners. “That’s hard for me to say, because I’m not there 24 hours a day, seven days a week to witness all the behavior on the sidewalk. It probably is a concern for some small businessmen. At the same time, the city owes these people, who are the most vulnerable and at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, an opportunity to get work if this is the kind of work they want.”

It’s the same old story, he said. “The larger picture is that during hard times--and it doesn’t matter whether it’s here or somewhere else, whether now or at an earlier point in history--when times get hard, society scapegoats certain minorities. These people are being blamed for a lot of things that are well beyond their control.”

Helen Wilson is a Lake Forest councilwoman and was the young city’s first mayor. She said the city targeted the employers in their cars because it can’t do anything about the men who congregate on the sidewalks.

“I think they have the right to look for work,” she said. “My concern is that we can’t have that activity creating traffic problems and safety concerns.”

Sill suggested that Lake Forest create a permanent site where the men could congregate. Wilson’s counterproposal was that Sill rally his neighbors in Modjeska Canyon to create such a center there. “I have real sympathy for these people (looking for jobs), but the problem I have with (a city job site) is that if we’re burdened with the responsibility of establishing that they’re legal citizens, I’m not sure that’s a business the city should be in.”

If you’re keeping score at home, here are the key players: employers wanting cheap labor, workers wanting jobs to feed their families, city officials reacting to constituent complaints.

You don’t need a Thomas Guide to find them intersecting all over Orange County.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.