Strike Lets Janitors’ Dreams Take Wing

It was hot in Pasadena, so hot the people handing out placards could see the air shimmering up from the asphalt on Lake Avenue. Smog drifted against the blue San Gabriels, wafted over the palm trees, refracted the hallmark suburban fragrance of roses. The yellow school bus was parked up from the Starbucks, disgorging wave upon wave of striking janitors.

What did they want?

They convened on the baking sidewalk, a sea of brown faces and red “Justice for Janitors” T-shirts. They looked around dazedly at the Williams-Sonoma, the Washington Mutual.

What did they want?

Anglos in Volvos honked, pale and offhandedly supportive.

What did they want?

“Justicia!” somebody called.

A cheer went up, as cheers will for justice. So abstract, though. Hardly the stuff of dreams. Back in the crowd, Sonia Lopez, janitor and single mother, had been thinking long-term specifics. “I would like to rent a better apartment someday, so I don’t have to live in Echo Park with one bedroom for six people,” she confided in Spanish. “I would like toys for my children, like SuperNintendo, which is about two hundred bucks!

“I would like, maybe, someday, to buy a car, a new car. I would like to send my children to college and take them shopping for clothes. Nice clothes.”

Where would she take them?

“Nordstrom,” she murmured, the bourgeois name so fancy-sounding, she rolled her eyes at herself, embarrassed. “Also, maybe”--going all-out now--”Bloomingdale’s.”

*

What did they want?

In the abstract, the question seemed a sentimental dispatch from the widening ranks of the have-nots. Wave upon wave of cheap immigrant labor has been disgorged by this global economy. The temptation was to suggest that bullhorns and pickets might not change that competitive equation, that it might be premature for unskilled laborers to be thinking “shopping spree.”

Within the ranks of the striking marchers, however, possibility was like a contagion. Say what you will about unions--and their downsides are documented--something had infected these long-silent people with confidence. Something had primed the pump, transforming low-wage resignation into rising expectations. Something had persuaded these janitors that they had as much right as the next bunch to imagine themselves, someday, in the middle class.

And that something--whatever it was--felt fresh in this moment of economic resignation. Even global economies, it seemed to say, are human entities. And there is something not human about just knowing your place, about tamping down ambition, about going gently into the shadow of poverty.

It’s not some immutable law of physics, this business of the poor having to get poorer. The middle class may be eroding, but the strike has also offered this food for thought: Demonstrations are middle-class constructs (those Elian protests in Miami aren’t being conducted by Cuba’s exiled po’ folks). Marches don’t happen unless the people involved have begun to see themselves as players. Unless someone has found the voice to ask: What do we want?

*

“For my children to get ahead,” said Rosalia Lopez. She marched, sweating, past a gleaming Chevy Suburban, hunter green, leather interior, parked curbside. “For them to maybe someday have”--she gestured--”one of those.”

“Maybe one house, someday,” shouted Carlos Santana, new father, over the ear-splitting chants of “Si! Se Puede!” “Maybe in Santa Monica.”

“For each of my children to have their own rooms,” dreamed Enrique Gaspar.

“To take my little girl to Knott’s Berry Farm once a year,” Karina Martinez replied.

“To send my son to university,” said Daisy Herrera.

“To be able to afford a computer with a hookup to the Internet,” said 17-year-old Manuel Rincon, marching at his father’s side.

“To finish my education, because I am going to school, so I can work as electricity--I mean, work as an electrician,” Max Salvador offered, his broad Oaxacan face concentrating hard on his second language. “And to own a house. Not a big house. But a house that is in a quiet place, like this place. And maybe”--now he was laughing out loud--”one Land Cruiser! Hey, who knows?”

His eyes grew serious as he added: “Because I have asked myself this question. And to live at this level forever--this is what I do not want for my family--for myself, as man.” The words were accented, as has been the tradition in such expressions of wanting, but the dream could have been your dream or my dream, or the dream of any American.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.