Day Laborers Turn the Burdens of Their Lives Into Ballads

On the corner, there is music in the traffic that rushes by, in the long afternoons filled with no work and diminishing pride, in the stubborn presence there of the day laborer.

Omar Sierra, 35, felt it resonate in his gut like a freshly struck chord one day in 1996, just before Los Jornaleros del Norte were born.

This is the story of that amateur band of Central American day laborers who turned their hard lives into song and now see modest fame dancing seductively before them. With their first CD on the horizon, they hope to provide the soundtrack for thousands struggling in the region’s new immigrant work force.

“I am going to sing, my friends, of something that brings compassion. One day in front of the Kmart, we were ambushed by Immigration. . . .”

The journey of Los Jornaleros began on a rainy winter morning four years ago in the city of Industry, when a mournful ballad, or corrido, sprouted inside Sierra.

Federal immigration agents, responding to neighborhood complaints, raided a spot in front of a Kmart where about 40 day laborers who were looking for work had gathered. At the time, the workers--or jornaleros--were in line for free HIV tests given by a county health department mobile clinic.

Sierra had a doctor’s needle in his arm when he heard the scuffle and grunts of frightened men tackled and handcuffed outside.

He yanked the needle from his arm and escaped, back toward the safety of his La Puente apartment.

Overcome by emotion, the stocky Honduran immigrant poured his anguish into a miniature guitar he kept as his companion since leaving his wife behind the year before to seek a better life in the United States.

It was as if the earlier commotion had occurred in 2/4 time. Sierra crafted a crude musical indictment against what happened to his friends, thinking of the precarious life led by the region’s estimated 20,000 day laborers.

He wove a melody from memories of the backbreaking jobs he performed for less than minimum wage. He used as lyrical muses the immigrants weary of the scorn they receive.

“We don’t understand the motive, nor the reason, for there to be so much discrimination against us if we are all ultimately equal when we are in the grave,” Sierra wrote in Spanish lyrics that rhyme.

The ballad would come to be known as “El Corrido de Industry,” one of several Los Jornaleros favorites that send immigrant couples twirling in the aisles during the band’s low-paying gigs in churches and halls as far away as Seattle.

Sierra couldn’t imagine that his song would spark a brush fire in the day laborer movement; not until he met Pablo Alvarado.

A former day laborer from El Salvador, Alvarado performs outreach for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles.

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Among other things, the nonprofit organization seeks to resolve problems involving day laborers by negotiating with city leaders or convincing immigrant workers to relocate to organized hiring sites.

The coalition also works toward recruiting jornaleros into the Day Laborer Union of Los Angeles County, an organization formed in 1998 that allows the often illegal immigrant workers to bargain for better wages.

Sierra noticed the guitar in the back seat of Alvarado’s car and asked if he could play it. Out came his new song, to the applause of a crowd of other day laborers who had gathered around. Alvarado saw the possibility of the music’s helping to organize the union. So they formed a band and later added five more players, with Sierra as the lead singer and Alvarado on the congas.

The impromptu performance, along with the story of the 1996 raid, are now legend in day laborer circles.

A Los Jornaleros fan named Diego has seen the group perform its cumbia- and nortena-style tunes at least four times at a North Hollywood day laborer hiring center managed by the immigrant rights coalition.

“The songs are real, about the people,” said Diego, an illegal immigrant who asked that his last name be withheld. He added that he recently bought and sent to his family in Guatemala a homemade music video that Los Jornaleros produced in 1998. “I think they’re going to be famous. Their message is universal.”

Most of Los Jornaleros’ seven members are still day laborers angling for regular work. Their performing gigs are sometimes free or provide just enough for pocket money, which makes staying together a struggle. The members--from different parts of the county--are sometimes too broke or tired to make it to their weekly rehearsals inside the coalition’s cramped office just west of downtown.

Nonetheless, the group’s concerts have been significant in recruiting for the 2-year-old day laborers union of roughly 800 members, Alvarado said.

“The band is a humanizing tool that brings dignity to the lives of the workers,” he said. “So if anyone sees them on the street, they’ll know that behind the weathered faces and callused hands are artists, musicians and fathers.”

The pride is evident during Los Jornaleros concerts, where audiences call for encores with chants of “otra, otra. . . .”

They hear their lives reflected in the accordion Sierra now plays for songs such as “La Frasesita,” an account of the vulnerability and frustration immigrants feel in not knowing English. They sway to the acoustic bass plucked by Jesus “Lolo” Rivas in a ballad about the 1996 beating of Mexican immigrants in South El Monte by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies.

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Or fans listen soberly to another of Sierra’s ballads, called “Prisoner in the U.S.A,” which tells the true story of how his wife grew tired of waiting, divorced him and married someone else in Honduras.

Non-Latino immigrant audiences also hear familiar themes in the band’s music.

At a recent fund-raising dinner for the Korean Immigrant Workers Assn., Jung Hee Lee, 35, said she did not understand Los Jornaleros’ lyrics when they performed for her and about 200 others.

But, seeing how Latino busboys in the audience lit up when the band went on, the Koreatown waitress figured that she knew what the group was singing about.

“I feel what they are saying must be similar to that of Korean workers,” Lee said through an interpreter. “We’re all very recent immigrants who are not in a position to pick better jobs or demand better working conditions.”

The musicians recently rehearsed at the immigrant rights coalition’s office, preparing to head into a professional studio a few days later to begin recording the CD they have been saving money to produce.

“When we’re successful, the difference between regular bands and us is that we’re from the corner and that’s where we’ll stay,” Sierra said, apparently already worrying about being seen as a sellout.

Electric guitar player Omar Garcia, 33, agreed, saying: “Our music is from the people and for the people.”

Such pronouncements escape Julio Cesar Bautista, 33, a Guatemalan immigrant who plays a gourd-shaped percussion instrument called the guiro.

At his two-room Watts apartment, he said he joined the group mainly to give his wife and kids an occasional thrill.

“I just want to set a good example for my two sons,” Eric, 7, and Edgar, 3, said Bautista. “They should know they can do whatever they want to do in the United States.”

As if on cue, the boys appeared, strumming toy guitars and shouting: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here we present you with Los Jornaleros del Norte!”

At home at least, Bautista is already a star.