Advocate Has Walked in Day Laborers’ Shoes

The day laborers were furious. Undercover Redondo Beach police officers had staged a sting operation and arrested more than 60 workers for allegedly violating a city ordinance barring curbside job solicitation.

Pablo Alvarado and his team of organizers immediately mobilized, planning a march on City Hall and recruiting attorneys to file a lawsuit against the city. During the rally in November 2004, Alvarado marched and chanted alongside the workers. A few months later, a judge temporarily blocked the city from enforcing the ordinance.

As head of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Alvarado defends the civil and labor rights of workers nationwide. He pushes for job centers, promotes a positive image of laborers and lobbies politicians on their behalf.

Alvarado, 38, has vaulted to the national spotlight as cities from Burbank to Baltimore struggle -- against a backdrop of increasing public protests -- to deal with day laborers soliciting work on their sidewalks.

Last year, Time magazine named Alvarado one of the nation’s 25 most influential Hispanics. Alvarado said he doesn’t do his work for recognition, but he does use his high profile to help the cause.

“I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to tell the story of the day laborer,” he said. “It makes it easier.”

Alvarado sees himself as an atypical national leader. He spends much of his time on street corners and at job centers, getting to know laborers and organizers and talking to them about their concerns.

“The only way to remain devoted to your ideals, to remain focused, is by having those connections with the workers,” Alvarado said from his basement office near MacArthur Park. “That’s how you humanize the fight.”

Earlier this month, Alvarado met with laborers at the Hollywood Job Center, located outside a Home Depot parking lot. Using a bullhorn, Alvarado warned them about anti-illegal immigrant organizations that stage protests at hiring centers. He urged the workers to remain peaceful if such demonstrators showed up.

“The day laborer is a symbol for them,” Alvarado told the workers in Spanish. “You are the visible face of the immigrant community.”

Alvarado also informed the men about pending congressional legislation that would increase sanctions for employers who hire undocumented laborers and require hiring centers to check the legal status of their workers. He urged them to get involved in the fight by educating themselves and lobbying congressional representatives.

One of those workers, Guatemalan immigrant Cesar Herez, said he was thankful for Alvarado and others who fight on their behalf and show the public that they are honest, hardworking immigrants.

“We are not taking anything away from anybody,” said Herez, 39. “We simply came here to look for work.”

Alvarado, who is most comfortable in tennis shoes and jeans, speaks softly and laughs often. He switches between English and Spanish with ease. He is contemplative and unassuming, traits that UCLA professor Abel Valenzuela said are effective and powerful.

“There is just no doubt that the work that he has done has made a huge impact,” said Valenzuela, who conducts research on day laborers and has known Alvarado for a decade. “He has really built a movement by bringing different worker centers and other community organizations together so they can strategize, coordinate and learn from each other.”

The privately funded National Day Laborer Organizing Network was created in 2002 and has about 30 member organizations, including the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Alvarado and others train laborers and organizers, advocate for legalization of the undocumented and work to educate elected officials about possible solutions to problems. The network also has enabled laborers and organizers to develop a coordinated response to anti-immigrant attacks.

“We’re not criminals,” Alvarado said. “We’re people, just like everyone else, who have a need to work, a need to feed our families.”

Despite critics who argue that illegal immigrants should not be rewarded for breaking the law, Alvarado said undocumented laborers deserve an opportunity to gain legal residency because the contributions they make to the U.S. economy outweigh the financial costs.

“It is us who have actually improved the quality of life of Americans,” he said.

Improving the situation for day laborers is about more than strategizing and responding to critics, Alvarado said. It’s also about uniting the workers and giving them a sense of pride about what they do.

Alvarado plays in a band, Los Jornaleros del Norte, or the Day Laborers of the North, that performs at hiring centers, political fundraisers and churches. The band was formed in 1996 after immigration agents raided a day laborer corner in the City of Industry. They sing of police beatings, families back home and learning English.

During an evening rehearsal last week, Alvarado played the conga drums and tapped his foot to the beat. When the group began to sing “Las Licencias” -- about undocumented immigrants’ battle to get driver’s licenses -- he picked up an electric guitar and joined in.

“I want my license to be able to drive,” the group sang in Spanish. “Because on the bus, I’m never going to make it. I wake up at 5 and I always arrive late. I wake up at 4. I arrive late anyway.”

Alvarado understands the workers’ struggles. He was raised in a small village in El Salvador, where his father supported the family of eight by distributing water by oxen to neighbors. At 22, he fled the civil war and headed north. Guided by coyotes, he traveled by bus through Guatemala and then grabbed hold of an old tire to cross the river into Mexico. When he got to the U.S. border, Alvarado hid in the roof of a truck to avoid detection.

“We were packed in like firewood,” he said.

Everything was new to him. Though he had studied some English, he didn’t understand a word. Even going to the grocery store was overwhelming. “I had never seen so much food in my life,” he said.

He married a U.S. citizen in 1997 and soon after became a legal permanent resident. The couple have two children.

A former day laborer, Alvarado has held jobs as a gardener, construction worker and factory employee. He began working with day laborers as a volunteer, filing wage claims for them and teaching them to read and write. In 1991, he co-founded the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, a nonprofit organization that now operates several day laborer centers.

He began working full time as a day laborer organizer for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in 1995. His first major task was to help broker a solution to the chaos outside a Home Base store in Ladera Heights. The men were littering, drinking, gambling and blocking traffic as they competed for daily jobs. Irate neighbors frequently called police and immigration officials.

Alvarado helped persuade Home Base to designate an area for the men to gather. He also helped persuade the men to keep their site clean and orderly. Ultimately, the laborers won a legal battle over a county ordinance prohibiting them from standing on the nearby sidewalk.

Since then, he said, the situation has improved dramatically.

“Day laborers are in much better shape then they were 10 years ago,” Alvarado said. “The only thing that hasn’t changed is that we haven’t really won the hearts and minds of mainstream Americans.”