Drifting In on Katrina’s Wind, Laborers Alter the Streetscape

Lee Circle had been bustling with itinerant workers for several hours by the time police showed up.

Contractors had already driven into the traffic roundabout and workers had charged after them, competing for jobs gutting, roofing and Sheetrocking houses.

Some visiting UCLA law students had stopped to talk with them about day-workers’ rights.

After that, a few workers gave up hoping for work that day and drank beer from paper bags.

Two New Orleans police officers drove up. They handed out fliers announcing that the city prohibited loitering and soliciting work. They promised to return the next day with a police wagon and, in the words of one, “everyone’s going to jail.”

The men -- Latino, black and white -- watched the police leave. Many of the Latino workers looked at the flier without comprehension. The words were in English, a language the workers did not know.

Residents say that before Hurricane Katrina, no one looked for work on the streets of New Orleans. Temporary employment agencies found laborers short-term jobs painting or unloading cruise ships.

“The police said, ‘Why don’t y’all find an employment agency?’ ” said Jerry Ross, a local laborer who once used those agencies, as the police left the circle. “I said, ‘This is the employment agency.’ ”

David Wilkins said, “It’s like some scene out of a Marxist pamphlet or a Jack London novel.”

Well- and soft-spoken, Wilkins said he moved to New Orleans in December after working for years as a fisherman and schoolteacher in Northern California. At the time of his move, he said, New Orleans was the only place that was a bigger mess than his own life.

“I work hard ... but I have no ambition,” he said.

So he came to Lee Circle, as many others have.

Lee Circle now pulses with free spirits and damaged souls, workingmen in faded T-shirts and baseball caps who commiserate over shabby police treatment, but shoulder each other out of the way to get to the window of the next stopped pickup.

This spot, a few blocks north of downtown, has been a swamp, a plantation, a railroad hub, a Union troop campsite -- and, since 1884, a traffic circle around a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

In other cities, day-labor corners are exclusively Latino. But Lee Circle is an uneasy mix of brown, black and white -- like the city itself these days.

Before Katrina, “everything was just right,” said Israel Douglas, a black day-worker standing at an Exxon station on the circle. “Now the situation is chaotic.”

Douglas arrives at the circle each morning at 6, and often gets work, but he says he has to wait until most of the Latinos are hired. Even black contractors, he says, believe Latinos work harder and give them the jobs.

“Our people, we built this country,” he said. “I was born here. I’m a U.S. citizen. They snuck in here. If they weren’t here, we’d be working right now.”

For their part, Latino workers say black contractors sometimes refuse to pay them after work is finished, leave them far outside town after a job or threaten to call immigration agents.

Clashes of race and economics are part of day-worker life, says Jesus Calva.

Calva, a Mexican immigrant, considers day labor his profession, having worked corners in Atlanta, Houston and Chicago. Once, hobos were the free-spirited dropouts from the American workaday world, working their way around the country. Today, Latino day workers like Calva continue that tradition.

“Every day in the same job, day after day getting up at the same hour,” he said. “After a year you’re dead from the stress.”

Calva has never married, though he has a woman in Houston. He works when he wants to, goes to where his chances are better, and is content to sleep in a closet, as he has in New Orleans.

A few things make possible his vagabond life. One is the vast influx of Mexican workers like himself, who since the mid-1980s have created day-labor corners in almost every U.S. city.

“On the corners,” he said, “you find all the information you need.”

Another is the cellphone, which has revolutionized day labor because it allows a worker to be contacted by employers and parlay one job into many.

Though divided by race, the men at Lee Circle are united in their view that New Orleans treats its transient workforce poorly.

After many complaints from businesses about men loitering, the city has turned to the police to deal with the workers on its streets. Officers who welcomed laborers after the hurricane have grown hostile.

Meanwhile, no civic authority seems to care about the common contractor rip-offs. Housing is so scarce that some workers sleep in nearby alleys or in a shantytown of flooded cars under an elevated freeway.

All this has winnowed the day-worker population here. A gruff attitude is common in other cities, but New Orleans has miles of damaged neighborhoods, and a desperate need for laborers.

Standing on the circle, Manuel Albarengas, a Honduran immigrant, said he was fed up. Albarengas came from Atlanta in November and remembers pulling bodies from houses -- work that the cops couldn’t stand to do. He even gutted the houses of a few officers, who were thrilled to give him work then. “Next hurricane,” he says, “I’m not coming.”

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As it turned out, the police didn’t bring the wagon the next day. Instead, they stayed in their cars and used loudspeakers.

“Let’s go, gentlemen. Move it,” officers said. They even used a Spanish word: “Vamonos.”

The men moved on but returned later. This went on for several days. One quiet Saturday morning, Wilkins and Calva stood at a corner near the circle.

Wilkins had fled the incessant banter of a crack-addicted carpenter for whom he was working. The cops had caught him sleeping in a park. Still, Wilkins figured on staying for a while: “I’m reveling in not giving a damn.”

Calva understood the police attitude toward the workers; there were so many of them, many drinking alcohol. “Every corner gets like that,” he said. “As a dayworker, you’re ashamed by it.”

But, Calva said, the law of supply and demand trumps any municipal code. The day worker, now part of the U.S. economy, is probably another permanent change to New Orleans courtesy of Hurricane Katrina, he said.

“No matter where they chase us,” he said, “people will always seek us out.”