Hispanics Build a Solid Base

The journey included a four-hour bus ride, a 36-hour truck ride and a 10-hour walk through mountains. One of his uncles who was living in Maryland sent him money to fly to Washington from Los Angeles.

He got his first job when he met the owner of a landscaping company at a grocery store in Landover. After four months, he switched to a job repairing asphalt on Interstate 95. He then received political asylum -- part of a wave of Guatemalan immigrants who were granted that status because of the civil war back home -- and found a construction job at Miller & Long.

Almost four years later, his brother told him that the company where he worked, Wood Steel Company Inc., needed a Spanish-speaking manager. Osorio applied.

"I don't know any Spanish, and all of a sudden my whole workforce is speaking it," says Kenny Wood, founder of the 55-person iron-laying company in Charles County, explaining why he made Osorio a foreman almost four years ago.

'This Is the Roughest Work'

At about 4:50 a.m., Osorio and his two roommates walk onto the Shakespeare Theatre construction work site, which is lit up by floodlights. One of his supervisors, Randy Howells, greets him.

"Everyone stayed yesterday?" asks Howells, who is 43 and white. He jots down details Osorio gives him about the group's work.

Osorio then makes his way down three makeshift ladders until he is on the level that will someday be an underground parking garage. It is cold that far down, and dark, except for a few naked light bulbs. He starts working, pulling wire from the coil on his belt and using it to attach iron beams together. Soon other workers appear, including his brother. Osorio nods and keeps working in the dark corner.

Howells looks down as the hole begins to fill up with workers -- largely Hispanic with a scattering of blacks and whites. "This is the roughest work," Howells says. "They work hard. There's not anything pretty about it."

For years, local construction crews were almost entirely white, often men from rural Virginia and Maryland. In the 1970s, more black workers got jobs in construction. At first, they were mainly hired for lower-paying jobs, such as dry wall, painting, landscaping, iron work and concrete. Gradually, they moved into plumbing, electrical work, brick masonry and carpentry.

By 1990, Latinos began appearing at local work sites in noticeable but still small numbers. Back then, whites held 60 percent of the local construction jobs, blacks 25 percent and Hispanics 15 percent.

But then Latinos started pouring into Washington just as the economic and construction boom ramped up demand for construction workers. These days, about 45 percent of the region's 166,000 construction workers are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census, although construction executives, labor unions and workers themselves say the percentage is far higher.

Young men born in the United States, even those who might have in the past followed their fathers into brick masonry or carpentry, had other aspirations, said Henry Gilford, chief executive of Gilford Corp., one of the area's largest black-owned construction companies. When Americans work in construction, they prefer trades, such as plumbing, where the wages are better and the work is less back-breaking than jobs such as iron work, according to union and company officials.