By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 26, 2005

Edvin Osorio's alarm clock echoes through his tiny Landover Hills basement apartment. It is 3:45 a.m. He and his roommates, all from the same town in Guatemala, rouse themselves quickly, dress and head to Osorio's white Chevrolet van.

Osorio climbs into the van with two of his three roommates and flips the radio to WHFS 99.1 FM "El Zol." "That's bachata ," Osorio says, smiling as the Dominican music fills the van.

They cruise down New York Avenue through the dark, sipping coffee from Dunkin' Donuts. Osorio pulls up to Sixth and F streets NW and parks at a meter, then waits for the six-foot-tall metal gate to open so they can enter the construction site of the Shakespeare Theatre.

The 35-year-old Osorio is one of tens of thousands of Hispanic construction workers who have been pouring the concrete and erecting the steel beams of the scores of buildings going up around the region. He and others are part of a historic shift to Hispanic from white construction workers that has brought prosperity to some immigrants and helped support the region's building boom.

Osorio came here illegally 13 years ago, and his first job was pulling weeds. Now he is here legally and makes $24.05 an hour. Each day, he shuttles between two worlds. As a construction worker, he deals with American bosses and translates their instructions for his co-workers who do not understand English. After hours, he eats food from home, listens to Spanish-language radio, watches television shows beamed in from Latin America and hangs out with friends from Guatemala and El Salvador.

"We like where we're from, our people and our ways," Osorio says.

His immigrant dream is not to have a big house in the American suburbs, but to earn enough money to return to Guatemala and start a business with his brother. That's partly because he misses Guatemala and partly because the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigrants makes him angry.

Osorio is particularly upset about a law recently passed by Congress that will make it more complicated for undocumented workers to get drivers licenses. That, he says, will hurt construction companies, which need these workers, as well as the immigrants, who are here simply to earn money to support their family.

"It's not fair," he says.

Osorio and at least a dozen of his co-workers are from Chiquimula, a town in the eastern region of Guatemala -- near the Honduran border -- filled largely with farmers who earn $6 a day growing beans and corn on small plots of land. Most families live in shacks with tin roofs and walls and no indoor plumbing, and they get around the hilly area by donkey or on foot.

His father, a farmer, is well known in the community because he helps serve Communion at his church and because his eldest son, Edvin, can help local men get jobs in the United States.

Osorio, who has a sixth-grade education, came to the United States with two cousins, an uncle and a friend. He rattles off the date his journey started the way others recite their anniversary or birthday: March 5, 1992. He paid a coyote, or guide, $2,400 to get him to California.

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.

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.

Robert Carter, a 30-year-old plumber's apprentice who is black, looks up from his work to say that Hispanics "are taking over" the construction industry.

Asked how he feels about that, Carter, who lives in Southeast, nods toward Osorio's group, which is working a few feet away. "Look at them," he says. "They work hard. Real hard. They don't stop. They don't complain, they get along. They came from much worse places, so to come in here and work is easy to them."

"In my opinion, if you want a job, you can get a job out here. You just have to work," says Carter, as he goes back to examining his blueprints for hot water lines.

Just as the sun rises around 6:15 a.m., Howells yells down: "Osorio, I need you and a few of your guys up here." Osorio nods and climbs up the ladder. Howells lays out the blueprints showing where heavy iron beams are needed to support the stage and the six stories of office building.

Osorio studies the blueprint and nods. "I got it," he tells Howells. He then switches to Spanish, explaining the plans to his crew, which includes 13 workers from Guatemala, eight of them from Chiquimula.

A few feet from Osorio's group, Hispanic workers with Clark Construction Group LLC saw plywood. Next to them, young Hispanics from another company push jackhammers into rock, their bodies shaking against the machines.

At 9:14 a.m., Howells yells, "Break!" Osorio and his crew scramble out of the hole and race to the lunch truck. A young Colombian man lifts the sides of the truck, and the workers push politely to get to the silver trays steaming with empanadas, tamales, pupusas, rice, black beans, broccoli smothered in melted Velveeta cheese and a tray of iced Mountain Dews and Cokes.

Osorio grabs a disposable plate, serves himself a tamale and milk and pays $4. He quickly eats his food, and by 9:28 a.m., he and his crew are back in the hole, carrying more long, heavy iron beams.

At one point, one Latino worker is rapidly tying wires, and Howells tries to tell him that the power boxes are in the wrong place. The worker's head bobs back and forth as he tries to follow the English. Workers and bosses say it's common for a boss to give orders in English to Spanish-speaking workers, who will then quickly look around for someone who understands English to translate. But they add that in construction, the language difference is not the problem it might be in other lines of work.

Later, a supervisor notices that Osorio's crew is struggling with some heavy iron bars. The supervisor, who is black and has been with Kenny Wood for 30 years, yells out advice: "Edvin, you've got to swing it up and out." Moses, a Salvadoran on Edvin's team, yells "Arriba. Arriba," as the others on the line push the beam. When another worker asks how much farther, some men respond: "Un poquito mas. Un poquito mas."

The supervisor, who doesn't know Spanish, chimes in, "Yeah, what they said."

At 1:30 p.m., a supervisor gives the signal to wrap it up. An hour later, Osorio and his roommates are back home. After showering, they eat a bit of grilled meat, onions and tortillas, and then chat about their impressions of the United States.

Americans, they say, don't recognize how good they have it and because of that, sometimes they are lazy. "Those who come here easily don't work hard," Osorio says. "But the person who has had to suffer to get here, they appreciate the opportunity to work." His two roommates nod in agreement.

He marvels at how much he makes. "By 5 a.m. in the morning, we've made more here on our jobs than we'd make on a job back home in a month," he said. "Here we make as much as a lawyer does in a week back in Guatemala."

Osorio, who started at Wood Steel in November 2001, makes $962 a week, or $50,024 a year. He and his two brothers send a total of about $1,500 a month to their seven siblings and parents. Osorio is saving most of the rest of his money to start a tire-repair business with his younger brother in Guatemala.

Osorio says he is proud of the contributions Hispanics have made to the Washington area. Hanging on his wall are five digital photos of a job at 900 7th St. that Osorio says was supposed to have taken nine months. His team finished it in seven.

He thinks immigrants have contributed significantly to the vitality of the Washington economy. So government efforts to get tough with illegal immigrants puzzle and frustrate him.

Developers, union officials and social workers estimate that half of the construction workforce is here illegally, although precise numbers are hard to come by. Some companies, such as Wood, say they check documents, though others say they depend on unions to screen out undocumented workers. Some workers say they join unions to avoid having their papers closely scrutinized by employers. But some unions say they lack the resources to verify a worker's legal status.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says the agency is focused on tracking illegal aliens who may be a threat to homeland security. Boyd says that employers can be fined for hiring an undocumented worker but that the government must prove the employer knew the worker was here illegally. Illegal workers often have legitimate-looking documents, and employers are not obligated to verify that the documents are authentic, according to an immigration official.

Osorio and others say immigration officials don't show up at job sites. But they tell stories about friends being pulled over by the police for a traffic violation and getting caught for being in the United States without a proper visa. It makes them feel unwelcome here and adds to their desire to keep a low profile. As a result, they spend their spare time with other Latinos.

At 4:30 p.m., Osorio and his roommates leave their house for a field in Cheverly a few miles away to play soccer. For Osorio and his friends, soccer is the biggest leisure activity.

The crowds are biggest on Sundays, when they often gather on a grassy field near a shopping center called the Plaza del Mercado in Silver Spring. On the sidelines, wives cheer, toddlers wander around and friends munch fried yucca and thinly sliced steak wrapped in warm tortillas cooked on portable grills. Spectators often number more than 100.

On this day, there are only a handful of people. They play for about four hours and agree to meet the next day.

When they arrive home, one of Osorio's roommates flips on Telemundo to catch the end of his favorite nightly soap opera, "Betting for Your Love." After it is over, they shuffle off to bed.

Osorio sets the alarm for 3:45 a.m.