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In New Orleans, No Easy Work for Willing Latinos
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The men around Arturo -- dozens of Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Ecuadorans and Salvadorans -- swarmed when a red truck pulled up.
"You need work?" they said in broken English, bumping against one another to get to the head of the line.
"I work cheap. I work hard."
Two young men piled into the pickup, with a heavyset man behind the wheel. Arturo was left behind.
Arturo said he slipped into the United States about 10 months ago, guided through the Mexican desert into Texas by a smuggler, known as a coyote, whom he paid $1,800. Arturo has made about $3,000, he said, barely covering expenses and leaving just a few hundred dollars to send back to his three children and wife in Michoacan.
By midmorning, the station owner had complained and the men were run off by a sheriff's deputy.
"I don't know why they want to harass us. All we want is to work," Arturo said. "We came to lift the city up."
Arturo drifted over to the only man he knows who has transportation: a tall, genial Honduran named Victor Manuel Gonzalez. Arturo needed to offer something to get a ride. And on this morning, he had something. A hot tip.
There was work, Arturo said he had heard, in a town that started with an S. Struggling with the pronunciation, he took out a sheet of paper and scribbled the letters S-L-I-D-E-L-I, coming close to the spelling of the far-flung New Orleans suburb, Slidell.
An impromptu crew formed, Arturo and three Hondurans, all undocumented, all out of work for days, all living in a gutted house -- Gonzalez, 36; Carlos Medina, 40; and a wisecracking 18-year-old named Marcos, who would not reveal his last name but who tells everyone they should call him Marc Antony.
Slidell looked promising as they crossed a bridge at the narrow eastern edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The houses were big, and broken. Blue tarps were everywhere. Arturo thought they were on to something: "Let's see if we're lucky. By the grace of God, we will be."
The pickup eased into a subdivision, and Gonzalez leapt out. Before he could cross the lawn, a man in a baseball hat was already shaking his head and gruffly saying, "I ain't got no work for you."
