In New Orleans, No Easy Work for Willing Latinos

The process repeated itself over and over. After an hour and a dozen rejections, Marcos was restless. Medina was angry. The conversation turned to a small recent roundup of undocumented workers in New Orleans.

"If they catch me, it would be all the same to me," Medina said. "I'm not making anything here."

Another half-hour oozed by. Nothing.

The men drove by dozens of signs advertising jobs, all unattainable because the workers are in this country illegally. Discouraged, they gave up, and Gonzalez pointed his pickup southwest.

Back in New Orleans, they encountered empty streets and more shaking heads. Sometimes, a head poked out of a broken window, another Latino face, someone who had beaten them to the job, someone they might see at the gas station the next morning.

"Let's get out of here," Medina implored.

Gonzalez was frustrated but willing to keep going. "Just a few more streets."

Around midday, across from a church in eastern New Orleans, they spotted a woman in a garage, struggling with an armful of splintered wood. "I make you good price," Medina told her.

"How good?" Marie Croson responded.

Their first bite. Medina whispered something to Gonzalez and then blurted out, "Eight hundred dollars."

Then Croson was interested. She has been trying for weeks to get her house gutted. A church group from out of state had offered to do the work at no charge, but it backed off upon learning she had insurance, even though she has yet to receive a penny from her policy. A neighbor was demanding $4,000 to do the job, way more than she could afford.

"Bleach, too?" she said.

"One thousand dollars, and we finish at 5, 6 o'clock," Medina said.

She nodded her head and Arturo raced into the house, punching his bare fist through rotting drywall before the word "deal" had slipped out of Croson's mouth.

Two other friends, trailing in a separate car, joined them. After paying for gas, they'll each make about $150 -- their biggest payday in weeks.

"That was god-sent ," Croson told her friend Joyce Bennett.

Behind her, Arturo was emerging with an armload of mold-spotted muck that used to be Croson's living-room wall. A smile spread across his face. It was his first of the day.

Staff writer Ceci Connolly in Atlanta and research editor Lucy Shackelford in Washington contributed to this report.