One Final Gift

Nelson Argueta, one of El Chino's brothers, asked the Salvadoran Embassy to recommend a funeral home. Bacon Funeral Home offered a price that included the coffin, visitation, preparing the body, fulfilling the red tape of international body shipments, and air fare. It was a decent price, too, according to Silvia Navas, a CASA organizer familiar with the market for such services.

Thus it was that, while in 1988 it had cost $2,300 to smuggle El Chino into the United States, now it would cost $4,468 to ship him back home.

* * *

On a cold morning outside a trailer behind a seafood joint on New Hampshire Avenue, day laborers dig dollar bills out of their paint-stained jeans, stuff them into a box, and remember El Chino.

"He was a good compañero , " Otoniel Paz, CASA's organizer of this day-labor center, says in Spanish. "He was concerned about all of us, and he looked for ways for everyone to find work."

"He always shared his food," says day laborer Alejandro Linares. "Beans, eggs, rice, tortillas."

"As a joke," says Victor Granados, "he said he was going to go back to his country to get out of the cold here."

Nelson made a life working as a self-employed home remodeler. El Chino preferred the companionship and independence of day laboring. It pained El Chino one day when a compañero scrambled first into the van of a potential boss, and the boss, recognizing El Chino, ordered the other man out of the van and hired El Chino instead. "I took the food out of his mouth," he told Dilcia that night.

Life without a punch clock was not always tidy. In 2001, during a brief marriage that ended in divorce several years ago, Argueta's wife filed a civil complaint of domestic violence, according to court records. The records are unclear as to how the matter, now closed, was resolved; the woman could not be reached for comment. Argueta, who struggled with alcohol, was an active participant in the local chapter of an El Salvador-based recovery group -- whose members said he was a big help in their own recoveries.

Bosses cared only that he was dependable. "I don't just work with anybody," says James Curry, owner of Curry Concrete, who paid Argueta $15 an hour for a semi-regular series of jobs. "He was a very skillful person, a very positive person."

Argueta made enough money to pay the $600 monthly rent at his apartment off Rock Creek Church Road in Northwest Washington, but not much in the way of savings.

Even though he had "papers," he had marched for immigration rights this year, and that impressed the day laborers. They know that many documented Latino immigrants are disengaged from their plight. "Even being legal, he was participating in the marches," Manuel Hernandez says, with a tone of admiration.