One Final Gift
Every Week the Laborers Might Send Something Back Home. And Now, El Chino Needed to Get There Himself.

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006

They stayed up past midnight in the church saying goodbye to El Chino. Soon it would be time to send the dead man home. But how -- and to where?

He was called El Chino because when he smiled, Oscar Antonio Argueta, 44, had a squint that made him appear Asian. This was the gaze peering out from the photocopies taped to the cardboard donation boxes that popped up last week around Langley Park, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, Wheaton. At the 7-Eleven. At the pizza place and the bakery. At the storefront where families go to ship packages home to El Salvador.

The picture was taken on a soccer field Oct. 22, the day Argueta scored a goal in the semifinals of the day laborers' soccer league, sponsored by the immigrant advocacy group CASA of Maryland. A few hours later, at home in the Petworth apartment, with his son, Kevin, 2, bouncing on his belly in front of the television, and his fiancee ironing clothes in the same room, and black beans cooking on the stove, Argueta suddenly collapsed and died.

He was not famous. He never made much money. But the shock of his absence shot through his Latino immigrant community as a shared pain. The community turned to a familiar ritual, founded upon two premises: Nobody dies alone. Death is expensive.

There was also this existential question: Where is home, really, for someone still cultivating roots in a new country? Where should El Chino be buried?

Many said his remains should be sent to El Salvador, where he had grown up: airmail on TACA Airlines, a very special package, a sad package, the remains of one American dream. It would take the same route as all those happy packages, the toys, the clothes, the electronics -- the tokens of dreams being realized, shipped every week to the people left behind, the folks back home.

But Argueta was born in Honduras, where his parents happened to live at the time. His fiancee, Dilcia Areli Banegas, 35, Kevin's mother, also was born there. She said the couple dreamed of buying a house in that country one day, after they bought a house in the United States. Then, was Honduras home?

But Kevin was born here; he is a U.S. citizen. Argueta's three brothers also live in the United States. Argueta himself had lived here since 1988. He arrived illegally -- traveling by bus and on foot through Mexico, across the desert to Houston, flying to D.C. But he soon obtained a work permit and had been legally documented ever since, his family said. Was that enough to make America home?

Ultimately, the people of this place agreed that home for El Chino is where the parents are. Aged and ailing, Gumerzindo and Izidra Argueta live in San Miguel, El Salvador. In the past 18 years, they saw their son twice. They wanted to see him one more time.

So it would be a sad package bound for El Salvador. Also an expensive package.

The homemade donation boxes had slots for inserting money.

On the outside, with El Chino's picture, were messages in Spanish. Said one, hand-lettered: "Antonio came to this country with many dreams, like you. Now that he is resting, his family needs a little of your help."

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.

The wind-swept lot feels lonelier now, without El Chino cracking jokes, telling stories, looking jaunty in his painter whites. The men approve of sending their friend back to El Salvador.

"Most of us, we don't think we are going to stay here," says Hernandez. "Some day we want to return to our land."

Chau , El Chino . They do what they can to aid the journey. Monday evening before the vigil at the church, the friends return to the trailer to open several of the collection boxes. They count the cash, twice, with witnesses to vouch for the integrity of the process.

The resulting wad is as thick as a dictionary. Callused hands shove it into an envelope, then slip in something else: a keychain medallion, stamped with images of a soccer ball, a net and a cleat.

Paz scrawls the sum on the outside of the envelope: $857.46.

* * *

Argueta grew up poor, in an improvised shack on vacant land. His father was a bricklayer.

Argueta was drafted into the Salvadoran army to fight guerrillas. His oldest brother was murdered. When he got out of the army, he held the possibly even more dangerous job of night security guard. At 26, he followed Nelson's path to D.C., where they had friends.

"People think the reason we come to the United States is to try to be rich," Nelson Argueta says. "The reality is, you just come here to make a life. You can eat better, you can live better," and most important of all, "you can be safe. "

The brothers lived in an Adams Morgan apartment. El Chino delivered pizzas for Domino's and worked in the kitchen of Mr. Day's in Dupont Circle. In recent Decembers, he sold Christmas trees on a Langley Park street corner.

One day four years ago, at Prince George's Plaza waiting for the F4 bus, he noticed a woman waiting for the C4. They started talking. The F4 came and went.

"That's your bus, why aren't you taking it?" Dilcia Areli Banegas recalls asking.

"I don't want to leave you alone. I'll wait until yours comes," Argueta replied.

He followed her onto the C4, and that was that.

She had been busing tables at a Bennigan's in Rockville, but Argueta told her he didn't want her to work anymore.

"He said he was man enough to take care of me and our son," Banegas says, in Spanish.

In recent months they had decided to get married, she says. She has three other children whom she had left in Honduras when she came here in 2000, and whom Argueta was helping to support by sending money and gifts.

He decorated the apartment with photos of his soccer teammates. He played in two leagues. He asked Banegas to wash his uniforms extra carefully, by hand. Sometimes he would come home with his feet so swollen that he said it was time to hang up his cleats. But by the next weekend, he'd be eager to play again.

"He used to say, 'I'm going to die playing,' " Banegas says.

The evening he died, after coming home from the tournament, he said he was cold. Banegas heated some juice in the microwave. Then he seemed fine, playing with Kevin. Suddenly his body became tense and he gasped for air. He fell, unconscious. The paramedics tried to shock his heart to life. He never revived. The official cause of death is pending, according to the medical examiner's office.

The day before, his 44th birthday, Banegas had snapped a cellphone photo of father and son in funny birthday hats, and made it the background screen on her phone. Now, when Kevin hears the phone ring, he sees the picture and exclaims that "Poppi" is calling. The other day, he darted into a crowd of men in soccer uniforms, inquiring, "Poppi? Poppi?" and "Oh-ka? Oh-ka?" which is how he says "Oscar."

"Poppi went to Heaven," his mother tells him. "He was taken to God, and he's not going to come back."

But Kevin doesn't quite seem to believe it.

* * *

Day laborers still in their work boots doff their caps and sidle into pews in Apostoles y Profetas church at Nicholson and 14 streets NW. Soccer teammates arrive, soul mates from the recovery program, organizers from the immigrant rights movement, plus assorted friends and family. Maybe 80 people in all attend the seven-hour vigil.

Argueta is laid out in a silver-colored casket on the altar, wearing a black suit, his hair slicked back.

Tamales warm in the church kitchen as Monday slips into Tuesday, nine days after El Chino scored his last goal.

"We are all immigrants," Marino Cordoba, the lead day-laborer organizer, says quietly in Spanish during the formal presentation of the bulging envelope. "We have to be together in life and in death. The only way we know to keep everything together is by working together."

Cordoba presses the soccer medallion into Banegas's hand, while Nelson Argueta receives the cash.

It isn't enough for the trip home, but the community has given more, including $1,000 that night at the vigil and $1,200 on the soccer field. Still, in the end, Nelson knows he will have to cash the $400 in quarters that he has been collecting for years and years.

Kevin scampers around the sanctuary, his smile seeming wider than his face, tousled black curls flying. He cares as little about the proceedings as any boy of 2 years and 8 months.

In his circumnavigations, Kevin passes near the coffin, but not too near. He glances out of the corner of his eyes.

"It's Poppi," Kevin's mother says in Spanish. "Do you want to see him?"

"Poppi?" Kevin still doesn't quite believe it.

Now the boy spies something else on the altar. It's one of the cardboard boxes, about a foot cubed, with a ragged slit cut in the top, ready for more donations. Taped to the box is the photo of the man flashing a squinty smile. His hair is wavy, not slicked back. He's wearing a soccer uniform, not a black suit.

"Poppi!" cries the boy. He sprints past the coffin, careening toward the cardboard box with open arms and happy triumph on his face, until the adults intercept him. He climbs into his mother's lap in the front pew. She tries again: "We are seeing him for the last time," she tells her son. "Poppi is going away."

Unlike her fiance and her son, Banegas does not yet have "papers." She cannot leave the United States to witness his burial Thursday and expect to return. She cannot count on ever visiting his grave.

"Today is the last night," she sighs.

The end of four years together: "He said I was the woman who had been able to make him happy, because I was the one who gave him a son," she says.

Now begins an uncertain future: "I don't know what we will do."

It is time. Without a word, a man from the funeral home approaches and turns out the light over the coffin.

Banegas places her hands gently on the body of her son's father and begins sobbing. "I won't see you forever," she says.

She steps back and the man firmly, finally, closes the casket.

Banegas trails the coffin into the night. Her cries echo in the quiet neighborhood: "Please, don't leave me!"

Nelson Argueta tries to console her as El Chino begins his journey home. "He will be with us forever."

Against the chill air, someone slips Kevin's knit cap over his curls. On the front it says, "God Bless America."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.