Work, Then Play

Day Laborers at Night, Blurring The Border Between Life and Art

Thin and frenetic, banging on his guitar in a Silver Spring union hall, Omar León is like a dream of labor balladeer Joe Hill, singing out in Spanish.

"¡La voz, la voz, también es un arma,

"La voz, la voz, también es un arma!"

The voice, the voice also is a weapon! he chants, while a couple hundred day laborers, organizers and allies dance and sing along.

Not too many years ago, León, 31, was a guy from Mexico in a ball cap waiting for work outside a Home Depot in Hollywood. Now he's a professional organizer and amateur troubadour. His group -- Los Jornaleros, or the Day Laborers -- has two self-published CDs out.

But León is just one voice. While Congress, critics of illegal immigration, employers and neighbors push and pull over this spreading yet still somewhat inscrutable population, day laborers are fashioning a culture. In the immigration wars, they have been defined two ways -- by the work they do, and by the way many entered the country. Now they would define themselves another way: through theater, painting, poetry -- and especially music.

Budding day laborer culture was on display Saturday into the early hours of yesterday morning at the National Labor College on New Hampshire Avenue next to the Beltway.

More than 200 workers and organizers from the Washington area and nationwide were attending a four-day convention to lobby for change and to attend workshops. This was the party after the politicking.

"When a people celebrates its struggle for work, for life and for rights, through song, poetry and painting, then art and culture become tools of resistance and liberation," Pablo Alvarado, director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network, says in Spanish to open the program.

This is homemade, outsider art, tinged with homesickness and longing, fired by hope and defiance. The photographs on the walls show men in vacant lots waiting to be hired, the lucky ones at construction sites. Paintings depict a stylized mythic river dividing two realities: on one side, shacks and hunger; on the other, fields, factories and skyscrapers.

Most of the artists decline to disclose their individual immigration status in a newspaper story, even as their art portrays a common lot as hardworking people whose only "crime" was to come seeking work.

"That question bothers me," says Victor Galicia, 40, a poet and house painter from Portland, Ore., who recited his sentimental sonnet against injustice, "La Reina de las Flores." "That's what the bosses ask."