By David Hansen, February 1, 2012 | Source: Laguna Beach CoastlinePilot.com
On any given day, a couple dozen Latinos wait on a dusty strip of dirt on Laguna Canyon Road, hoping for work. Most support families back in Mexico. They will be lucky to work one day a week.
The recession has taken a toll on nearly everyone, including those in the Day Labor Hiring Center.
“I’m paying for two families,” said Jose Villaseñor, 58, who has lived in the U.S. for 21 years and has four children. “I work maybe one day a week, maybe no work, no nothing.”
Villaseñor gets up at 4 a.m. and takes two buses from Santa Ana to get to Laguna by 6 a.m., when the work center hands out lottery numbers. In an effort to avoid a free-for-all, the lottery system tries to more fairly distribute work.
“We’re a barometer,” said David Peck, chairman of the South County Cross-Cultural Council, which runs the site. “Before the recession, about 50% got jobs working two to three days a week. Now, it’s maybe one to two days.”
Mexican actor Demian Bichir, who was nominated Tuesday morning for an Oscar in the Best Actor category for his role as a Mexican day laborer in the film “A Better Life,” has dedicated his nomination to the millions of undocumented immigrants in the nation.
The drama portrays the life of an undocumented gardener, Carlos Gallindo, in East L.A. The gardener struggles to keep his teenage son on the straight-and-narrow and give him a chance at “a better life” after his wife abandoned the two of them after crossing the border into the United States.
“A Better Life” is rather timely given the contentious national debate over immigration.
Bichir’s nomination also comes at a time when people around the country are protesting controversial immigration laws, such as Alabama’s HB56 and Arizona’s SB1070.
The film Una Hora Por Favora shares the story of a lonely woman “Elissa” (played by Michaela Watkins) who, when she desperately needs her shower fixed, picks up a Latino day laborer named “Arturo” (Valderrama). Elissa and Arturo are quickly swept into a whirlwind love affair, and soon Arturo is introducing his new girlfriend to his barrio, and she takes up studying Spanish. The couple seems to swap cultures before the relationship sours. In Una Hora Por Favora, it appears that one hour can change everything.
Neither Chris Weitz (the director of A Better Life) or Jill Soloway are Latino, yet both directors boldly present Latino themes in their movies, as well as attempt to introduce Latino characters with depth in their chosen storylines. Soloway tackles complex subjects, including cultural assimilation and gender stereotypes, in Una Hora Por Favora. She uses comedy as the vehicle through which to disguise these controversial topics, and at the same time, slip them onto the tips of our tongues for serious discussion: Click to continue »
There is something bourgeois, even aristocratic about sitting for a portrait, engaged in the labor of sitting still. That contributes to the unexpected excitement in the aesthetically traditional portraits of Latino day laborers by John Sonsini. In a controversial move, Sonsini hires workers from Los Angeles work sites and pays them their hourly wage to sit for him. His expressionist works are mostly all of Mexican males and yet his pieces aren’t overtly political; instead, the message behind Sonsini’s thick brushstrokes is subtly filtered through the SoCal sunlight.
Organizer, Mark Day re-caps the wage theft workshop:
Our wage theft workshop on Oct. 29 in Oceanside was a huge success thanks to the teamwork of college students, organizers, guest speakers, jornaleros, and household workers who attended. Special thanks go to the Mira Costa college students of the Human Rights Committee of Oceanside for setting up the workshop at the Mira Costa Community Learning Center and for coordinating the food and other tasks.
Our special guest was attorney Renee Saucedo from the Centro Legal de La Raza in San Francisco. Renee encouraged us to take direct action against employers who refuse to pay their workers. She also told the story of how the San Francisco day labor center got started 20 years ago, and how it has become so successful. The bottom line, said Renee, is that we have to keep organizing–and eventually we will reach our goals.
Veronica Federovsky of the National Day Labor Organizing Network advised day laborers and household workers on how workers can do to protect their own interests when dealing with employers. This includes being paid in cash the same day of the work and taking careful documentation on the employer in case he/she fails to pay. Click to continue »
By Chris De Benedetti | Source: Hayward Daily Review/MercuryNews.com | January 4, 2012
HAYWARD — The Hayward Day Labor Center, a nonprofit agency hit by burglars over the New Year’s holiday weekend, is asking for help replace some stolen items.
The job-training organization — which provides a variety of social services to those in need in the greater Hayward area — lost computers printers, and gardening tools in the burglary, said Gabriel Herndandez, the center’s executive director.
The burglars also damaged a book-dispensing vending machine and stole soccer uniforms from Tennyson High School that Hernandez, the squad’s head coach, was storing at the center.
The estimated cost of the stolen and damaged goods was between $8,000 and $10,000, Hernandez said. The crime took place sometime between Friday and Sunday morning, when a delivery person discovered that the center had been robbed, police Lt. Roger Keener said.
Anyone wishing to donate to the center can write a check made payable to Community Initiatives, c/o Hayward Day Labor Center, and mail it to the center at 680 W. Tennyson Road, Hayward, CA 94544.
CARRBORO - The Chapel Hill and Carrboro Human Rights Center may have found a new home around the corner from its old neighborhood.The center put a three-bedroom, brick ranch house at 107 Barnes St. under contract Dec. 23 for $155,000, director Judith Blau said. County records show the 1,075-square-foot house was built in 1970 and is owned by Dorothy and Bernard Atwater. It is valued at $138,363.
They still need to close on the house, but after the sale goes through, Blau said they might improve the gravel driveway and build another room.
Interim Town Manager Matt Efird said the group first must seek a home occupation permit or some type of rezoning. The exact requirements will depend on the information center officials submit, possibly by early spring, he said.
Blau and center community organizer David Rigby said they couldn’t have found the home so quickly without the local NAACP and its president the Rev. Robert Campbell, Community Realty agent Bronwyn Merritt, Carrboro town officials and members of Occupy Chapel Hill-Carrboro. Click to continue »
Close to 70 agricultural day laborers arrive every day at the Centro de los Trabajadores Agricolas Fronterizos (Border Farmworker Center) in El Paso in hopes of being hired to harvest nuts and red chilis, but with little hope at all for next year.
Around 1:00 a.m. the farmworkers gather in the street hoping that the overseers or farm owners will soon show up to hire them.
“The harvest season is almost over, which is why the overseers can pick and choose the workers they want. They always prefer the youngest and strongest,” Mexican laborer Roberto Miranda told Efe.
Once in the fields, he said, they put what they pick in baskets and get paid 80 cents for each basket they fill.
“After eight hours of work without anything to eat, they give me between $25 and $30. But some days I only earn $10,” Miranda said.
Many of his fellow farmworkers also complain about the meager pay they get for toiling in the fields, but are universally afraid to say anything about it in public. Click to continue »
They sit with shovels and rakes and spades, waiting.
The faceless day laborers in Ron Ritzie’s painting, Waiting Game, are a face of Morristown that he cannot ignore.
“You see their images all around town, looking for work,” Ron said on Wednesday at the Morristown Neighborhood House, where he donated a signed giclée (digital ink-jet) print of the painting to Pathways to Work.
That program, now in its third year, matches workers with people seeking to hire casual labor.
'Waiting Game,' by Morristown artist Ron Ritzie. he donated a print of the painting to the Pathways to Work program at the Neighborhood House. Photo by Bill Lescohier
Pathways Manager Rosa Chilquillo said she was “escstatic” about Ron’s gift. “It depicts what Pathways to Work is is,” she said. “We work with anybody who is unemployed, who needs work.” Click to continue »
Fifty-year-old Michael Kembe, a professional cook and dishwasher, knows he’s in the middle of a simple problem.
“Everybody wants to work,” he says in his accent, like a father imparting life advice to his son. “In today’s economy, there’s no jobs.”
After a decade of saving some his some earnings from working at Baguettes and Bagels Deli just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, Kembe arrived in Los Angeles in mid-2010 to reconnect with his only friend in America.
Finding a steady job in L.A. has turned out to be much more impossible than the optimistic Kembe had expected. At most, he thought it would take three months to find a job. It’s been 15 months.
“Everywhere you go they say the business is slow,” he said. “I mean everybody, business slow, business slow. Even the warehouse, business slow. It’s not just the restaurants. Warehouse. Security guards.” Click to continue »
Meanwhile, the Latino day laborer character was in the spotlight yet again with 
