Haven for day workers overcomes turmoil to become statewide role model
By Linda Taaffe, Town Crier Staff Writer
 Mountain View Worker Center Executive Director Maria Marroquin speaks to potential employers while workers await jobs at the Calvary Assembly of God Church located at California Street and Escuela Avenue. The center provides a safe place for day workers to find work, food and support for themselves and their families. |
Jim Stringer wasn’t expecting any miracles when he opened the doors of Calvary Assembly of God Church to local day workers in 2002 on a meager budget and with even less community support. The Mountain View pastor simply chalked up the church’s offer to provide a temporary place for workers to arrange day jobs with employers as a good deed to people who didn’t have many advocates.
Most of the 100 or so workers had been displaced when the only nearby center of its kind closed in neighboring Los Altos a year earlier. Workers had few alternatives other than to stand along city streets to find employment - something local laws prohibited.
Stringer said there is no reason a worker center should have succeeded: Most of the workers come from other countries, unable to speak English, with little understanding of the local culture and limited work skills. They risk their lives, in many cases, in search of a livelihood just to put food on their families’ tables back home.
In the streets, they face racially motivated verbal assaults, citations for loitering and laws created to discourage them from soliciting in the area. Yet they still keep coming, looking for a chance at a better life. So many are coming, in fact, that there has been a backlash against day laborers in recent months. Arizona lawmakers recently passed legislation prohibiting the government from funding worker centers. Vigilante groups have begun to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border and are demanding the government tighten immigration laws. Along the Peninsula, workers continue to battle their right to gather in public while cities try to limit them in response to resident complaints.
By all accounts, the Mountain View Worker Center at Calvary Church should have failed months ago, but somewhere along the way something happened that Stringer and others can’t explain.
The center has not only thrived in recent months, it has emerged as a role model in California. The workers have become a driving force in the community, influencing lawmakers, school boards and immigrant workers in other cities. The director, who came to the area as a day worker herself, was recognized as “Woman of the Year” by the California Assembly in 2003.
“God just seems to bring people to (Calvary Church),” Stringer said. “There’s no reason a worker center should have been successful … yet we’re still here, and people still want us here.”
Bridging cultures
Director Maria Marroquin counts the center’s blessings daily.
She kisses a check for a $6 donation, and thanks God for the money as she settles into her office for the morning last week. She beams as she looks at another $187 donation from St. Timothy’s Church. They are both unsolicited contributions.
Every day has been a struggle to find funding, she said, but to her surprise, private donations and grants keep coming in to cover the approximately $5,000-a-month operational expenses, which include utilities and staff salaries. The workers hold carwash fund-raisers during their off hours to cover any shortcomings.
Marroquin has been the director for three years; first with operators St. Vincent de Paul and recently with Calvary Church. Before that, she was a day worker. She eventually found permanent work as a housekeeper but continued to bring food to others who waited for work.
Being part of the community has been key to the center’s success, Marroquin said. She helped create a workers commission in charge of making operational decisions when the center broke away from its operator St. Vincent de Paul last October to become independent.
Mountain View is one of the few centers operated by workers. The commission meets Saturdays to discuss how the center is doing.
“It is important that they have the power to decide and have a say in how to run the center,” she said. “They feel like they have ownership.”
Those who use the center, must agree to be sober, not gamble while waiting for work, talk quietly and not loiter outside. Most also volunteer for chores while they wait for their names to be called off a list for employment.
Commission member Gonzalo Garcia uses the center to find work on his days off from his part-time job as a maintenance worker. He has looked for work at other centers as well as on the street.
He says the Mountain View center has provided him a sense of belonging that he hasn’t found elsewhere since he left his family and a job as a clerk in a grocery store in Mexico six years ago to find better work in California.
“At other centers, the staff is not so involved. They just tell you when there is work,” Garcia said.
The Mountain View center provides a voice for workers if there is a problem with collecting payment, if there is an injury, or other misunderstandings arise. The center records employer-employee information for every job to monitor performance on both sides. For those waiting for work, the center provides English and other enrichment classes, Garcia said.
Marroquin describes the center as a temporary bridge between two cultures for workers when they first arrive.
“It is a really different style of life for most (workers). They hear about (us) from friends and come. Little by little they get in touch with the rules (in this society).”
Some workers find permanent jobs through the center. Others stay only long enough to make enough money to bring home.
Garcia and others attribute the center’s success to Marroquin, who came to the United States as a widow with her son in 1996. She was able to use the center as a stepping stone to an administrative career. She has since remarried, owns a house and gives immigrants a voice, they say.
Marroquin is more humble. She insists that her journey here was easy. She didn’t come out of financial need, but rather to find social opportunities not available to single women in Mexico.
“I fell in love with this country. I felt so free,” she said as she talked about her first visit to the United States to visit relatives. With her family’s help, she became a permanent resident.
With her experiences, she is able to lead with a clear understanding of what workers need, Garcia said.
Community members believe in her, too. Residents stop by the center to drop off food or clothing, teach English classes or help staff log employment information into the computer.
Gaining a voice
Until three years ago, local workers struggled just to stand along the streets looking for employment. Mountain View and Los Altos were enforcing laws that made it illegal for workers to look for work along city sidewalks. Those laws ultimately catapulted local workers into the headlines.
In 2001 a group of day workers threatened to sue Mountain View and Los Altos. if city lawmakers refused to get rid of their No Solicitation laws, which laborers claimed infringed on their freedom of speech. Mountain View dropped its law. Los Altos refused.
Workers successfully sued the city in 2003 with the help of resident and attorney John Rinaldi, Palo Alto law firm Morrison and Foerster and the Mexican-American Legal Defense League. A federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional. The decision became a springboard for other workers in cities throughout California facing similar ordinances. Local workers were the guest speakers at the state’s first California Day Laborer Convention in San Francisco in 2003 to share their story. Laborers, including those in San Mateo, are currently following suit and waging lawsuits to secure their civil liberties.
Local day workers organized the only Northern California vigil to push for equal rights and improved worker laws during a national vigil sponsored by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network last year. The event drew workers from as far as Oakland.
Local workers have traveled to Sacramento and turned to the Internet to petition for and against proposed legislation that will either give them more rights or infringe on them. Marroquin said workers are educating others and rallying support statewide for the Health Care for All Bill that would give all Californians health benefits.
Workers also helped organize parents to protest the closure of Castro School in Mountain View, which included a high enrollment of immigrant children. The Mountain View-Whisman School District Board of Trustees postponed making a decision for another year after parents and workers spoke out against the closure.
“Most (workers) leave their families and come here with nothing. They don’t have anything that is important to them, so they get involved, and I think it gives them a feeling of (importance),” Marroquin said.
Daily struggles
Misconceptions about the workers appear to be one of the biggest obstacles at the center.
Potential employers aren’t aware that some workers speak English only, Marroquin said. Workers come from as far as Vietnam, the Caribbean, Africa, Russia and Latin America as well as the United States.
“They are not terrorists. They don’t come here to bother the American community for ambition or fun. They are hungry. They come here to work and to put healthy food in their children’s mouths,” she said. “They are heroes not delinquents. Delinquents are everywhere, but heroes, just in a few places. … And the Mountain View Worker Center has many.”
In Mexico, the minimum wage for workers in some towns is 42.50 pesos per day or 5.31 pesos per hour - that’s approximately $3.95 per day. The federal minimum hourly wage in the U.S. is $5.15. That’s $41.20 for an eight-hour day - more than ten times what the minimum wage worker in Mexico earns, according to a recent article by Mary Turck in “Connection to the Americas.”
Marroquin said the situation is only getting worse. She notices more skilled and educated immigrants coming to the center.
Los Altos residents continue to account for the largest percentage of employers at the center, she said.
She said no one has expressed any concerns about workers locally since the vigilante groups began patrolling the borders in Arizona.
The future
The center is scheduled May 7 to celebrate its third anniversary in Mountain View. Despite the center’s recent strides, Marroquin said there is much more to do. They need a larger facility to hold English and other enrichment classes. The center can hold only 50 workers at a time. There are typically 100 workers who show up.
The center decided last December to become independent after mediation with the former operators was unsuccessful, according to Marroquin. This means they must secure funding on their own, she said.
The center is scheduled to meet with Los Altos representatives next month as part of their continued efforts to find a permanent center as conditions of the lawsuit and to continue working together.
The wet weather hasn’t helped bring in employers in recent weeks. As few as 20 of the 100 or so who regularly show up for work at the center were able to find employment on some days during recent weeks.
The Mountain View Worker Center at Calvary Church is located at 1880 California St. and Escuela Avenue in Mountain View. For more information about the center or its May 7 anniversary celebration, call 903-4102.
