Community leaders rolling up sleeves to help center at height of immigration controversy
By Bruce Barton and Megan Ma, Town Crier Staff Writers
 Mountain View Worker Center volunteer Sue Sullivan teaches workers English phrases during a Thursday morning session. The center provides job placement services and offers meals to area day laborers. Spanish-English dictionaries are supplied to assist in learning and communicating with employers. |
The English class is in session Thursday morning at the Mountain View Worker Center. The sparse church room has been converted into a makeshift classroom and community space. A few dozen men and women sit at the rows of tables, speaking Spanish. To prepare them for the day ahead and the prospect of work, volunteers hand out a desayuno (breakfast) of homemade tamales and coffee.
A group of approximately 15-20 workers is gathered around Sue Sullivan of Los Altos Hills as she offers handouts and pencils. The handouts point to English names for furniture in the home. She writes the words in English and Spanish on a whiteboard. Chair is la silla, curtain is la cortina and carpet is la alfombra.
It appears an even exchange. Sullivan seems to learn Spanish from her students as she teaches them English.
“It’s very stimulating,” she said of her work at the center the past year and a half. “They make me happy.”
The class is one of a host of services the center, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in October, offers local day workers. Drawing approximately 80 workers daily, the center serves as a connection point between the workers and prospective employers. It also has served as a partial solution to a 15-year problem of workers, mostly illegal Latino immigrants, loitering curbside at and around San Antonio Road and El Camino Real, flagging down work.
The influx of new homeowners recruiting inexpensive labor for remodeling tasks has spurred the workers’ continual presence.
Besides offering the workers a safe waiting spot for employment, the center provides legal services, health screening, letter-writing assistance and lessons in American politics and geography taught by volunteers to help immigrants better navigate and understand American culture.
“For many, this is the only opportunity the people have to improve their lives,” said center director Maria Marroquin. “They learn all different things and, in the meantime, they wait for employers.”
Los Altos Mayor Ron Packard said volunteer efforts are commendable. “Providing some opportunities and dignity for day workers is praiseworthy,” he said. “The center brings some order to the chaos.”
Despite the hard work and dedication of center volunteers, the past 10 years have not been easy. A group of local churches helped form the original St. Joseph the Worker Center at Jordan Avenue and El Camino Real in Los Altos. The center lost that location in 2001 when the property owner grew tired of day workers overwhelming the area and surrounding businesses. Then the chief supporter of the center, St. Vincent de Paul Society, dropped out two years ago amid a dispute over Marroquin. Marroquin stayed on with the support of the day workers, but funding sources became uncertain.
Leaders offer help
A 24-member advisory committee comprised primarily of concerned Los Altos leaders formed last December to address the future of the center as well as the issue of day workers in the community. The committee formed after the day worker center’s board of directors asked members of the Los Altos Community Foundation for help.
“The whole goal is to help the board of the center with their operational things, their financial liabilities,” said Jim Geers, co-chairman of the advisory committee with former center director Elizabeth Fitting.
The committee seeks additional funding for the center and a more suitable location than the current facility at the Calvary Church quarters on California Avenue.
Good news came Thursday when the board of directors for the San Mateo-based Peninsula Community Foundation approved a $75,000 grant for center operations. With that came the promise of two $75,000 renewals if progress at the center meets foundation approval.
To get the grant, committee members developed a three-year strategic plan aimed at both short- and long-term challenges, such as adding expertise to the center’s board of directors, helping to train center employees and stabilizing funding through more public and private donations.
“The Peninsula Foundation (members) were really impressed that so many people were trying to help,” said Geers, who brings business planning expertise to from years at the helm of AIM Technology.
Marjorie Fujiki, Peninsula Community Foundation senior program officer, said the project has “so much wonderful potential for bringing the community together. It fits within our community-building portfolio - strengthening and improving conditions in communities.”
Geers noted that the worker center has the advantage of being volunteer driven, which is the best model because it ensures a minimum of bureaucracy and more participants who have a vested interest in ensuring success.
Fitting, also a worker center board member, is the principal grant writer. She said the center established a board of directors in 2004 following the split from St. Vincent de Paul. “It looks like we’re going to have stable funding,” she said. “It allows the board to focus on other things - with the help of the advisory board.”
The worker center may get additional aid from the San Francisco-based Community Focus, an organization aimed at working on long-term community issues. The group has chosen the worker center for its inaugural California Solutions project. Its goal, according to director Sarah Rubin, is to identify stakeholders in the community - local leaders - and commit toward helping solve problems. In this case, an overcrowded worker center in need of updating cries out for expansion to new, larger quarters. That would translate to more workers receiving help and fewer on street corners fending for themselves.
The first California Solutions meeting was held two weeks ago, and Fitting and Packard attended. The Los Altos mayor is the designated convener of the group, which is reaching out to other community leaders.
“They are asking them to be part of a six-month process where the focus will be funding a new day-worker center,” Rubin said.
Rubin said she learned of the Mountain View worker center through stories about it on the Internet. “We’re interested in day-worker issues,” Rubin said. The coffee-growing industry in Latin America has taken a big hit from Vietnam, she observed on a recent visit to Latin America, sending even more people north in search of work.
National impact
A few day workers are here legally, but most are not, according to day-worker supporters.
“Felix,” a carpenter and gardener from Chihuahua, Mexico, is typical. He can earn 10 times more here than in his native country for the same work. He travels back and forth between the two countries to provide for his family.
“John,” another worker, summed up the humanitarian perspective: “Everyone deserves the chance to survive.”
The congressional battle over immigration that has prompted mass demonstrations across the country has not spared the Los Altos area. Day workers said they plan to join an organized nationwide “strike” scheduled Monday. This results from U.S. House of Representatives-approved bill 4427 that would make illegal immigrants and those who employ them felons.
Another controversial provision in the bill, stalled in the U.S. Senate, is construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s a hateful bill, and it’s un-American,” Sullivan said.
Some workers were aware of the immigration proposal, and Sullivan, translating their Spanish, related how some workers felt they were discriminated against and not given the chance to earn citizenship. They want working papers - they work hard and don’t get much in return. They don’t like to live here illegally.
On Monday, Marroquin said, workers plan to avoid going to work and sending their children to school to make a statement about their rights as human beings. “We’re asking Mr. Bush to listen to our peaceful message,” she said.
The strike has some day-worker supporters concerned, including Mountain View Councilman Greg Perry, a member of worker center’s board of directors.
“In some ways, I think it’s a distraction,” he said. “There’s a lot of nuts and bolts work to be done. That isn’t about marches and rallies - (but) funding for the center, trying to make sure English classes are up to quality, childhood education. Neither side of the immigration debate is addressing the question of how do you know that today’s 8-year-old can find a job when he’s 18?”
Marroquin reasoned that, while it can be the source of some discomfort, the Monday strike is necessary to draw attention to the immigrants’ plight, just as Cesar Chavez’s marches cast light on the problems facing legal farm workers, even though they are legal.
“They have mixed feelings,” she said. “They have a lot of respect for this country, but they also want to live here legally.”
Cause for optimism
Sullivan, Geers and others remain optimistic that there are better days ahead for area day workers. “If you get Sarah Rubin (Community Focus), the Peninsula Community Foundation and the Los Altos Community Foundation (involved), it feeds on itself,” Sullivan said.
Geers added, “If we can set it up where the center can provide greater capacity, that’s what will get them off the streets.”
State Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, been an advocate for day workers since her days on the Mountain View City Council, welcomes the groundswell of support for the worker center. “Any support from the community will really help,” she said. “The center has been struggling financially for a number of years.”
She noted that some workers have received Community Emergency Response Training, can give back to the community helping during a disaster.
“These people are more than just implements of labor,” Lieber said. “They have hopes and dreams.”
Another understated yet important goal for the center volunteers is to nurture some hope for immigrants, said Alma Lalonde, a first-generation Mexican-American who grew up in a Texas migrant worker family. When she moved to Palo Alto a year and a half ago from the East Coast, she was disturbed to see immigrants on street corners and decided to help. She now teaches English at at the center.
“They probably feel that I bridge the two cultures, and they see that there are opportunities,” she said. “When I tell them, ‘My father was like you,’ they see a kind of success story. I really feel inspired to work with such humble people.”
The Mountain View Worker Center is located at 1880 California St. For more information, call 903-4102.
