By Megan Ma

Day Worker Center Director Maria Marroquin participates in a play portraying the lives of day laborers.

The audience overflowed to the sides of the theater at the Community School of Music and Arts’ Finn Theater Friday. Supporters, fundraisers and community luminaries attended to celebrate the Mountain View Day Worker Center’s 10th anniversary.

After Assemblywoman Sally Lieber welcomed the crowd, volunteers launched a short documentary video on the history of the center from its sparse and temporary beginning at St. Joseph Church in Mountain View to its climactic local immigration march in May.

As the primary-hiring center for immigrants, many whom are illegal, the leaders have met both political opposition and support over the last decade.

Onstage, in brief snapshot scenes, a team of actors and workers depicted a day in their lives as “jornaleros” - from cleaning homes, waiting on street corners for work and learning English at the center at the Calvary Church. While the one-hour performance in Spanish and English was sprinkled with humor at times, the real-life stories of the workers also conveyed the unpleasant reality for many illegal immigrants from Mexico and Latin America of looking for work and sending money to families left behind.

At the center of the piece, the actors, who recited lines from playwright Dorothy Heller’s interviews with workers at the center, expressed their discomfort at what it means to be an illegal.

“I don’t like to stand on the street … Children and mothers look at me like I’m a criminal … it hurts my feelings,” one actor said.

After 10 turbulent years, the center has flourished into a community space for workers and employers to meet in a dignified manner. Center Director Maria Marroquin said she hoped the performance would show the dignity of the worker who seeks a better life for his family amidst discrimination.

Marroquin called the performance a “thank you” to the community that has supported the center in the last decade.

“La Espera,” the name of the play, is a word meaning both “to wait” and “to hope” in Spanish, the narrator explained at the end.

“That’s our life, señoras y señores. Waiting to work, waiting to see the faces of our loved ones again. And hoping, always hoping,” the play’s narrator said.