The Men at the Office

His name is Juan Carlos Ruiz. He’s a husky, 30-year-old Latino who doesn’t expose himself, bother little children or urinate on street corners.

Ask him if he does those things and he feels insulted. “Do you?” he demands, and when you shake your head no, he replies, “Then why do you think I would?”

Well, it’s because he’s got, you know, brown skin and talks funny. It’s because he’s Mexican. It’s because he’s one of those day laborers you see trying to hustle work on street corners.

“I need food and I need rent money, but I don’t break the law,” Juan Carlos will tell you proudly. “I’m here to work.”

That’s no crime. Not yet. But if L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke has her way, it will be.

Burke is proposing a law that would criminalize what Juan Carlos Ruiz and hundreds of others throughout the county are doing: soliciting jobs on street corners.

She’s responding to complaints from residents in Ladera Heights who just don’t want the men there. Forget that they’re trying to survive. Forget that they vehemently deny doing the kinds of things they’re accused of.

“They say we’re gambling,” Juan Carlos says. “You know what that consists of?”

He takes a nickel from his pocket and flips it into the air. “We toss coins,” he says incredulously. “We toss nickels to pass the time!”

Do they, as accused, begin drinking about noon and stay drunk half the day? Juan Carlos shakes his head and waves the question off with a broad gesture.

“We can’t,” he finally says with a sigh. “We have to stay sober to watch for immigration agents.”

*

They call their corner at Slauson and Fairfax avenues “the office,” and they’re usually there from about 7 a.m. until 4 p.m.

They’ve become a family of men, good friends who help each other get by in difficult times. Recently they came up with $60 in donations to help a fellow worker injured in an automobile accident.

This at a time when even the nickels they toss are hard to come by, earned with picks and shovels and the sweat of their brow.

Burke’s ordinance, delayed 45 days for review, would end all that. It’s not because most of them aren’t good people, she told me the other day. It’s just that some of them ruin it for others.

Sadly, Burke is another example of a legislator unwittingly pandering to a rising incidence of hatred directed toward Latinos. Rooted in the recession, it has come to embrace not only illegal immigrants, but anyone with brown skin, whether or not he’s on the public dole.

Those we dignify as homeless are free to beg at whatever street corner they choose, sleep in any doorway available and piss in any park. You want drunks or addicts, try wandering among these people. But get the Latinos off the street corners.

I’ve tried a dozen or more times to hire homeless whites to do light yardwork for $6 an hour and haven’t had a taker yet, despite the signs they hold offering to labor for food.

You’ll find them on street corners too, often with small children, in a bid for sympathy that opens wallets and empties pockets . . . without ever swinging a pick or lifting a load.

*

I dislike being an advocate for any group, despite my surname. I don’t speak Spanish, I don’t live in a barrio, frijoles don’t turn me on and I’ll be damned if I’ll ever sing “La Cucaracha” in a crowded cantina.

But this isn’t a question of ethnic defense. It’s a question of human decency.

I never expected that L.A., its history rooted in Hispanic culture, would be mean in an effort to solve or explain economic problems that immigrants had little or nothing to do with.

Mexicans didn’t plunge this country into financial chaos. Nicaraguans didn’t shut down the defense industry. Salvadorans didn’t chase General Motors out of the Valley. Peruvians don’t control pork-barrel politics.

But I hear everyone from Bill Clinton to Pete Wilson damn the immigrants. I hear Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer damn the immigrants. I hear City Council members damn the street vendors. And now I hear Yvonne Brathwaite Burke damn the day laborers. Even in disaster, the hard voices rise: no long-term earthquake assistance for illegals, they cry. To hell with compassion. To hell with mercy.

You don’t have to be a Latino to sense the hatred, but the men at the office are feeling it the most, and the pain is intense.

A Nicaraguan day laborer in my community, where they are also under attack, said it best when he said, “They’re turning the lights out on us.”

He was talking about the lamp beside the golden door.