Santa Anita Tells Its Side After Alien Roundup

The rooms provided for stable workers at the Santa Anita race track are only 12 feet square and, when two people share the space with all their belongings, it’s crowded.

Some of the rooms--designed for storage of tack and other horse-racing gear--are untidy, with clothing and bedding strewn about. But it’s hard to find a dirty one.

Each of the rooms has a window, a wall heater and a cement floor.

The toilets and showers are in another building.

“The bathrooms are cleaned every day, but they don’t stay clean,” night watchman Gustavo Rafael Cueto, who shares a room with a stable hand, said Thursday, a day after a raid on the famous Arcadia track by federal Immigration and Naturalization Service agents netted 169 suspected illegal aliens. “There are a lot of people using them, and some people are pigs.”

Makeshift Quarters

More than 2,000 grooms, stable hands and “hot walkers” (men or women who walk racehorses to warm them up or cool them down) work at the track. And hundreds of them live in makeshift quarters in the tack rooms assigned to thoroughbred horse trainers.

The conditions those workers live in were severely criticized by senior INS officials after Wednesday’s dawn raid. INS Western Regional Commissioner Harold Ezell accused trainers of providing better conditions for their horses than for their workers.

INS officials charged that trainers use illegal aliens because they will work for lower wages amid poor conditions--things Americans would never accept.

But trainers, workers and track officials denied the allegations Thursday and pointed out that workers live at the track not because they are required to do so, but because they get the rooms free.

“People live in the conditions they want to live in, and that goes for grooms and stable boys, or millionaires,” said Sue Seidner, secretary to thoroughbred trainer Danny Velasquez.

Carol Frank of Pennsylvania, who said she has worked as a hot walker at tracks all over the United States, said conditions at Santa Anita are among the best.

“And they’re a lot better than at Del Mar. They’re terrible there,” she said Thursday.

Frank, who earns $120 for a 35-hour week, said she likes her job and particularly likes the tough security at Santa Anita, which makes it safer for women to work there.

Horse owner John Valpredo said the lowest wage he pays is $3.70 an hour to hot walkers. He pays his grooms the same, but they also get a commission of 1% of the winnings of any horse they take care of.

“You have to pay good money to get good people” he said. “The horses on this track are worth at least $50,000 each, and some are worth millions. You have to have people who know what they’re doing.”

Alan Balch, assistant general manager at Santa Anita, said the rooms in which workers live “were never designed as living quarters, though I’m aware some of them have been used for that since 1934.”

‘All-Purpose Rooms’

The rooms, Balch said, were originally designed as “all-purpose rooms.” Trainers are allocated rooms according to how many horses they keep at the track, he said. The trainers then assign them as sleeping rooms for their workers.

“We only make sure the bathrooms are clean, control security and make sure safety regulations for electrical use are observed,” the official said.

Under pressure from the INS to stop employing illegal aliens and hire Americans or legal foreign workers, the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protection Assn., which represents trainers, grooms and stable hands, three weeks ago opened a school to train new employees. It is run by two former jockeys--Tony Dominguez, 53, and his brother, Vernal, 51.

Tony Dominguez rode 3,000 winners before a head injury suffered in a bad fall 15 years ago ended his 25-year riding career.

The school has already turned out 25 “hot walkers” from among the first 40 applicants.

“Some of the people coming in are straight off the street,” Tony Dominguez said. “They’ve hardly ever seen a horse. . . . I tell them the horses they’ll handle here are worth anything from $10,000 to $10 million. So they’d better learn what they’re doing.

“A thoroughbred is much friskier than other horses. They’re high, ready to go, bursting with energy. Anything could scare one of these horses. If you walk into his stall without first calming him down, he could rear up, lash out with his hoofs. He could hurt himself, or he could kill you. . . .”

First, Dominguez uses a life-size fiberglass model of a horse to explain the animal’s features to his students. Then he and his brother lead the class through the motions of cleaning stalls, leading a live horse into and out of its stall, putting on bridles, checking legs for the first signs of problems or injuries.

Male and Female

The students are male and female, from teen-agers to people in their 50s.

One is Trudi Helms, who just turned 16 and is a granddaughter of jockey-turned-trainer Johnny Longden. Standing 4 feet 11 1/2, she is more than two inches taller than her famous grandfather--and eight pounds heavier.

“Johnny came to me and said, ‘Teach her everything, from the ground up,’ ” Dominguez said.

Helms said she has lived around horses all her life and had her own pony. “But now I want to learn it properly.”

One of the top pupils is Victor Calderon, 21, who is seeing horses close up for the first time in his life. He was a painter at a department store until he saw an ad in a newspaper for people who wanted to learn to handle horses.

“He knew nothing about horses,” Tony Dominguez said. “. . . He’s learning fast. He’s going to be a good groom one of these days.”