EL MOSCO : It means day labor, and, increasingly, all the controversies and conflicts that surround Latin American immigration in Southern California

EVERY SATURDAY MORNING, Poli Jaramillo says goodby to his wife and two daughters and walks several blocks to the busy corner of Lankershim Boulevard and Strathern Street in industrial North Hollywood. There, along a two-block commercial strip--an auto-parts store, a Burger King, an Arco gas station--60 or 70 men stand and wait. Following his custom, Jaramillo joins the group in front of the Mel-O-Dee Nursery, exchanging greetings with men from his home state of Michoacan, Mexico. El mosco is open for business. The day-labor employment lottery begins.

The men are mostly young and mostly undocumented, transplanted to el mosco from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. They will stay today, as every rainless day except Sunday, until noon, when the trickle of hiring patrones usually taps out. If a car or truck pulls over, they will rush the vehicle, competing for the brass ring--the patron ‘s invitation and a job: You. Hop in, quick, hop in.

Mostly they will wait. And while they wait, they talk of pueblos , novias , the search for full-time work, future dreams. They gamble, tossing dimes. They jump when Mel-O-Dee owner Clyde Miyata, campaigning daily to drive them away, turns on the sprinklers. And they tell stories of el mosco .

In Spanish-English slang, mosco means “bug”--a variant of mosca , Spanish for “fly.” In Jaramillo’s neighborhood, however, where graffiti spell it “mosko,” it is the made-in-America noun that means first the gathering place, but also the wait, the rush for the job, the harassment by cops and shop owners, the uncertainty, the whole day-labor experience. Elsewhere the hiring corners have a simpler nomenclature-- la esquina , “the corner,” la yarda , “the yard.” But in North Hollywood, the story goes, a new worker, overwhelmed and appalled by the crowd clambering around a patron ‘s truck, called out the word mosco , and the ironic tone stuck: el mosco , the place of swarming insects.

The place of swarming insects is also the place where a man once paid Jaramillo $2 to move a couch and then tried to drop him miles from North Hollywood. Where everyone has a story about the prostitutes and evangelicals who troll the crowds. Where occasionally mariposas-- “butterflies,” the “men of the other side”--pick up workers for gardening help when they want something else entirely. Where one ruinous day four years ago, three vans pulled up and the first driver said: “ Trabajo para todos “ -- “work for everyone.” Nearly 75 men piled in, laughing at their good fortune. And then La Migra ‘s doors locked, and off to the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility and Tijuana the entire mosco went. Within two weeks everyone was back on el mosco , Jaramillo reports, smiling at its irrepressibility.

Every week, migrants from “over there” arrive “over here.” They come for jobs--pushed by hardship and unrest in their own countries, pulled by an economic boom they helped create in Southern California. Of the estimated 150,000 Latinos, documented and undocumented, who increase the region’s population each year, the men on el mosco account for a small fraction, perhaps 5,000 to 15,000 on any given day. They are the ones who for a variety of reasons--few village or family connections, hunger, no papers, owing the coyote money, bad luck--haven’t gained a foothold or have lost the one they had. They hear about el mosco and use it as a springboard, a place to earn money for food, to learn who is hiring or where to find a bed, to make a little extra on a day off.

Standing and waiting at dusty rural turnouts, on upscale suburban reales and in front of the Mel-O-Dee Nursery, day laborers are a constant reminder of the controversies and conflicts surrounding Latin American immigration in Southern California. By their ubiquitous presence, they have become the most visible symbols of the region’s complex ties with its legal and illegal Latin American work force.

On the one hand, the day laborers represent the Latino immigrants who are welcomed by the Southern California economy. On the other, they’re fuel for a fire of resentment and discomfort, caught in the middle of an ambivalent relationship: Even those who direct hatred at the immigrants live in an economic system that depends on hiring them. The moscos also are a street-level report card on laws such as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which was designed to reduce illegal immigration by fining employers for hiring undocumented workers. If you drive down Lankershim, it’s clear that the law is failing: The men keep coming and the men keep getting hired.

The frustration over immigration problems and the conflicts over day labor are being played out in nearly 20 predominantly Anglo, middle-class communities across Southern California. Citizens from Santa Clarita to Encinitas have characterized the men as “dirty,” “rude,” “intimidating.” Complaints from shoppers, locals and merchants have coalesced into the demand that someone do something about the growing number of moscos-- an estimated 40 sites in Los Angeles County alone.

Occasionally, angry citizens have taken matters into their own hands. In Carlsbad recently, two employees of a market called the Country Store were charged with handcuffing and roughing up one of the undocumented day laborers who have made the store’s parking lot a day-labor site. The worker involved in the handcuffing incident was found with a bag over his head on which was written: “ No mas aqui “--”no more here.”

But it is the nature of the moscos , and the men, to return. Part Young Migrant Latino Men’s Club, part settlement house, part curbside hiring hall, the moscos are a matter of grim necessity. El mosco , says Poli Jaramillo succinctly, is the job that is no job.

Jaramillo, at 23 a clear-thinking young man, is something of an expert on el mosco. When he migrated to L.A. four years ago, he had job prospects waiting, routes into the economy secured by those in his family and village who had come before him. But then he lost his first job, and he found himself on el mosco every day, making $300 or so a month, with a hungry family to feed. He feels lucky, and less depressed by el mosco , since he found full-time work again--as a welder for $200 a week. Now he comes to Lankershim and Strathern only on Saturdays for a chance at an extra $40.

His weekly snapshots of el mosco comprise a time-lapse portrait of day labor. “Each year,” he says, “there are all new people. They leave, more come, in six months they get set up in a job somewhere, they’re off el mosco .” But Jaramillo has no fear that one Saturday he will show up at the Mel-O-Dee and be the only one hoping for work. El mosco , he says, never ends.

THE ENDLESS MOVEMENT ON AND OFF el mosco is part of a Latin migration that has driven a spectacular 30-year boom in the Southern California economy. The migration began when the federal government recruited 100,000 seasonal workers each year from Mexico in the bracero program of the 1950s. It begat a remarkable change in the region’s work force, which absorbed huge numbers of Mexicans and ultimately Central Americans, especially in manufacturing and unskilled positions such as busboy and janitor. Because those Latinos worked for lower wages, they reduced the cost of doing business in L.A., fueling new industries and new jobs.

Just as manufacturing plants took on a Latino cast, so did another Southern California marketplace: the street corner. Historian Rudolfo Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge who has been informally tracking the development of day labor for 40 years, remembers when skilled workers of every ethnic group crouched by their toolboxes waiting for construction work in the 1940s in West Los Angeles. New street-side hiring sites have followed the region’s development ever since. By the 1960s, most sites were manned by migrant Mexicans. Today, perhaps half the street-corner population is Mexican and half Central American.

Both the migration and the corners expanded rapidly in the 1970s, an expansion that continues today. The number of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles doubled between 1975 and 1980, according to researchers at UCLA. The early 1980s’ wars in Central America pushed hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans north. And the 1987 collapse of Mexico’s financial markets forced migration from rural states such as Oaxaca, Guererro, Sinaloa and Puebla, which had never before sent sons and husbands, fathers and brothers north for economic reasons.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, writes immigration researcher Ann Forsyth, “job competition (increased) as the supply of new-immigrant workers swelled the job queue.” As the wait for full-time work got longer, more migrants had to resort to el mosco .

Recent surveys by immigration attorney Elliot Grossman and Pablo Amado of the daily Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion found that three-quarters of those on the moscos are undocumented, half don’t have families here, and 80% want to return home after they make some money. Nearly all have been in the United States less than a year. They live with relatives or other migrants in pooled-rent apartments, under freeways, in rented chicken coops or charity shelters.

Each year they probably complete close to a million workdays of dirt moving, tree trimming, hauling, moving, painting, yard and pool cleaning, dry-walling, plastering and tiling for the region’s homeowners and small contractors. It is labor, says Isidro Rocha of the Laborers International Union Local 1082 in El Monte, that might not get done if it weren’t for migrants willing to work for $5--or less--an hour.

But even the lowest wages on el mosco can seem a significant increase in income for many of the workers. As much as any one migrant can stand for all migrants, 19-year-old Roberto Tabora is typical. A native of Honduras who left home “on a whim,” Tabora worked in Mexico City for five years before hopping a train to Houston and finally Los Angeles. His motivation was simple. In Mexico, he reports, the minimum wage is 75,000 pesos per week, about $30. “Here you earn that in a day,” says Tabora.

If someone hires you.

Tabora is small, jumpy, talkative. He tells tales of stealing onto trains at midnight, full of the desperation of solo migration. He knew no one when he got to L.A. eight months ago, but he quickly heard of La Placita, a church near Olvera Street on the edge of downtown, long a magnet and refuge for Latino immigrants. It’s one of several churches that temporarily house migrants. From there, he makes his daily assault on the Los Angeles job market.

What he has in mind is anything but el mosco. In Houston, where he first heard of such sites, he rarely got work by waiting at the corners. And when he arrived in L.A., he avoided the moscos , instead walking the streets, striking up conversations, following rumors of work. In December, for instance, he rushed downtown after hearing that toy factories were hiring box loaders. That time, there were no jobs.

But other times he’s been luckier. Tabora has manned a snow-cone cart for three months, varnished furniture in a factory at $2.50 an hour for a month, helped a welder for a month. Both the factory owner and welder were Latinos he met by chance; both, in the end, were unable to pay him what he was due. Between jobs he has fallen back on el mosco. There, he has landed four-day jobs with Armenian immigrants as a painter and ditch digger, and he has gone for three weeks without being hired. All told, Tabora has worked only five of the months he’s been here and has sent home money once. He still sleeps in a free shelter.

He’ll use the moscos until the next steady job comes along, he says, and again if the next job disappears. If you believe Tabora, the only way to remove him and the others from el mosco is to give them work.

THE DAY LABORER’S daily first decision is where to go. One night, Jorge Romero, a stolid, straight-talking 21-year-old in paint-spattered khakis and white Converse high-tops, reviews his options.

He rules out Pico and Main, downtown, which he reports is sometimes crowded with men who drink and aren’t serious about finding work. Atlantic and Beverly in East L.A. is close by, says Romero, a steelworker from Mexico who is living temporarily at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights, but the bosses who use it are tough, low-paying Chinos (“Asians”) and pochos (Chicanos). Lately, Romero has been going to the corner at Artesia Boulevard and Hawthorne Boulevard in Redondo Beach, where he’s had more luck getting work. But it is 90 minutes away, and it’s the only mosco he frequents “where the cops give you trouble.” Tomorrow he will try Redondo.

Like Tabora, Romero spent his first weeks in Los Angeles looking for a regular job. Everyone asked him for documents, and that route to employment seemed hopeless. So when someone at his shelter told him about el mosco , where no one ever asks for papers, he gave it a try, starting with Pico and Main and experimenting from there. “When work is scarce you get desperate and try another corner,” Romero says.

His careful planning and persistence have enabled him to earn $300 to $400 a month, and he has sent home a little each month--$122 in December, he remembers precisely. And after seven months, he may have finally found a way off the corners. A migrant he met on el mosco says Romero is first in line for the next opening at the downtown aluminum-table factory where he works. The job would pay $4.25 an hour compared to the $1 an hour he made at his job in Aguascalientes. But it would require only a small investment--$25 for false papers. It hasn’t happened yet, and today Romero’s pocket contains bus money and little else.

He rises at 4:30 a.m. to catch the bus downtown, where he transfers to the Redondo line. Redondo Beach awaits him nervously. Officials of this middle-class city of narrow lanes and home-spun merchants have been grappling with el mosco since 1981, when the city responded to complaints by driving day laborers from Rindge and Marshall Field lanes, in one of its most intimate picket-fence neighborhoods.

Later, when the men moved to Redondo’s main shopping boulevard, Artesia, the city authorized police to ticket drive-by employers under no-stopping laws. They sometimes aggressively go after the workers themselves, one morning rounding up 70 men and ticketing them for “soliciting work from a sidewalk.” But the most determined men, like Romero, keep coming to the busy corner where Artesia crosses Hawthorne Boulevard.

Several rules guide the strategy that earns Romero his average of three jobs a week. Stand with a small group of four or five. “Twenty men together can scare off the boss,” Romero says. Find a group with an English speaker; patrones gravitate to them. In front of paint or lumber stores, make eye contact with those going in for supplies. If you are asked for a specific skill you don’t have--say, laying bricks--don’t lie. “You might get the job, but you won’t be able to do it,” he says, shrugging. Don’t work for too little money and advise less-experienced men to do the same. “Guys who take work for $3.50 hurt us all. I say, if the work is hard and the pay is low, don’t go. If the pay is $5 an hour or more, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard or easy. Take it.”

At 7 a.m., Romero is one of several dozen men at Hawthorne. He splurges on coffee, standing, talking, ready to react. He knows he’ll have to move in an instant if a patron ‘s car or truck stops in front of them. Peter Lucey, a Mt. Washington resident, remembers the other side of such transactions and his first nervous trip to a mosco. “I just aimed the car at the curb and the rest was kind of a blur,” as men came running from the sidewalk and across the street.

For the men, the prize in such reaction tests is the passenger-door handle. “If you get it and you can do the work, the job is usually yours,” says Romero. If the patron seeks only unskilled braceros, his fingers will count off how many he needs and the pushiest extras pile in. But sometimes the patron is more particular and an instantaneous lineup occurs. Some employers go for obvious strength--Poli Jaramillo, for example, gets many jobs simply because he is large. Others have specific requirements--an employer doing a muddy, dirt-moving job might look for a man with boots.

From pick-up to pay, the job is a continually unfolding mystery. “When they get in the truck, they don’t know where they are going, what they’ll be doing, the pay, anything,” according to Rocha, the union official, who says he is amazed at the day laborers’ exposure to abuse. Mosco veterans and conscientious employers try to correct that. Jaramillo, secure with his weekly wages, asks about pay within two blocks. If it’s $3.50 or less he gets out and walks back to el mosco. Lucey says he announces the pay right away with two of the few Spanish words he knows, cinco and dolares . But many employers say nothing and the men go on faith. To them, any pay, any work, is better than nothing.

Nerves relieved by getting work begin unraveling over getting paid. A common phrase for succeeding on el mosco is me defendi. It means “I defended myself” or “I survived,” and it reflects how quickly stories of nonpayment travel. Romero has two. Once, a co-worker picked up Romero’s share for a three-day plumbing job and promptly spent it drinking and gambling. “What goes around will come around to him” is all he says about it. Another time, a man promised $5 an hour and took Romero “down one long freeway and then another. I had no idea where I was.” The job was brutal--loading chunks of concrete into a truck for eight straight hours--but at day’s end he was given a $10 bill and told to show up at the same corner for another day’s work and the full pay. The man never showed; Romero, without recourse, still fumes.

Fear of such disaster mingles wildly with thoughts of the big score: a long-term job. When it’s clear from a job site that there are days or weeks of work ahead, the worker becomes suitor and the boss the object. Bosses are addressed respectfully as Senor , Senora or even Don , as in Don Peter. Unwilling or unable to communicate, the boss doesn’t reveal his plans; the worker, inflating silence into possibility, auditions feverishly. And at day’s end, the worker “always, every single time” asks about future work, Lucey says.

Employers often answer inaccurately, Romero reports. “A lot say, ‘You’re good. I’ll come back tomorrow.’ But many never come.” In particular, the workers are wary of immigrant employers. “(Asian bosses) are irresponsible, hostile, and will leave you anywhere,” a worker was quoted in La Opinion. “Latino bosses . . . are despots.” When the Japanese pull up,” reports Jaramillo, “only two or three will go to the car. No one wants to work with them; they pay very little and never feed you.” Acuna, the Cal State Northridge professor, goes to el mosco once a month--”these guys need work”--and says the men he hires to work around his house invariably have stories of being exploited by employers. “Unfortunately, most (abusive employers) are recent immigrants themselves, on the economic fringes where unions and rights are not a big concern,” he says. A generic bitterness toward el mosco ‘s poor rewards accrues.

There are exceptions. Workers with specific, in-demand skills--bricklayers, welders--find el mosco relatively lucrative. Jaramillo knows one man with 12 years on el mosco who now bases his tree-trimming services at the street corner; patrones search him out at Lankershim, which allows him to set his price like any subcontractor.

And those who work for homeowners often credit them as fair. The best are employers such as Lucey, a computer salesman with two children who originally worried about the unknowns of bringing strange men onto his property to dig a new driveway. After getting high-priced bids from landscape architects “who would probably go to the corner themselves,” however, he decided to do the job himself. Three times he hired a single laborer to work with him on a Saturday, and he says his worries were misplaced. “These guys’ focus is totally on whether or not they’ll go home with money for their families,” he says. Each hire worked hard and well, he reports, and Lucey fed them large meals, paid promptly in cash and dropped them back at their homes. “Hey, I’m a good white liberal,” he jokes. Lucey even acceded once at mid-day when one worker said $6.50 an hour was a fairer wage than $5.

“What luck I have!” says Jaramillo when he describes such patrones. He happily recalls one Saturday last November when a Spanish-speaking Norteamericano paid $40 for three hours’ weeding work, and then offered him several cold beers.

But days like the one Romero has are more typical. At 8 a.m., his Redondo gamble goes awry. Down the street, a police car pulls up and an officer talks to a clump of men. Muddled word travels fast up the street: The cops are going to ticket; the cops are going to call in the INS. Romero was deported last year at another mosco , and since then he has avoided officialdom at all costs. Checking the time, he decides to bail out and hops the bus, trying to get back to Atlantic and Beverly for the last hour of hiring. He makes it but is not hired.

It is noon. Without money, unable to eat until the mission’s 6:30 p.m. meal, Romero goes to the public library. With English the ticket to better employment, he looks at English-language magazines whenever he can, hoping to build the vocabulary he’s picking up in a class at the mission. Within a year he wants to try for work in San Francisco’s earthquake reconstruction effort or in Washington state’s apple orchards. “I’ve never worked in the countryside,” he says. “But I’ve learned construction skills pretty fast here.”

On Sunday, Aguascalientes, Mexico, sends yet another young man north: Romero’s 19-year-old brother joins him in Los Angeles, and on el mosco . There are now four fellow townsmen at Dolores Mission, all sent by families expecting remittances back home. Romero, with nothing to show for today, blames those who pressed for anti-day-labor action in Redondo Beach. “The cops are just doing their jobs,” he says. “It’s the people who live there who don’t like men looking for work. At times, I think they are racists. We’re not bothering anyone. We’re just standing there.”

IN 1985, Orange County Supervisor Ralph Clark sent out a questionnaire on day labor. “You should put these people in boxes and ship them back to Mexico,” said one respondent. Steven Greenberg of Sam’s U-Drive in Van Nuys told La Opinion that he has recurring nightmares of pulling into his lot only to find it crowded with day laborers while an 18-wheeler bores down on him from behind. He says he wakes up panicked with indecision over whether to get crushed in his car or run over men. “It’s a public safety issue,” he says. In city council meetings across Southern California, day laborers are accused of littering, verbally threatening passers-by, urinating or defecating on private and public property, creating traffic danger.

Not just the day laborers and those who want to see them dispersed are unhappy. The political heat ignited by the complaints puts three critical players--the INS, local government and immigrants’ rights advocates--in awkward positions. “It’s a pretty sensitive issue from all sectors,” INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice says dryly.

Already nobody’s favorite agency, the INS is getting skewered. If its job is to enforce the Immigration Reform and Control Act, critics say, that should include erasing the most visible sign of illegal immigrants, el mosco . But serious flaws in the law are making the task extremely difficult.

The law’s Achilles’ heel, in the words of one government researcher, is its requirement that employers review and record, not verify, a worker’s documentation. Almost any worker can easily come up with documents: False papers now cost from $3 in the Central Valley to $25 in Los Angeles.

“Both employers and employees have learned how to play the game,” says Leo Chavez, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine, who has studied the impact of new immigration laws. For example, says researcher Forsyth, one well-used loophole in the law allows employers a three-day grace period before requiring them to ask workers for papers. Many undocumented day laborers, she says, are recruited to work at factory after factory, putting in technically legal three-day stints before being asked to move on.

Ironically, the portion of the law that gave amnesty to as many as 900,000 formerly undocumented people in Southern California has spurred illegal immigration, further increasing the INS workload. Many newly legal immigrants are apt and equipped to house relatives and villagers and help them migrate, taking illegal immigration tallies up, not down.

Despite these difficulties, however, INS officials argue that the growth of day labor shows that their strategy is working: Unable to get regular jobs, migrants without papers must hit the corners in despair. Soon, goes the argument, word will get back to Mexico and Central America: Don’t migrate.

But most researchers believe that the law--whatever its toll on undocumented job seekers--won’t slow migration. Preliminary surveys done to measure the effectiveness of the law, according to Beth Asch of the Rand Corp., indicate that “despite fewer opportunities, more people are coming”--most likely because conditions in Latin America are worsening. No law, researchers say, can obscure the fivefold-to-tenfold disparities in income on the two sides of the border.

The INS defends slowing down its once-active campaign of corner deportations by arguing that a better way to reduce illegal immigration over time is to cut the demand for illegal migrants. Its current program, mandated by the law, educates employers about hiring requirements: They must ask each new employee for documentation and fill out paper work for each new hire. Employers who don’t comply--and are caught--face fines. But Rand Corp. studies show that between a quarter and a half of employers are not obeying the law. Some businesses fill out paper work incorrectly and some--particularly in the apparel industry in Los Angeles, still 85% undocumented, according to some estimates--ignore it because they “prefer undocumented immigrant labor.” Still, INS officials expect compliance to rise as businesses become more familiar with the law.

With neither the law nor its midwife, the INS, able to cripple el mosco , INS officials and local politicians have bitterly exhorted each other to fight a battle both know neither can win. Don’t “just throw up (your) hands and say it’s Uncle Sam’s problem,” former INS regional director Harold Ezell used to say to local officials grappling with day-labor issues. “It’s (not) up to the cities to resolve an international problem,” Glendale City Manager David Ramsey has responded.

While the INS can duck, many local politicians cannot. They must answer not only to the constituents who complain about the moscos but also to those who defend the workers’ right to use them. Immigrants’ rights groups, which organize and speak for the men, keep the level of political discomfort high. It is not unusual for advocates to bring 100 to 300 workers to a city council meeting when day labor is on the agenda.

“It’s pretty hard on politicians,” Marjorie Gaines of the Encinitas City Council said on a recent television documentary. “If you admit there’s a problem and try to do something about it, (immigrants’ rights groups) inevitably decide you are a racist and call you that in the newspaper.”

That makes officials squirm. “I’m not a racist. I’m a member of the ACLU,” said an amazed Jan Moore, Topanga Town Council secretary, after her board’s decision to ask residents to snitch on employers hiring day laborers came under attack. “People I don’t even know are calling me names.”

Responding to such pressures, politicians have experimented with three broad day-labor policies. Redondo Beach has adopted a not-in-my-back-yard philosophy. The police there simply try to drive the men across city lines. Cities taking that indirect tack target and ticket day laborers for tossing cigarettes, loitering, jaywalking, trespassing and not wearing seat belts.

Others go beyond such enforcement to more active opposition, taking a divide-and-conquer approach. Reed Williams, a barbershop owner in Orange, explains: “Look, we know it’s a sad situation. But there’s a simple solution: If they’re illegal, get them the hell out of here. If they’re legal, then leave them alone.”

Costa Mesa is the most cited divide-and-conquer example. Working with the INS, the city established a legal-worker-only hiring site at an abandoned gas station and then moved against the renegade mosco at Lion’s Park, passing a law (now being challenged in court) against even intending to solicit work from a sidewalk. In one sting, police officers dressed in jeans drove up in a truck loaded with irrigation pipe and a wheelbarrow and asked for 10 workers. When the men predictably converged, four patrol cars pulled up and arrested everyone.

The third civic reaction is to accept both the workers’ humanity and constituents’ complaints, concede the conundrum’s difficulty and get creative. This was the case in Glendale in 1988, where the mosco at Jackson Street and Broadway, a stone’s throw from a major shopping center, was said to supply needed labor to Glendale’s downtown renaissance, while at the same time it damaged that renaissance by intimidating shoppers.

In response, officials pressured immigrants’ rights groups to create a hiring hall elsewhere. A hiring hall, at a minimum, can reduce complaints by offering toilets and parking and by removing the men from the sight of offended neighbors and merchants. The experiment worked for a year, until resourceful migrants began intercepting employers on the way into the hall. Still, other cities saw potential in the hiring-hall idea. It was reconstituted in Los Angeles late last year when Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores negotiated city funding for seven sites.

Among the moscos to be replaced by such a hall is the one at Lankershim and Strathern, a project that has the support of L.A. City Councilman Ernani Bernardi. Bernardi supports FAIR, a lobbying group devoted to using the harshest possible measures to reduce illegal immigration, but he has been persuaded that el mosco needs subtler handling. “We hear about welfare fraud, and here’s a group of people willing to stand outside in the cold and look for work,” he has said. “We need to take a different approach than saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to arrest you.’ ”

Before that can happen, though, the city will have to go through the difficult process of locating a site that merchants and residents will accept. Shirley Walton, Bernardi’s local aide, has been listening to concerns about el mosco for several years, and “the biggest source of complaints,” she says, “is mom-and-pop businesses”--including the Mel-O-Dee Nursery.

“I hate to be the one to say someone can’t work,” says owner Miyata. “But we’re just getting ruined by these labor guys,” whose presence on his property, he says, intimidates his customers and drives them away. He calls the men “dirty” and makes disparaging comments about Mexicans in particular. Miyata says he’d welcome any attempt to “get these guys off the street.”

The city’s first attempt to do that is an open-air project in Harbor City Park to replace the tense mosco at Pacific Coast Highway and Belle Porte Drive. Although the INS pointed out that the city’s promotion of that site to employers encouraged the illegal hiring of undocumented workers (KNX radio called it “The Black Market Employment Authority”), everyone else has been supportive.

For the December media event that opened the Los Angeles hall, the city hired a mariachi band, and after the press went home, the workers celebrated this official hiring yard, which many of them had lobbied hard to establish. It was, for some, their first positive contact with U.S. institutions. Yet the victory was bittersweet: Their better mosco was still just a mosco.

A handsome laborer in a cowboy hat sang call-and-response with the band’s trumpet player, and the several hundred laborers who stood on metal folding chairs lined up in rows under trees in the park cheered as their compadre sang a homesick song: “I see myself alone and sad, I feel like crying, I feel like dying.” Across a parking lot, the trumpet echoed the verse.

ON A WARM MORNING early this year, the Harbor City hiring site couldn’t be more different from Poli Jaramillo’s Lankershim Boulevard or Jorge Romero’s Redondo Beach. A trailer houses a bilingual staff of two--one a former day laborer. Luxuries such as coffee, rolls and outhouses are free. Hiring is by a lottery system created by the workers. On a picnic table sit five coffee cans from which employers can draw workers’ numbers: ayundantes (unskilled laborers), roofers, pintores (“painters”), carpinteros (“carpenters”), soldadores (“welders”). Nearby, a volunteer English teacher arranged by CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigration Reform in Los Angeles, drills 35 of the day’s 80 workers in tenses.

“Yesterday I cleaned!” she barks. “Today I . . . ?” she asks a worker. “I . . . am cleaning!” he answers back triumphantly.

The atmosphere is relaxed. La Migra so far has stayed clear of the site.

Despite all this, el proyecto (“the project”) has at least one of the same problems that el mosco had. Not enough work.

Francisco Orozco is a fit, college-educated physical education teacher from Michoacan who migrated in October for a $6-an-hour construction job arranged by his brother-in-law in Costa Mesa. When it fell through after a month, he found work as a baker for three days a week and comes to el proyecto the other four days. This is not what he expected from the United States. Earning $200 a month in Mexico, a middle-class wage, Orozco migrated only because he and his wife heard from returning migrants of $8-an-hour jobs. “We started calculating that we will be able to buy a car, buy a house”--things he cannot afford on his teacher’s wage. Yet in three weeks on el proyecto ‘s lottery, he has worked only three days. He needs more income to justify the painful separation from his wife and children, whom he writes weekly and telephones twice a month. “We have never been apart,” he explains.

Up the street on Belle Porte, the old mosco is still operating. The 35 men who haven’t yet been hired are strung haphazardly over a block and a half, in front of the same businesses where the day-labor complaints in this area originated. Orozco assumes that these men are so new to the United States they haven’t heard about el proyecto or aren’t ready to trust a government to help.

The old mosco is definitely competing with el proyecto. Many employers still pick men up the old way, and Orozco worries that the men there might be getting more work. If all the workers came to el proyecto , employers would have no choice but to follow, he argues. But it’s not likely. Today at el proyecto only 12 employers hired 26 workers. More than 50 got no work. It was hoped that the press attention to el proyecto would attract Palos Verdes homeowners who were intimidated by the old mosco , but there has been no flood.

Orozco will return to Mexico a changed man, he says. “It’s helped me value what I have in Mexico. I don’t have a reason to be here suffering when I have an OK job there. I feel bad for the guys on Belle Porte because most of them don’t have that choice.”

But he is not heading home just yet. Francisco Orozco pulls out a fake Social Security card and alien registration card he bought last week for $40. The Social Security number is mispunctuated--565-46-67-57. He doesn’t care; he has heard that nearly anything will work if he can just find a regular job to apply for.

“I guess it takes some time,” he concludes. “But I don’t have time. I’m here to work and this is not enough.”