It is 6 a.m. Monday. The winter sun has not yet risen, but slowly, shadows of men flit through the dark. They gather against the bare rock walls of Pare de Sufrir Church in Woodside.

And in the morning emptiness, the laborers of Roosevelt Avenue begin their daylong vigil for temporary work.

A giant white cross hangs on the corner of the church, obscured by the elevated tracks of the No. 7 line that runs along Roosevelt. At 8:30 a.m., more than 50 Latino men, mostly from Ecuador, gather on all four corners of the intersection and wait.

For day laborers, New York City has long been a mecca where pay was good and work plentiful, according to Oscar Parades-Morales, executive director of the Latin American Workers Project in Jackson Heights. As the rest of the nation went through the subprime mortgage crisis, workers from as far off as California converged on the city looking for work, says Parades-Morales.

But in recent months, the construction industry has entered a slump. New York state has lost 2,000 jobs in construction since September 2007, according to the Department of Labor. A report released by the New York Building Congress, which represents the construction industry, expects 30,000 jobs to be lost in the city by 2010.

On Roosevelt, the workers are already facing difficult times. Last October, police arrested 10 laborers for obstructing the sidewalk at 37th Avenue and Broadway, three blocks east of the intersection. The incident was unusual, but has left the men apprehensive.

Below the white cross is a short, middle-aged, undocumented man who refused to reveal his name. “Jose” crossed into the United States from Ecuador seven years ago with his family.

“Running. Running [through] El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico,” he says. “Maybe all day here.”

Jose is desperate for work. He needs money for child support payments to maintain visitation rights to his daughter and son.

Jose’s friend, “Jorges,” who also declined to identify himself, has his family in Ecuador. He came to New York City in 1986 when Ronald Reagan was president. He is taller than the others and is dressed in a brown leather jacket and a navy blue “NY” cap turned backward on his head.

“My baby,” he says of his nine-year-old son as he pulls out a passport-size photo of a black-haired, chubby boy from his wallet. “My wife.” He displays a photo of an unsmiling woman.

“No job yesterday. This year, no job,” he says. He has filled out an application for work in Manhattan, but no one calls him. So he ends up with the uncertainty of Roosevelt, waiting for contractors who pay less than minimum wage and hire one person for jobs that require at least two workers.

The men wait at a street corner until a contractor pulls up looking for day laborers. The men come cheap and one will do the work of many Americans. They are uniformly dressed in caps, sweatshirts, and blue jeans, and tote black knapsacks. There are a disproportionate number of mustaches in the crowd, a sign of manhood in Latin American nations.

At 9 a.m., the men stand around, doing nothing. Some sit on the litter-strewn sidewalk in their baggy jeans. Concrete is a natural conductor; it sucks the warmth of the human body. The younger men choose to be in the sunlight farther down 69th Street, but the older men stay under the cold shadow of the El. When a car pulls up, the extra seconds it takes to hurry back to Roosevelt can cost them the day’s job.

Some talk. Others don’t. Women walk by without sparing them a glance. The day laborers do not seem to notice. They are transfixed by the flow of traffic. When innocuous vans pause on the street, the men stare and wait for them to pull to the curb. A car honks on Roosevelt. Every man turns his head toward the car, but it doesn’t stop.

A green sedan pulls up to the curb. Three men race up to the car, hopeful. The lady asks for directions; the men help her out.

Every time I talk to Jose and Jorges, men dart across Roosevelt, thinking I’m hiring for a job. “You want worker?” they ask.

“They are like bee. Everybody will sting the car. They are like, grab the person,” says Pamela Plum, the owner of Color and Cut, a salon on 69th and Roosevelt, outside which the laborers wait.

The men switch positions and move from the wall of the church to the edge of the sidewalk. One man in a denim shirt is barely as tall as the mailbox he leans against.
At 9:37 a.m., a gray car pulls up. Three laborers go up to it and stand at attention. The driver gets out and talks on the phone, gesturing furiously. He then haggles with the laborers. The three get hired.

The going price for labor is cheap. It used to be $120; now they are lucky if they get $80 for a whole day’s work.

George Memdoza, 25, has blue-green eyes, fair skin, and a protruding belly. He came from Ecuador 10 years ago and lives with his mother.

He got a job moving furniture Sunday at 9 p.m. He finished work at 5 a.m. For eight hours of work, he was paid $80.

“No job is easy,” he says. “There was only me. Moving everything. Bed, cabinet, chair. Right now, my eyes very sleepy.” He came directly to Roosevelt after that job. “No go back to house,” he says.

Memdoza is harsh on the police. “Police come to intersection, ask if we have coke, marijuana. I’m no <i>narco</i>. Police <i>no comprende</i>,” he says.

This erratic work is the only source of income for these men. They are undocumented and unskilled, and the economic recession has snatched away too many jobs.

“The economic crisis is horrible,” says Parades-Morales at the Latin American Workers Project. “I have workers on the street who don’t find jobs for three, four months.” Parades-Morales tells of a man who got seven hours of work one week, and then two hours of work the next.

Many fall prey to unscrupulous contractors who do not pay at the end of the day, according to Parades-Morales. The men have no Occupational Safety and Health Administration training, a fact illustrated by the fake Nikes the men wear. Too few are in heavy-duty construction boots. In 2008, 21 men were killed in construction-related accidents in New York City; 17 of them were Latinos, according to Parades-Morales.

At 10:30 a.m., a plain white van pulls up. Men dart into traffic to get to the other side of the intersection, Jorges among them. About 20 cluster around the van.

“This guy, everyday he come here, take four, five people for delivery,” explains Jose, Jorges’ friend.

Jorges is not hired. The younger men are cooler, the older ones more jittery. They have greater family obligations. They have kids and must send money home. Jorges unfolds a yellow Western Union receipt and displays a $30 deposit to Ecuador proudly. He says that he needs a job today to pay his $100-per-week rent.

The small man leaning against the mailbox is at the edge of the sidewalk, anxiously scanning traffic.

By 10:37 a.m., most conversation has ceased. The El thunders by constantly. Many younger men give up and leave. The older men hang on.

At 11:30 a.m., in a Starbucks 10 blocks down the road, two elderly white men discuss the day laborers. “I remember postcards where the authorities fight the illegal immigrants [from Latin America] off because once they land, they start sucking off the public welfare system. … They come here and find heaven.”

At 2:30 p.m., there are two men outside Pare de Sufrir. Everyone else has left. Jose and Jorges waited for five hours but they finally gave up.

One week later in November, the men complain about the residents of 69th Street. Some men had drunk beer and created a racket overnight on 69th and Broadway, for which the day laborers had been blamed.

“What we do? We trying to live,” said Jose.

As night falls, the brothels along Roosevelt traditionally come alive as day laborers seek female company away from home and family. But these days, no one goes, according to Gustavo Gomez, a day laborer with family in Ecuador. Money no longer flows along Roosevelt.
 

In The Fray Contributor

The sardonic graffiti appearing around New York’s SoHo lately seems incongruous, since this is one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

“Where’s my bailout?” a homeless woman asks in one stencil.

Another, in a pink makeshift frame with the words “The greatest depression” scribbled on it, shows a man being silenced by a United States of Debt dollar bill.

Graffiti has always adorned the buildings of SoHo, the formerly industrial Manhattan neighborhood that attracted artists with its spacious lofts in the ’70s, and today is home to top boutiques, restaurants, and galleries.

But the new wave of recession-themed graffiti feels like a throwback, or at least a vibrant collage of frustration and parody.

“It’s a free outlet for people to express themselves to a large audience,” said Timothy Kephart, creator of Graffiti Tracker, a web program that interprets graffiti. “Ironically, to express their displeasure with the economy, you could argue that the vandalism has a negative economic impact both in the monetary loss and in the quality of life loss.”

But some welcome the fresh dose of color.

“It’s awesome,” said Julian Kouyoumjian, a salesman at Kid Robot, a counterculture store on Spring Street that draws much of its essence from the graffiti scene. “We actually collaborate with a lot of street artists,” Kouyoumjian said. “It’s really popular and goes hand in hand with the stuff you see in here.”

And with new works appearing daily outside their doors, even some galleries can’t resist grafitti’s guerrilla appeal.

“It gives the neighborhood character,” said Alexandra Tayne, director of Lumas Editions Gallery on Wooster Street.

A poster depicting a man with “F___ the stock market, buy art” tagged along his sunglass lenses got Tayne thinking about the economy’s impact on the art industry.

Many SoHo gallery art buyers tend to work in the financial sector, she said, so times are also tough for galleries that rely on one big sale per month. “Luckily for us, we deal entirely with photography,” she explained. “So if we need to adjust prices, we can just make more prints. There will still be a limited number, and just a few are signed. Art has never been stopped by a recession.”

The community board that serves as the neighborhood’s main local voice doesn’t share the enthusiasm for street art.

“SoHo, like much of CB2, is landmarked,” said district manager Bob Gormley. “If graffiti is defined as any sort of tagging, writing, or painting on property owned by someone else, and doing so without the owner’s permission, it is always illegal. If a graffiti artist has the owner’s permission, that is a different matter. However, any such work would have to be in compliance with the city’s landmark laws.”

Certain pieces — like an illustration of an AIG employee being pummeled in the face by a pair of brass knuckles — seemed unlikely to win approval, anyway.

Resident complaints have waned considerably, though. Everyblock.com, a website that uses the mayor’s Community Affairs Unit database to compile data graffiti cleanup requests, indicated that complaints dropped significantly after the recession.

From January 2008 to April 2009, 101 graffiti cleanup requests were filed in SoHo, 70 by August 2008. But from September 2008 (when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, an event linked to the beginning of the recession) to March 2009, a mere 31 requests were filed.

Maybe SoHo residents are discovering an appreciation for graffiti. Or maybe they have bigger things to worry about nowadays.

“My apartment has been hit with graffiti, and it feels terrible,” said New York University student Louis Formica. “I didn’t ask for it to be tagged. It’s a strange feeling to know someone stood outside your house and vandalized it.”

If only bad news graffiti could always be on someone else’s property.

SoHo graffiti turns topical. 

In The Fray Contributor

Perhaps the most consequential single episode in the recent history of the northern Mexican city known as the Laguna occurred on May 13, 2007. On that sunny Sunday afternoon, local political heavyweight and underworld boss Don Carlos Herrera and his wife were on their way back from a trip to the local Sam’s Club when their armored car was intercepted by an armed unit. The assailants riddled the car with more than 100 rounds.

Like hurricanes, armored cars are measured on a scale from one to five, with level-five armor offering the greatest capacity to repel projectiles. Herrera’s Cadillac Escalade was a level four, but the bullets, which had never before been seen in the Laguna, blew right through it.

Both Herrera and his wife suffered bullet wounds, and they were raced to a nearby hospital. Scores of local police maintained a one-block perimeter around the area, with no unauthorized person allowed to come any closer. Herrera and his wife survived, but Herrera’s longstanding control over the local drug trade was no longer undisputed. The battle for the Laguna had begun.
 
Carlos Castañeda is a stocky man in his late 20s, with a shaved head and a wide, welcoming face. He’s worked as a reporter in the Laguna since he graduated from college in early 2000, which he says was the fulfillment of a long-held dream.

“I always wanted to work for a media outlet. As far back as I remember, that’s what I wanted to do. It seemed like the most interesting career. My family wanted me to study some other major, engineering, something that paid a little better. But no, it wasn’t what caught my interest.”

The city where Castañeda works is actually made up of several cities: the Laguna is the colloquial name given to the neighboring municipalities of Torreón, Matamoros, Gómez Palacio, and Lerdo. With more than a million inhabitants, it is the ninth-largest metro area in the nation. Its economy (based largely on exports), quality of life (relatively high), and weather (hot as can be for 10 months of the year, bone chilling for two) make it a typical northern Mexican metropolis.

When I first moved here in 2005, the tranquility of the city and the trustworthiness of its inhabitants were among its foremost traits. While neighboring regions suffered under the weight of surging drug-related violence, the Laguna was an oasis of calm, an unlikely “Pleasantville” just south of the border region. You could walk around late at night undisturbed. Physical violence didn’t go beyond bar fights. Sightings of machine gun–toting federal police and army troops were limited to the television.

In May 2007, Castañeda was a relatively new reporter to the crime beat at La I, a local tabloid newspaper with a penchant for splashy photos and direct, pithy headlines. At that point, Castañeda’s reports revolved mostly around drunk driving accidents. As luck (or more precisely, his schedule) would have it, Castañeda was not working the day Herrera was attacked. But an event of such significance prompted a phone call from his editor, and when he went to work on Monday, he began following the story. This meant little more than the mundane task of tracking Herrera’s physical improvement in the hospital, but the broader significance of the event would soon be known.

The attempted assassination of Herrera was the opening shot in what has turned out to be a very long battle for control of the city. The drug gang known as the Zetas — founded by ex-military officers and linked to traffickers in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas — had moved into town and was determined to rip control of the Laguna from Herrera and his backers in the Pacific state of Sinaloa. At stake were both valuable smuggling routes (Torreón is just six and eight hours, respectively, from key border crossings in Nuevo Laredo and Juárez) as well as the growing local drug market.

What followed was a string of recriminations, kidnappings, threats, grenade attacks, and killings that carry on to this day. In the days following the attack on Herrera, the leader of the region’s anti-kidnapping unit, Enrique Ruiz, was himself kidnapped; his captors videotaped their blindfolded victim identifying local businessmen as being in a league with Herrera.

As Ricardo Ravelo narrates in his book Chronicles of Blood, the Zetas then arranged for the video to be shown before a reunion of a local business group, many of whose members were implicated by Ruiz. A letter was read to the gathering, which warned, “The person who has illicit business outside of our organization will be bothered … be informed that any disobedience before our petition will bring irreversible consequences for yourself and your business partners.” According to Ravelo, 25 private aircraft left the area for the United States the following day.

Today, more than two years later, incidents worthy of an action film are regular occurrences. The city awakens to the sight of executed bodies on a near daily basis.

Last summer, an armed group attacked the police station in Lerdo in broad daylight, killing four officers and beating up female employees before fleeing. (The chief resigned shortly thereafter.)

In September of 2008, Torreón received national news coverage when the army arrested several dozen of its local police for working for the Zetas. Torreón celebrated Christmas Eve with a gun fight in the midst of a downtown shopping rush, and rang in the new year with a nationally televised, four-hour firefight that caused the evacuation of the city’s toniest neighborhood. Schools around the region closed days early, ahead of the 2008 Christmas holidays, due to rumors that armed groups were planning to force their way into the schools to rob all the teachers of their Christmas bonuses (worth two weeks of salary). It’s as if the various cities making up the Laguna are competing for the most sensational headline. 

For Castañeda, all this has meant navigating a city that was far different than the Laguna in which he had grown up. A common trope about the drug wars in Mexico is that the drug gangs only kill each other. There’s an element of truth to that, but the underworld fighting invaded the daily routines of the Laguna as a whole. The Zetas created a climate of fear that extended well beyond those who make their living smuggling cocaine, marijuana, and the like northward. They supplemented their trafficking income with car theft, kidnapping, and extortion, all of these crimes much more of a public menace than the peaceful passage of drugs. Other criminal groups, dedicated to many of the same activities, took advantage of the chaotic backdrop to establish a toehold in the Laguna underworld.

The press was among the casualties. Castañeda talks about a local press corps that was threatened and bullied. Various newspapers and television stations were threatened as well. One reporter in Gómez Palacio was kidnapped and beaten up in response to something he wrote, but Castañeda said the threat to the local press went far beyond one mere incident.

“More than a direct threat against any reporter in particular, what you see is a change in the climate in which the reporters work,” Castañeda says. “The editorial chiefs say to be careful, to not investigate too much.”

“[You write] what the authority tells you, no more. Don’t search for more, don’t ask, don’t investigate, period. This is the problem, the self-censorship that has taken hold in the media outlets, which definitely goes hand in hand with the fact that it has gotten more dangerous. That’s how the reporters see it.”

Reporters in the Laguna have reason to be concerned. Mexico is one of the most dangerous places on the planet for a reporter, with more than two dozen journalists killed since 2000, and a handful more who have disappeared. Both Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists rank Mexico as the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere to work as a reporter. From the federal government down, official efforts to address the problem have been slow and ineffectual.

Castañeda says the impact of the threats is palpable. “These threats, whether they are real or not, have modified the way the coverage is carried out.” In response, some newspapers also removed authors’ bylines from crime stories and had local police stationed at the entries to the offices throughout the workday. Media outlets also coordinated their coverage, so that no one newspaper or TV station stood out too much.

Castañeda adds: “Between the media outlets, there’s a discussion among the editorial bosses, the directors, when there’s a story about a murder, and execution — any of that — it’s treated with official information, with information sent by the procuduría, and since then, nothing has been investigated. Nothing is published beyond that which is official information. Information that the authorities provide. There’s no way to balance this information. So as to not get us in trouble, to not investigate too much, to not receive threats, to not be singled out, to not provoke these powers — the drug traffickers — we’re going to go with official information.”

At the same time, the basic obligations of the job hadn’t changed, which left people like Castañeda walking an increasingly fine line. “The reporters have to be playing two games — with the company for whom they work, and with the authority. And with the organized crime, too.”

“Now the officials are so scared, that they say, ‘Don’t put me in the news. Don’t interview me, please.’ It’s really tricky, the situation now. Before, the same functionaries would call you and tell you, ‘I have a detainee here, it’s interesting’ … The authorities themselves feel threatened.”

The vacuum that the threatened media left behind ceded space for the dissemination of news through other, less formal means. Alarming, and often brutally graphic, email chains spread news of assassinations, as well as warnings of upcoming violence.

Incidents like those described above were accompanied by the daily dissemination of fear-mongering email chains. Most, written by a concerned citizen or someone pretending to be one, warned against imminent bloodbaths at some bar or another: “So I ask you to please listen it’s for your good don’t go out to bars in the night and if you see trucks without plates report them. In Lerdo be careful in San Isidro and Back Stage. Gómez: In Flamingo’s and Tonic. Torreón: K-pital and La Quinta bar.”

Other emails claimed to be the voice of one trafficking group or another, and tried to justify their presence while condemning their competitors: “[W]e DON’T KIDNAP, NOR ROB, NOR DO WE HARM INNOCENT PEOPLE, we ask that you don’t get scared with big-talking assholes that act with impunity because they are protected …”

Still others served no communicative purpose other than to terrorize. I once received an email that was just a series of snapshots of severed heads in a convenience store, all with a bloody “Z” carved below the hairline.

The impact of the rising tide of drug-related violence in Mexico has extended far beyond one mayoral administration or a small coterie of business big shots. The Laguna has seen the organic weakening of society, from top to bottom. Mexico City columnist Ricardo Raphael captured the prevailing sense of chaos during an August 2008 column:

“Until a little while ago, the Mexicans from the Laguna were famous for being big spenders and big partyers … Now, nevertheless, the streets of the Laguna empty out at eight o’clock at night and consumption has plummeted. The war against drug trafficking has dramatically affected the lives of these residents. As in Tijuana, Juárez, or Culiacán, here also fear has gained ground.”

The same day that Raphael’s column ran, a heavily armed military convoy — totaling 350 ski-masked soldiers and more than 50 Hummers and troop transports — drew stares while proceeding down Torreón’s main drag. A dozen police patrol trucks accompanied the soldiers, a handful of jackals escorting a pack of lions. The soldiers reassured the inhabitants that there was an official authority more powerful than any drug gang, but violence didn’t drop. Indeed, it continued to rise.

Just before the new year, Castañeda switched off the crime beat. Like the ex-police chief in Lerdo, he cited stress as a reason for the switch. Since his professional interest is based less on covering crime than in reporting generally, it has been an easy adjustment. Now he writes international and national news summaries, studies English in his spare time, and freelances at a new magazine called Magdalenas, which focuses on sexuality in the Laguna.

Mexico as a whole saw a drop of 26 percent in drug-related killings in the first three months of 2009. Some of the biggest drops were in Tijuana (79 percent), Juárez (39 percent), and Culiacán (45 percent) — the same trio of perennially drug-addled cities mentioned by Raphael.

Unfortunately, the Laguna largely missed out on this hopeful trend. More than 120 people were killed from January to March, which would give the Laguna a murder rate greater than any in the United States. In one night in February, 11 people were killed in firefights around the city.

In mid-May, a reporter from La Opinión, one of the two major dailies in the Laguna, was abducted and murdered. He was the first reporter to be killed for his work in the city. In its influential Bajo Reserva editorial column, Mexico City’s most prominent newspaper, El Universal, had the following reaction:

“They tell us that in the Laguna things are very, very dangerous for the press, and for society in general. Two groups are fighting for the city: Zetas and ‘the ones from the house on the hill.’ The former are locals. They tell that the two groups continue giving forced conferences to the press. Be careful. The Laguna is coming apart; some say it could be the next Juárez.”

The civilian population, from the mayor’s office, to the press, to the burrito vendors, remains cowed. The reporters who are able, find safer topics than crime to write about.

Patrick Corcoran