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COMMUNITY BUILDING
I began to study English In order to defend myself From an American bastard where I was working.
They jerked me around like a puppet
Just because I didn't speak that damned English.
The American told me, in English and all pissed off,
"You wetback, ya don't understand what you are supposed to do..."
-Los Jornaleros del Norte "La Frasesita"1
They present an increasingly prominent public face all around the country, and yet they are flatly ignored by most libraries. It's hard to imagine a more information-impoverished constituency than immigrant day laborers. For a number of economic, linguistic, legal, and cultural reasons, the jornaleros who gather on sidewalks and the parking lots of hardware stores each morning to scramble for job offers are effectively shut out from essential services and information sources that most of us take for granted.
Public libraries are in an ideal position to address many of these needs. There is a solid library tradition of doing just that for other labor groups, and the accelerating development of day laborer organizations nationwide offers some enticing opportunities for collaboration involving librarians.
This report begins with an introduction to day laborers and their hiring sites, both the organized and the much more common nonorganized variety. It follows with a consideration of some of their crucial information needs, offers suggestions of the kinds of steps libraries could take to better serve these workers, and points the reader toward a selection of relevant resources. Librarians already familiar with jornaleros will want to skip directly ahead to the final sections of the article.-Editor
Who Are Day Laborers?
Although their characteristics surely vary according to region, certain broad generalizations hold true: the typical jornalero or esquinero (labels derived from Spanish words for "workday" and "street-- corner") is a young to middle-aged Spanish-speaking male. About half are single men, and the other half are married with families to help support.
Their first important demographic portrait was painted by UCLA Professor Abel Valenzuela's day labor survey of 481 jornaleros at eighty-seven Los Angeles and Orange County hiring sites in early 1999. He found that nearly 30 percent had been in the United States less than a year and that twothirds were less than thirty-seven years of...