He carves career from studying lives of immigrant workers
Whenever Abel Valenzuela Jr. gets his car washed, he puts on what he calls his “thinking cap” and observes how car washers, usually Latin American immigrants, go about their back-breaking work. He avoids talking to the workers, lest they get into trouble with their bosses. A professor of Chicano/a studies and urban planning and director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, his latest research project revolves around the working conditions of car wash establishments in the city of Los Angeles.
“For several years now, there has been a campaign to organize these workers, who face some of the worst conditions in the workplace,” Valenzuela said, explaining that because of this activism car wash owners are leery of their workers talking to researchers — or any outsiders. Interviewing workers who might not have legal documents, who labor in restricted or closely monitored workplaces, or who are employed in jobs that fall under the radar of standard labor practices has become Valenzuela’s research specialty.
Valenzuela, who has spent a good part of his life talking to immigrant laborers on the street corners of numerous U.S. cities, is an internationally renowned authority on their lives, especially the prejudices and abuses they suffer at work. He is, in fact, one of the celebrated authors of
“On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States,” the first national analysis of immigrant, mostly undocumented, day laborers, or
jornaleros, which offers the most comprehensive and reliable portrait of these workers to date.
The two-year study was conducted by a team of four researchers at UCLA, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the New School University in New York City. It was released to widespread media attention in 2006, a year marked by much agitation both for and against undocumented immigrant workers.
Valenzuela’s scholarship on day labor is valued well beyond academic circles. In 2006, he briefed Senate and congressional staffers and analysts at the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., impressing on them the need for a reasoned instead of emotional, debate about the causes behind the phenomenon of day labor. He has also testified before various city councils about the many downsides of day labor work. He was invited by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to join L.A.’s planning commission. (He declined the offer to focus on his research.)
On a typical day, the “On the Corner” study found, some 117,600
jornaleros — three-and-a-half times the population of Beverly Hills — are out working or hunting for jobs. Not many make more than $15,000 a year doing jobs most Americans have long considered dirty, dangerous or just too harsh: demolition, excavation, building drywalls and stone walls, hauling goods, painting, roofing and trimming trees.
As an American-born son of Mexican immigrants who realized the American Dream — his father, now retired, owned a flourishing furniture upholstery business and his mother was an Montebello Unified School District schoolteacher — Valenzuela grew up seeing hardworking immigrants. “Growing up, I didn’t go to bed hungry, but I had relatives and family friends from Mexico who lived in and out of Los Angeles and were experiencing, if you will, the ‘immigrant move to the north,’” he recalled, adding: “Their lives — their difficulties and successes — were part of our lives.”
At his parents’ home in East L.A., the young Valenzuela learned through his parent’s example the virtue of hard work and helping others. Years later, he became academically obsessed with
jornaleros — day laborers — while pursuing postdoctoral studies at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s. The trigger: an article about day laborers in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“It was mostly pejorative — local residents complaining about these men,” Valenzuela recalled. “I read the article and thought to myself, ‘Wow, I remember those guys hanging out in front of the Standard Brand paint store in E. L.A. — there used to be one off Atlantic Boulevard and Pomona — and I used to wonder what they were doing, hanging out in painter pants. I remembered my mother saying, ‘Oh, they’re just waiting for work.’”
The workers have long been part of L.A.’s topography — as well as much of the San Francisco Bay Area’s. So Valenzuela was surprised to discover that there was no academic literature about them at all. That, in many ways, was “a mini-gold mine for me — professionally, I knew I had stumbled across a topic that nobody else had studied,” he recalled. “And that’s a highly valued commodity, because it meant that I would be the first to make a major scholarly contribution in this area and hopefully improving worker lives.”
By 1996, Valenzuela began interviewing
jornaleros as part of a full-scale study that culminated three years later in the first-ever findings about day laborers in Los Angeles. “Nobody had comprehensively studied day laborers before, and nobody knew anything about them other than from anecdotal evidence based on short interviews or personal experience,” he said. In 2002, he replicated the L.A. study in New York City and, two years later, teamed up with his fellow researchers to launch the “On the Corner” survey.
His work has enabled Valenzuela to “demystify common misperceptions of a certain type of worker, somebody who works in a public corner and is likely to be without papers but who is also a family man, a hard worker, a churchgoer,” he said. “All of that contributes in a small way to changing the discourse over these workers and their search for work.”
In particular, Valenzuela’s scholarship has busted the widespread but misplaced belief that
jornaleros are outsiders — “a blight on communities because they look for work in uncommon ways,” as the professor put it. “I was able to say, ‘Well, you know, that’s not really true,’” he said. Valenzuela’s scholarship has provided data that show, for example, that the vast majority of day laborers live in or near the neighborhoods they look for work. The finding has helped transform a volatile immigrant issue into an urgent topic for communities to address.
Valenzuela’s connection to day laborers is more than just personal and professional. “It’s also a social justice issue that I think many people can grasp and think about, especially in a country that has a long, storied immigration history,” he observed. “It’s a story that’s easy to accept, absent business cycles and this new dichotomy between legal and illegal, which wasn’t as pronounced 30 years ago.”
Valenzuela has been studying
jornaleros for at least 12 of the past 17 years that he has been teaching at UCLA. Although he justifiably considers himself “an expert on who these workers are,” there have been moments when his scholarship has proved inadequate in helping him appreciate the full extent of the struggle that many day workers endure to make ends meet.
“How are you doing?” he once casually asked a
jornalero in Washington, D.C., who he reckoned must have been
in his early 50s. “The worker paused, and then tears welled up in his eyes, and he started crying,” Valenzuela recalled of his encounter six years ago.
It turned out the man was depressed — he hadn’t seen his wife and kids for three years. “Here he was, 3,000 miles away from them, searching for work on the streets of America,” recalled Valenzuela. “I was stunned — my pain in seeing him cry was incomparable to what he was going through.”
