Immigrants join "gold rush" for jobs rebuilding New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — As the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina receded in September, the roads filled with residents leaving the city, their vehicles jammed with what they had salvaged of their lives.

But another mass movement was taking place on the other side of the highways.

Thousands of men from Mexico and Central America were driving into the city. Word had spread among Hispanic immigrants that New Orleans had plenty of work, construction wages had doubled to $16 an hour and no one was asking for papers.

"It was like a gold rush," said Oscar Calanche, a Guatemalan immigrant who lived in New Orleans before the storm and returned as soon as waters receded. "In one car there'd be three up front and three or four in the back, with suitcases and tools on top. It looked like a river of people from our countries."

Hispanic workers have gutted, roofed and painted houses, and hauled away garbage, debris and downed trees. Illegal immigrants have installed trailers to house returning evacuees at New Orleans City Park, their pay coming from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) subcontractors.

"It's all illegals doing this work," said Rey Mendez, a FEMA trailer subcontractor from Honduras.

No one knows how many Hispanic immigrants are in New Orleans, but John Logan, a Brown University demographer who has studied the city since Katrina hit, said, "There must be 10,000 to 20,000 immigrant workers in the region by now, and the number is going to grow."

As the Senate debates new immigration laws and marchers demonstrate across the country, these immigrants offer another reminder of the country's reliance on illegal immigrants from Latin America.

And as New Orleans redefines itself after Katrina, the influx of large numbers of Hispanic immigrants is another jolt for a city that has historically thought of itself as black and white.

A port town owned at times by three different countries, New Orleans once absorbed immigrants.

While the South's feeble economy, racism and xenophobia kept out new people and influences, New Orleans took in waves of newcomers — Italians, Greeks, Germans and Irish — in the decades before World War I. Later arrivals came from Honduras, Cuba and Vietnam.

But beginning in the 1970s, the port downsized, businesses left town, wages fell, and welfare rolls and crime rose as the public-education system collapsed. A black underclass took low-skilled, low-wage jobs. Fewer immigrants moved to town.

The rest of the South, meanwhile, became attractive to newcomers: Atlanta; Memphis and Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte, N.C., saw tens of thousands of Mexicans arrive, taking jobs in hotels, restaurants, construction and landscaping. Historians call their arrival the largest influx of foreign workers to the South since the days of slavery.

But New Orleans' listless economy didn't attract such workers. According to the 2004 census, New Orleans had 1,900 Mexicans. Nashville had 80,000 Mexican immigrants by 2000, city officials there estimated.

Before Katrina, the Hispanics in New Orleans, mostly middle class, made up about 3 percent of the population.

"We were the first melting-pot city in America," said Lawrence Powell, a Tulane University historian. "It's striking that those great waves of immigration from Mexico passed us by."

But that changed in September.

Leonel Santos was working in Virginia when a New Orleans roofing contractor he knew from his hometown in Mexico's Durango state called. The contractor sent a car that picked up Santos and seven other workers in Virginia and North Carolina and brought them to New Orleans.

"We were packed like matchsticks," Santos said.

The group slept in a park for a month, showered with hoses and used bushes as toilets. By day they put blue tarps on roofs for a FEMA subcontractor.

"We ate once a day," Santos said. "We'd buy canned food from a store that had a few things for sale."

Among the new arrivals were four men from the town of Pasoamapa, in the Mexican state of Veracruz. More followed; there are now 25 Pasoamapa men in New Orleans and more on the way.

Brothers Juan, Amadeo and Hermenegildo Sanchez and their cousin Eloy Bendito were on their way to the United States when Katrina hit, and they headed for New Orleans.

"We really didn't know where it was," said Bendito, 29, who left his wife and two children in Pasoamapa. "We knew it had some kind of history, but we didn't know what it was. Whether it has history didn't interest me. What interested me was the money."

After the storm, hotels were the first to hire, preparing for the rush of aid workers coming in. The Sanchez brothers and Bendito found work gutting rooms at the Marriott and Holiday Inn. "We pulled everything out of there: rugs, curtains, televisions," Bendito said.

Next they found work "house leveling," lifting houses sunk in the marshy post-Katrina soil by using hydraulic jacks and propping them on stilts, bricks or concrete supports.

New Orleans was unprepared for the large numbers of Hispanics moving in. Few New Orleans residents speak Spanish. Money-wiring businesses are scarce.

But during this year's Mardi Gras, Spanish could be heard throughout the French Quarter as immigrant workers wandered amid the throngs on Bourbon Street and gawked.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Mario Moreno, a construction worker from the Mexican state of Guerrero, as he stood outside a market.

The laborers brought a single-minded focus on work that many residents say is foreign to the Big Easy. "We're here to work," Juan Sanchez said. "We're doing this to build our own houses in Mexico."

It's not clear how long the workers will stay in New Orleans. Most left families behind. Rents are rising.

But the men from Pasoamapa said they will stay until there's no more work. An additional 20 men from their town are on their way, they said.

"There's work for them as soon as they arrive," Hermenegildo Sanchez said. "We're not thinking of leaving."