Salon.com > Roberto Lovato

Gulf Coast slaves

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:16:00 +0000

Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.

Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

Rebuilding the Big Easy

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:30:00 +0000

While Mayor Ray Nagin trumpets the return of lights, power and tourists to the French Quarter, Ruben Lopez of Fresno, Calif., and his roommate Myron Moran, a Guatemalan immigrant, rest in the pitch-black room of an abandoned hotel on Canal Street. They've just finished another sultry 14-hour day rebuilding the Big Easy.

"The rats here are the size of rabbits," says Moran, whose teeth glow white in the dark as he describes his temporary home. "We're paying $60 a night to this guy Eddie for a room with no AC, no lights, no electricity, no water and a bed that stinks," says Lopez, a California native who drove with his father to New Orleans after hearing about construction and cleanup work at a job fair in Fresno.

Lopez and Moran are part of a little-understood army of "aliens" (or, among the more politically correct, "out-of-state workers") drawn to the new New Orleans, a city on the verge of a radical Latinization that is also transforming other urban landscapes in the country.

The big gamble

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:30:00 +0000

In a town best known for glitz and golf, the 392 members of the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians enjoy a rare and ever-increasing kind of power. Thanks to Indian sovereignty laws, even members of the city's rich, white Republican majority, living in estate-studded canyons near multimillion-dollar hotels, resorts and office buildings, must regularly stifle their concerns about the tribe's grand designs for Palm Springs. The tribe's power was on full display at the recent opening of its Spa Resort Casino, built near the hot springs that drew both the Cahuilla Indians -- the tribe devastated in Helen Hunt Jackson's mythic 1884 novel of California, "Ramona" -- as well as later migrants who founded this legendary playground for the wealthy.