Geoff Dougherty

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`Taperos’ break down union walls; More Mexicans enter Chicago trades

By Geoff Dougherty | Chicago Tribune staff reporter

EL FRESNITO, Mexico—Drive the rough cobblestone streets of this farming village 600 miles south of the U.S. border and two things stand out: the expensive, American-made pickup trucks and the scarcity of working-age men.

The men are in Chicago, taping drywall joints together inside glittering skyscrapers and suburban housing developments.

Some estimate that as many as 95 percent of the tapers represented by the Chicago painters union are Mexican—the vast majority from El Fresnito and nearby towns.

The rise of the “taperos,” as they’re called in Spanish, illustrates the changing nature of the city’s building trades, which were once dominated by white ethnic groups.

A handful of Chicago’s unions, including those serving bricklayers and carpenters, have seen increasing Hispanic membership over the years.

Their increasing presence at construction sites has encouraged some unions to promote Hispanics into management, and forced others to begin printing magazines and membership notices in Spanish.

The availability of union jobs paying as much as $60,000 a year also has transformed El Fresnito, where the gaunt cattle roaming the streets outnumber the economic opportunities.

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but most of the village’s 800 residents seem to have at least one family member working on a Chicago construction site.

“It seems like everyone is in the U.S.,” said Roberto Quintero, who has four sons taping drywall in Illinois. In a country jammed with decrepit Volkswagen Beetles, El Fresnito’s new Dodge Rams and Jeep Cherokees, some bearing Illinois plates, are rolling testimony to the value of union jobs.

Another clue lies in the dozens of partially completed homes scattered across the village.

“Half of the houses here were built with money from Chicago,” said Quintero, his taciturn face shadowed by a Motorola baseball cap. “You build one part. They send a little more money and you build a little more.”

The prosperity has also brought heartache.

“The main problem is disintegrating families,” said Humberto Alvarez, president of the county government that serves El Fresnito. “We see addiction, drop-outs, all types of problems. The moment the father leaves, the family breaks down.”

And while the taping jobs have opened opportunities for men, they have stranded young women. Those on their own fight for waitressing and other service jobs that pay as little as $15 a week.

Waiting for boyfriends

Even those who have boyfriends are apt to be disappointed. “They have a boyfriend and he leaves and they wait years and years for him to come back,” said Maria Quintero, Roberto’s wife, whose four daughters avoided the dilemma by moving to Chicago.

The changes in El Fresnito owe much to a World War II-era labor shortage in the United States, and one man who set out to secure his own future and ended up doing so for thousands of Mexican workers.

As Americans were pulled from farms to fight abroad or toil in bomb factories, the U.S. government responded by recruiting temporary “guest workers” from Mexico to temporarily fill job gaps created by the war.

One of the Mexicans who traveled north was 25-year-old Manuel Pinto, who had faced an uncertain future in Ciudad Guzman, a city of about 85,000 that lies in a valley just below El Fresnito.

After the war ended, Pinto began mixing drywall joint compound at a company in Blue Island. Each time his supervisors gave him a day’s work, Pinto said, he finished by noon.

“I was desperate for something to do,” said Pinto, now a burly 71-year-old. Pinto learned to tape drywall joints, and became one of the first Hispanics to join Chicago’s branch of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. And when a friend started a construction company, Pinto joined in 1956 as its drywalling foreman.

That break opened up chances for better lives for his family and acquaintances. Pinto estimates that he secured union taping jobs for at least 100 people from Mexico.

“They were working every minute,” he said.

Now retired and living in the south suburbs, Pinto is a legendary figure. “Manuel Pinto was the first. He opened up the jobs for everyone,” said Manuel Jimenez, who followed him to Chicago.

As Ciudad Guzman residents settled in Chicago, they even formed a soccer team, named Zapotlan after the region that encompasses Ciudad Guzman and El Fresnito.

Seeking a competitive edge, Zapotlan members recruited players from home.

“We used to take the star players, buy them a ticket to the United States and give them jobs in construction,” said Antonio Ochoa, a colleague of Pinto’s.

Over the years there were other trailblazers like Francisco Nunez, one of the first from El Fresnito to become a union taper.

“My father and my mother became a gateway for many people who came,” said Nunez’s son, Juan.

“They stayed in our house for long as needed to, and they got into the same business. And then they started to send money back to their families and things started to get better back home.”

Gregorio Chavez said the decision to follow Nunez and other villagers was easy.

He earned so little farming in the shadow of the snow-covered volcano that towers over El Fresnito that his children worked the fields barefoot.

“I never made enough money to buy them shoes,” Chavez said.

He said he easily found a well-paying job in the drywall union.

“We all start the same,” said Chavez, “There are always friends who will teach you.”

It was much the same with the Quinteros’ sons.

The first to leave El Fresnito was Roberto, who initially worked as a non-union taper. “He had some friends on the job,” his mother recalled. “They helped him get into the union.”

His five brothers followed.

“It was all family and friends working together,” said his father, Roberto Sr. While family connections continue to encourage most Hispanics to join labor organizations, the painters union has two Spanish-speaking organizers patrolling job sites, signing up workers.

Many new arrivals start out in non-union work and organizers aim to sell them on the union’s higher wages and benefits.

“We are a labor organization and we represent workers in the construction industry,” said Mike Metz, training coordinator for the painters union. “If they want to work in our industry, then we want to be there for them.”

Many immigrants from El Fresnito and nearby towns cross the border illegally. Fear of deportation prevents them from complaining about shoddy treatment from contractors and safety problems.

Still, some shy away from applying to become union members because they believe they have to have political or family connections.

“A lot of Mexicans get discouraged,” said Noel Tapia, a union bricklayer of Mexican descent. “But it’s as simple as filling out the application and taking the test.”

Testing is only in English

For some, language is a barrier. A pair of recent Mexican immigrants approached Tapia on a construction site, but they spoke only Spanish.

“The test is only given in English. They couldn’t take the test,” said Tapia. Union wages have allowed immigrants to start businesses and to buy property. Taper Antonio Ochoa, who was hired by Manuel Pinto in 1969, purchased a home in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, then bought two more in the same neighborhood.

Six years ago, Jorge Vargas of El Fresnito bought a house in the south suburbs. And Manuel Jimenez retired from the union and started a Mexican foods company in California. Such financial security allows immigrants to send $100 to $200 each month to relatives in Mexico—money that can account for up to half of a family’s income.

For others, Chicago evokes fear.

Pictures of the two sons Maria Quintero lost to on-the-job injuries adorn the pink walls of her tidy, brick-and-adobe home.

Manuel Quintero fell from a two-story scaffolding rig in Chicago and died in 2002. The next year, anotherson, Jorge Luis, and two other tapers died from carbon monoxide poisoning while working on an unoccupied home Columbus, Ohio.

So each day she worries about her other sons in Chicago.

“It makes me tremble,” she said. “I’m afraid of the next phone call.”

September 26, 2004