VivirLatino

According to an article in the NYT (who still thinks it’s ok to use “illegal” as an adjective), homelessness is up among day laborer in Queens.

Mr. Ruano, 38, who had drawn his living from 69th Street and Broadway for six years, has been on the streets since. He and other hard-luck day laborers have slept wherever they can: in the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center, in unfinished buildings abandoned by bankrupt developers and under bridges along the freight railroad tracks that slice through western Queens, where dirty mattresses and work boots lay on the rocky ground one recent morning.

“The only reason we don’t go hungry is because there are people who offer us food,” Mr. Ruano said on a snowy Saturday as he clutched a cup of soup from a group of Pentecostals feeding day laborers at a park on Woodside Avenue.

With their isolation and day-to-day existence, the laborers are perhaps the most invisible and hardest-to-reach victims of the recession, advocates and city officials say.

The invisible comment got to me. I have lived in an immigrant neighborhood for a number of years and there is nothing invisible about this trend. There is a small plaza three blocks from casa mala where laborers who aren’t working hang out and more and more I have seen more people there, and yes sleeping.

It’s amazing to me really how visible day laborers are when they are allegedly peeing and drinking on “white streets” but in POC/immigrant neighborhoods, their not having a home is suddenly invisible.