Male Day Laborers Turn to Prostitution

heir faces reflect how uncomfortable it is for them to talk about. On street corners where day laborers congregate, it’s no longer as easy to find work – but there are plenty of offers of sex for money. There is also a high incidence of workers being drugged and raped, something suffered by many, and hidden by all out of shame.

"The situation is happening more frequently. It happens more on the unorganized corners than in day labor centers, but the problem itself is widespread. It’s like a well-known secret that everyone knows and has experienced, but no one talks about,” explained Pablo Alvarado, national coordinator of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

In an investigation by La Opinión on various day labor corners in Long Beach, Rancho Cucamonga, Los Angeles and Moreno Valley, more than half of those interviewed admitted having received at least one offer of sex in exchange for money.

“Gringos see us as cheap brothels and not as day labor centers. Many enter into it (knowingly), but the majority of us are tricked into it. They tell us it’s a job and later it turns out they want sex. I have co-workers who have even been drugged without realizing it,” said Ricardo Ceniceros, who is registered to find work at a day labor center in Rancho Cucamonga.

Mauricio Rodríguez, a day laborer at a center in Long Beach, was hired to paint the bedrooms of an apartment. "'We’re going to pay you well,'" two men, one white and the other Latino, told him when he opened the door of their green Honda Civic.

According to Rodríguez, when they arrived at the apartment he was supposed to paint, a middle-class apartment in the heart of the Southern California city of Signal Hill, the shouts and insults began.

“'We don’t want you to talk, pendejo. Take off your clothes and move over there,'” the white man ordered.....

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