Pablo Alvarado is angry. Beneath his quiet tone, his easy calm checking on logistics, helping hang a banner, thanking volunteers, in his Pablo-uniform of T-shirt under flannel with jeans, Alvarado is outraged.
“Of course I am angry, but it is important to not let those feelings turn into hatred,” the day laborer activist, 58, said. “The images we are seeing, children being handcuffed, windows being broken, we are being hunted down like we are animals. Masked men, heavily armed with weapons used for conventional warfare, armored vehicles, this is how a country descends into authoritarianism or fascism. Americans don’t know about this, but we immigrants know, and we’re warning Americans. It’s happening.”
At the Pasadena Community Job Center on Thursday, Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and a bustling crew of staff and volunteers, are getting ready to distribute PPEs to workers in the Eaton fire burn scar. As a thank you, they are also treating them to a loud and rhythmic mobile serenade from Los Jornaleros del Norte, the band that uses cumbias and corridos to tell the story of day workers.
“If you have tension, music de-escalates, on both sides,” Alvarado said.
He confesses to not having had much rest since Jan. 7, when the Eaton fire decimated Altadena and parts of Pasadena. Evacuated from his Pasadena home, Alvarado showed up at the job center already asking how they can support the community.
“How do we organize? He’s always in that mindset, to help with an open heart and support the most vulnerable in our community,” said Jose Madera, 36, director of the Pasadena Community Job Center. “That’s what guides him. And he teaches that to everyone.”
The man Time magazine called “the Cesar Chavez of the jornaleros” (day workers) has many strengths, Madera added.
“The heart that he has for doing this work. This is not a job for him. This comes out of his heart,” he said. “He loves being involved with community, always finding different ways to support community in whatever challenge that may be.”
NDLON and the job center is still immersed in rebuilding Altadena and Pasadena, from leading day workers to clean debris from streets even as the fire raged on, to now training them to become certified disaster site workers, Madera and Alvarado said their work is grounded in justice and solidarity.
“This is a new fire,” Alvarado said about the weeklong immigration raids and protests continued throughout Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. “Everyone is now facing this fire.”
Alvarado calls into a meeting even as he drives to Altadena, smiling at people on the street waving at the musical caravan, and delighting in construction workers at a corner breaking into the cha-cha at their approach.
“Let’s protect each other,” he said. Giving people a sense of solidarity, connecting them through music or prayer or culture, can incite others to accept the humanity in people, in migrant workers.
Alvarado said he leans into his “beautiful family, my beautiful wife, my son and my daughter,” the 30-year-marriage that family is founded on, when news are too stark and the work heavy.
“I just want to believe in people,” he said. “My children are 20 and 25, and I hope they turn out to be good people, honorable people. Whatever they decide to do, I hope they don’t step on anybody to advance, and they don’t go through the things I went through.”
What Alvarado went through can provide inspiration for an epic folk ballad: one of a family of eight born in the small village of Usulután in El Salvador, his father raised oxen, grew corn and delivered water to make a living.
From his father Sabino, Alvarado learned how to work hard. From his mother, Elva Julia Gutierrez, among other things, he learned to speak English, after a fashion.
“My mother didn’t know how to read and write. She taught herself,” he said, already smiling at the memory. “We would buy beans and rice and they would give it to us wrapped in newspaper. From that, she learned on her own, reading that newspaper.”
His smile widens: “Then she taught me. She would say, ‘Repeat. After. Me. Burro. Donkey.’ And if I didn’t learn it, she would hit me on the head with her hand.”
A sister moved to the U.S. in 1978 and six years later sent enough money to help their father buy a truck, offering the family some relief. But the 12-year civil war pushed Alvarado to go north, traveling to Mexico and crossing to the U.S. at 22.
Even though he was college graduate, until he became a permanent resident, Alvarado worked as a day laborer, gardener, painter (“not that kind of painting,” he motions to murals nearby), part of a demolition crew, and as an English as a second language teacher, before he started organizing with CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
He helped found NDLON in 2002, three years before TIME magazine named him one of the country’s 25 most influential Hispanics.
Before the ICE arrests in L.A. County added to his already-full plate, Alvarado was working shoulder to shoulder with grassroots leaders in Altadena, including Altadena Rising, My Tribe Rise and the NAACP, calling for a safe, just and inclusive reconstruction.
His mantra remains “Solo el pueblo salva el pueblo,” only the people saves the people.
“Our lives are interconnected,” Alvarado said, recalling the 12,000 volunteers who showed up at the job center in the days and weeks after the Eaton Fire, helping distribute relief supplies and working with day laborers. “Immigrants are part of the socio-economic fabric of this country.”
Brenda Lopez-Ardon, 25, said she and the mostly-immigrant residents of their Altadena apartment complex put their lives in Alvarado’s hands four months ago. Alvarado had heard reports that units in the complex remained with gas or electricity since the Eaton Fire. NDLON helped Lopez-Ardon organize a tenants’ committee to demand and work on solutions.
“I admire his will, and his dreams,” Lopez-Ardon said. “He has so many great ideas, and never once have I ever felt he thinks he’s this great person. He is so humble and it’s amazing.”
The “new fire” that Alvarado talks about has gripped the L.A. area in recent days after President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to L.A. That came following protests over his administration’s stepped-up enforcement of immigration laws.
Dozens of workers have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in a series of raids that include in LA’s fashion district and at Home Depot parking lots in Southern California.
Federal immigration authorities have been ramping up arrests across the country, with a goal of fulfilling Trump’s promise of mass deportations with a goal of making the nation safer.
Todd Lyons, the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, defended his tactics earlier this week against criticism that authorities are being too heavy-handed. He has said ICE is averaging about 1,600 arrests per day and that the agency has arrested “dangerous criminals.”
Echoing Lyons at a news conference on Thursday, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the enforcement operations were targeting violent criminals. During her news conference, photos of criminals detained during the Southland operations were shown on video screens.
“We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor (Gavin Newsom) and that this mayor (Karen Bass) placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city,” Noem said, pointing to the state and city’s so-called “sanctuary” policies, which prohibit the use of state and local resources and personnel for federal immigration enforcement.
But in L.A. County, it’s brought fierce pushback from many leaders, including Alvarado.
At caravan’s end, already running to another meeting, Alvarado assures anyone disheartened about human rights, immigration and the state of the nation, to remember that “every time you do something with good intentions, nothing goes wrong.”
“Look around,” he says. “The music. The people. When a people are under siege, they come together. That’s hope. Hope doesn’t exist in the air. It is created. It is built.”