PHOTO: FANG CUI

By Franziska Bruner & Fang Cui

At 6 a.m., most 19-year-olds in New York City are still asleep. Not Fernando Feijoo. Every day, just before the sun rises, the Ecuadorian immigrant is already out on Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside, Queens, looking for work as a construction day laborer.

The jobs he finds there, when he does find any, are exhausting and pay little. But Feijoo has no choice-he is the sole breadwinner for a family of eight back in Cuenca, Ecuador. Back home, he earned only $20 per week. In New York, he makes enough to send more than $400 to his family each month.

Feijoo is not the only teenager from Cuenca who has moved to New York. Almost all the boys he grew up with, he says, have joined the growing exodus of Mexican and Ecuadorian teenage males who flee bleak Central American economies to look for jobs in the United States. Some come to New York when they are as young as 14, when their youth gives them the energy to work long hours, but also makes them vulnerable to exploitation by bosses, landlords and gangs.

The 2000 census shows the Mexican population is growing more rapidly than any other Latino group in the city, and the "great majority" of the new immigrants are here illegally, says Deyanira Galindo, press secretary for the Mexican Consulate.

There are now at least 203 percent more Mexicans living in New York than in 1990, and 29 percent more Ecuadorians, according to the census. But, no one really knows how many of them are teenage illegal immigrants, Galindo says, since it is very difficult to count an undocumented population.

PHOTO: FANG CUI Feijoo is among other immgrants waiting in Woodside, Queens, for daily labor work.

Groups who work with Latino youth, like Asociación Tepeyac, a coalition of Mexican church groups based in Manhattan, say they have seen a definite increase in youth immigration. Almost all the new immigrants work in menial jobs, often being paid less than minimum wage, says Esperanza Chacón, Urgent Services Director at Asociación Tepeyac.

"The people get younger every year," says Nadia Marin-Molina, Director of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, Long Island, a group that aids Latino day laborers.

Marin-Molina says many of the teen immigrants are too young to work legally, but in day labor jobs like Feijoo's, bosses don't check for age.

"As far as we can tell, the employers don't care how young they are," Marin-Molina says. "As long as they look strong, they don't care."

Since the teens are both illegal immigrants and underage workers, few complain to the State Department of Labor when they are underpaid or abused, partly out of fear they will be fired or deported.

"They are hiding in the basement, in the kitchen," Chacón says. "They don't speak the language, they don't understand the system. They don't know where to complain. There is no protection for them."

There are no welcome wagons for the teens, no relatives with outstretched arms waiting to greet them at Kennedy airport. Most have to fend for themselves when they arrive in the unfamiliar city.

When Feijoo came to New York last November, he spent his first weeks sleeping on the Number 7 train.

"I felt horrible…I had never slept in the street in Ecuador," Feijoo says in Spanish. "I was afraid."

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School Dreams

Gangs on the Rise

 

Mexican and Ecuadorian Population by Borough (in thousand)
Borough	Mexicans	Ecuadorian
Bronx	3.44	1.29
Brooklyn	5.88	1.90
Manhattan	3.04	1.03
Queens	5.55	5.77
New York City	18.69	10.10
Source: Bureau of the Census, US Department of Commerce, 1990