By Eric Berkowitz

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — In the harsh morning glare, a woman in red slippers shuffled unsteadily across the Sandman Motel’s parking lot. Carrying a fifth of something in a black plastic bag, she followed a familiar path from the nearby liquor store, climbed the motel’s stairs with effort, and disappeared into the $49 per night desolation of her room.

Here, at the edge of South Central Los Angeles, there is no shortage of despair. An indoor gun firing range abuts a windowless pornography shop, which sits hard by another liquor store. But the business done in those establishments is matched — if not dwarfed — by the area’s underground economy. The people on the street do their own cash-based commerce, selling either themselves or substances that make their customers feel like someone else.

And here, in a motel populated with drunks, drug dealers, and acne-faced prostitutes, a few of the nation’s 12 million illegal immigration problems are being played out in real time. The Sandman’s owners use the cheapest, most plentiful and vulnerable labor available — undocumented Latino women.

As she has done for eight years since she left Guatemala, Aramida Gramajo is cleaning the mess left by the Sandman’s guests. The 39-year-old mother of five is supposed to get $7.75 per hour, “but it doesn’t always come out that way in the check,” she said in Spanish. “We don’t know how they pay us.”

Pointing to her darkened fingers, Gramajo said her hands are “almost at the point of being deformed from cleaning — but I need the work.” Without residency papers, she said she is unemployable elsewhere. “I’ve submitted applications in other hotels, but they won’t give me a job because they check your status. I would love to learn English and at the very least clean houses for Americans or be a nanny.”

Gramajo has never been in a position to lose income. When she left Guatemala, “my daughters had been begging for food,” she said. After her first attempt to cross into the United States failed, “My sister said, ‘Don’t give up . . . What are your kids going to eat?’” Despite the erratic pay at the Sandman, she sends about $200 a month to Guatemala to support her parents and three children still there. She also pays for therapy for a daughter living with her who was sexually abused by a relative back home. She has no car, no insurance and no savings.

Nevertheless, on May 1, Gramajo will not be taking the bus to the Sandman. She plans to join other immigrants around the country that day to flex their collective economic muscle by boycotting work, school, and consumer activity. The objective is to influence the ongoing debate in Washington over immigration reform legislation. “My personal goal is hopefully they grant us amnesty and they give us papers – not just me but to all the Latino people that have the need to be in this country,” she said.

Gramajo has also been encouraging others to skip work on May 1. “All my friends, I’ve asked them if you are going to work that day. They say no,” she said. “We’re going to take a day of rest, because we never do it.”

It is impossible to predict the how many other people will joining Gramajo, but it appears that workers in most sectors of the economy will be taking off. Calls by religious and union leaders to go to work are being ignored.

“Mexican restaurants will be closed,” said Jessie Diaz, spokesman for a Southern California-based coalition backing the boycott, which it calls “A Day Without an Immigrant.” “There will hardly be anybody on the freeway. There will be very few trucks in the ports,” he said.

Miguel Lopez, the Teamster union’s port representative, said the union has been getting “numerous calls” from both its trucker members and employers, and that the walkout looks like it will be “widespread,” perhaps a “national shutdown.” The Teamsters do not officially endorse the boycott, he said, but “people have the right to exercise their civil rights in whatever form they choose.”

A group of truckers called the Los Angeles Troquero Collective (”troquero” is Spanish for trucker) is asking truckers to shut down their businesses and gather at ports, rail facilities and truck stops, reported etrucker.com, a trucking industry website.

The Service Employees Union Local 1877, which claims to represent about 24,000 California janitors, security workers, and event workers, is already negotiating with employers to give their workers the day off, said Javier Gonzales, the union’s political representative.

Gonzalez said many of the union’s workers will take off work regardless of whether they get permission. “If you can travel 2,000 miles with 10 dollars,” he said, referring to the journey of many illegal immigrants to the United States from Mexico and Central America, “you can miss a day’s work and risk losing your job. So I think people can expect people aren’t going to go to work.”

“If we go to work that day, then we will not be heard. We are human beings,” said Janitor Grey Pichante, 26, who worked in the United States illegally for eight years and is a member of Local 1877.

Los Angeles County has agreed to give vacation time to its employees wishing to take off work that day, provided that the absences don’t disrupt services, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The potential economic effect of the walkout is as uncertain as the anticipated number of people participating. “We’re holding our breath,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation. The gross product of Los Angeles County is $1.2 billion per day, he said, and an interruption of shipping operations, especially the trucking of containers on and off steam ships, could be disruptive. “A one day work stoppage could easily be magnified across both the national economy and even over Asia,” he added.

The constant flow of cargo into the port requires tight coordination of sea, rail, and trucking operations, but a one day shut-down may not be that disruptive, said Patty Senecal, vice president of Transport Express, which coordinates short-haul trucking in and out of the port. In the past, “every one day lost took us almost five days to recover,” she said. But since July, 2005, the port has been operating at night four days a week which relieves the backlog pressure.

Since many short-haul truckers are independent operators who make as little as $10-15 per hour, “I don’t know how many of them would be in the position to blow off a day of work,” Senecal said. Some truckers “may choose to work at night and boycott during the day.” Still, Senecal’s company posted a sign-up sheet so truckers can let them know if they will be taking off work on May 1. “Our concern is that we have a business to run, we have customers,” Senecal said, and the customers have to know what to expect. “If I’ve lost my customers, what’s the benefit?

The boycott is “obviously a publicity stunt,” said Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for restrictive immigration policies. “Boycotts generally don’t work, and I’m sure this one isn’t going to work either.” Still, he said that the strike will highlight the need to “crack down on employers” who hire illegal immigrants at rock-bottom wages.

Mehlman added that many jobs, such as door-to-door distributors of advertising flyers, would not exist if employers couldn’t hire cheap, undocumented immigrant labor. “My life would be complete” without such flyers, he said, although it “would be a hardship for the burglars who would have to find out other ways if I was home.”

Sitting on a tattered bedspread in a room at the Sandman Motel, Gramajo said she is used to slurs. “They humiliate us. They accuse us of everything. But we’re here. It’s something I have to do, send money to my mom so my kids can survive.”

Gramajo said she would strike again if the May 1 boycott didn’t generate adequate results in Washington. “And if they said we have to not eat, then we wouldn’t eat so that they hear us and they know we have to be in this country with honor, without asking for food stamps. That’s what we’re asking.”

This way to exploitation. The rooms at the Sandman Motel in Inglewood, Calif. will be a little dirtier on May 1, when at least one of its undocumented cleaning crew takes the day off to protest for immigrant rights.

It doesn’t just look like a prison. Sitting in the urban blight of Inglewood, Calif., the Sandman Motel employs a cadre of undocumented maids who cannot find work elsewhere. One maid, Aramida Gramajo, says she isn’t always paid what she is owed, but she has no recourse. As one of the 12 million undocumented workers in the United States, she has no right to go after her employer for back pay.

The Sandman Motel, in Inglewood, Calif., pulls more business from the nearby liquor store than the tourist trade.