The men range in age from young adult to their 50s. They spend much of the day watching television or talking to each other. But the mood shifts when a small group of young adults enters the building.

The men gather at tables, appearing eager to learn, as the newcomers create a makeshift classroom.

The newcomers, who usually are the ones sitting in classrooms at UCLA, instead are leading the classes. They have come to teach English to day laborers, most of whom are native Spanish speakers.

About 20 UCLA students are part of Proyecto de Jornaleros, the Day Laborer Project. The program is a community service project of the UCLA Community Programs Office.

Every Saturday morning the volunteers go to gathering sites for day laborers - one in downtown Los Angeles and one in West Los Angeles. The volunteers also work on Friday mornings at the downtown Los Angeles center.

"One of my favorite parts of doing this is we have a chance to create a political and social awareness here in Los Angeles and in the nation," said Jesus Gonzales, one of the project coordinators. "We teach these English classes so they know how powerful words are, so they aren't stopped by a language barrier. They are able to stand up for themselves."

At the beginning of each session, they break off into three groups to teach English - beginning, intermediate and advanced.

The volunteers teach the curriculum they developed during the week. They use themes that are relevant to the day laborers, such as the general election, politics in Latin America, worker negotiations, immigrant rights and arts throughout the world.

They teach for about an hour, and then they break for a snack, usually sandwiches, chips and vegetables.


Then they resume instruction until late morning. For the last 15 minutes, they all gather together and each participant gives a short summary of what he learned that day.

Gonzales, 22, a senior political science major from Bell Gardens, Calif., is in his second year of teaching English. He said he likes volunteering and working on the curriculum for the day laborers.

Gonzales draws from his area of study in explaining the significance of the project.

"One of my favorite parts of doing this is we have a chance to create a political and social awareness here in Los Angeles and in the nation," Gonzales said. "We teach these English classes so they know how powerful words are, so they aren't stopped by a language barrier. They are able to stand up for themselves."

Marianne Armenta, a project coordinator in her second year of teaching English, said she was drawn to the program because it helps adults, rather than many community service projects that focus on youths.

"This population is completely ignored in society and is at the bottom of a caste system," Armenta said. "I've always been interested in labor rights, so the program seemed like a good fit."

Armenta, 20, a junior from San Francisco majoring in linguistics, said she likes interacting with the workers and learns something every time she works with them.

Valeria Lopez's parents are from Mexico. Her first experience in teaching English was when she was 10-years-old - she helped her aunt study for her naturalization exam.

Now Lopez, 21, a junior from San Diego majoring in history and one of the project directors, is in her third year of teaching.

"It's a good way to reconnect with what I was learning on campus and going back to the community," she said. "It makes me feel like what I am learning is applicable and useful and I'm being useful. It's benefiting someone other than just me."

The UCLA students teach English at day laborer centers run by IDEPSCA, Instituo de Educacion Popular Del Sur De California, also know as the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California. IDEPSCA is a nonprofit community organization founded by a group of Chicano and Latino activists in 1991 to help organize and educate low-income Latino immigrants concerned with solving problems in their own communities.

Cynthia Paredes, now development director for IDEPSCA, was one of the founders of Proyecto de Jornaleros.

Paredes, 24, of Los Angeles, said she and others developed the idea for the day labor
project in fall 2000 when they were preparing for a Day of the Dead event for the UCLA student group Conciencia Libre, a multiethnic progressive student organization with a mission to supplement university education with firsthand experience in grass-roots organizing of students and workers while participating in community activism.

Paredes said the students went to a job center and hired day laborers to help them build 600 crosses for the Day of the Dead event, and after talking with the workers, got the idea to create the English classes for them.

Proyecto de Jornaleros started its first classes in the fall of 2001 with a handful of students at the downtown Los Angeles site on Saturdays, and the group has grown to about 20 volunteers working at both the downtown site and West Los Angeles site on Saturdays and the downtown site on Fridays.

"I'm really proud of the project because the UCLA students are able to contribute to their community," said Paredes, whose parents both were born in Mexico. "It helps students who have immigrant backgrounds to be rooted in our community and not forget where we came from. It is globalization at work right here - there are a lot of people looking for work at street corners."

Cristina Lopez, 25, of Los Angeles, also works at IDEPSCA and is a UCLA graduate who taught with Proyecto de Jornaleros.

"The classes are a good exchange of experiences and ideas," Lopez said. "We really felt we were learning as much from them as they learned from us. The students are making changes in their lives and other people's lives."

In addition to the English lessons, the volunteers take the day laborers on quarterly field trips. Among the places they have visited are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Monica Pier and UCLA.

Tim Ngubeni, the director of the UCLA Community Programs Office who serves as an adviser to the students, said one of the most important lessons they can learn from this community service project is to remember where they and their families came from.

"It's a humbling experience for them to work at the centers, which have a very different atmosphere to the more upscale setting at UCLA," Ngubeni said. "It helps them relearn the conditions where their families came from and gives them a better conceptualization of what people are going through in their daily life."

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