Land of Opportunity

Photo gallery Leonardo, desperate to attach a new back door to his damaged car, works with his roommate and friend Fernando (reflected in window) so that the two can get to work in the morning.

Leonardo is 33 — though he likes to say he’s 30 — and he’s a long way from home.

He came to the Roanoke Valley illegally almost four years ago. To work, he says. To work. He needs a car to get to work.

Leonardo earns about $500 a week hanging drywall. He travels from Allegheny County to Franklin County, wherever he can find work. Every few weeks, he sends $300 home to pay for his new house in San Luis Potosi.

The money he earns here is worth 10 times as much in Mexico. Leonardo keeps about $200 of his weekly paycheck to cover rent, buy food and get phone calling cards. He calls his family almost every day.

He has few friends in Roanoke. The friends he had would give him rides to work, but they soon grew tired of his humorless moods and his refusals to join their partying.

Before long, they didn’t invite him to ride to work anymore. Leonardo realized he would need his own car to drive to work. And soon.

“People think I’m a fool or an idiot because my hair is not combed right or I don’t go out,” he said one day last summer. A group of Hispanic men were chatting near a van outside his apartment. He wasn’t asked to join.

“I wear torn-up jeans and do not look good,” he continued. “But I keep track of my money. I don’t waste it. I send it home.”

Leonardo bought a 1992 dark blue Saturn two-and-a-half years ago. The person who sold it lent him the license plates. Leonardo didn’t want to know when the tags would expire because he didn’t want to give them back.

He was driving fine until August 2005, when police approached him at an apartment complex before dawn. Leonardo was honking his horn. It was his way of telling his friends — his co-workers — to come out and go to work.

Photo gallery Leonardo focuses on a windy road while driving to Virginia Tech where he worked for several weeks, finishing drywall in a renovated banquet room. He works nearly seven days a week, hoping to save enough money to move back to Mexico by the end of 2008.

A Roanoke police officer told him he couldn’t honk his horn like that. Leonardo said the officer told him he had received complaints from neighbors. He asked to see Leonardo’s driver’s license.

He didn’t have one. Insurance? Nope.

Leonardo got three tickets totaling $128 and was told not to drive. But he continued anyhow. It’s the only reliable way to get to work, he said.

In April, the law caught up to him again. This time, it was on U.S. 460 after work.

La policia often watch Hispanics suspiciously, Leonardo said, and he had seen them looking at him days earlier when he drove the same route.

Leonardo was arrested for driving without a license and spent a few hours in jail. He went to court a few days later, paid fines of $201 and got his car back.

But not the license plates.

He hasn’t driven the car since. Without the plates, he doesn’t think it’s right to drive. The cops are also likely to pull him over.

For a while, Leonardo hitchhiked. The few friends he had would drive him to construction sites in places as distant as Bedford County, and he would seek out rides from strangers to Roanoke when the day grew dark. He can’t read the signs — he can’t read Spanish or English — and doesn’t know where he is on the roads. But he knows where to tell the driver to make a left, right or keep going straight.

In May, Leonardo paid a stranger $650 to help him get a pair of license plates. The man took the money and Leonardo waited to hear back from him.

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