Guadagno Carnival Returns for 20th

Guadagno and Sons Amusements, the carnival that has come to Tehachapi for 20 years during the Mountain Festival, is a fourth-generation operation.

Joe Guadagno (gua-DAN-nyo) was in Tehachapi to oversee the setup of 16 carnival rides on the vacant lot bounded by Valley Boulevard and Curry Street. He works with his brother Chris and his father Tony and mother Sharon out of the West Garden Grove, Orange County company headquarters.

Joe Guadagno's grandfather John founded the company in 1954.

"My grandfather started on the Pike in Long Beach," he said. "He sold jewelry and eventually bought a ride. My father and uncle took it portable in the 1970s."

The company has 30 rides in carnivals running at various locations around the state. They do 60 events a year, sometimes three in a week.

Guadagno said some of the rides in Tehachapi came in from Ventura County and others arrived from Sunland.

The newest ride is The Zipper.

"It makes everybody sick," Guadagno said. "It's a teenage ride."

Tehachapi is one of his favorite stops.

"It's nice coming up here. It's a nice little town. I see familiar faces. Everybody is friendly."

Guadagno has a crew of 40 people working the Tehachapi carnival. Of those, he said, 30 are Mexican nationals and 10 are American workers.

The Mexican workers are here on H2B temporary visas, which is for industries that can show a need for temporary or seasonal workers when U.S. workers cannot be found. The agriculture industry uses a different visa, the H2A.

"It's a great program for us," Guadagno said.

The employees come to work for Guadagno from the area of Tlapacoyan, Vera Cruz state, in two or three groups at the beginning of the season. They work for nine months and at the end of their contract, Guadagno flies them to Mexico City, where they then return to their wives and children. For living quarters, they have private rooms in the big company multi-unit trailers.

The employees are screened by Homeland Security and are trained in the OSHA safety programs.

"Each of them is cross trained in the operations and maintenance of all our rides," Sharon Guadagno told Forde Files. "G&S Shows has a zero drug/alcohol policy."

They also have a no-beard, no-longhair policy.

The current federal administration is not a big advocate of the H2B program.

"The Labor Department is making it tougher and tougher," Guadagno said. "As an industry we have been battling the government for eight years. We came close to going out of business last year."

James Judkins of JKJ Workforce Agency, the company's labor broker who facilitates paper work, compliance and recruitment, said the program is highly regulated.

"The current administration, for political purposes, think that those that use the program are villains and those that hire undocumented workers are fine. It's a screwed-up world," Judkins said.

"It is one of the few programs that works. We bring in foreign workers for a specific period of time, for specific employment for a specific job. It's audited. The workers go home. They don't bring their families. They stay in their home country. They pay Social Security, Medicare, withholding, state and local taxes and go home. They can earn six times what they can at home and their family gets ahead."

Under H2B, no one has to pay coyotes to smuggle the workers in, he said.