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Family struggles with casino layoffs but keeps the faith

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. - Walfa Caceres was the first of the sisters to make the journey to Atlantic City.

The Caceres sisters (from left) Walfa, Esperanza, and Fanny, along with Esperanza's husband, Ramon Melo, all lost jobs in the recent casino closings.
The Caceres sisters (from left) Walfa, Esperanza, and Fanny, along with Esperanza's husband, Ramon Melo, all lost jobs in the recent casino closings.Read moreCLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. - Walfa Caceres was the first of the sisters to make the journey to Atlantic City.

It was 1992 and she was 26. New York City, where they had moved to join their father, Toribio Caceres, a former police officer at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic who now owned a fried-chicken restaurant on 168th Street, had never really suited the Caceres siblings.

"Too loud," said Fanny Caceres, five years younger than Walfa. "Too busy."

But in Atlantic City, something clicked for Walfa - particularly when she saw the line of customers stretching for the new French Quarter buffet at Showboat, willing to wait two hours to get inside.

She took a job as a Showboat buffet server after a few years at Harrah's and set about the business of the rest of her life. Her two sisters soon followed, then others in their family. They prospered.

And so when Showboat and Revel both closed over Labor Day weekend, no fewer than eight members of the Caceres family - sisters Esperanza, 51; Walfa, 48; Fanny, 43; brother Juan, 41; Esperanza's husband, Ramon Melo, 52; his cousin Mercedes Justo, 51; her son Steven, 24; and Fanny's daughter Esmerelda, 23 - were working at Showboat or, in Esperanza's case, Revel.

A bubbly, loving, busy, and successful family - a tight clan that had just celebrated Ramon and Esperanza's long-awaited marriage in the backyard of their home, a wedding announced on Page 12 of El Correo de Atlantic County, which also carried the front-page headline "Atlantic City: game over" - stopped in its tracks.

No doubt, on balance, they are thankful. But stunned.

"We have everything from Showboat," said Melo, speaking in the living room of his home on Fork Road in Egg Harbor Township. And truly, this is a family at a fork in the road. "A house, a car, the casino gave opportunity for everybody, a nice education for my daughters."

"For my son," added Fanny, a cocktail server at Showboat who worked as a secretary in her native country. Her son, Carlos Mancebo, is in the Air Force and calls every day from South Korea wanting to know: Has she applied for any new jobs yet? She, like Walfa, also has a daughter in middle school. Her husband still works in housekeeping at the Tropicana. Carlos would prefer she didn't go back to a casino.

"We have six mortgages," said Justo, a former housekeeper in Environmental Services at Showboat. "Everybody is head of their household."

"We've been working so hard," said Fanny, a former waitress at Showboat. "Now we're at risk to lose everything, the way we live."

'A positive person'

Still, it is really too soon to feel the impact, the sisters say. And there is some good news: Brother Juan, known as Tony, was rehired by Caesars Entertainment, now at Bally's as a bar porter. When pressed, the Caceres sisters say that in five or six months, without new jobs, they will face true crisis.

Among the Caceres sisters, there is no feeling sorry for themselves. For now, they stay positive and smiling, sitting together on Esperanza's couch, in a living room painted with subtle earth tones selected by her interior-designer daughter. "I'm feeling, Oh my God, the bills, the house, I'm worried," says Esperanza. "But I'm a positive person."

So they giggle together and throw their hands up, as they surely have done throughout their lives, from the Dominican Republic to New York City to Atlantic City, where they rented homes and became citizens, to lives now in homes bought in Egg Harbor Township and Galloway.

Overcome

Melo, who was a chemical engineer in the Dominican Republic, is the one more susceptible to sadness. The other day, he and Esperanza sat together on folding chairs at the end of a long table inside the convention center room set up to process unemployment forms for the thousands of workers who lost casino jobs. Esperanza was fine, but moments after he got up to leave, Melo was overcome with sadness. His eyes filled. It was the idea that he was applying for government help, he said.

"I don't like to think of taking this, this welfare," he said.

In the Dominican Republic, Melo worked at the factory that produced Presidente beer.

When he interviewed at Caesars Entertainment and told them this, it became shortened to "I make beer," which led to a job as a cocktail server, where he was one of the few males.

He did it for 14 years at Showboat before being laid off. Now, he wonders whether it's possible to get a job in the field for which he was educated. He has a certificate of equivalency that equates his engineering degree in the Dominican Republic to a bachelor's in the United States. At an interview for a possible transfer to another Caesars property, the manager asked him to name something not in his resumè that he could do. When he said dance, he was asked to demonstrate.

"I danced a little salsa," he said. But he was not given a new job. Other casinos hire few men as servers, he said. He would really prefer to return to something in his original field.

Melo's eldest of three daughters, Magdalis Melo, 27, is an interior designer in Philadelphia who attended the Art Institute of Philadelphia. She owns her own company, Magda Green Design. The youngest, Esperlis, is studying education at community college. Julisse, 22, is a licensed cosmetologist.

Last Friday, Magdalis drove home to Egg Harbor Township to try to rally her family, maybe come up with a totally different strategy for them.

"In my family there are maybe eight people that lost their jobs, two aunts, my mom, my dad, both of their incomes," she said. "We're trying to do something, like a store. So many people with no jobs."

Esperanza, her mother, believes in a positive attitude. She saw her Revel job, in environmental services, not as a mere casino floor cleaner but as someone responsible for creating a customer's first impression.

In the last months at Revel, after the closing date was announced, she was called "the butterfly," bouncing around to all of the sad workers and motivating them to keep working. Melo is sure she would make an excellent supervisor.

"I saw the people down, the depression, crying," said Esperanza, who also has worked at Bally's. "I give them support. Calm down. Nobody wanted to work."

The sisters are exploring options, some that would require training in new fields such as tax preparation or medical technology. Esperanza may go to work in her daughter's office, joining Magdalis and Walfa's older daughter, Francesca, a pharmacy technician, in Philadelphia. The house they own ties them to the area, plus the family. Many casino workers' homes nearby are already on the market.

As for Walfa, she plans to get a commercial driver's license, something she has wanted for a while. She too is not ready to walk away from the place that gave her family a home. Many years, she was laid off temporarily after the summer anyway, she said.

"We say thank you to God for everything we used to have and everything we will have in the future," she said.

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@amysrosenberg