Los obreros: Latino labor influences the way things are built--and what they're built with--across the state.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: BUILDING NORTH CAROLINA

Saturday dawns warm and bright. At outdoor tables along the industrial-chic section of Charlotte's South Boulevard, diners breakfast on juice and croissants. A few blocks away, the interior of a building under construction is drenched in shadows and the tawny light of sun on fresh lumber. David Furman, the building's architect, walks its maze of hallways, finding shortcuts by squeezing between studs.

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On a portable radio, singer Trace Adkins blares Hot Mama to the hollow drumbeat of dozens of hammers. "Consigame mas clavos! (Get me more nails!)" a worker named Ramon yells as he kneels beside a wall. He glances up, flustered to see the architect. Furman laughs. "They love that country music."

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Here, wood and drywall will soon house shops, offices, parking and more than 100 condominiums. At four stories and about 140,000 square feet, the construction site covers a city block like a matchstick modeler's tabletop fantasy. When finished, The Village at South End will be one of the largest wood-frame buildings in the state.

But its size isn't the only thing worth noticing. Here and in other Tar Heel cities, global influences are shaping local construction. The most visible sign is the work force. Furman's site includes a fraction of the 65,000 or more Latinos who state labor officials and immigration officers estimate work construction in North Carolina. The state's Hispanic population nearly quintupled in the '90s. Its growth rate led the nation.

Combine their impact with other factors, and the result is not only being felt in the state's 220,000-employee construction labor pool but in the design and materials of buildings. For instance, partly because many such as Ramon lack formal training--he picked up basic carpentry skills from his father in Mexico--wood will be used more, some experts say. And it won't be just in houses and apartments but in commercial buildings and mixed-used projects like The Village at South End.

"Wood is forgiving," says Bohumil Kasal, an engineer and member of the wood-science and engineering faculties at N.C. State University in Raleigh. "If you have a lowly qualified work force, you have a harder time building with steel and concrete. But the nail is a very simple and primitive way of connecting things." Adds another engineer, Roberto Nunez, a native of Ecuador and president of Infrastructure Quality Engineering and Consulting...