LOS ANGELES - The barrilero never stops moving.

All day he wheels cardboard barrels stuffed with used clothing through the narrow aisles of the warehouse. He dumps the load atop tables for sorters, who separate nylons from cottons, satins from silks, denims from plaids. If a sorter is standing around with no garments, it's the barrilero's fault. Super­visors hover nearby.

Tons of old clothing come in every week, and tons go back out, to India and Pakistan, where it's sold at outdoor markets.

The factory hired the barrilero in September, not long after the now-21-year-old showed up looking for work. Right away, the manager had recognized him as Anthony, a kid who walked his factory floor selling chocolates to workers years ago.

Anthony didn't say much about where he'd been, or what he'd been doing since. He was polite and upbeat, but his hair was falling out, and there was something unfamiliar in his eyes.

"He seemed sadder," the manager said, "like he wanted to say something but didn't know how."

There were many things the barrilero would keep to himself. First among them: His name wasn't Anthony.

Luis Luna returned to his hometown of South Gate in May. His arms and legs were scraped raw from cactus and he was constantly blinking, his eyes still starved of moisture from an eight-day trek through the Arizona desert the week before.

A friend, Julio Cortez, found it hard to believe that this gaunt young man with patches of missing hair was the same person he'd known in middle school.

"I was in shock to see … all he had gone through," his friend said. "It made me sad and angry."

Cortez, a 22-year-old Cal State Long Beach student, took Luis to buy some clothes. Another former classmate gave him a cellphone. Luis slept on couches and in spare bedrooms, and spent his days passing out résumés filled with the jobs of his teen years: flipping burgers, waiting tables. He fudged the dates to account for the 15 months he spent in Mexico after he was deported for being in the country illegally.

Much to keep hidden

Luis had been pulled over three years earlier for a broken headlight in Pasco, Wash., where he and his mother lived. He was ticketed for driving without a license, jailed and ordered out of the country in February 2011.

He had a wife back in Washington, but she had left him, in part because of the long separation. Luis decided to start over in Southern California, where he had grown up and where he still had friends.

Weeks after arriving, he was still jobless and borrowing money to eat when he decided his future might lie in his past. He started retracing the route he took as a boy, selling chocolates at warehouses and factories. The workers, truck drivers and managers knew him as Anthony, the name his mother told him to use to hide his identity.

They could vouch for his strong work ethic - that he'd been working for a living since the age of 5.

He eventually found the barrilero job, and a place to live. A swap meet vendor who picked through the bins of cast-offs for vintage garments told Luis he had extra room at his house.

Luis goes home to a converted two-car garage with no address in a middle-class neighborhood of trim lawns and streets lined with late-model cars. Much of his clothing is stuffed in a battered dark green suitcase that sits at the foot of his bed. The only other furniture is a mini-refrigerator and two lawn chairs.

Future holds little hope

In some ways, Luis is a typical youngster with edgy tastes. He has a sleeve tattoo, wears skinny jeans and earrings, and is part of a deejay crew that plays at house parties. He cheers the Los Angeles Lakers, hangs out in hookah bars, and is constantly texting flirty messages.

But his future is dimmer than most. Many of his friends are planning for life after college. Some are applying for work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation, taking advantage of an Obama administration program, announced in June, to help young people who were brought into the country as children.

Luis was 3 when his mother smuggled him across the border. But he won't be getting a reprieve. He's disqualified because he was arrested twice trying to re-enter the U.S. after his deportation.

Luis eventually told friends that his struggles to get back in the country had been chronicled in a Los Angeles Times story in January. The article had ended with Luis stranded and homeless in Mexico.

A teacher at a junior high school in Anaheim who had read the story found out Luis was back and invited him to speak to students. The students, some of whom were undocumented immigrants, sat riveted as Luis spoke in a soft but steady voice.

He described days of hunger, homelessness and disorientation wandering through pueblos and cities of Sonora and Chihuahua, the bodies left on the streets of Ciudad Juarez, victims of that border city's drug wars.

Students enthralled

Desperation drove him to risk his life repeatedly to get back to the U.S., he told them. He rode underneath a freight train once, he said, and almost died from dehydration in the desert on his final, successful try.

Children crowded around afterward, asking to see his scars from the police dog that bit him when he was caught hiding under a boxcar.

The class had featured Holocaust survivors and Vietnamese boat people as guests in the past, and Luis' tale resonated. The students wrote U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., urging her to support his quest for legal residency.

Luis believes he deserves U.S. citizenship, but knows his situation may never get better than this. He long ago accepted the limits of living in the shadows. But he takes comfort in familiarity.

"I actually have a bed and a roof over my head," Luis said. "I can close my eyes and sleep until I wake up, knowing that I'm going to be alive."