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When
her children were young, Teodomira Elizalde would part the curtains of
her family’s Minnie Street apartment and point to the drug dealers, hookers
and gang members outside.
“You see there,”
she would tell her children. “That is your future if you don’t work hard
at school.”
Elizalde and
her family have since moved from Minnie Street to a new neighborhood just
north of the Civic Center that is home to about 7,000 residents, more
than half of them immigrants.
Like many other
Mexican immigrants, she clings to the belief that “la educacion es la
llave al futuro” — education is the key to the future.
She and others
were drawn to the United States by the promise of better jobs. But many
now see education as their children’s most potent weapon against crime,
racism and other problems in the barrio. Elizalde’s neighborhood is served
by four public schools — Hoover elementary, Sierra middle, Willard Intermediate,
and Santa Ana High — and one parochial — St. Joseph’s.
While the difficulties
of a new language and culture cut short the education of some children
of immigrant families, other children not only adapt, but thrive.
Ana Navarro dreams
of being a doctor.Though
only 12, she is prepared for the challenge. The seventh-grader, who emigrated
with her family from Mexico five years ago and lives at the Courtyard
Apartments on Spurgeon Street, has a high B average and parents who go
out of their way to make sure she’s doing well in her studies.
“I want to do
this no matter what,” says Navarro, long-haired and shy, putting her hand
over her face. “I want to help people. We need more doctors who speak
Spanish.”
All four of
Elizalde’s children have graduated from high school, and the youngest,
Alma, became the first to enroll in a four-year college last fall when
she won a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley.
“I want to fight
for the rights of other people like me and my family to come to this country
and seek a better life,” she says, her voice rising with passion as she
speaks of her plans to become an immigrant-rights lawyer.
It will be hard
work, but Alma is used to that. Throughout high school, she worked 20-35
hours a week as a waitress at a Newport Beach restaurant to help support
her family. Her work ethic comes from her parents.
Her father, Apolonio,
55, is a thin man with deep wrinkles and calloused hands. He’s a factory
worker and cook who has always held more than one job at a time since
coming to Orange County in 1981.
When she was
younger and healthier, his wife worked beside him in the strawberry fields
and fruit orchards of California. Until 1986, Alma’s family was in this
country illegally, living in the Minnie Street apartment. Her parents
attained legal residency through the immigration-reform act, and, with
their children’s help and a government loan for low-income families, purchased
a three-bedroom house on a quiet street last year.
The family’s
neighbor and fellow immigrant, Javier De Leon, also has worked hard to
ensure an education for his two children at St. Joseph’s, the local Catholic
school. Years of sacrifice and thousands of dollars in tuition, books
and uniforms seemed well-spent as he watched his daughter, Ivette, 14,
walk down the aisle during eighth-grade graduation ceremonies last spring
at the parish church.
De Leon, who
abandoned a dental practice when he emigrated from Mexico 10 years ago,
has scrimped and saved to pay the $310 a month to send both his children
to St. Joseph’s, but he figures it is an investment in their future.
He believes they
are protected from drugs and gangs at a school that teaches Christian
values and has an enrollment of only about 200 students, in kindergarten
through eighth grade. As Ivette walks by in her cap and gown, De Leon’s
eyes fill with tears.
“For us, really,
it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice,” he says of the scrimping and saving
that have led to this sweet moment. “It’s our duty as parents.”
For other parents
and daughters in this central-city neighborhood, the promise of an education
is more elusive. Gangs, drugs and poverty are just some of the obstacles
that stand between neighborhood residents and educational opportunity.
Yolanda Montufar,
an attendance officer at Sierra middle school, lives in the neighborhood
and sees her students’ hardships. She has visited apartments where sheets
hang from clotheslines in the living room, separating one family from
another; where a walk-in closet outfitted with a mattress fetches $ 150
a month. It is a brutal contrast to the riches seen outside the neighborhood.
“They see pictures
on TV every night of people driving nice cars and owning mansions,” Montufar
says. “Meanwhile, for them, something as basic as getting glasses or dental
work is a struggle. That’s a hard reality to handle.”
Real-life problems
are found throughout this neighborhood, including Santa Ana High School.
Drug dealers and addicts
ring the school, where students are kept in a central patio during lunch
to protect them from stray bullets from gang fights and drug battles in
the surrounding neighborhood.
Ninety-five percent
of the school’s 2,500 students are Hispanic, and one-third of the 112
teachers are bilingual. Stereotypes about high dropout rates and misbehavior
usually ascribed to inner-city minority schools do not apply here. Still,
15 percent will drop out before graduation, many of them casualties of
adult problems they encounter as teen-agers.
At 19, Cristal
Ibarra is a single mother of a 1-year-old son and works at Taco Bell.
She dropped out of high school when she was 17 and lives in a dilapidated
house on Sixth Street shared by seven families.
Even her bedroom
is not her own; she shares it with her son, her cousin and her cousin’s
9-year-old daughter.
On the day her
contemporaries are to graduate from high school, the black-haired teen
sits on her bedroom floor amid trash bags stuffed with dirty laundry.
She tries to lose herself in a popular Spanish television soap opera called
“Searching for Paradise. ”
Where does she
see herself in five years? She shrugs, calling attention to the blurred
rose tattoo on her right arm, a remnant of her girl-gang days. She hungers
for friendship, yearns to escape the chipped paint and moldy smell of
her surroundings. She clutches her child’s hand and walks into the dark
hallway leading to her room, kept pitch black so children do not play
in it.
“It is all in
the hands of God,” she says. “I know I’ll still be looking out for my
child. And if I’m lucky, I’ll be studying to make something better of
myself. ”
Alma Elizalde
is proof that it can be done. She graduated this year from Century High
School as the ideal well-rounded student: cheerleader, soccer player,
debate-team member, class leader with a 3.8 grade-point average. She had
done all she could, and in May, the letter from the University of California,
Berkeley, sat on the table waiting for her to open it. She froze.
What if she didn’t
get accepted? It would be a letdown for her parents. What if she did?
How would she pay for such an expensive school? She held her mother’s
hand to stop trembling.
Finally, she
ripped open the envelope and let out a squeal. She was in. Her years of
hard work had paid off. So had her parents’ gamble to move to America.
No better testimony to that, Teodomira Elizalde said, than the college-bound
daughter standing beside her.
Beaming, she
leaned over and kissed Alma on the head. “Dios te bendiga, mija,” she
said: “God bless you, my daughter.”
Staff writer
Jeordan Legon immigrated from Cuba with his family in 1979. He lived for
most of last year in the Courtyard Apartments in the predominantly Hispanic
neighborhood near 15th and Spurgeon streets in Santa Ana.
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