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Every afternoon, Jose Reglas’ truck horn echoes through this immigrant
neighborhood, beckoning customers to the tune of “La Cucaracha.”
Within minutes of his arrival at Courtyard Apartments on Spurgeon Street
in Santa Ana, women line up at his truck, which bulges with dried legumes,
fresh vegetables, medicines and spices. One asks for four potatoes. Another
wants chilies and chamomile tea. A third buys a pound of red beans and
some tamarind candy.
Such is commerce in an area where good jobs are scarce and the nearest
supermarket is 15 blocks away, and where everything from tortillas to
toilet paper is sold on the street by dozens of vendors and door-to-door
salesmen.
A father of four, Reglas, 42, makes about $150 a day — not bad, he says,
for a man who spent his childhood begging in the streets of Mexico City
and arrived in this country 10 years ago without a penny in his pocket.
“I’m really the American success story,” he says, smiling broadly. He
has prospered in an underground economy essential to a neighborhood where
more than half the 7,000 residents are illegal immigrants. It is raw American
capitalism — without permits, sales taxes or proof of legal status. Reglas
buys his goods from wholesalers in Los Angeles, where he lives.
Knowing that times are hard, he extends credit to many of his customers
and tends to all of them with the care and respect of a neighborhood grocer.
In return, he has earned their loyalty.
“Good morning, Dona Eloisa,” he says. “Right away, Mrs. Sandra. … Hello,
Marta. How’s your daughter?”
Few in this transitional community just north of the Civic Center are
unemployed. Census figures from 1990 show that 91 percent of the area’s
residents work, mostly in service industry and manual labor jobs, compared
with a countywide figure of 94 percent.
But there is a wider gap financially: County residents as a whole have
a median household income of $52,000 a year, while households in this
neighborhood have a median income of $22,366. Those figures are misleading,
however, because immigrant households often are larger than others.
Neighborhood residents and employment-agency operators say most immigrants
earn about $250 a week, or $13,000 a year, so in many instances, it would
take the combined wages of more than one working adult to total $22,366
a year.
For illegal workers, earning just minimum wage is a challenge. Marco
Alarcon, 24, works 10 hours a day at $3 an hour, pruning trees and mowing
lawns for a landscaping company. It takes him a week to earn what Reglas
makes in a day, but he does not complain. He is happy to have a job that
pays enough for him to afford to share a two-bedroom apartment with his
sister, her husband and their two children.
On a typical workday, he and two co-workers zip around the county in
a pickup loaded with lawn mowers, pruning shears and trash bags. At day’s
end, his green khaki pants and yellow T-shirt are soiled and stained with
dirt. But Alarcon feels good.
“I’m proud that I earn my money in an honest way,” he says.
Many in Alarcon’s neighborhood eke out a living in hourly wages. Those
who aren’t lucky enough to find work with factories, restaurants and construction
companies make money by meeting the needs of others.
On North Spurgeon Street, an employment agency does a land-office business
catering to affluent county residents looking for cheap labor to fill
$200-a-week jobs as live-in maids, nannies, gardeners, day laborers and
caretakers for the elderly.
Most who line up outside the agency every weekend are younger than 30.
They work for people in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Mission Viejo
and Irvine, or in mansions overlooking the coast in Dana Point and San
Clemente. In the past four years, the agency has placed more than 1,000
people in jobs.
Applicants who find work pay $100 of their first month’s wages to the
agency for setting up interviews with prospective employers, says Ricardo
Elder, 33, the employment company’s co-owner. Most of the applicants are
undocumented. Elder leaves it to employers to check their residency status.
Raquel Tibares, 25, found work through the agency as a live-in domestic
helper. She came from Guadalajara, Mexico, two years ago and would rather
do something else. But she does not speak English, lacks marketable skills
and is undocumented. She stays with a family in Laguna Beach on weekdays,
caring for a 2-year-old girl, cleaning a three-bedroom house, doing the
laundry and ironing — all for $180 a week.
“I know that they should be paying more,” Tibares says. “But they treat
me well, and I don’t have to pay rent or buy food.”
On weekends, she stays with her sister — and her sister’s husband and
four children — in a two-bedroom apartment on French Street. One reason
she took the job was to escape the crowded living conditions.
But just getting to work can be difficult, especially when her brother-in-law
can’t give her a ride and her boss can’t pick her up. On those occasions,
she rides the bus. Three buses, to be precise, for a 2 1/2-hour trip from
Santa Ana to Laguna Beach.
“You really waste a lot of time riding the buses,” she says. “But at
least they are there. Otherwise, I couldn’t get to my job.”
Some without steady jobs sell pizzas on street corners, while others
in trucks loaded with chilies, spices, rice and beans routinely ply the
neighborhood like ice cream vendors. Business thrives, despite city-imposed
peddling restrictions and a ban on unlicensed street vendors.
“It’s the only job I can do right now,” says Lourdes Cruz, 28, who sells
Mexican sweet breads. “It lets me take care of my children. I don’t need
a green card. And I can have a good time talking to my neighbors.”
By day, she stays home with her two children, Javier Jr., 6, and Jesse,
3. By night, she walks door-to-door in the community, carrying a large
metal tray piled high with muffins and an assortment of strudels and puff
pastries coated with sugar and butter or filled with fruit. She is good
at what she does and pockets profits of about $20 a day, selling the pastries
for 50 cents apiece.
The money helps buy clothing, food and gifts for her children and husband,
Javier, a construction worker. Their combined income is about $1,200 a
month, barely enough to cover the rent, utilities, car payment and other
necessities. Cruz is proud that she has been in this country only four
years and already has a business, however modest.
“I’m not making a fortune, but at least it’s something,” the Guadalajara
native says. Legal immigrants usually fare better. Jose Mijangos, a Guatemala
native, earns $9 an hour working 12-hour days as the head custodian at
an electronics company. He is trying to save enough money to move to El
Salvador, his wife, Isabel’s, native country, and buy a home and a big-rig
truck. She makes $5.50 an hour at a plastics factory.
Every night, they light a candle to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s
patron saint, to give thanks for their jobs and the legal status they
acquired as refugees from war-torn countries.
“We are fortunate that we don’t have to live with the fear of losing
our jobs or being deported,” Jose says. But despite their relative success,
they have worries.
Their daughter, Ana Cristina, 4, spends most of her day at a baby sitter’s
house. Her first words, her first steps, were in front of the sitter,
not her parents.
“I’m heartbroken, because I feel we are missing out on our daughter’s
childhood,” says Isabel, 23, who came to Orange County five years ago.
“It’s wonderful to be prospering here in the U.S. But always, there is
a price.”
Though the couple can afford the $800 rent on their two-bedroom duplex,
they wonder whether Isabel should quit her job to spend more time with
Ana Cristina. Her husband looks forward to the day when they both can
quit.
“Now I want out,” he says. “I’m tired of working six days a week and
seeing other people get rich off our labor.”
Lourdes Cruz, selling sweet breads door-to-door, talks of opening her
own bakery. It is a distant dream, and perhaps unrealistic, but she is
encouraged. “Hey, there’s a lot of immigrants who have come here seeking
a better life and found it,” she says. “Why not me?”
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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