Thread: Immigrant's Lives Continue as it Did in Their Native Country

For many immigrants in the Valley, life continues as it did in their native countries
By Tony Castro,.Staff Writer
07/13/2008

PACOIMA - The Mexican ranchero music blaring from the corner jukebox drowned out most of what the afternoon lunch crowd at La Costa Azul restaurant was saying.

It could have been any one of thousands of Mexican diners throughout Los Angeles: Mirrored advertisements for Corona Extra, Tecate and Budweiser. A painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe and another of her discoverer St. Juan Diego. Votive candles above the shelves of glasses.

And the day's shrimp specials chalked on a board: Camarones Rancheros. Camarones al Mojo de Alo. Camarones a la Diabla. Camarones Empanizados. Camarones Ahogados. Camarones Imperiales. Camarones a la Plancha.

"You can now live in some communities in America and live your entire life as if you were still in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras," Pacoima neighborhood activist Edwin Ramirez says while munching one of La Costa Azul's house specialties.

But there is no hint of braggadocio in his observation. Instead, there is a sense of ironic sadness and lament.

"I straddle two worlds - and they are both my own," says Ramirez. "Culturally, it's good that Spanish is spoken universally in a lot of communities like Pacoima. But it's not good when it doesn't allow you to assimilate into the new society. There are people here (from Central America) who have been here since the 1970s whose English is still worse than that of kindergartners.

"They've never had to learn English, and what you end up with is a large population that is dependent on the system for translators when they are exposed to the outside American society, and that's a cost we have to bear."

Staying Mexican'

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained last year to a convention of Latino journalists that Mexican and Central American immigrants were "staying Mexican" because they weren't learning English, he just may have been talking about much of the Northeast San Fernando Valley.

Today in Pacoima, Sun Valley and other areas of the Northeast Valley, Latino immigrants can do everything from shop and work to service their vehicles and get health care - all without having to learn English or interact with non-Latinos.

On one spring afternoon, Ramirez unloaded his 5-month-old daughter Alexandra from his black Volkswagen in front of La Costa Azul on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and surveyed the neighborhood.

The old El Tigre market and tortilleria building is across the street, which is lined with businesses such as Raspada Xpress, Golfo de Fonseca Mexican restaurant, a hardware store offering "servicios cellulares prepagados" - prepaid cell phones - and Vigo Envios de Dinero, where each week immigrants send money to relatives back home.

Walk into any of these businesses and the first language - often the only language - spoken is Spanish.

In La Costa Azul, the Salvadoran-born Ramirez and his lunch partner are the only ones who speak English during an entire afternoon.

Too dependent?

Ramirez, who along with three generations of his family has lived in the United States for three decades, comfortably drifts into Spanish with Latino neighbors who greet him.

"I've felt and I've had differences with my wife about it - that Latinos are being pampered," says Ramirez. "We're being catered to. We're being made more and more dependent because there's always a service for everything that we need.

"Not just Latinos, but in general, the government has spent too much money on services that turn people into being more dependent. There's no reason to fight for anything if you're getting what you need."

Pacoima and the surrounding Northeast Valley are growing evidence of how Central American and Mexican immigrants are increasingly forming linguistic, cultural, economic and sometimes even political enclaves outside the traditional American mainstream.

But experts and educators say that is no different than the ethnic pockets American cities have always fostered - Little Italy in New York, the Irish community in South Boston, Chinatowns in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"The Spanish-speaking community remains intact because it's constantly being replenished through new immigration," says Rachel Moran, director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley.

It is that ongoing immigration, say experts, that also tends to perpetuate the perception of a dual society and overshadows the assimilation of many longer-standing immigrants like the Ramirez family.

From the day they stepped foot in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, the Ramirez family members immersed themselves in assimilating into the dominant culture of their adopted homeland.

They learned English at night school and entered the long route toward citizenship. They built two successful small businesses. Edwin Ramirez helped found two charter schools in Pacoima that his son attended.

Ramirez himself became a parents' leader at the schools and in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Smitten with community activism, in the 1990s he turned to work in former Mayor Richard Riordan's charter reform movement meant to empower local neighborhoods.

"I believed in Mayor Riordan's idea of neighborhood councils and dedicated myself to passage of charter reform," says Ramirez, who then became a founder of the Pacoima Neighborhood Council and eventually its president.

Dual society

But day after day, Ramirez himself must reconcile his and his family's Americanization with the reality in which he lives.

"It's very complicated," says Stanford history professor Al Camarillo of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. "To say there's not assimilation because they're close to their home country is just a gross generalization. That's not to say there's not some validity to saying that, but this is a very large group of people.

"Immigrants tend to live in immigrant neighborhoods, and that reinforces language use and Mexican national identity. But that's not true for everyone."

A recent study by the Manhattan Institute found that Mexican and Central American immigrants - especially those in the country illegally - had among the lowest assimilation rates of all immigrants.

But it also found that while there may be a general appearance of a dual society in some communities, there also is a slow-but-steady move toward assimilation.

The longer immigrants live in the United States, the study concluded, the more characteristics of native citizens they tend to take on.
"This is something unprecedented in U.S. history," says professor Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke University, author of the study. "It shows that the nation's capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong."

Consider these findings from the latest U.S. Census Bureau:

Most Latino immigrants learn and speak English quite well. Only about 2.5 percent of American residents speak only Spanish. The majority of residents of Spanish-speaking households speak English "very well."
Only 7 percent of the children of Latino immigrants speak Spanish as a primary language, and virtually none of their children do.
Immigrants share the traditional value that the family is the core social unit in the U.S. Some 62 percent of immigrants over age 15 are married, compared to 52 percent of natives.

The majority of Latinos who entered the U.S. before 1980 have become citizens, and the majority of immigrants also own their own homes.
At a table near the front window of La Costa Azul recently, several Latino men debated the merits of a new American-made pickup versus an import.

Near the back, Luz and Herman Garcia planned their daughter's quincea era over lunch and concerns about their daughter's dreams.

"Our daughter seems more interested in her cheerleading than she does in her quincea era," says Luz. "She's a teenager. Her goal is to move to Texas and become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader."

At another table, two plumbers shared a large plate of Camarones a la Plancha while talking about the previous night's Dodgers game.

"Latinos," says Los Angeles author Joel Kotkin, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, "represent the city's grass-roots future - from its aspiring working class to a rapidly growing middle class.

"They are the city's emerging majority. Their ownership of small businesses has exploded, increasing nearly fivefold since the 1980s. They constitute the majority of new homebuyers in many Southland communities.

"Few can deny that, ultimately, Latinos - their music, their cultural values and political sensibilities - will reshape the essence of Los Angeles in the new century."

And while it may not appear that Edwin Ramirez and his family typify the stereotype of the immigrant experience in America, they fit the image that emerges from census data.

"You should not come here and expect to live the same way you lived where you came from," says Ramirez. "There's nothing wrong with keeping your culture. You keep your culture. You keep your roots.

"But you cannot have the same life. You have to be part of your new community."

Ramirez says he knew that the day he arrived in the U.S.

Man of the house

"When I first came to America, I was working days and going to school at night," he says. "I was translating everything that came to the house (because) my mom had a hard time learning English. My brother and my sisters were too young.

"My sisters went to school. My brother went to work - his choice. I didn't have much of a choice. I became the man of the house. I was the oldest and the responsibility fell upon me."

In time, he and his brother built their own gardening and packaging businesses, while also making sure their sisters finished school.

"For a long time, I've believed that change will come from within," says Ramirez. "That if I do things different, I'll force you to do things different, better. That you can make a difference and that it's important to be a role model, especially for those you love."

Three years ago, Ramirez, his wife Marybell - a teacher at Pacoima Middle School - and his son Ivan moved into their own home, where they now often entertain family and friends with carne asada cookouts in their spacious backyard.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Ivan had just returned home after his sophomore year at Lewis & Clark College, and held his baby sister as his father welcomed guests and kept an eye on the grill.

"I grew up sometimes living in a single room, just me and my dad, because of financial burdens and just tough times," says Ivan. "And now we have this beautiful house, a beautiful family, and I'm going to college.

"So I do realize the sacrifices my dad has made for me now more than ever."

Nearby, his father smiled with approval.

"Why do parents in the country work so hard and sacrifice?" he asks rhetorically. "For our children. It's our hope that they'll have opportunities we didn't.

"There are no regrets. There is only greater hope."

tony.castro@dailynews.com 818-713-3761

Second of three parts.





http://www.dailynews.com/ci_9872546?source=rss_viewed

"I straddle two worlds - and they are both my own," says Ramirez. "Culturally, it's good that Spanish is spoken universally in a lot of communities like Pacoima. But it's not good when it doesn't allow you to assimilate into the new society. There are people here (from Central America) who have been here since the 1970s whose English is still worse than that of kindergartners.

Bingo.....they are not assimilating because they don't HAVE to.

My question is.....why would you want to recreate a country you were fleeing from?

That is how they take over. first it's a neighborhood, then a city then a state. This needs to be reversed if I want to experience the latin culture then I will travel. But I don't want to live in it at any cost.

This whole article is bogus because it doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants when presenting percentages. IMO, the pro-illegal alien advocates have done a good job of obfuscating the truth where legal and illegal immigration is concerned. Their refusal to differentiate between the two types of immigration is misleading and dishonest.

I wonder if the people providing the percentages used in this article are the same people that keep telling us we only have 12 million illegal aliens?