Thread: In Santa Ana,CA Mexican Villagers Re-Created Community

Going back to 1997 when reporters wrote the stories that didn't hide the Union involvement. It is still a tear jerker for sympathy, but the numbers are interesting.

In Santa Ana, Mexican Villagers Re-Created Community


Immigration: As jobs opened up, families headed north. But with success came problems.


August 04, 1997|
NANCY CLEELAND | TIMES STAFF WRITER

SANTA ANA — In a haggard Orange County neighborhood of rental houses and faceless apartment buildings, of litter and rusting shopping carts, the rebirth of a dying Mexican village began.
Here, near 1st Street and Grand Avenue in the heart of Santa Ana, the first people from Granjenal settled 35 years ago, after two decades of following crops around the American Southwest under the U.S.-sponsored bracero program.


Hundreds of relatives and friends followed--some with papers, some illegally--as their town in the parched hills of northern Michoacan state emptied.

Orange County's fast-growing suburban sprawl created a hungry job market, and Granjenal's people developed a reputation as uncomplaining and adept at the low-skilled muscle work that was the foundation of the construction trade--digging ditches, pouring concrete, laying irrigation lines and planting sod.

Their new neighborhood was affordable, and more important, within walking distance of Laborers Union Local 652, where most men reported at 5 a.m. to be trucked to work at new tracts in the southern part of the county.

Newly arrived families shared apartments or houses near each other, slowly re-creating their community and cushioning the jolting transition from rural Third World poverty to urban blue-collar life.
At the same time, they helped transform Santa Ana from a city of English-speaking, American-born Anglos to one that is overwhelmingly Latino and Spanish-speaking, and increasingly foreign-born.

Experiences Repeated Elsewhere

Their story is typical of immigrant movement from rural areas, a process known to anthropologists as network migration. "A pioneer manages to establish a foothold in a place and then serves as the focal point for others," said Leo Chavez, an anthropology professor at UC Irvine. Those who follow cluster together for a generation or two before assimilating into American culture.

Joined by weddings, baptisms, funerals and Sunday Mass, by twice-a-year dances at the union hall and by soccer games that pitted them against other immigrants, the people of Granjenal held on tightly to the intimacy of a small town.

Over time, however, the immigrants learned that with opportunity and vastly higher incomes came financial pressures, fear of crime, occasional--though still rare--divorce and unrelenting competition from others with the same dreams.

They could not maintain the tranquillity and connectedness of rural Mexico in urban America, a place that many of Granjenal's people found to be isolating, immoral and dangerous.

"There are things people lose when they leave their roots, and they don't realize it until it's too late," said Francisco Lopez, 59, a construction worker who settled in Santa Ana in 1962 and eventually brought his wife and eight children north.


Lopez would do it again, he said, because he had no choice. He could not have provided for his children by working his tiny plot of land in Granjenal. Still, he dreams of the easy pace of his hometown, where he knew every neighbor and where life presented fewer possibilities but was safer and simpler.

"I think of life here as a sort of slavery," he said. "There is a constant need to work to pay the bills. . . . We have an expression for the life here. We call it the platter of gold--you can touch it, but it never belongs to you."

Lopez is a stocky man with a soft handshake and small eyes that shine with pride when he speaks of the Orange County tracts he helped build--Mission Viejo, Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita. "Leisure World, the place with the big globe, the men of Granjenal built that," he said.

The same look of pride dances across his face when Lopez recalls his daughter's graduation in June from Santa Ana's Century High, in a class with six other children of Granjenal, and when he tells of his son's recent swearing-in as a U.S. citizen.

As Americans, his children have far more opportunity, said Lopez, whose education ended at the fifth grade. That alone justifies the sacrifices he made, he said.

But the transition was hard on his generation. For 35 years, Lopez worked back-straining jobs. He endured years of separation from his family, and once they joined him here, he struggled to pay for rent, food and clothing.

Even now, he struggles.

Every morning at 6, Lopez reports to the union hall, a beige, one-story building that has become a second home to Granjenal's immigrants. In a windowless back room, he joins dozens of men from his hometown at large round tables, where he plays cards and banters, and waits for his name to be called.

Lopez, who is paid only when he works, has waited for months.
During Orange County's three-decade-long building boom, he and other Granjenal men prospered. But work is scarce now, in part because more jobs are nonunion, and there is more competition from younger immigrants.

Desperate for work, many Granjenal men have followed construction jobs to Las Vegas or Arizona, forming yet another set of communities and repeating the pattern of living apart from their families.

But 350 Granjenal immigrants continue to pay their $24-a-month union dues--comprising more than one-tenth of the local's membership, according to the members.


To make ends meet, Lopez and his wife moved in with a son who is buying a home in Santa Ana. Like many of his generation, the son has become his father's hope for the future.

'Something Better With Our Lives'

Born to parents with grade-school educations, many of Granjenal's new generation have finished high school and college. They hold jobs as secretaries, court interpreters, police officers, teachers, real estate brokers and small-business owners.

The extended Granjenal family also includes a psychologist, two attorneys and two doctors.

"The older generation wanted us to study hard and do something better with our lives," said Robert Maldonado, 36, whose father, Epitacio, was one of the original eight men from Granjenal to settle in Santa Ana 35 years ago. "They wanted us to be more than construction workers."

Maldonado, who was brought north when he was 4 years old and has three children, owns a Costa Mesa takeout restaurant called Taqueria El Granjenal and sponsors one of three Granjenal soccer teams in Santa Ana. His team won the Orange County Soccer League championship in June, the second time in five years.

But, like many of his hometown friends, Maldonado has drifted away from his roots as he moved toward the middle class. It's been five years since he visited Granjenal. Several years ago, he bought a house in Irvine and left the old Santa Ana neighborhood. Better schools. Safer community.

"My children come first," Maldonado said. "I've got to think about their futures."

For hundreds of Granjenal immigrants, however, home continues to be a corridor of rental houses and massive apartment blocks between Santa Ana's Main Street and Grand Avenue.

When the first eight Granjenal pioneers settled here, less than one-fifth of the city's residents were Latino and less than one-tenth were foreign-born. But as scores of towns like Granjenal sent workers to California, Orange County's ethnic makeup changed radically.

The change accelerated after 1986, when the U.S. amnesty law granted legal residency to 3 million undocumented immigrants nationwide, including about 140,000 in Orange County. Many workers could then bring their family members north.

Now, according to state estimates, slightly more than half of Santa Ana's 305,000 people were born outside the United States, and about 69% are Latino.

Among the county's new faces are those of Maura Guillen and her seven sons, who came north two years ago to join Maura's husband, Alburio, in a sprawling apartment complex in south-central Santa Ana called the Country.


The boxy brown buildings, separated by narrow rows of clipped grass and spindly trees, bear no resemblance to the sparsely settled Granjenal countryside. Neighbors are close enough to hear each other cough, but most don't know each others' names.

The seven Guillen brothers, ages 12 to 26, squeeze into one bedroom. Maura and Alburio share the other.

Timid and afraid of losing her way, Maura Guillen rarely ventures outside. She spends her days tidying the rooms and cooking for her large family.

A soft, motherly woman with a gracious smile, Maura Guillen said she had dreamed of coming north for years. Now she's not so sure it was a good idea.

The family is together at last, three sons are in school and the rest are working in factories, on construction sites and in an auto parts store. For that, Maura is grateful.

But their lives are limited by fear and isolation. Most evenings, the boys, tall and gangly, straggle home from school and work, walk through the sliding glass door and stay inside until morning. The family gathers on a black sofa of peeling vinyl and watches television to kill the hours.

Every morning, Alburio and his oldest son go to the union and sign up for work. Most days, they return home disappointed. The family is saving for a down payment on a house, but at this rate, they could be confined to the apartment for years, said Alburio, a compact, muscular man of 56.

Afraid of the streets after he was accosted by gang members one night, Alburio said he has another equally great fear: that for all his sacrifice, his sons won't succeed.

Success, but Danger Too

Mothers in Granjenal say sons raised in California grow taller and have a greater chance of success by attending high school and college. But there are trade-offs: the ever-present fear of gangs, drugs and violence.

The Guillen sons have avoided such problems, but the price has been confinement and isolation.

"In Granjenal, you can go walking in the afternoon, you can even walk at night," said Jose Guadalupe Guillen, 16, a junior at Saddleback High School. "Here, people look down when they walk. They all look depressed, everywhere you look. There's so much pressure."

Thirty years ago, when Granjenal had no electricity or running water, the advantages of moving north were clearer, said Vicenta Maldonado, who came here with six children to join her husband, Timoteo Tapia.


Tapia was another of the Granjenal pioneers. He left the village in 1943, joining tens of thousands of Mexican workers hired to replace Americans who had gone to war. He moved to Santa Ana after becoming a legal resident.

Tapia brought his family north as soon as he could, and they settled into a rickety two-bedroom apartment above a Mexican food market called La Chiquita, a few blocks from the Santa Ana train station. They live there still, 31 years and 26 grandchildren later.

Maldonado, a tiny woman with a strong, plucky voice, vividly recalls the day she arrived--March 19, 1966. "I liked Santa Ana right away. A lot more than Granjenal," she said. "For one thing, I didn't have to make tortillas by hand anymore."

Along with electricity and running water, Santa Ana had buses and taxis, health clinics, supermarkets and public schools through the 12th grade--all of which Granjenal lacked.

"Life is better here," said Maldonado, who took the oath of U.S. citizenship in early July. "That's why we came."

http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/04/news/mn-19272/3

Americans did field labor, until they were undercut by illegals.

Growers do save money by using illegal labor, but the rest of us pay the price in money spent on educating and providing health care to their illegal families. In effect, we're paying these people to colonize us, and we don't even need them.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade