Family Values

Thin and shy, Adela Carranza walks to Oxnard College. She studies until her forehead aches and her eyes burn. And she vows not to falter, for there is more at stake than her grade point average.

“I won’t fail, because I want to be somebody,” the 19-year-old said on a chilly December morning as she waited for classes to begin. “And I want my brothers and sisters to see they can do it too.”

As a college student, Adela is a trailblazer in a farm worker family typical of many from the hardscrabble villages of rural Mexico.

In fact, the Carranzas stand out among poor immigrants in south Oxnard; they made news in 1993 when 43 family members escaped a flash fire amid the worst crowding in city history.

Now, 4 1/2 years later, the families of six Carranza brothers who once occupied

a single three-bedroom rental have turned a tragedy into a story of hard work, good fortune and success. They have risen from the ashes in small steps.

Adela--unable to speak much English four years ago but an A student in English by the time she was a high school senior--became the first member of her parents’ extended families to attend college when she enrolled in September.

Adela, brother David and cousin Alicia became the first high school graduates in the family when Hueneme High School awarded them diplomas in June. And David is now enrolled in Oxnard College for the spring semester, hoping to become a police officer.

All six Carranza brothers now earn more money than ever before--two make more than $20,000 a year compared with the $6,000 to $8,000 before the fire.

Five of the brothers, all seasonal strawberry pickers in 1993, now work full time: a mechanic, a machine operator, a maintenance worker, and two packers in a chicken-processing plant.

A sixth brother, awaiting the next bean or strawberry harvest, is enrolled in a machinist training program.

Five wives work at least part time in packing or field jobs too.

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Two Carranza brothers have saved enough money to buy their own homes.

Brother Ruperto Carranza became the family’s first adult U.S. citizen when he was naturalized last December.

All six brothers were illegal immigrants when they arrived in Oxnard as teenagers or young men in the 1970s.

But now all family members are legal residents because of amnesty programs and births in this country.

“Things have been getting better ever since the house burned,” said Ruperto, a city of Oxnard maintenance worker who just bought a $50,000 double-wide mobile home after saving $14,000 for the down payment.

“You can see the progress being made in this country,” he said. “It’s a real beautiful thing.”

A sure sign of prosperity is stacked around a Christmas tree at Adela’s apartment. For the first time, parents Javier, 46, and Bertha, 43, had enough money to buy Christmas presents this year. Eleven youngsters--age 4 through 19--will open gifts of shoes, shirts and pants on Christmas morning.

“Things they need the most,” Javier explained. “There’s no money for toys.”

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Not that their lives are easy: Javier and Bertha, for instance, still can afford to serve only homemade tortillas, beans, rice and potatoes for every meal. The kids wash it down with Kool-Aid.

The six Carranza couples are not well-educated and, at best, speak broken English. So they cannot help their 38 children very much as they struggle to read and write in a language not spoken at home.

Taken together, the Carranzas may represent the immigrant story in Ventura County.

“We’ve had several work here--brothers and cousins and uncles,” said Kevin Muller, a foreman at Pictsweet Frozen Foods in Oxnard. “They work real well. They’re just proud and conscientious.”

Graciela Gandara, principal at Hathaway School in Oxnard, knows the family too. And she identifies with their story--she arrived from Mexico herself at age 10. About half the students in her school are immigrant children in bilingual classes.

“They are good little kids, and they’re well cared for,” Gandara said of the three school-age sons of Ruperto and Rosalva Carranza. “The mom is here for breakfast, and we just have to pry the children away from her. I see a lot of concerned parents. We just had parent conferences, and we had about 100% turnout.”

Yet, even as the Carranza family has begun its climb out of poverty, the strains that immigrants have placed on housing, education, health and social services have prompted a backlash--with calls to reduce legal immigration and halt public services for illegal immigrants.

In Ventura County, legal and illegal immigrants are predominantly Latino, and the Latino population grew twice as fast as the rest of the county during the 1980s.

More than one in four county residents is Latino. One in every five local schoolchildren speaks limited English or none at all.

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About 30% of the county’s welfare cases and 48% of Medi-Cal recipients involve people who speak only Spanish. About 15% of 8,407 families receiving the basic welfare subsidy--Aid to Families with Dependent Children--include at least one undocumented parent, county officials say.

A Times Poll this fall found strong resentment of illegal immigrants and a belief by many county residents that immigrants--legal or not--take more from the economy than they give back. Thirty-eight percent said immigrants are a drain on society, while 24% said they are a benefit overall.

Stephen R. Frank of Simi Valley, who led the county’s campaign for a 1994 ballot measure denying public services to illegal immigrants, said he does not distinguish between immigrants who are currently undocumented and those who were once illegal but are now legal residents--such as the Carranzas.

“Granted, they work their butts off, and there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Frank said. “But their success comes at the expense of families that did not break the law and are needy too. And the money that was spent on these families came from others who worked hard and expected their tax dollars to go to those who did not break the law.”

On a personal level, however, the story of the Carranzas’ two-decade struggle to escape the poverty of a dusty village in northern Mexico resonates because it has been played out for 200 years in immigrant communities throughout America.

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The Carranza brothers displaced by the 1993 fire--Javier, Baltazar, Felipe, Rogelio, Ruperto and Jose--are six of 12 children born in the farm village of Los Cerritos, Michoacan, to farmer Jose Guadalupe Carranza, now 75.

The family’s nine sons had all moved to Oxnard by about 1980, because work as sharecroppers on government-owned fields yielded only enough corn and beans to last two or three months. There was some extra work for them as laborers for rich property owners, but it brought only a few dollars a day.

So as the sons matured, they came north one at a time to the Oxnard Plain, where the soil is rich and the jobs, though seasonal, could be counted on from year to year.

“We came here to work,” said Javier, the eldest brother. “And that is what we do.”

By 1987, with rents increasing rapidly, five brothers shared the same L Street house. About 20 family members shared the residence. A sixth brother, all six wives and 30 children lived there by March 1993, when an overloaded electrical cord forced them into the street with a fiery pop.

As it turned out, the resulting fire was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. The Carranzas were homeless due to catastrophe, so they quickly moved to the top of the Oxnard Housing Authority’s five-year waiting list.

Within weeks, they were living in six spare but clean houses or apartments with rents subsidized, so they paid only 30% of their incomes for housing.

The families also found they qualified for food stamps and free hospital care for newborn babies. But they said they did not like the feeling of being on the dole.

Shortly after the fire, Javier said, “I am proud that I was able to do it and not ask the government for help. I hope in a couple of months I will no longer need help.”

As it turns out, he still does.

With 13 mouths to feed, including one daughter born since the fire and two newly arrived sons from another marriage, Javier still lives in a city housing project and receives other public assistance.

A strong man with a friendly face and gentle manner, Javier works as a mechanic at Oxnard’s Pictsweet yard and travels to company facilities in Bakersfield, Brawley and Yuma, servicing farm equipment.

It’s 40 hours a week in the off season, as many as 100 a week during harvest. But it’s a very good job, Javier said, that pays about $23,000 a year. And he doesn’t have to break his back picking strawberries.

“There are times when I work 15 to 18 hours a day: I can’t do any more,” Javier said. Son David, who drove a bean picker last summer, will continue to work part time as a $5.15-an-hour restaurant busboy after he starts college next month.

“I will help all my children as long as they continue going to school,” Javier said, sitting at a small dinette table at his south Oxnard apartment with younger brothers Baltazar and Ruperto.

As their wives and teenage children looked on, the men said they are thankful for the government assistance they have received.

But step by step, they say they are freeing themselves from dependence on anyone else.

Baltazar, 44, Blandina, 40, and their eight children took a big step forward when Baltazar landed permanent work as a machine operator at an Oxnard plastics plant. Blandina works when called to pack onions, strawberries and calamari. Their two oldest children also have jobs.

“I left the housing subsidy behind,” Baltazar said proudly. “But I still get Medi-Cal and food stamps.”

Perhaps more than the others, Ruperto, 34, Rosalva, 24, and their five small children are making it on their own.

Ruperto earns more than $20,000 a year maintaining the Squires Drive project for the Oxnard Housing Authority. And beginning in January, when he moves into his new mobile home, he will receive no government subsidies at all, he said.

“I feel I can do for myself,” Ruperto said. “I feel free.”

Ruperto made an impression with city housing authorities almost from the day he moved into the Squires project after the fire, becoming the tenant association president and leading a drive to expel families whose children vandalized the apartments.

“It was just an intimidating atmosphere for the families,” housing officer Robert Martinez recalled. “Ruperto got well-known for his courage and assertiveness. He was willing to go to court and testify.”

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Since he was hired 2 1/2 years ago, Ruperto also has pleased superiors by sprucing up the housing project and dressing sharply in a pressed uniform.

“He’s changed this whole neighborhood, basically made it nicer,” supervisor Ben Abiba said. “We don’t have the most glamorous job in the city, but he takes pride in it.”

While Ruperto, Javier and Baltazar have stayed in Oxnard, the other displaced brothers have moved to try to better themselves--Jose to Santa Paula and Rogelio and Felipe halfway across the nation to rural America to find a living wage.

The two brothers and their wives now work for Tyson Foods in Rogers, Ark., toiling in a chicken-packing plant for $6.45 an hour, and living better than ever before.

“It’s not so much, but it’s more than we were making there,” Rogelio’s wife, Pilar, said.

And instead of being wedged into one small apartment, Pilar, 39, Rogelio, 37 and their four children rent a large house with a big yard in a nice neighborhood for $628 a month, Pilar said.

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With steady work, the couple’s welfare assistance ended.

“We were preparing for the day we’d let go of all government services,” Pilar said. “So now we’re learning to survive off the earnings at the plant.”

Felipe and his family live “pretty far away, about 14 blocks,” in the same small town in the Ozark Mountains, Pilar said.

Even that close, the families miss each other because they lived communally for so long--sharing food, income and child care.

It’s worse for the children.

“All the cousins were like brothers and sisters,” Pilar said. And now they don’t see the families in California at all. “Oh, it hurts a lot,” she said.

This cold Christmas in Arkansas will probably bring a toy for each of her children, Pilar said. But maybe not much celebration. “If there’s chicken, we’ll probably work Christmas Day,” she said.

The youngest of the Carranza brothers, Jose, says he feels isolated too, even though he lives in Santa Paula, only a few miles from his brothers.

But generally, times are pretty good, say Jose and wife Marianna, both 32. They still pick strawberries, but Jose also drove a bean picker at Pictsweet last summer. And while drawing unemployment in the off-season, Jose will soon begin a six-month course to be a machinist, he said.

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Even on field wages, Jose managed to save $12,000 cash for a single-wide mobile home in an attractive trailer park near the Santa Paula Freeway.

“We were able to save little by little to buy a place like this,” Jose said recently, as three of his four children huddled on a couch nearby. “It was a sacrifice to buy even little things the kids need.”

Araceli, 12, the oldest child, is honored by a refrigerator sticker proclaiming her a top student at Isbell Middle School.

“I wish for her and all my children that they could be something great,” Jose said. “I’ll let them pick the profession--but no field work. I don’t want them to do the same thing that I did.”

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Work and education.

They are the reasons the Carranzas say they came to the United States--and the reasons they stay.

That is why they are frustrated by the angry debate now waged over the worth of immigrants.

Javier says he hears the harsh words on television news. Ruperto says he feels the sting in the community. Baltazar says he believes he must work harder than others to keep his job.

“They can always find someone else and pay them less,” Baltazar said.

Although Javier now has a good job, he said his many years in the U.S. job market have reinforced his feeling that Americans think “I’m made to work a lot more, a lot harder, than the others. And to never complain.”

He takes particular exception to the common belief that he, his brothers, their wives and their children came to this country to take--and not to give.

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“The people who come here don’t take any jobs from anybody,” he said. “We help the government by working. They take away a lot of taxes, and we don’t see much of that.”

Federal legislative moves to take away benefits from legal residents prompted Ruperto to become a citizen Dec. 13, 1996, he said.

“But that’s fine,” he said. “It feels great to protect your rights. And as I began to master the [English] language, I started to feel like I was part of this country. And we do feel this country is a little bit better than our own.”

The Carranzas, however, say they don’t talk too much about such things.

They focus instead on their children, and how to make life better for them.

At Hathaway School, for instance, Principal Gandara said immigrant mothers could hardly be more concerned and involved. “We have to swish them out of the classrooms so we can start teaching,” she said. “They come right into the office and ask who their children are hanging out with.”

That does not mean the parents are equipped to help their children. Some, especially farm worker parents, are not educated even in Spanish and are stumped by work their children bring home from school.

That makes the hurdles they clear even more impressive, Gandara said.

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For that reason, teacher Teri Vasquez gives special attention to two Carranza children she has taught at Hathaway--7-year-old Daniel and 6-year-old James, the oldest children of Ruperto and Rosalva.

“The mom’s supportive of her kids,” Vasquez said. “She brings them to school on time. But in terms of academics, I don’t think she knows what to do.”

So Vasquez helps both with their homework after school.

“At first when the two boys would come in, mom would stand outside,” she said. “Now she’ll come in and say, ‘Hi.’ She’s no longer afraid or intimidated.”

At the other end of the education cycle, teachers at Hueneme High say the older Carranza children are generally not gifted academically, but simply refuse to fail.

“Adela started off at [a lower level] in an English as a Second Language class,” counselor Joel Lovstedt said. “But when she graduated she was taking college prep English and she got an A. That’s an accomplishment.”

Her brother David might have come even further, failing some classes as a freshman, but getting Bs and Cs as a senior, Lovstedt said.

“Those are two very good kids,” Hueneme High ESL teacher Maurice Shimabuku said. “They were very hard-working and respectful in class. That’s typical of the Carranzas.”

Shimabuku has taught seven or eight Carranza cousins over the past five years, he said, and he has been impressed with how they help each other succeed.

“I have four in my class right now, and they’ll say, ‘I know how to do that because Adela showed me,’ or ‘David showed me this because you taught him that.’ That speaks for their strong sense of family.”

Then again, Shimabuku said, the Carranzas are not so different from many other newly arrived immigrant children he has taught who seem happy just to have hope for the future.

“They’re a refreshing bunch to work with,” Shimabuku said. “Only in a America, you know, man. Only in America.”