Keeping Dreams Alive in the Best of Times

Reyna Perez graduated from high school four years ago. It was, the commencement speaker said, the best of times. She believed it. She was an immigrant child of immigrant parents, a 19-year-old with a strong back and a broad, sensible face. In the family, they said Reyna was the go-getter, the one destined for big things.

In her cap and gown, she marched up to get her diploma. Then she went home with her mom and sister and kid brother, to wait. It had been three years since her parents had applied for her papers; soon the whole family would be legal. Just one little work permit and one nine-digit Social Security number and she could get a job, go to college, be on her way.

Is there any seed more resilient than a child’s trust? Is there any season less sincere than “the best of times?” Three years went by, and when she thinks about them, her meek voice rises: “Every day, I looked in the mail for those papers. Every day. Sometimes I would go two times, just to see if I missed something. I’d think, ‘Could my parents have just forgotten?’ I couldn’t do anything. I stayed home, cleaning and cooking and baby-sitting. People said, ‘Just go down to 7th and Alvarado in L.A. and get some fake papers,’ but I don’t believe in that stuff, and what if I got caught?”

Finally, long past the point of big things and go-getting, the federal government deigned to send the papers. Reyna Perez was 22. She literally ran for the want ads, but even in the best of times, there are only so many years a girl can afford to lose.

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It is said that this is the land of boundless opportunity, but for those without skill or privilege, this has long since ceased to be reliably true. For a generation, it has gotten steadily harder to reach that crucial second rung of the ladder. The good jobs--the ones that pay the rent--seemed to Reyna Perez to be “for people who were smart and could do things,” not for the likes of her.

She went to work at McDonald’s, the worst shift, noon to 7 p.m. No time for second jobs and night classes. She could see her future waiting to trap her, even as she copied down 800 numbers for rip-off diploma mills. Then one day, she saw an ad in the Yellow Pages for the federal government’s Job Corps. It said Free Training. She applied. They brought her to downtown Los Angeles, to their cluster of aging, ugly buildings. First, they made her work on her math and English. Then they sat her down at a computer. She was so inept, she cried.

And yet, she kept going back to that keyboard, in off-hours, on weekends, again and again. All the while, the Job Corps people kept pushing. Saying Reyna Perez was destined for bigger things.

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Of course, none of this drama reached the public radar. For the 34 years it has been in existence, the Job Corps has been notable mainly for its unassuming efficiency. Unlike the other government agencies that would dither for years with an immigrant child’s future, the Job Corps--one of the last vestiges of the old Great Society--offers more than lip service to ideals like hope and opportunity.

Since 1964, it has provided vocational training, education and general bucking-up to more than 1.7 million people 24 and under. If I run on about it, it is because it has never been as valuable as it is now, in this “best of times.” We may have the lowest unemployment rate in a generation, but it rests on a legion of minimum-wage, dead-end jobs. The notion that people go anywhere after they start at the bottom is a cruel joke in this knowledge economy.

The fortunate many who hit the ground running have no idea--no idea--how hard it is now for a minimum-wage worker to get just a glimpse of the good life, just a used car in the garage. Nor do they grasp the cost of self-betterment. Not so with the people at the Job Corps, who sink up to $25,000 into every kid they take in.

Last week was their commencement. There were about 175 graduates. There was the dropout from South-Central who had worked her way back to a secretarial job, the wannabe musician who got real and got back on track toward a college degree. There was the single mother from San Jose whose baby had sickle-cell anemia, and who, by the end of the program, had gone from a job cleaning bedpans to a $14-an-hour career as a licensed vocational nurse.

And there was Reyna Perez of Echo Park, battered shoes peeping from her graduation gown, the recipient of a YWCA award and a $1,000 Texaco scholarship. She has a day job lined up. Her next goal: a degree in computer science.

“Hopefully, I might even get into UCLA,” she says, “the university of my dreams.” And who knows? I have heard it said that Reyna Perez is destined for big things.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.