Program Develops Immigrant Literacy

There were no books in Alicia Flores’ childhood home in Mexico. The only ones she saw were at school. By ninth grade, when she went to work in the Zacatecas cornfields, school and schoolbooks were over for her.

No one ever read Flores a story -- not once. So now when the 30-year-old mother tries to read to her two small daughters, she has no model. She lacks confidence. “I don’t know what to do,” she said softly in Spanish. “I want them to love books.”

So each Thursday morning she heads to Sharpe Elementary School in Pacoima to sit in a classroom with 16 other mothers, most of whom are recent immigrants too -- from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico.

They come to the school for a free program called FamilyRead, which is designed to help them build skills that can make reading a part of their family life. In the class, conducted in Spanish, the women take turns reading aloud. When one stumbles on a word, the others rush in to help.

FamilyRead is about literacy. It’s also about community. Many of the women live isolated lives, unable to speak English, at home alone with their children.

“This is about the only outlet for these women,” said teacher Martha Gurule.

In each class, she tells the women that no subject is off-limits, no opinion wrong. They listen. A discussion about a picture book can, in a single moment, prompt a confession about an abusive husband or about loneliness.

FamilyRead is one of many programs offered by Friends of the Family, a family resource center in Van Nuys celebrating its 30th anniversary. The center, which serves 8,000 adults and children, is one of 56 charities in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties that received money from last year’s Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign.

Friends of the Family is a community safety net, offering individual counseling, programs for teen mothers and fathers, classes to help mothers and their just-turning-teen daughters communicate and programs to give young boys the tools they need to solve problems constructively in school and at home. Help comes in English, Spanish and Armenian.

As their children sit on the other side of a partition, watching cartoons, the women in the Pacoima classroom learn to look at a book and recognize its main themes. Conversation flows.

On this morning, a book about a child visiting grandparents at their ranch in Mexico strikes a chord. The ranch has no electricity or running water. Most of the women grew up without these things. “They want everything for their children,” Gurule said. “They had so little themselves.”

This holiday season, The Times is highlighting agencies that benefit from its fund-raising campaign established in 2000, which is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund.

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