Dynamism, Faith Fueled Drive to Build Duarte Hospital

“Everybody has a talent. God gave me a talent with bricks.”

-- Mother Margarita,

hospital’s founder

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The hospital she helped found has closed after nearly 75 years. But Mother Margarita’s legacy of community service and dedication remains as strong as the buildings that she helped shape with her own hands.

Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte shut down its emergency room and its few remaining acute-care beds this month because of financial troubles and a nursing shortage.

But 58 Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart still call its 17-acre grounds home. A nursing home, fertility clinic, chapel and child-care centers remain open, and outpatient services are still offered.

Nothing would be there without the vision and robust personality of Mother Margarita, known as “the builder.” Even now, more than 15 years after her death, her faith serves as the foundation for Santa Teresita.

She was the bricks-and-mortar guiding spirit, collecting the money and even sometimes laying brick herself. She found someone of equal energy and vision to create the hospital’s aesthetic and spiritual legacy: East Los Angeles sculptor Rudolph Vargas.

Mother Margarita was born Maria Concepcion Hernandez in 1903, in the small town of Ameca in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Her parents were deeply religious. When she was 20, she was invited to join the active Carmelite Order in Guadalajara, founded in 1904 by Mother Maria Luisa Josefa.

“If you put me in charge of the sick, the patients will surely die,” she warned the founder and mother superior, whom the nuns called Mother Luisita.

But Mother Luisita chose not to heed the warning and assigned the novice to a hospital. It was 1927, a dangerous time during which Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles was determined to rid the state of religious influence.

Church schools and convents were closed and church property was seized, setting off a backlash by outraged religious militants known as cristeros. That triggered anti-Catholic violence; some zealots went so far as to hang and shoot nuns and priests.

Mother Luisita escorted Sister Margarita, 23, and another nun away from the bloodshed. Disguised as civilians, they crossed the border into the United States.

Sister Margarita had unwisely traded in her sandals for a pair of red high heels, not knowing she would have to hike for several miles over rocky terrain.

“My feet hurt terribly,” she said in a 1986 newspaper interview. “A man kindly said he’d help me,” and she walked “with him on one arm and his wife on the other.”

When the three nuns reached Los Angeles, the Immaculate Heart sisters gave them a home. For three years, they did social work for the growing Mexican immigrant population and started the Little Flower Missionary Home for seven orphaned girls in Lincoln Heights. It is now a day-care center operated by the Carmelite sisters.

More Carmelite nuns emigrated from Mexico and, in 1930, with the blessing of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and a $22,500 loan, they bought a run-down three-acre farm in a Duarte orange grove. There they founded the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart, opening a tuberculosis sanatorium for girls.

It was named for St. Therese of Lisieux, a French-born cloistered Carmelite nun who said life was about “not great deeds but great love.” She had been a nun for nine years when she died of tuberculosis at 24. Pope Pius XI designated her a saint in 1925.

The Mexican rebellion ended in 1929, and Mother Luisita returned to Mexico in 1930. Sister Margarita, then 27, was promoted to mother superior.

She began replacing the dilapidated sanatorium buildings. In the early years, Mother Margarita wielded a trowel with as much energy as a journeyman bricklayer.

“By Christmas [of 1930] we had 16 patients,” she recalled in a 1986 interview. “The government paid us $1.05 for each patient for each day of treatment.”

Mother Margarita believed in tending the soul as well as the mind. When she wanted art for the hospital grounds, she wanted classical works, “not something just semi-artistic.” Art, she believed, served as therapy and inspiration for her patients.

The young Vargas was eager to oblige. He would become known as El Maestro for his sculpting genius. His masterpieces include a Madonna carved from English rosewood that is in the Vatican’s collection.

He also carved the cherubic children and jolly villains for Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

For Santa Teresita, he created more than 50 woodcarvings, including a 500-pound, 8-foot-tall crucifix and a Nativity scene.

He did the work for free, believing that it was his opportunity to leave something behind that would be cared for and appreciated forever.

“Religion is the only entity that keeps and protects real art,” Vargas once said. “In religion, I can grow and create.”

The nun and the sculptor met in 1932 after Mother Margarita saw Vargas’ work at another church and contacted him. Both were natives of Mexico who had fled religious persecution. They remained close friends for the rest of their lives.

With her hospital in hand, Mother Margarita turned to her little flock of Mexican novices and postulants. She insisted that they attend night classes at Monrovia High School to learn English and earn high school diplomas. She received her U.S. citizenship in 1935.

The sisters were a familiar sight in Duarte -- sometimes pushing their stalled 1917 Ford while Mother Margarita worked levers and jiggled the throttle until the jalopy coughed, sputtered and finally started. “You did not dare stop once the motor started,” Mother Margarita said, “so the sisters would dash to jump on the running boards.”

The nuns’ chief duty was to care for young girls ravaged by TB, who came from as far away as Mexico and Navajo lands.

Only relatives, not friends, were allowed to visit patients. But Sister Maria Teresa, now in her 80s, recalled one patient fondly. She “had two boyfriends who quickly became her ‘cousins’ in order to visit her. One ‘cousin’ visited her every Wednesday, while the other visited on Sundays. When she returned years later for a reunion, I asked, ‘Who did you marry?’ She said, ‘The one on Wednesday.’ ”

In 1941, just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mother Margarita opened the Carmelite Sisters’ Sacred Heart Retreat House in Alhambra. There, today, 24 novices and postulants are preparing to take their vows.

In the 1950s, she brought her only sister, Lusita Hernandez, to live at Santa Teresita. For nearly half a century, Lusita sewed the nuns’ brown and black habits. Even the week before her death in 2002, at age 92, she continued to dress the “brides of Christ.”

After treating more than 2,000 tuberculosis patients, the sanatorium closed in 1955 and reopened as a 24-bed hospital, named for Archbishop John J. Cantwell.

Another expansion extended the facility into the city of Monrovia. The cottages originally built for tubercular girls were remodeled to house geriatric women. At its peak, the hospital had nearly 300 beds.

In 1981, it entered rough financial times. Mother Margarita led a drive that raised enough to keep the hospital going and build a five-story medical office building on the grounds.

“You’ve got to have problems or it’s not God’s work,” she said. “If everything goes too smoothly, it’s not the way he wanted it to happen.”

Some called her a miracle worker. But she had more of an earthly view of her accomplishments. “I could say, ‘I have a headache,’ and take two aspirins,” she once said. “I get rid of the headache, so it’s a miracle.”

But it was Vargas, she said, who was the real miracle worker. His works still grace the chapel. They include panels of the Nativity, St. Joseph, St. Therese and 14 stations of the cross.

The day before Vargas died in 1986, at age 82, he was still at work on the grounds. He presented Mother Margarita with two notebooks containing his handwritten autobiography.

“This is my life that I give to you, because you have been my inspiration,” he said. “I am leaving for home tomorrow.”

The books remain the property of the Carmelite sisters.

Two years later, Mother Margarita, 85, followed her friend in death.

“She always told us, ‘The greatest insult that another person can give you is to fear you,’ ” said Sister Michelle, chairwoman of the hospital board. “No one ever feared her. She was our strength and weathered the storm for all of us.”