Against All Odds

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Going from Skid Row to Easy Street is rare, but a few poor Angelenos have achieved a measure of success

Every weekday from morning to night, Antonia Sanchez stands at the end of a dilapidated freeway off-ramp in Hollywood, breathing the fumes of cars driven by motorists who whiz past her with barely a thought.

Carrying a plastic bag of oranges in each hand, she approaches stopped motorists and asks with a nod whether they are interested in making a purchase. Most times they’re not. Once in a while they shell out $2 for one of the 10-pound packages.

Sanchez, 33, has been peddling fruit on Los Angeles street corners for three years now, earning between $600 to $800 a month in a job that has become an economic point of entry for newly arrived immigrants with little education and little command of English.

This is just a way station, she hopes. In a few years she wants to be in a better-paying job and send more than the usual $150 a month to her two teen-aged sons living with her sister in Mexico City.

“I am much better off here economically than I was in Mexico, where I was earning $120 a month cleaning schools,” Sanchez says, speaking in Spanish as she fishes change out of her fanny pack for a customer who bought a bag of oranges. “I need the money for my sons, to get them a better education, to buy them books and pay for school in Mexico. And maybe, if God is willing, they will come here to the United States one day.”

For many in L.A., success is defined by splashy shows of conspicuous consumption like the expensive foreign car, the hand-tailored suits, the matching Kate Spade bag and shoes.

But for the poor, success is measured in less obvious ways: the first credit card, the first car, the first job that pays better than minimum wage. For some, the greatest triumph is getting an apartment in a transitional housing program where they can work toward achieving a high school equivalency.

Behind all the bleak poverty numbers are people who are not just surviving, but moving up. Many are newly arrived, others have been in this country all their lives. Their success cannot be generalized it stems from any number of factors: assistance from family and friends, community outreach programs, language skills, previous job training, and of course, the robust economy.

It also comes from perseverance and just plain luck.

‘Cardboard condo’

Herman Jones Jr. has lived on Skid Row for almost a decade. He would go to shelters for a hot meal or a shower, but for years had no intention of leaving his “cardboard condominium” for anything permanent. To go into a shelter meant rules he didn’t want to follow and people he didn’t want to talk to. It also meant giving up his drug habit.

Jones came to Los Angeles from Texas in 1980. He wanted to move in with his aunt in order to try to escape the bad crowd that had fed his addiction in Texas.

“I lived with my aunt for awhile, but her house had rules I didn’t want to follow,” Jones says. “So I took to the streets, at first staying with friends, then in drug houses. But I even managed to burn those bridges by stealing from my friends, stealing from drug dealers to support my habit. I was doing crack, PCP, weed, alcohol it didn’t make a difference what it was as long as it got me out of myself.”

He became the stereotypical denizen of Skid Row. He pushed three shopping baskets, lived in a cardboard box, and spent his time trying to find his next fix. He was in and out of prison five times on various drug charges.

“My feet stunk so badly you could smell them through my shoes,” he says. “My hair was matted down.”

In the end, Jones says he simply became fed up with such an existence. He became involved with the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger & Homelessness by participating in the organization’s voter registration campaign. His efforts to sign up the homeless to vote eventually led to a job interview with the L.A. Family Housing Corp., an organization that provides homes for the poor.

“The job called for having an A.A. degree, having 10 years of experience in social work and being bilingual,” Jones says. “In the interview I told them I didn’t have any of that. I was real honest about my life. All my experience was life experience. I knew what people would be feeling that came into our offices for service. I knew where they could go and get help, because I had used all those services myself.”

Four hours after the interview, Jones had the job as a service advocate. In the three years since, he has moved to West Los Angeles, bought a new car (a 1999 green Volkswagen Beetle, he gleefully explains) and has gotten married.

His time on Skid Row has served him well in his career, much as he said it would in his job interview.

“From time to time people come in, full of self-pity or in such a state of denial,” Jones says. “I share parts of my story with them and tell them, ‘If I can do it, anybody can do it.’ ”

Some good days, some bad

Those would be encouraging words for an altogether different member of L.A.’s working poor, Maximiliano Martinez. The 33-year-old day laborer has held any number of construction jobs since arriving here 16 years ago from El Salvador. For the last four years, he has been among a group of Spanish-speaking laborers who gather outside a local HomeBase store waiting for construction bosses, landscapers, gardeners and homeowners to drive by, offering employment for a day or two.

While there are some days that Martinez earns up to $10 an hour, there are other days when he earns nothing.

Those are the days when he has doubts about his future. Martinez has no education because he began working at the age of 8 in the family’s cornfield in El Salvador. He is fairly proficient in English, but it would be a chore for him to hold a job requiring him to speak or write English all the time.

Still, he pursues the dream. By being frugal, Martinez says he has amassed $40,000 in savings. One day he hopes to open a fast-food restaurant that serves Mexican or Salvadoran food. “I think I have an idea of what a good business would be,” he says, sticking his hands inside his coat to warm them from the cold wind dancing down the sidewalk. “Do you know where I can get a $100,000 loan?”

If Martinez needs rays of inspiration, he need look no further than Manuel Najera, also from El Salvador and now living in South Central Los Angeles. Najera, 35, arrived in the United States with his sisters and nephews some 20 years ago, fleeing a country in the throes of a civil war.

When he first arrived here, he was too scared to go out of the house. But a year later, he got his first job, dying large bolts of fabric. He worked in that profession for 12 years. After his English improved by attending community adult school, he and a partner started a landscaping and gardening company. Their clients are in Pasadena, Carson, Palos Verdes and South Central Los Angeles.

Martinez who is married, has three children and makes about $30,000 a year is about to become a U.S. citizen. His next business project is to open an auto mechanic shop.

Status, class are crucial

Academics who study recently arrived immigrants have discovered certain factors that often make the difference between a long struggle to budge from the bottom and a quick ride to the top.

“Status and class in one’s country of origin is extremely important. It determines how you come in and where you settle upon arrival,” says Abel Valenzuela Jr., associate director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA. “Many sociologists place an emphasis on place of residence (once an immigrant arrives in the U.S.) because it is important for access to jobs, job networking and other resources. Other factors might be the degree of family ties in the new country, and if the parents and children learn English relatively fast and push for a greater degree of assimilation, as opposed to keeping their traits from the old country. I think there is the factor of luck, too.”

People like Roland Furtado made it without a college education or family support group. He has relied on a large dose of perseverance, which transformed him from a pizza-shop employee to the owner of a freight-forwarding business.

Furtado was born in Bombay, India, but left as a teen-ager to spend years working in the Middle East in the freight-forwarding business. In 1986 he visited some friends in the United States and decided to stay.

Six months later, with a work permit in hand, he landed a job in a Straw Hat Pizza store, where he juggled several jobs pizza maker, busboy, dishwasher, cashier all while surviving on a steady diet of pizza in order to economize.

After a string of bad luck in a number of freight-forwarding businesses, Furtado decided in 1992 that the only way to succeed would be to start his own company.

Borrowing $3,000 from a friend, he rented an office, got his insurance bonding and filed the required papers with the Federal Maritime Commission. He only had $167 in his pocket on the first day he opened Roland International Freight Services in Westchester.

Business began to trickle in and has grown over the years. Furtado, 41, expects to gross $675,000 in sales this year. His ultimate goal is to open an office in every major U.S. city.

“I worked very hard, am very service-oriented and put my personal life on hold for this job. I just got married this year,” he says, explaining the keys to his success. “In my opinion, if you are good and willing to work hard, anyone can succeed in the United States.”

That’s easy for Furtado to say. He’s made it. But for the many thousands of working poor, especially those without the benefit of education or job training, success is more relative.

‘Victim of circumstances’

Take Wendy Griffin. The 44-year-old grew up on the hardest streets of South Central, where homeless people clustered in her neighborhood and she could walk down any street and watch drug deals.

She dropped out of school in 11th grade. In rapid succession, her parents died, she separated from her husband, and she lost custody of her son. She wound up on the streets.

“I was drinking from sun up to sun down,” she says. “My source of income was collecting cans.”

At the end of 1995, en route to the recycling center, Griffin passed by a drop-in center for the homeless on Slauson Avenue. Rico Evans, a “recruiter” for the center, called out to her from the entryway of the building.

“He said to me, ‘Hey Miss Scandalous Lady, where are you going?'” Griffin recalls. “I said, ‘Who are you talking to?’ He asked me if I wanted to have a bath and a nice hot meal.”

Tired, hungry and sick of being outside in the rain, she went inside.

After six months and a stint at a sober-living home, Griffin was ready to start anew. She first got a job at Goodwill as a custodian. Then she got a call from Evans, who told her of a job opening on Catalina Island.

Now Griffin is the housekeeping supervisor at the Catalina Island Marine Institute, a marine biology camp for children. While earning $35 a day, plus room and board, she oversees a staff of eight and is learning a variety of skills, including plumbing and driving a stick-shift van to bring in supplies.

“I’ve just been blessed,” Evans says. “I surrendered and just then somebody reached out and helped me. I love my job. It’s very beautiful over here and it’s so nice to see these children learning something and wanting to come back.”

Turning the corner

Many of the working poor mention spirituality as a key to their turnaround. Some return to the faith they were raised in, while others become involved in religious services as part of outreach programs for the poor.

It was when a group of recovering addicts began to pray for him that Gilbert Saldate, 39, was convinced to disassociate from his gang and get off drugs.

Saldate had been in and out of jail for gang activity and drug offenses since he was 15 years old.

In between stints in jail, Saldate worked odd jobs as a custodian, a machinist, or in construction. In 1989, he was released from prison and transferred to a Christian halfway house.

“I thought of it as a way to get out of jail,” Saldate says. “I was going to leave, take off that night. But there were a lot of guys there who said to me ‘Let’s pray, we know what’s going through your mind.’ At that moment, I looked at these big guys, with all their tattoos on them society’s worst, really and realized that they were praying for me. I felt some genuine concern and love from these guys, and I thought, ‘I’m a dummy if I leave.'”

During his time at the halfway house, Saldate grew to believe that God intended for him to help others get through trials like those he had suffered. He is now at the Tricities Mental Health Center in Pomona, where he works on outreach programs for the homeless. He is married, has four children and lives in Alhambra.

“I broke the chain of poverty,” he says. “My kids get straight A’s my daughter wants to be a doctor. Sure, I still have gang tattoos, but that tells people where I’ve been. As ugly as they are, it’s a point of inspiration to some people.”

From drugs to freedom

For Clyde William Clemens Jr., getting off illegal drugs and staying on his prescribed medication for manic depression has meant the difference between being out of work and being gainfully employed.

After high school he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the military, where he began smoking marijuana. His stint in the Army only lasted a year, after which he was granted a medical discharge for stress. Clemens soon became addicted to cocaine. Eventually he was fired from his job as a custodian for the city of L.A. because of his drug use. He moved back in with his family and did temp work for a number of years.

But soon his family couldn’t take care of him any longer and he was placed in a board-and-care living facility in Santa Monica, which at least gave him some stability and a diagnosis for the bipolar disease that led to his mood swings and violent outbursts.

But Clemens often didn’t take his medication and when he became psychotic, he says his caretakers didn’t know how to deal with him. Clemens’ last case manager stole a year’s worth of his veteran’s benefits and his payments were discontinued while the Veteran’s Administration tried to untangle the mess.

Finally, friends on the street led him to the Mental Health Association of Los Angeles County. That was his turning point. He has gotten a stable job as a receptionist with the Village Integrated Service Agency, an offshoot of the Mental Health Association. And now that his benefits have been reinstated, Clemens is applying for a home loan from the V.A. Over the years, Clemens has completed three years of college and is in the process of getting his degree in electrical engineering. He also gets regular shots of the medication he needs.

“Getting my medication keeps me in a stable frame of mind,” he says. “The Village helped me get a place to live and get Social Security. SDI (federal disability insurance) helps to pay for my apartment, since I’m considered disabled.”

Clemens has an apartment in Long Beach, where he lives alone. He has his own stereo and a working refrigerator. After so many chaotic years on and off the street, he spends much of his time listening to music and reading.

At last, credit

Sometimes success is measured by the impulse to help others have a better life.

Ricardo (who did not want to give his last name) has been working steadily in Los Angeles since 1984, when he arrived here from El Salvador with his wife. Through the years he has moved up from minimum-wage jobs to working as a houseman at an exclusive club in Santa Monica.

These days he and his family are off food stamps, they have two cars and they live in a spacious and clean three-bedroom apartment. Perhaps most important, he has finally gotten credit, which is especially difficult to obtain for immigrants and others living from paycheck to paycheck.

But with a new level of comfort comes the desire to become active politically, and Ricardo is now involved with the Living Wage Coalition in Santa Monica. Even with the new comforts he and his family enjoy, they still don’t have health insurance and his wife does not live legally in the United States.

Ricardo is involved in efforts to pass a new immigration bill that would grant amnesty to people who have been residents since 1986. He also has gotten involved with trying to form a union and get benefits at his job.

“The most important thing is that my kids move forward in life,” he said. “I want to prepare them for a good job, and have some security in life. I want them to get an education. I don’t want to see them suffer the same things I have.”

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