Outside the tan stucco building with thick iron bars on the eight front windows, a gaunt, gray-haired woman struggles to push a grocery cart overloaded with stuffed plastic bags and blankets down the sidewalk of Hawthorne Blvd. in Lennox.
Inside St. Margaret's Center, back in a makeshift room, a tall, lean, almost bald man dressed in a black T-shirt and worn jeans is leading an ESL (English as a Second Language) class of 14 students. Eleven are women, a good mix of young and middle-age Latinas. The three young men have their legs stretched out from the children's seat-desks. On the green board is written: "Mr. Croom," and then below: "Students will be able to discuss personal information."
"Simon says touch your nose," the Centinela Valley Adult School teacher sing-songs.
The ladies giggle, touching their nose. "Nose."
"Simon says touch your neck."
Again, students carefully touch their neck and mouth the word.
"Simon says clap . . . double clap . . . good, triple clap."
Next Mr. Croom breaks up the class, sending six "beginners" to a nearby partitioned-off area with a rectangular table. Cardboard boxes are stacked high against the walls. The only educational aid in sight is a kid's blackboard wedged between a refrigerator and water cooler.
After handing out a worksheet, with drawings and captions underneath, he pairs off the half-dozen neophytes. "One listens, the other asks the question," he explains. "You read, you write." Then he demonstrates: "Is Otis in the bank?"
"No," the group says.
"Is Mr. Bascomb at the office? No, he isn't. He's at the bank. Ok, is Nick at the garage?"
A young man in a baseball cap meekly ventures, "Yes." But the rest shake their heads.
Mr. Croom purses his lips and makes a face, holding out his arms. "He's right! The picture says Nick's at the garage."
The young man smiles, slapping his hand down on the table.
Radical difference
One of the largest groups making up the nation's working poor today is recent immigrants - especially those who have fled entrenched poverty and government oppression in Mexico and Latin America. In 2000, there were more than 30 million immigrants in the U.S., making up 11 percent of the total population, according to the census. Many of these newcomers were Latinos with no or very limited English skills.
Still, they often find jobs. Foreign-born workers accounted for more than 12 percent of the total civilian labor force in 2000. In fact, foreign-born men worked more (80 percent) than native-born men (74 percent).
But the jobs they land knowing little or no English pay minimum wage, or even lower. The Urban Institute found that although seven percent of all workers are noncitizens, almost 20 percent of all low-wage workers who support low-income families with children are noncitizens. While 43 percent of immigrants have jobs earning less than $7.50 an hour, the comparable figure for all workers is 28 percent.
In addition, only about a quarter of all working immigrants have job-connected health insurance. And the children of immigrant families make up one-fifth of the low-income kids in 20 states.
The good news in recent studies, however, is that learning English can make a radical difference for working poor immigrants and their families.
"English proficiency isn't just helpful for immigrants' success in America. It is the key to living the American dream," declared "The U.S. English Report."
The research-based newsletter pointed out that in 1999 the average employed immigrant who spoke English "very well" earned almost $41,000, nearly two-and-a-half times the $16,345 made by immigrants who spoke no English.
The National Immigration Law Center reported in 2003 that immigrants fluent in English earn about 24 percent more than their non-fluent counterparts, regardless of their qualifications. And the Center for Law and Social Policy pointed out that earnings are "much lower" for workers who don't speak English well.
Perhaps the U.S. English Report summed it up best when it said, "English is power."
Maria's raise
Maria Gonzalez is proof positive.
For the last two years, the 49-year-old mother of five has been coming to English classes at St. Margaret's Center. And when she started, the immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, had only six months of formal schooling.
"Before I didn't know any English," Gonzalez says. "Nothing. But I come here every day from 8:30 to 12:30. It's a good place, and they teach you good. I wanted to learn for my job. I am a bagger in a supermarket store. This is my first year.
"They wanted me to know English to answer questions from people," she explains. "Everybody has a question for me: 'Where's the bread? Where's the meat? Where's the milk?" And she smiles. "Now I can tell them."
She works at a Best Way supermarket in the community from 3 to 10 p.m., five days a week. Before, she cleaned houses and babysat, earning a lot less - sometimes not even minimum wage.
But today - June 27 - is a special day for Gonzalez.
"Today was very good," she says grinning. "Today I got a 50-cent raise."
Was it because of her newly acquired English prowess?
"Oh, yes," she answers, still smiling. "Mr. Croom is a good teacher. I like him." After a moment, she says, "Also I feel more confident in my home when I speak to my children in English. So it's helped my whole life."
Fear and loathing of English
Gonzalez is a "blazing example" of a core group of a dozen or so super dedicated adult students at St. Margaret's, according to her 47-year-old teacher, Troy Croom. They rarely miss an English class, and haven't for years - despite enormous obstacles and distractions like large families to take care of and little or no formal education.
The majority of students are less consistent. Many attend only a couple times a week; others drop out entirely for family, work, health or other reasons.
"The average students here finished six years of school in Mexico," he reports. "So they come to me 10 or 20 years later with fear and loathing of school, let alone English or any kind of language acquisition."
Helping them with their concrete life struggles is what Croom's ESL class is all about. Job skills. Survival skills. How to go shopping or to the doctor. How to read street signs. How to understand their boss at work and interact with others.
This is what he spends four hours on weekdays teaching at St. Margaret's, three semesters a year plus a summer school session. Classes, like this Tuesday morning session, are multilevel, meaning they're split into beginning and advanced English learners, and hands-on, with the tall teacher trotting back and forth between different groups, offering one-on-one help to his students.
"The majority of the work is trying to find a way to motivate them to learn really simple vocabulary and get down to basics," Croom reports. "There's no Dickens or Proust or Blake here.
"It's teaching them how to survive in the work place," he adds. "And maybe they'll learn enough English to better themselves to jump to the next level."
A 'huge' step
Reaching that next level is what it's all about for working immigrants struggling to grab a toehold onto American society, according to Mary Agnes Erlandson, who started St. Margaret's Center in 1987 with the help of two local churches and Catholic Charities of Los Angeles.
"A lot of our people work at childcare, cleaning houses - that sort of thing. And oftentimes they don't even make minimum wage. So even though for some people, you know, to be working in a supermarket like Maria Gonzalez doesn't seem like a huge step up, it really is," she points out.
"Because once you're in the 'legitimate' economy, you have certain protections in the workforce, and a working wage. So she can only go up."
Erlandson is always impressed with first-generation immigrants like Maria who struggle tremendously to learn English, while their children pick it up almost by osmosis.
She's also taken by all the women who sign up for ESL classes who have never worked outside their homes and, as a result, have a lot of fear about American culture. Leaning a new language is a big help in overcoming that anxiety.
The working families and homeless individuals who come to the center for its English classes, citizenship processing, food pantry, thrift store, counseling and referral services as well as rent assistance, shelter vouchers and other services are hurting more than she's seen in the center's 19 years of existence.
Plus, there are just more and more people seeking help at the center. She blames the ongoing crisis mainly on rising rents in Lennox, Inglewood and Hawthorne, where there's no rent control.
"Between rent going up, gasoline prices going up, food going up, your minimum wage doesn't cut it anymore," Erlandson explains. "So a lot of the service workers who come here for [our food bank], especially, at least one member of the household is working full time, and they still can't make ends meet. We see a higher and higher percentage of their income that goes to rent. Sometimes it's 90 percent."
St. Margaret's Center features four hours of ESL classes every day because the staff believes so strongly that it's one of the most pragmatic ways to help the working poor take that next step up the proverbial societal ladder that millions of Irish, Italian, Polish and other immigrants have climbed before.
"On a daily basis, really, we see people who when their English skills improve their jobs and whole lives improve," says the veteran front-line antipoverty worker. "It just goes hand and hand."
THE WORKING POOR, PART III |