Complex reality at street level
By ARTHUR JONES
Los Angeles
Its a storefront on drab East Seventh Street in Los
Angeles hustle-bustle garment district, just a couple of blocks over from
rough-and-tough Skid Row. The door opens, a young woman or man looks in,
covertly, cautiously. Ava Castorena is invariably there. Shes asked a
quick question or two, and the inquirer, deeming all is safe, enters.
The Los Angeles garment district will soon have another pair of
hands sewing shirts, blouses and pants for the fashion industry. Castorena is
the instructor.
Its mainly word of mouth, said the Rev. Alice
Callaghan, an Episcopal priest and former Catholic nun, as she explains how
newly arrived immigrants hear of Las Familias free sewing lessons.
Callaghan two decades ago founded Las Familias del Pueblo as a community center
for garment workers and their children (and 25 years ago was on the front page
of NCR when she left the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus for the
Episcopal church).
The average sewing trainee -- theyre in their 30s or
younger, with a couple of children -- is newly arrived in the United States and
doesnt speak any English. If the trainee has any skills, said Callaghan,
we might see them twice. Others we see for several weeks. Then
theyve found a job.
Not that Callaghan helps them with skills -- she cant sew a
stitch. But then, when she started Las Familias, she couldnt speak a word
of Spanish, either.
Theres a modern art sculpture outside the center that once
held a sewing machine aloft. Late one night someone wrenched it off, and the
statue remains bereft. Inside, though, theres still the rank of sewing
machines at which Castorena shows the immigrant women and men how to use the
industry-style equipment identical to that in the nearby sweatshops and sewing
factories. A retired factory owner, Eve Vollmer, began the program.
Recruitment is healthily haphazard. We could have three
people this week, one person next, and 12 the week after that, said
Callaghan.
To some, preparing a person to work in a sweatshop might seem a
retrograde step. The petite, peppy Callaghan dismisses such sugared notions:
First find ways to help them get work, get some money coming in, feed
those kids, get somewhere to live -- then worry about next steps.
Las Familias is full of next steps -- English lessons, legal aid,
after-school drop-offs and programs for the children. (The ice cream man times
his visits to coincide with the arrival of the 100 or so young children who
come thundering in around 3 p.m. daily once school is out. They stay until
their parents stint is finished at their garment district job.)
Doing something useful
To the battling Callaghan, whos usually confronting some
government or business agency on behalf of the immigrants or the inhabitants of
nearby Skid Row, the noise of the kids is angel music. Shes also
extremely protective of their parents who, she says, would be intimidated at
the thought of being interviewed, even anonymously.
Worrying about the immigrants future is a step up for
Callaghan compared to 20 years ago, when she was anxious about their immediate
safety. Those were really the bad old days when immigrant families were ending
up in Skid Rows flophouses.
Its been some odyssey, recalled Robert Wyckoff, retired
president of oil giant Atlantic Richfield Company, and for 20 years chair of
Las Familias board.
The pair met at All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena where, for eight
years, first Sister Alice and then the Reverend Alice
did homeless outreach in the city.
Wyckoff credits Callaghan with helping me find ways to do
something useful for other people. Shes just incapable of seeing an
injustice or a wrong without doing something about it. She decided she wanted
to spend some time just walking around Skid Row to figure things out.
(The term, Skid Row, comes from 19th-century logging jargon. Skid
Road was the track logs were sent down. Later -- before entering urban slang as
any city section that draws the unemployed, the hobos and societys
cast-offs -- Skid Row meant the place unemployed loggers congregated. At 50
square blocks, 11,000 inhabitants -- 7,000 of them living in 65
single-room-occupancy hotels -- Los Angeles Skid Row is perhaps the
nations largest.)
Born in Calgary, Canada, Alice Callaghan was raised in Los Angeles
and Orange counties, joined the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus and, in
northwest Pasadena in the early 1970s, with a couple of other sisters, started
an alternative school in an old Methodist church. Loved kids, hated
teaching, she summarized.
Her involvement with All Saints Episcopal Church came through its
Peace Center Against the Vietnam War. I asked them for a job. I
dont cost anything, I said, and as it was a job that didnt
really exist. She added social outreach programs for the homeless --
meals in the park, and Union Station, now the largest of all the homeless
missions in Pasadena.
During that time at All Saints, she made three decisions. One, to
not be a nun. Two, to pursue ordination. Three, to see if she could make
herself useful around Skid Row, Los Angeles, 12 miles away.
You dont get a note on your
pillow
I didnt quit being a nun in order to become a
priest, said Callaghan. I quit because I didnt want to live
in celibacy. I pursued ordination in the Episcopal church because they have
options for men and women who dont want to live the celibate life.
Id been working at All Saints for years. I liked the Episcopal church --
and the Episcopal and Catholic churches are so similar. With a smile, she
added, and Id much rather be a priest in the Episcopal church. You
dont get a note on your pillow one day telling you youre going to
Africa the next morning.
She gets on well with her bishop, Fred Borsch, is not attached to
a specific church, and is not married. She hasnt said Mass in a while.
I dont think theres anything magic in doing it on that kind
of weekly basis. For a priest like Alice, the Eucharist includes
sacramental action.
The action began in 1980-81 when, after a day of Skid Row
peregrination, she was seated on the fire escape at the Skid Row Catholic
Worker house talking to Jeff Dietrich of the Catholic Worker. He said,
Why dont you come and work with the immigrant families?
The migration routes to El Norte are as well-known to the
potential Central American and Mexican immigrant as a Greyhound bus schedule
was to rural Americans in the 1930s. For the successful new arrivals, the way
north, though dangerous, even deadly for some, is the equivalent of a
stagecoach service through Mexico, with a transfer to a shuttle service at the
U.S.-Mexico border.
In the early 1980s, the immigrants were being shuttled from the
border into Los Angeles in ever-increasing numbers, dropped at the edge of Skid
Row, and pointed in the direction of the dozens of broken-down single-room
occupancy hotels -- SROs.
Trouble was, Callaghan explained, the hotels were dangerous.
Families, women with young children, were sharing corridors and facilities with
Skid Row men who dont mind their manners, their mouths, their morals or
their anti-social malice.
Relying on friends at All Saints, with not a word of
Spanish, we put together a board of 12 people, had $3,000 in our pocket, rented
a storefront, plugged in the coffee pot, and declared it a center for Skid Row
immigrant families -- somewhere they could escape to from the SROs. A safe
place if they didnt want to stay in their room.
We had kids at the center all day while the parents hunted
for work, or were at work. We started a legal clinic for work-related problems.
We did parenting classes, she said, and lifestyle classes. And we
made a decision -- to put ourselves out of business by moving all the families
out of Skid Row. That began in 1982, and we ultimately moved 400 families out
of 22 hotels.
She came with lawyers
The plan was a simple copycat program of what people --
particularly church- and synagogue-connected folk -- were doing for the
Vietnamese Boat People. Callaghan said Skid Row families were adopted, money
was found to pay for an apartment -- deposit, first month and last month rent.
It worked out to a little over $600 per family.
There was an obvious problem, of course. Move out one family from
a hotel and another would move in. It was a cycle that could have lasted
forever. Callaghan solved that one Alice-style. Alice-style is
confrontation born of indignation and fueled by determination. She plants her
feet on behalf of the beleaguered immigrant or Skid Row inhabitant and stands
her ground. And not police, not the Business Improvement District, nor the
local political machinery can shift her. (The political issues usually concern
the homeless -- in 20 years the Immigration and Naturalization Service has
never raided Las Familias.)
To stop the constant hotel turnover of immigrant family out,
immigrant family in, she turned up at the hotels with lawyers. Wed
meet with the owner, measure the rooms and say you cant have that many
people in a room this size. If you decide to re-rent to families,
shed tell them, we will call the fire department, the building and
safety department, well sue you for the criminal conditions in your
hotel, and well sic the city attorneys slum housing task force on
you.
Years later, Callaghan looks back and laughs. We did that
for four years. It shifted the hotels economics -- they were getting far
more for a room renting to families than to a single guy off the
streets.
She closed down the Las Familias Skid Row day center and moved it
to its safer present-day garment district site a few blocks away.
But shes still using the same tactics. Providing
port-a-johns for those who live on and off Skid Row was an eight-year saga.
Callaghan won out. Under Mayor Richard Reardon -- the previous mayor
wouldnt budge -- 26 portable toilets were allocated to Skid Row. The city
lined them all up side-by-side.
Callaghan objected, said they needed to be spread around the
50-square block region.
The city said they stay put.
Each night, after the streets department went home, Callaghan and
company and the Catholic Worker community uprooted the johns and replanted them
around the neighborhood. The next morning, the street department put them back.
That continued until the city gave in.
I dont always agree with Alice, said board chair
Wyckoff. I dont think anybody could always agree with Alice, but
her stances are taken with honesty and good judgment. She often does look
beyond the obvious into some of the secondary affects of what people are
proposing, and recognizes therell be problems. And its surprising
how often she knows what those problems are, and faces them.
A demolition moratorium
Having seen how bad the hotels were, Callaghan again took a
contrarian course -- instead of favoring their demolition, she got a demolition
moratorium for the remaining 65 hotels. That lasted for close to 10 years. It
has now expired.
Callaghan and company then embarked on another venture, buying the
hotels, rehabbing them and renting them back to the Skid Row inhabitants --
often for less rent than theyd previously been paying.
We have raised hundreds of millions of dollars -- the board
has. Theres state money, and tax credit money, she said. Las
Familias bought the first two or three hotels, then we created the Skid Row
Housing Trust as a separate entity. It now owns 19 hotels. Other
nonprofits have done the same.
Yet Callaghans journey and stances point not to success
stories, not to how society can clean itself up and do the right thing, but how
complex things can get. Reality at the street level is not necessarily everyone
elses reality.
In the 1990s, out-of-step with California progressives, Callaghan
began to publicly oppose the existing bilingual programs -- because they taught
children to read and write only in Spanish, thus guaranteeing theyd
never go on to college. None of the people favoring bilingual education had
their children in it. Our parents complained, and finally, I understood. They
boycotted, and we subsequently helped write Proposition 227, which passed
in 1998 and ended the bilingual program.
Equally complex, Las Familias is part of Sweatshop
Watch, she said, and we support all those efforts. I am extremely
ambivalent about doing so. Because, if you clean up the garment district, our
families will lose their jobs.
And thats the reality. I mean our families are below
the working-force level. Theyll do any, I mean any job. And any job is
better than no job.
But the agonizing was interrupted.
The after-school kids were pouring in through the front door. And
in the rear yard, with its tall wooden fencing and jungle gym equipment, the
gate was opened and in came the ice cream man.
Arthur Jones is NCRs California-based editor at
large. His e-mail address is ajones96@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, October 12,
2001
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