Centro Latino for Literacy - Three Lives and a Literate City's Shame

Three Lives and a Literate City's Shame
L A Times: October 13, 2009 by Hector Tobar

Julia Rodriguez, Juan Contreras and Mercedes Meza couldn't read or write. For years they got by with the help of friends and good memories for the sorts of sights that differentiated streets.

There is a neighborhood in L.A. where you can hear people converse in the language spoken by the Aztec emperors Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc.

Julia Rodriguez lives there -- in Pico-Union, just west of downtown. She spoke only Nahuatl when she arrived in Los Angeles 15 years ago.

In L.A., she quickly taught herself to speak Spanish. But when she was growing up in a small village in Mexico's Guerrero state, she never went to school. So she'd never been taught to read in any language.

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Mercedes Meza, a 64-year-old Westside housekeeper and nanny, always wanted to read too.

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Julia, Juan and Mercedes all told me they were deeply ashamed of being illiterate in the modern city they now call home. But the shame is really ours.

We Angelenos have allowed people from desperately poor places to come to our city to do the hardest jobs for the lowest wages. We all benefit from their labor, but many live among us with the private suffering and stigmas that are the legacy of the small Central American farms and Mexican villages where they were born.

The Census Bureau estimates that there are more than 200,000 Spanish-speaking people living in Los Angeles County who did not attend primary school as children.

Add up the American lives of just three of them -- Julia, Juan and Mercedes -- and you get three-quarters of a century of L.A. nanny work, clothes-making and meal-cooking. Giving them the alphabet and the ability to read and write the names of their children seems like the least we can do.

The good people at the Centro Latino for Literacy agree. The Pico-Union nonprofit recently announced the ambitious goal of teaching 10,000 Southern California adults to read and write in the next 10 months. READ MORE !