He’s still able to bank on family

With bill collectors hounding him and the rent chronically late, Raul Menjivar swallowed his pride and moved back home with his parents.

He brought his wife and baby daughter with him, to live in one bedroom in South Los Angeles. He was about to turn 30.

An economic collapse will make you do desperate things.

Once upon a time, Menjivar earned $4,000 a month installing hardwood floors, more money than either of his immigrant parents ever made.

In 2007, “everything crumbled,” he told me. His work hours were whittled away and then disappeared. “So we had to give up our privacy. . . . It was my worst nightmare.”

More than two years later, Raul, his wife Luz and 3-year-old Emily are still living with Raul’s parents. Like so many other L.A. families, they’re Great Recession castaways.

Raul’s mother and father, born in El Salvador and now in their 50s, have been L.A. residents since the early 1980s. They bought their three-bedroom home with wages earned during three decades of moonlighting and overtime.

“I told him that no matter what, he and his family can always have his room here,” said Margarita Menjivar, who commutes daily to Bel-Air, where she works as a nanny.

It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes they fight over silly things -- like Emily’s penchant for covering the living-room floor with Barbie dolls.

But Raul’s parents have given him a life raft. During the boom years of the last decade, he was a well-paid high-school dropout. Freed from having to pay rent, he’s become a full-time student. Now he’s broke but just a few courses away from graduating from West Los Angeles College and transferring to a four-year university. His career dream: teaching high school.

“You’re almost done,” Luz tells him. “You can’t quit now. You have to go all the way.”

The crisis took away Raul Menjivar’s income. But it didn’t take away the people who loved him. And that’s been his salvation.

Losing his own home also taught Raul the value of an education -- something he didn’t see when he was a teen living with his parents in the 1990s and he “ditched the entire 11th grade.”

I learned this family history while talking to the Menjivars one night this week. We sat in a living room with polished hardwood floors, in a Craftsman bungalow on one of those South L.A. blocks whose well-tended homes resemble a patch of suburbia.

They told the kinds of stories being repeated in countless L.A. homes these days -- about people being thrown together by need.

“I’m grateful that Luz has put up with me,” Margarita told me. “Because we mother-in-laws have a bad reputation.”

Luz, 29, has been working as a licensed vocational therapist and is close to becoming a registered nurse. And she has her in-laws, Margarita and Raul Sr., to thank for it.

“It was hard to get used to” living with the Menjivars, she told me. “I’m in her kitchen now, not my kitchen.”

Raul also had to ask his brother Kevin, 24, to move into a smaller bedroom that Kevin calls “the box.”

“The hard part is when they [Raul and Luz] start fighting and when Emily goes into my room,” Kevin said. “I can’t really have my friends over like I used to.”

But other things help make up for these inconveniences, Kevin told me -- like the big smile his niece gives him and the sound of her young voice calling him “Que-que.”

Long-standing family traditions have also made the transition easier.

Back in Central America, three generations often live under the same roof. During the recession, those “old country” ways have become an additional safety net for many L.A. residents.

Over the years they’ve lived in L.A., the Menjivars have had at least seven houseguests. Cousins, uncles and brothers have passed through. The Menjivars never had much money -- Raul Sr. works at a grocery store -- but they were always sharing it.

“All the time we were growing up, we always had relatives staying with us,” Raul recalled. “There was Rosalia, and Miguel, and Berta, and Neto and Jacqueline . . . “

A few years back, when things were going well, Raul Jr. told his parents to stop helping their relatives.

“My parents were getting older,” Raul told me. “They deserved a rest.” And he felt some of those relatives were taking advantage of the Menjivar generosity.

It’s an age-old American story -- the tension between the way things are done in the old country, and the way they’re supposed to be done in the U.S.

Raul Jr. was then in his mid-20s. He and Luz were renting a one-bedroom Mid-City apartment for $1,100 a month.

Then the economy turned bad. Raul’s boss saw it coming as far back as 2005. Hardwood floors are a luxury, Raul explained, a kind of canary in the coal mine that gets hit early in a construction downturn.

As their savings disappeared, Luz thought her husband was taking it a little too calmly.

“Look, just because I don’t break down and cry and start throwing things doesn’t mean I’m not going crazy,” he told her. “We have to survive this.”

Enter Mom and Dad -- and their suddenly crowded home.

Now Raul is grateful for their generosity. He repays them by getting A’s and by being a devoted father and husband. He’s sacrificing a little privacy now in exchange for a future with less uncertainty.

“If I got a job, it would have been minimum wage. I’d just be paying for the child care,” Raul told me. So he enrolled at West L.A. College -- among other things, it offers free day care.

Community college is Menjivar’s bridge away from the underclass.

But whether he completes a crossing is still an open question. With the budget crisis, he’ll have to scramble to get the last classes he needs for his A.A. degree. And then, even if he does get into UCLA or Cal State Northridge, will there be any teaching jobs waiting when he graduates?

Raul Menjivar doesn’t know the answer. But he’s already a stronger person because his parents gave him the chance to come home, fix his teenage mistakes and build a new life.

hector.tobar@latimes.com