Group Finds Jobs for Latino Seniors : Holiday Party Brings Spanish-Speaking Elderly Together

“It’s kind of sad,” Carmela Lacayo was saying, “but at Christmastime folks are more interested in toys for kids” than in the plight of low-income senior citizens.

As president/executive director of the Asociacion Nacional Pro Personas Mayores (National Assn. for Hispanic Elderly), Lacayo is very much interested in senior citizens. She understands that they are apt to feel lonely, cast off and hungry--emotions that are easily exacerbated at holiday time.

Few Hours of Fun

That’s why, each Christmastime, the association gathers its clients together--350 of them this year--for a Christmas party. It’s a once-a-year day when the seniors, granted a long lunch hour by employers participating in the association’s older worker program, come to eat turkey and to take home trinkets. And, most important, to have a few hours of fun.

Last week’s event, scheduled for noon to 2 p.m. at the Breakfast Club in Los Feliz, stretched on for close to four hours. And, if an occasional guest was seen nodding off, it must have been fatigue, not boredom. Consider the entertainment: senior citizen volunteer Sadie Winter, a contemporary Santa Claus in her red tights and fringed white cowboy boots, reappearing as a dancer in fringed flapper gown, sequined garter and yards of pearls; Lacayo, responding to the beat of a mariachi band, leaping from her chair to grab octogenarian Marcos Contreras for a spirited zapatiero ; a troupe of a dozen over-70 dancers, in aloha prints, flexed their hips in a lively hula.

They came wearing sombreros and baseball caps and Sunday-best dresses. They left with shiny red shopping bags into which had been tucked Christmas treasures such as packages of saltines and packs of note paper. More than one guest was seen stowing away the turkey leftovers.

Most of Lacayo’s clients are Latinos, members of what she calls the “hidden” poor who scratch out a living in the city. Most have no Social Security benefits and many still have children at home to support on the $3.35 an hour they earn at 20-hour-a-week jobs with nonprofit agencies.

Federal guidelines specify that, for eligibility in this worker program, they may not earn more than $4,000 each annually. “According to technological society,” Lacayo observed, “they should be the most depressed, the most down and under.”

Yet there was joy in their faces as they tapped their toes to the mariachi rhythms played by senior citizens from the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, and as they sang along to “Las Mananitas,” the traditional Latino birthday song--”How beautiful is the morning when I come to greet you. . . .”

Last year, Lacayo was saying, “We had a belly dancer. I thought we were going to have some cardiac arrests.”

She was complaining that her dance partner, Contreras, who admits to 89 but whose wife claims he is 91, had worn her out. It must be diet, she figured. The diminutive Contreras, always gallant, demurred, insisting, “All the women dance well.” (He also expressed his fondness for blonde Americans.) And he laughed and said, “People admire me that I can still move around.”

Not only does he move around, he works four hours a day as a maintenance man in Santa Ana. Once a farmer in Jalisco, as well as a mariachi musician, Contreras followed his four children to the United States 12 years ago. Since 1978 he has been in the association’s senior work program. It keeps him feeling youthful, he explained.

And he never misses the Christmas party. He is touched that “all these people are willing to be with an old man.” More pragmatically, he simply likes “to be in the wave of things.”

This is probably the largest federally funded manpower program left in the country, founder Lacayo said of the association’s senior community service employment program for those 55 or older who, because they speak little or no English and have no skills, “for all intents and purposes had no access to the job market whatsoever.”

The association places them in part-time minimum-wage jobs with 125 nonprofit agencies in Los Angeles and Orange counties, among these Goodwill Industries and a number of day-care centers. Last year the association placed an ad in the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion to fill 35 jobs and, Lacayo said, “In one two-day period we had 300 applicants.”

About 60% of these older workers are female (coming out of the garment industry, or displaced homemakers) but more of the senior men are monolingual and unskilled. “Our men end up doing maintenance work,” Lacayo said, while the women become kitchen helpers, teachers’ aides and sometimes clerical workers. A retraining program enables about 15% of the seniors to phase into full-time jobs out of the nonprofit sector.

The program is federally funded, with Los Angeles and Orange counties receiving $2.5 million annually, the largest slice of the $9-million pie for programs in 10 states. Some of the money goes to ancillary services such as medical checkups and emergency aid. Lacayo explained, “Many don’t have the money to get a bus, or clothes to go to work in.”

For most, home is the central city. For many, it is Skid Row.

Only a few receive MediCal. But many have health problems, such as tuberculosis contracted in their native Central America. Although most of its clients are citizens who have lived in this country a decade or more, the association does not screen out undocumented workers.

Lacayo, who started the program here in 1975, had just returned from Miami, where she had attended a similar event for 250 Cuban seniors.

Originally, this Department of Labor-funded program was strictly an income-subsidy effort. Today, Lacayo said, “The seniors are really providing a service” as workers in the nonprofit sector. “They’re more stable than young people. They’re reliable, they’re proud. Sometimes they’re there before the centers open (in the morning). The work ethic is very much imbued in these people.”

Several have been hired by the association as full-time members of its staff, which numbers about 30.

Lacayo is the driving force, a Mexican-born former nun who left the Sisters of Social Service in 1971--or, as she says, “kicked the habit.” It was a decision she made while assigned to Rome, where she found increasingly “it was difficult to be working at the grass roots with poor people and then go live in your convent in the hills.”

She is a woman who cares about the people she serves, and they about her. “You’d be amazed,” she said, “at the number of older folks hidden in this big city.” (Of an estimated 800,000 to 1 million seniors, 10% to 12% are Latino. The per capita income of all Latino seniors in Los Angeles, according to a 1981 county survey, was $7,567.)

“Most of our seniors don’t go into mainstream programs for seniors,” Lacayo said. “The services are just not accessible,” both because many do not have bilingual staffs and because Latinos do not understand the bureaucracy and outreach programs are inadequate in scope.

The association, a private nonprofit corporation, is now getting involved in senior housing through its subsidiary, El Pueblo Community Development Corp., working with the Community Redevelopment Agency in East Los Angeles.

“Hopefully,” Lacayo said, “we’ll have our ground breaking by spring” for a multi-generational family housing project. Lacayo is adamant that it be multi-generational, saying, “I think it’s very important that we don’t do to our seniors what the dominant population has done.”

She has another idea, too, to help her clients. Among the association’s 450 clients, she noted, “We have everything from weavers to shoemakers to lace workers to pinata-makers.” Why not a cooperative crafts workshop to market handmade articles “that yuppies love to buy?” Now, she was thinking, why not a boutique in some fancy shopping mall. . . ?

The need to raise money remains. There are some private contributions, in addition to the federal funds, but Lacayo has learned, “foundations and corporations are more interested in building museums than in people projects.”

“Otro!” demanded the audience as the mariachis started offstage. Volunteers had cleared the plates once laden with turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie from the long red-and-green draped tables. Now, most of the guests couldn’t wait to see what surprises their red shopping bags held.

Lacayo smiled. “For many,” she said, “what we give them is what they end up getting for Christmas.” A pair of earrings, perhaps, a coffee mug, whatever merchant donations the association had been able to gather.

But they were not longing for Mercedes. Eva Zapata, 67, had dressed for the occasion--pink dress, red shoes, pearls--and she thought the party was “fantastica. “ An immigrant to this country 16 years ago from Colombia, she helps support an ill sister with what she makes as a part-time community center worker.

She is happy. “God is very nice,” Zapata said. And if she could have anything she wished for Christmas? Zapata did not hesitate: “Peace.”

Josefina Juarez Gusman, a 64-year-old widow who immigrated from Mexico in 1960, had also been clapping along to the music. A kitchen worker for a Head Start project, her Christmas wish list includes only help for her son, who is “very ill,” and happiness for her daughter, who has marital difficulties.

The buses (donated by the city) had arrived to take guests home. Lacayo, glancing at her watch, was surprised to see that it was almost 4, two hours over schedule. Two o’clock “Latin time,” she decided.

The party was over. Association staff members were removing the tinsel and ornaments from the Christmas tree, which would bloom again another place. “We recycle everything,” Lacayo said.