Up From the Barrio: A Latina’s Challenge

Celia Gonzales Torres, grand-daughter of a Mexican immigrant, has “made it.”

She is among the 1.2% of Latinas who have prospered and excelled and who hold high-level positions in business, education, government, the community. She is a founder and chair of the National Network of Hispanic Women, an elite group of Latina leaders from around the country.

Recently honored as the 1986 Mount St. Mary’s College Alumna of the Year, she also has a master’s in social work from USC and is beginning the four years she expects it will take to earn a doctorate at UCLA.

She is the wife of a successful doctor and partner with him in profitable business projects. She is the mother of five children, all of whom have or are working toward college degrees; two already have master’s degrees. She is active and respected in Latino and Catholic circles for her community service.

Seemingly, Celia Gonzales Torres has it all.

Or does she?

Torres and her family are microcosms of two cultures, Mexican and American, and the times that have brought sweeping changes to both.

Her grandmother was a Mexican immigrant; her mother worked in a garment-district sweatshop. When she was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles, both cultures encountered the same problems as they do now: social problems, poverty, illness.

Young Celia saw one way out of the barrio: education. Her mother and her aunt, who was also her godmother, sent her to Catholic schools. Her teachers, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, taught her values.

She did the things expected of an educated Catholic woman in the ‘60s. She was a social worker, she married, worked to help her husband through medical school, had five children in seven years (all Caesarean births), gave up her profession to rear her children and to help her husband start his medical practice and his business.

Celia Torres fit her life into theirs--but never lost her sense of where she was going nor the theological and human values instilled by the Carondelet Sisters.

Torres, a petite, delicately boned woman who turned 50 this year, sat in her pleasant Pacific Palisades apartment, informal in shirt, slacks and espadrilles, and spoke of her life. She began with her family.

“My grandmother came north from Mexico and brought her family with the help of her older son,” she said. “My mother was the second to the youngest of 12 children. It was the Depression. We were on welfare. We knew who the other people getting aid were because they were getting the same kind of fabric to make clothes; we’d try to find a ribbon, a trimming to make our clothes look different.

“My mother had an eighth-grade education, but she quit school because she had to work. She did errands for a penny. Then she went to work in the garment district.”

Education for Celia Torres began at 2.

“I led a very strange early childhood,” she said, “After the first couple of days crying, I must say I loved school. I enjoy learning. Books--that’s how I still learn.

“In the second grade I went to St. Mary’s Academy, the grammar school, the old one at Slauson and Crenshaw. That was in the early ‘40s. Sister Mary Brigid was my second-grade teacher; later at Mount St. Mary’s College she was my freshman department head and my adviser. Sister Anne Marie taught me parliamentary procedure in the fifth grade.

Mother Got Tuberculosis

“I was cared for by several families. When I was in the third grade--I was 8--my mother got tuberculosis. She was sent to Olive View (at the time a county TB facility). Tuberculosis was an illness of poverty--and I went off to St. Mary’s Academy. Every day I went to school, then to my aunt’s after school and slept at my grandmother’s at night.

“I was at St. Mary’s Academy until the sixth grade. Then in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades I went to St. Vincent’s parish school, where the Carondelet sisters also taught.

“It was a crucial time. I remember my teacher saying to me, ‘How about being sodality prefect (leader of a religious-oriented student organization)?’ I was surprised and asked why, and she said, ‘You know parliamentary procedure.’

“In seventh grade I was sodality prefect again. From sixth grade through college I held at least one office per year, which was good training in leadership skills. I knew what had to be done, how to do it, so I’d do it.”

Paid Her Own Way

Torres worked her way through St. Mary’s Academy--she paid for transportation, tuition and books--and Mount St. Mary’s College, beginning at 15 with jobs that included selling clothes on Broadway, waitressing and working at the Central Library downtown. The change between a financially poor life and that of the Mount in Brentwood, which at that time still had elements of a finishing school, was marked.

“I lived in two separate worlds,” she said. “I’d go from an empty refrigerator back to the Mount. . . .”

She got her bachelor’s in sociology with a minor in psychology: “I wanted social work.”

She got a job with the county Bureau of Public Assistance. She turned down a chance to study in Washington and chose to marry Julio Torres instead. She worked until she became pregnant with her first child, then went back to work to help pay her husband’s way through medical school, quitting when she became pregnant again. She decided to stay home with her children. (They now range in age from 19 to 26.)

“The fun part was using my skills in early childhood development with my children,” Torres said. “I just used a lot of creativity. We had art shows in which the (Carson) neighborhood children could sell their art work. We’d invite all the neighbors. . . .”

The Torreses sent their children to a Montessori school. As change swept into the Catholic Church, Torres and several other mothers felt unqualified to instruct their children and hired a Montessori religion teacher.

The family moved to Palos Verdes Peninsula, where she was active in parent-teacher groups. As the children grew, “I saw I could go back and do what I wanted to do. I went to the USC graduate school the year my oldest son started college as an undergraduate. I got the letter accepting me on the 18th birthday of my oldest child. I still had the guilt because four were still at home but it (receiving her acceptance) was an affirmation to me.

“Those were two very difficult years. Then in 1980 I got my master’s in social work from USC. One of my teachers asked me to join her consultation services firm--I was so flattered. The work fit in with my family.”

She also instilled her belief in community service in her children, working with them in the Catholic Worker program on Skid Row. Family obligations kept her from attending the 1975 International Women’s Year in Mexico City, but by last year Torres, a confirmed feminist, not only attended the session in Nairobi but took her youngest daughter with her.

Even in graduate school, Torres worked actively in the family business. She is executive vice president of Torres Enterprises, an investment and management firm dealing with apartments, motels and hotels: “We did very well.”

She became involved in volunteer work, notably with projects for children, education and Latino causes. In 1981, she was named a regent of Mount St. Mary’s College.

“I had a unique qualification in that I was bilingual,” she said. “I was a regent of the Mount to help with Hispanic scholarships. I would accompany the development people when they went to see influential friends.

“But we were aware of our dropout rate, and we were concerned that the Mount be committed to Hispanic women. One vehicle was our Hispanic alumnae. I hired one student, a Hispanic, and developed a proposal.”

In the process Torres gathered information that led her to Sylvia Castillo of Stanford University, who had done a project for young Latinas. From it came the idea that became the National Network of Hispanic Women.

Problems in Education

“We began with Latinas in higher education and their problems in mainstream education,” she said. “There were problems in education for women in general, especially in academic advancement, and doubly so for Hispanic women.”

The network idea grew to include women leaders in business, corporations, government and the community as well as education. One of its goals, she said, is “a sense of community.” The network counts about 400 dues-paying members (“We are not a grass-roots group”) and sends its newsletters to more than 6,000.

Presently Torres is working on the network’s second national conference, set for April in Miami.

“We’re around and we’re in high-level positions, but we are not visible,” she said. “The network has brought Hispanic women together, placed them so they can take a leadership role. The majority are helpful in mentoring young women. . . .

“If you go through education, you are different. How do you relate to the barrio you came from if you live in Palos Verdes? A common bond is our culture, and the network is a vehicle of OK-ness.”

Celia Torres is a long way from the barrio, but she is the first to say she has a long way to go.

“We have not been untouched by problems,” she said. “My youngest daughter is a recovering alcoholic, my middle daughter is a recovering anorexic. No, I am not afraid to have these things mentioned. . . .

“It is important that we do not appear plastic. We are real people. I am very proud of my children. They recognized a problem and took steps to overcome it.”

Torres also is open about her marital situation: She and her husband are living apart.

“He and I are in transition,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Whatever that might be, Celia Torres has the spiritual resources instilled by the Carondelet Sisters.

“I was taught and breathed and ate from the sisters,” Torres said. “I do have convictions. Find the truth and do something; the Spirit is working within you. We must do what Christ taught--and we go chasing after other things. It is both a cross and a glory.

“Strength: That is what I get from my prayer life.”