Women’s Center Credits Health to Savory Tamales

When the new Women’s Clinic rises next to the Logan Heights Family Health Center, it will be built of steel and concrete and all the most modern building materials.

However, the new clinic, which will specialize in offering perinatal care to low-income patients, will rest securely--if figuratively--on a foundation of tamales.

These savory mouthfuls, made of highly seasoned stewed pork wrapped in a moist corn flour dough, have made friends and money for the health center over the past 17 years. Just in the last year, the monthly tamale luncheons (attended by a spectrum of patrons that sometimes includes developer Tawfiq Khoury, Police Chief Bill Kolender and County Supervisor Brian Bilbray) have raised more than $100,000 for the center’s programs.

The campaign to build the Women’s Clinic, which is expected to cost $250,000, will be launched Friday at the first of a new series of “Spirit of the Barrio” fund-raising luncheons. More than 200 center supporters will sit down to a hearty meal of tamales, rice, beans, salad and fruit, washed down by wine, beer and soda, for which the guests will pay the princely sum of $10.

That’s low by most fund-raising standards, but the proceeds do add up, and the lunches have had the side effect of attracting significant patronage from organizations and individuals known for their deep pockets. For example, Las Patronas, the La Jolla philanthropic group, has named the center one of the major beneficiaries of its annual Jewel Ball and is expected to donate more than $12,000 after the August event.

The hands that patiently shape the 700 tamales required for each luncheon are the same hands that 65 years ago guided a blind father to his job at a downtown newsstand. They also are the same hands that once militantly seized the keys to the structure that now houses the Logan Heights Family Health Center. This tenacious pair of mitts belongs to Laura Rodriguez, a lifelong barrio resident whose devotion to her neighborhood is as strong at the age of 77 as it was at the age of 15, when she gave up the chance at life in a mansion to return to her roots.

After losing her mother at the age of 3, Rodriguez and her brother and sister were raised by their father, a blind man who made a meager living selling newspapers in front of the old Marston’s department store at 5th Avenue and C Street. Because there was no money for trolley rides, Rodriguez guided her father to work each day, a long walk for a little girl. A member of the Marston family took the three children into her home when their father died shortly after Rodriguez’s 13th birthday, but Laura pined for her old neighborhood, and found her ticket back when she married David. They have been married 62 years.

Rodriguez’s life might have been less eventful--and less replete with tamales--had it not been for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Until the late 1960s, Logan Heights was served by the original Neighborhood House, but an infusion of federal funds allowed that organization to expand (it offers services in several neighborhoods), and it consequently moved. It did not relinquish the building, however, which set the stage for something of a coup by Rodriguez, along with several Vietnam veterans and college graduates who were then returning to Logan Heights.

“My neighbors and I were very upset when Neighborhood House moved because we lost our services,” Rodriguez said from a perch in the health clinic’s kitchen, the unofficial seat of her very real power. “We asked to use the building for a meeting, but we decided in advance not to leave, not to give back the keys, and not to let anyone into the building the next morning.”

Rodriguez admitted that she knew her actions were illegal, but she wanted that building.

“The Neighborhood House people thought that we would get tired and leave,” she said. “They were wrong.”

The Rodriguez group did not acquire title to the structure until 1976, but by that time the Chicano Community Clinic, as it then was known, had already been functioning for five years.

“It was fortunate that in 1971 free clinics were in vogue around the country because that made it easy for us to find doctors and other people who were eager to help us get started,” Rodriguez said.

The beginnings were modest, with services provided two evenings a week by a volunteer staff. Currently, the health center employs 65 and handles 4,000 patient visits each month. Services no longer are free, but they are substantially underwritten by a host of public and private funding programs.

Then there is Rodriguez’s cooking, which has been part of the center’s financial lifeblood almost since the beginning. For one full year, the center was a Navy Seabee project, which meant that the naval engineers spent every weekend on remodeling the aging structure.

“I fed all 40 of those men every Saturday and Sunday,” said Rodriguez. “Word spread about the lunches, and pretty soon all the Seabees wanted to come work here.”

The tamale lunches, originally called “Hour in the Barrio,” started in 1972 under the auspices of the Mexican & American Foundation. For several years, the meals provided seed money for the foundation’s annual “Evening With the Stars” fund-raiser, which contributed a portion of its proceeds back to the center. That arrangement, and the luncheons, ceased in 1977, and the meals were not revived until early 1986.

The health center continued to grow during those lunch-less years, however, most recently with the addition last year of the Laura Rodriguez Pediatric Clinic, named in honor of the woman who is now one of the center’s two directors emeriti.

According to center development director Wenda Aldrich, the planned women’s clinic is seen as the answer to what is viewed as a crisis in prenatal care.

“When you look at the low-income, primarily Latino women we serve, you find many who can’t afford any sort of prenatal care program,” said Aldrich. “The new clinic will allow us to see many more patients, and will allow us to give them a basic education in how to take care of themselves.”

The clinic also will continue to make available to about 35 patients each month a publicly subsidized comprehensive perinatal care program that costs about $1,000, or significantly less than the $2,500 fee that such programs normally cost when administered by private organizations.

At Friday’s luncheon, Dr. Richard O. Butcher, president-elect of the San Diego County Medical Society, will address the issue with a presentation titled “Prenatal Care: The Crisis for Low-Income Women.” Other speakers will be Maria Velasquez, public affairs director for KFMB-TV and radio, and Bea Roppe, UC San Diego family health education supervisor.

These three doubtless will have an attentive audience, but just how attentive may depend on their attraction to Rodriguez’s tamales. She expects them to eat plenty.

“Restaurant tamales are not so great,” she said. “Mine are the best.”