A Mother Perseveres : After Months of Homelessness, a Family Finds the Joy of a Place to Call Its Own
Evelyn Mojica will be home for Christmas this year. So will her two children, 14-year-old Damian and 16-year-old Lela. Home is a modest apartment near the UC Irvine campus. A poinsettia will have to substitute for a Christmas tree. But to the Mojica family, it looks like a very large slice of heaven.
Mojica--a tiny, vibrant woman of Puerto Rican and French ancestry--doesn’t like to remember last Christmas. She was bedded down with her children on the floor of a friend’s apartment, full of self-doubt and anxiety.
“We had a tree last year,” she said in her cubbyhole office at UCI, “but it wasn’t ours. This year the poinsettia is ours--and it looks beautiful.”
For almost a year, Mojica and her two children were a statistic in the growing army of American homeless. But where sociologists and politicians see statistics, Mojica sees people. “Most Americans,” she said, “see the homeless as derelicts lying around the streets of big cities. That’s not the way it is. Most people in that situation got there because of circumstances over which they had no control. It’s a terrible blow to your pride and dignity.”
Mojica had the dubious distinction of being homeless in what has been presented almost since its inception as America’s model city, the be-all and end-all of urban planning: Irvine.
That notwithstanding, Irvine has its share of homeless and, in an attempt to deal with the problem, applied for and received in October a $496,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to convert a vacant animal shelter into a 50-bed facility for homeless families. That plan was scrapped earlier this month when HUD canceled the grant, citing concern over potential danger because of its proximity to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. The city has until Jan. 25, however, to find a new site for the shelter to still qualify for the grant.
Mojica says she doesn’t know enough about the technicalities to comment. Nor was she aware of the recent survey in which Orange County showed up with one of the lowest ratios in the nation between income and giving.
“All I would like to say to the people who are making these decisions,” Mojica said, “is that they may well be talking about their next-door neighbor--or themselves--some day. They just don’t want what they see as transients around. People with this attitude say they’ve worked hard to get where they are, but what they don’t understand is that others who have worked just as hard sometimes find themselves homeless because of circumstances that could happen to anybody.”
Mojica certainly didn’t expect it could happen to her. She spent her early childhood with six brothers and sisters in New York City. The family moved to Long Island in her teens, and she graduated from high school there and attended several years of college at the Stonybrook campus of New York University before her children were born. She went through an experience then that she won’t talk about beyond saying that it traumatized her enough to send her to Southern California with her two children.
“Let’s just say,” Mojica said, “that I’ve been a single parent for 14 years.”
She had saved enough money to finance the trip, and when she visited a friend whose husband was stationed at El Toro, she discovered UCI. Mojica had studied dance as a child and was accepted in the Fine Arts School at UCI. She found campus housing, put her children in school in Irvine, supported herself by tutoring and teaching and earned first a bachelor’s and then a master of fine arts degree.
“I loved Irvine,” she said simply, “and I saw it as my hometown.”
But when she graduated, she had to go where she could find work--and thatturned out to be Carbondale, Ill., where she accepted a job as an assistant professor of dance at Southern Illinois University. She taught there for two years, then decided to come back to California “because I felt stifled. The area was stagnant culturally, and the arts were booming in Orange County. I wanted to be a part of that.”
So she looked for a job in her field in Southern California, and the closest thing she could find to Irvine was a teaching post at Cal State Los Angeles. She took it, packed up over the summer and reported for work in August, intending to find an apartment in Irvine and put her children back in school in their “hometown.” That’s when things started downhill.
When she appeared to do the necessary preliminary paper work, she was told that the job already had been filled. “I had a letter, but no contract,” she said. “I was helpless to do anything about it except look for other work.”
Teaching is a seasonal profession, and the jobs already had been filled everywhere Mojica looked. There was disappointment but no panic at first. Mojica had $7,000 with which she had hoped to make a down payment on a house. To make it stretch as far as she could while she looked for work, she moved into a crowded apartment with a friend in Garden Grove where she had to sleep on the floor. She shared expenses, but it was cheaper than a motel. Meanwhile, she enrolled her children in Irvine schools and they commuted by public transportation.
When she could find no teaching job, she paid to have her skills tested at a resource center. “I got some self-esteem back, but no job,” she said. Desperate by now, she took temporary work wherever she could find it. “I was doing office and clerical work for $5 an hour,” she recalled, “but at least I was earning something, and I was thankful for that.
“But my self-esteem took a real nose dive during this period. I had creditors, large car payments, and the money was going fast. I isolated myself, didn’t contact any of my old associates and spent all the time I wasn’t working going to church, caring for my children and cooking. And to make it worse, there was a lot of domestic tension where we were staying.”
Throughout this trying period, Mojica was adamant about one thing: Her children stayed in school in Irvine. “I have a strong faith in God, and I prayed for answers,” Mojica said, “but they didn’t seem to come. Then one day coming back from work on the freeway, I had an emotional breakdown that really scared me--and also turned me around.
“I called Irvine Temporary Housing that night. I couldn’t see myself as destitute, but I was desperate. I got a recording. The second time I called I was told there were insufficient funds and I should try again in a month. The third time Evelyn Heubner, who is the counselor there, returned my call and said to me the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard: ‘What can I do for you?’ ”
They met, talked and Mojica was told that she was eligible for help. There had just been a cancellation in one of the five apartments that the privately funded, nonprofit Irvine Temporary Housing operates. Mojica got it. Meanwhile, she also had started a clerical job at UCI that didn’t pay much more than her temporary work but was a foot in the door. So last spring, Mojica moved her family into “a three-bedroom apartment with food in the cabinets. I never understood before how important it was to have a place you can call your own.”
She struggled with a sense of pride, “but we faced a situation where we needed help. The Lord has a way of knocking heads when we’re being too stubborn. I didn’t feel I could ask my parents for help. They have their own obligations, and I felt I should be helping them instead of calling on them. But it was a bad time. I felt my family was falling apart.
“Then I made that call for help, and things began to turn around. The first few weeks were like, oh, wow. It’s amazing how stress falls away when you have someplace of your own. The healing that comes, the restoration of ego is marvelous. One thing that helped me was the work I had done with battered women in New York. They came from every social class, and I knew they were there because of circumstances they couldn’t control.”
Mojica participated enthusiastically in weekly counseling sessions with Heubner in which money management played a large part. “I knew about budgeting, but this taught me so much about being aware of where the money was going,” she said.
She also spent much of her spare time looking for housing in Irvine that would square with her income and her new budgeting skills. She found that her income qualified her for the partially subsidized apartment in which she now lives, and at the end of her 90-day temporary housing period, she was able to move her family into a real home of its own.
“It’s still financially tight,” she said, “but I’ve learned to be a lot more thankful for small things. And I’m so proud of my children. When I told them I was thinking about doing this interview and using our names and asked if that was OK with them, they said, ‘Sure, why not?’ They’re very special kids with a real sense of security about who they are. Their values aren’t based on material things, and they rose to every occasion.”
Mojica is trying to give back whatever she can. Once a month, she goes with a church group to Tijuana to take food and toys and love to orphans there, and she also volunteers at the Orange County Rescue Mission.
“I have lots of compassion when I think of my own kids being on the street in the kind of weather we’ve been having. I think what bothers me more than anything else in all the talk about shelters for the homeless is the hardness of people’s hearts. I very seldom hear the people who are critical say: ‘I don’t really want it in this location, but let’s find another, better place.’ Instead, they seem not to want it at all. And that upsets me. That’s why I was willing to talk about this. If it can happen to someone in my circumstances--well, maybe a few people can be touched.”
Meanwhile, Mojica has been upgraded to a much better job in UCI’s outreach program. Her children are doing well in school. She’s getting on top of her money problems. And there’s the poinsettia. But the best, the most glorious gift of all to Evelyn and Lela and Damian Mojica is just being home for Christmas. Their home.
