Minnie Street Project : Santa Ana Center Hopes to Defuse Ethnic Tensions

At 430 S. Standard Ave., in what once was a Christian church, an ambitious effort has been launched to bring government aid to a southeast Santa Ana community that no government agency has ever succeeded in reaching.

The Minnie Street Project was organized by the Orange County Community Consortium, a coalition of public and private social service agencies.

And in fact, it is an effort to reach not one community, but several.

The Minnie Street neighborhood, about 15 square blocks of overcrowded apartment complexes and single-family homes, is an ethnic powder keg of 12,000 residents--70% of whom are Latinos and 20% of whom are Cambodian refugees--with one thing in common: poverty.

Plagued by severe health problems, high unemployment and widespread crime, the area has fallen prey to racial tensions that, in the words of community activist Donald Sizemore, once made it “a likely candidate for perhaps the first race riot in Orange County history.”

Police on foot patrol keep a vigilant watch during the day and, at night, attend community meetings hoping to defuse cultural misunderstandings, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Collie Provence said.

Until now, the neighborhood has been cut off from the county’s health, social welfare, food, employment and other services by language and cultural barriers, said Sizemore, director of planning for the Orange County Community Development Council and chairman of the steering committee of the Orange County Community Consortium.

Sizemore and others hope that the opening last Tuesday of the Neighborhood Service Center in the church building on Standard Street will help change that.

“We’re going to coordinate health and human care services for those people living near Minnie and Standard streets,” consortium director Mary Ann Salamida said. “We’re going to bring services to them and teach them how to access the social service system.”

Job training, immigration information, English classes, health checkups and prenatal care are just a few of the services the center will provide, Salamida said.

In the past, outreach services in the area have been extremely limited and have met with little success, Sizemore said.

But the center plans to go beyond just providing services.

“We’re going to set up support groups for different ethnic groups,” Salamida said. “For instance, we’ll have different rooms set aside at the center for Hispanic clients who may need special privacy, especially with amnesty information. We’re trying to form a women’s support group for Cambodian widows.

“We want to have them feel that this is their center, and many of them will also sit on the center’s board of directors, telling us what they want to do. We want this center to succeed.”

Today, Sizemore said, members of the consortium--which includes a representative from the county’s Human Relations Commission--believe there is a “very real” threat of escalating violence between Latinos and Cambodians if preventive measures are not taken.

Unemployment stands at 86% among Cambodian residents and 38% among Latinos, according to a consortium survey, and the fear of an AIDS outbreak “is real,” Salamida said, because of neighborhood drug use and prostitution.

In addition, residents suffer from overcrowding, high rents--$500 for a one-bedroom apartment and $625 for two bedrooms--inadequate nutrition, depression, a high miscarriage rate and illiteracy, according to the survey.

With unemployment so high, many men spend their days sitting idly on sidewalks and in doorways, staring vacantly.

“They’re suffering from a lot of stress, post-traumatic stress, because many of them were tortured or put in labor camps or re-education camps during the Pol Pot regime,” said Santa Sisowath Smith, referring to former Cambodian Premier Pol Pot. Smith is the only Cambodian-born mental health worker with the Orange County Health Care Agency.

Of her Cambodian caseload, “all have suffered from torture” in their homeland and a lot have seen family members die, she said.

Except for Salamida and an assistant, there is no permanent staff at the Neighborhood Service Center. Instead, she has arranged for about 20 different public and private social agencies and school districts to provide nurses, immigration counselors, job trainers, mental health workers and English teachers on a rotating basis for regularly scheduled activities at the center.

“This is the only project in Orange County that cuts across political and competitive lines,” Sizemore said. “Rather than the old duplication-of-services argument, Mary Ann was able to get competing agencies, who often fought with one another for the same funding dollar, to cooperate, and that’s a first.”

Ironically, the consortium’s plan developed out of failure. Sizemore said an attempt by a similar coalition to help residents in Garden Grove’s Buena Clinton area failed.

But Salamida is optimistic about the prospects for the new effort.

“We’re excited about the long-term goals,” she said, “because we want to use the same model we use for Minnie Street for other areas in the county.”

Already, the City of Placentia has asked for the consortium’s help to assess needs there, and Anaheim has expressed an interest in seeking the consortium’s assistance in the blighted Jeffrey-Lynne area.

The consortium began with a $25,000 community services block grant from the Community Development Council to conduct an assessment of the Minnie Street Project in October, 1986.

When the Board of Supervisors approved a $6,000 revenue-sharing grant in December, then-chairman Roger R. Stanton praised the consortium as a “creative model” because it brought these different groups together to help poor residents.

Salamida said funding continues to be a major concern for the consortium. The center has received donations from Pacific Bell, the Arco Foundation and the Irvine Foundation, “but we always need more help,” Salamida said.

To make the center workable, Salamida said, she seeks an even mix of Latino and Cambodian clients. The clients in turn will be selected to sit on the center’s board of directors, she said.

“Cambodians have always stayed away from official-looking government buildings. They’re not socially adjusted to the United States yet. They’re still afraid,” Smith said.

In many ways, the Cambodians are a shy, retiring people, said Phuoc Lam, a Cambodian-born job-training counselor at Community Resources Opportunity Project Inc. in Santa Ana.

That trait and the liabilities of illness, poverty, language problems and a lack of job skills have left Cambodians like Eap Peav, 61, helpless and vulnerable.

“I’m physically not as strong as I used to be,” Peav said quietly through an interpreter. “When I was younger, I had to work hard in Communist labor camps under Pol Pot.

“They fed us very, very little. Usually only rice,” Peav said, cupping one hand to show that his daily ration “was this much.”

A folk medicine healer in an area of the world that has little use for his herbal cures, Peav spends most of his time chatting with other Cambodian men in the neighborhood and helping a 29-year-old daughter who is mentally retarded. They depend on public assistance for support.

He left Cambodia after a village official told him and his family that they were going to be reunited and moved to a re-education camp, he said.

“They were doing that with other people accused of various crimes,” he explained. “They were rounded up and left, but they never returned. They joined the ranks of the missing people.”

The friction between the Cambodians in the Minnie Street area and the Latinos, who have lived there much longer, is evident in an anecdote Police Sgt. Provence likes to tell. It has to do with a bumper catch of squid--a favorite food of the Cambodians--and how it was dried.

The police had to step in.

“Many of the Cambodians caught hundreds of squid, then came back and hung the squid out to dry outside their apartments,” Provence said. “They didn’t think it was wrong, but the whole neighborhood started smelling. We had to tell them it offends people, and they stopped.

“At community meetings, we had to explain to the Hispanics that these people do things differently, but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Gilbert Sanchez, pointing to Cambodian youths playing one of their favorite sports, sandlot volleyball, said: “I don’t have problems with the Cambodian people. They don’t like soccer, and we don’t like playing volleyball. They keep to themselves, and we keep to ourselves.”

Other Latinos in the neighborhood expressed reservations about their Southeast Asian neighbors.

“I believe that we’re all equal here,” said Alicia Fernandez, who with her husband, Jose, has lived on Minnie Street for 13 years.

“We have to try and be friendly toward each other because this is our neighborhood.”

Apartment managers have responded to the tension by renting to Southeast Asian tenants in one apartment building and only to Latino families in another when possible.

Ramona Osuna said: “We’re on this side of the street, and they’re on the other. That’s good.”

Progress for the Minnie Street Project will almost certainly be slow, Salamida said.

“It’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s certainly a start in the right direction,” she said. “It’s better than what they have now, and that’s nothing.”

Salamida said softly that Minnie Street’s special problems “needed a special approach.”

Nhu Hao T. Duong, director of the Community Resources Opportunity Project Inc., said: “That’s where the role of groups like ours need to help Mary Ann’s group to smooth over the depression of the Cambodians and ease their transition to our culture here.”

“But they need help, our help.

“Without it, they will continue to receive public assistance and not learn English. They won’t gain the skills needed to help themselves. With the new center, they can do that and at the same time help others.”

PROFILE OF MINNIE STREET

A survey of the Minnie Street Project target area by the Orange County Community Consortium shows:

An 86% unemployment rate among the Cambodian population and a 38% unemployment rate for the area’s Latinos--compared to Orange County’s overall unemployment figure of only 3.3% in October, 1987.

Severe depression in the Cambodian population, attributed to post-traumatic stress syndrome. During the regime of former Cambodian Premier Pol Pot, a third of the country’s population--or more than 3 million people--died from torture and murder.

Of the Cambodian residents, 20% are single-parent widows, due in part to the torture and murder in Cambodia.

Among Latinos, 80% do not seek a dentist when they have a dental problem, and 65% cannot afford dental care.

Among Cambodians, especially pregnant women, nutrition information and prenatal care is sorely needed. Cambodian women suffer from a 49% miscarriage rate. Consortium members attribute the high rate to medical practices carried over from the homeland and poor nutrition.

The potential for an AIDS outbreak because of a high rate of intravenous-drug use among the area’s addicts.

Almost 90% of Cambodians in the area are on welfare, with high rents eating up much of their money.