Culture Klatch : Ethnic Swap Meet to Be Staged in Living Rooms of Costa Mesa as Residents Share Their Backgrounds

Kazuko Nishida remembers being so lonely after leaving her native Japan to live in America that “whenever I heard an airplane, my tears came down.”

Mary Aguna, born in Texas and of Mexican descent, drove through Costa Mesa with her husband 24 years ago, looking for a home, “and saw no ethnic groups at all. In fact, I told my husband: ‘Don’t they allow them here in Costa Mesa?’ ”

Pham Thi Hue arrived in America as a student, saw huge concrete ribbons stretching into the distance and looked in vain for the rivers running beneath them. Then she learned that these were not bridges but the superhighways called freeways that she had heard so much about in Vietnam, her homeland.

Nishida, Aguna and Pham will join dozens of other Costa Mesa residents next week in living rooms throughout the city to discuss the changing ethnic makeup of their community, talking over what unites them and what separates them.

“This is the first citywide program of this sort ever, anywhere in the United States, so far as we know,” said Vicki Plevin of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

“This is a pilot program and something that I think Costa Mesa has been very forward-looking to attempt. We believe at the commission that the success of this project will encourage other communities to try something like this. In fact, we’ve already been approached by other cities to get information about the program.”

When federal census takers fanned out across the country in 1980, it had been only five years since the fall of Saigon and the first massive exodus of Vietnamese fleeing the Communist regime. At that time, 4.6% of Costa Mesa residents were listed as “Asian and Pacific Islander,” the category that includes Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians. Everyone is certain there are more now, but since the census is taken only once every 10 years, no one is certain how many.

The 1980 census put Costa Mesa’s population at 81,800. The state estimates the 1987 count at 89,909, a 10% increase. In 1980, 89.9% of the residents were classified as white, .65% as black, another .65% Indian and Eskimo, 10.3% of Hispanic origin and 4.2% as “other.” The figures add up to more than 100% because of overlapping categories, and they have not been updated since the 1980 census.

But the school district found in a survey done last fall that Latino and Asian enrollment had increased dramatically. In the Costa Mesa elementary schools, while the white enrollment dropped from 67.5% to 61.7% between 1981 and 1987, the Latino enrollment increased from 20.5% to 26.8%. In grades seven through 12, the white enrollment dropped from 80.6% to 64%, while Latino enrollment jumped from 7.8% to 17%. Asian enrollment went from 11% to 17.7%.

In some schools, the enrollments were even more striking. For instance, Sonora Elementary School reported 28.6% of its enrollment as Asian, Filipino or Pacific Islander. The Latino enrollment was 61.6% at Whittier, 54.7% at Pomona and 48.7% at Wilson elementary schools.

“The whole point is that the city is changing greatly,” said Jean Forbath, an official of the Costa Mesa-based Share Our Selves program, an anti-poverty agency run by volunteers. “But we want to encourage a peaceful, helpful type of change and stress that Costa Mesa will continue to be a great place to live.”

That is what Olivia Cornejo wants, too.

Cornejo, born in the Mexican state of Jalisco 31 years ago and an immigrant to the United States 15 years ago, said she thinks that what are called the Living Room Dialogues are important “because we live in a community where until the present we never have had any problem with gangs or anything like that.”

“I think if I start doing something like this program, my children will grow up in a community where everything is nice and the neighborhood is one we want to have.”

Cornejo’s tale is not untypical of immigrants to the United States across the centuries: One member of a family coming, earning money, sending for another relative, keeping it up until finally the whole family has made it here.

“My father came here about 27 years ago and then my mother, and I was in Mexico with my grandma until I was 16 years old,” she said. “And then I came to live with them.”

Why did her father come at all?

“I think probably looking for a better life, or at least to earn more money,” she said.

Carlos Ornelas, too, was born in Mexico, in Chihuahua state. Now 32, he came to the United States at age 7, earned a degree from Cal State Fullerton with a double major in public administration and Latin American studies, and works as a production planner and scheduler for an electronics firm.

He rates participation in the intercultural get-togethers important because of what he sees as an increase in ethnic tensions, “especially in the last few months.”

“I guess the tension consists of . . . people sharing the idea that the Hispanics should be treated as they were treated in Orange,” the city where officials have been conducting “sweeps” of Latino day laborers lining Chapman Avenue and environs in the mornings to wait for work. Many of the laborers were deported.

The sentiment in Costa Mesa to give Latinos “the Orange treatment” is “becoming pretty popular,” Ornelas said. “You overhear conversations or you notice attitudes. I think that is the wrong approach . . . (but) in Costa Mesa you can see (sentiment for that approach) rising. . . . You can almost see people viewing it that way. I’m sure it’s because of fear and doubt.”

Costa Mesa’s citywide dialogues are an outgrowth of similar meetings last year that were held in only one area of the city. And those localized meetings were spawned by residents’ complaints about the same thing that Orange businessmen complained about this year: morning “shape-ups” of immigrants seeking work.

In 1986, Costa Mesa residents complained about Mexican immigrants gathering daily in Lions Park to search for work. This year, it was complaints from business owners in Orange that “mob-like” groups of Latinos were gathering and looking for day-laborer jobs. Police arrested hundreds, some for throwing a cigarette on the street or not wearing seat belts in a car, and handed them over for deportation as illegal aliens if they couldn’t produce identification.

When the Costa Mesa complaints began two years ago, the city set up a task force that recommended greater cultural awareness among Latinos and Anglos. One result was the formation of meetings of members of the two groups in the western part of the city.

They were successful enough that the meetings were expanded citywide, with next week’s sessions to be sponsored by the county Human Relations Commission, the Newport-Mesa-Irvine Interfaith Council, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District and the Costa Mesa Service Organizations Council.

Extensive publicity throughout the city resulted in more than 50 families agreeing to host gatherings, Plevin said. Organizers are continuing to seek participants for the meetings down to the wire and are asking those interested to call (714) 567-7470. Their hope is to find more people like Kazuko Nishida.

Nishida said she wants to meet people like Cornejo and Ornelas and also wants to get to know some other Asians.

“I’m from Japan, and I know about Japan,” said the woman who accompanied her husband from Hiroshima when he took a transfer to Costa Mesa to work in the U.S. headquarters of the Japanese car maker Mazda.

“But in California, especially around here, there are many, many people from different countries, different nations,” Nishida said. “And I’d like to know what they are thinking, what they think about American culture, comparing it with their own cultures. Because I don’t know their cultures. It’s so interesting for me to know different cultures.

“In Japan, I have never seen Vietnamese or Chinese or other countries’ people. I’ve seen many Americans in my town in Japan, but I’ve never seen other Asian peoples.”

Nishida credits her 4-year-old son with helping her overcome the loneliness of her early days in Costa Mesa.

“I missed my parents, my friends,” she said. “I felt very lonely. . . . I missed my country very much. But a few months later I met a friend and she had a little boy. Then I felt comfortable. Now I have no problem, and I want to live here forever.”

What are some of the more obvious differences between the two countries--besides the language, of course?

“The big surprise is husbands carry a baby on their back” in the United States, she said. “And they carry shopping bags, while their wives have nothing except a purse. I felt that American men are tied to their wives’ apron strings. In Japan, a husband often carries a baby, but not on his back.”

Another difference was that in the United States “most husbands fix their own breakfast, according to my friends. In Japan, that seldom happens. Even if the husband leaves home early, the wife gets up early and fixes breakfast and then says goodby.”

If differences between countries are sometimes enormous, there are changes from one region to another within the United States as well, as Arthur and Gladys Davis found out.

“There’s quite a dearth of African-Americans in academe that I’ve seen, much fewer than back East,” Arthur Davis said. Holder of a Ph.D. in psychology and an accomplished classical musician on the double-bass, Davis said there are far fewer blacks overall in Southern California, certainly in Orange County, than there are in New York.

Asked what they want other participants in the dialogues to learn about them, Gladys Davis said, “I feel that No. 1 is, we are a black couple with college children. Many people know about the races through sensational headlines in the newspaper, which are in many instances negative.

“(I want people to learn) that black people work very hard, that they have the same goals that middle-class white people have for their children. We have two kids, one at Stanford in pre-med and the other at Kutztown (University, in Pennsylvania) in pre-law.

“We have the same concerns about the American economy, war, pollution, and--now that we’re in California--earthquakes. Those are the kinds of things that we have concerns about. . . . We love, we hurt, we have all the human feelings.”

A Veterans Administration nurse for 22 years, Gladys Davis said that when she transferred to the VA Hospital in Long Beach, “I found that racially they were back in the pre-1960s, very much like an old plantation. I found the supervisor was like ‘Miss Ann’ and I was a little peon.

“I had held responsible positions at the VA for 15 years, (supervising), working with people, very good labor-management skills. (Yet in Long Beach) I was relegated to the back burner, until I fought up to the front burner.”

Davis said things have improved considerably at the hospital and notes that in Costa Mesa, the people “are very kind, empathetic, or compassionate, or whatever word you want to use.”

Another fan of the city is Pham Thi Hue, whose perspective on the United States is colored by the fall of her native Vietnam to a Communist government and her resultant inability to visit the land where her mother and three sisters still live.

“The thing people should know is Vietnamese people come here and try to make a better life here,” Pham said. “Many Vietnamese refugees or immigrants come here because of the great country of America that has liberty and freedom. . . . Many have risked their lives on the high seas to come here because of the freedom in this country. And I think many people do not realize that, and I’d like to stress that.”

Pham received a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Houston. Two years ago, with the the oil business having fallen on hard times, taking Houston’s economy with it, she headed for California with her husband and three children.

Now a counselor at Orange Coast College, Pham said she was lucky to be one of the early Vietnamese immigrants to America, even though she had planned to return home after finishing her education.

When she arrived, she said, she was a rarity, and Americans “showed great interest in Vietnam, they asked me about the war in Vietnam.” Later arrivals have told her tales of discrimination, such as being denied jobs in Texas because of their race.

Still, her main theme during the Living Room Dialogues will be the freedom of America. And if things are slow to warm up, Pham says she has an ice-breaker.

“I married and did not change my name because it is the (Vietnamese) custom,” she said. As a result, she and her husband have different names. “People have been confused, but I think it’s a good way to begin the conversation.”