The Final Day : Some Hopes Rise, Others Fall as Last Chance for Amnesty Fades

Bernardo Tavera stood on East Chapman Avenue in Orange on the last day of amnesty and talked about eating chicken, of which he has tasted little since he came to the United States two weeks ago.

Tavera came with the hope that he might qualify for legal resident status and be better able to provide for himself and his family back in Mexico. He was badly mistaken, and now he is thinking about returning home.

Norma Ivarra came here with her family in 1972. But with three kids and no husband around, life has not been easy. She figured her impoverished condition would disqualify her from amnesty. But at the last minute, she told herself, “I have to do it for my kids,” and ended up at the Santa Ana legalization office.

There, early Wednesday morning, chief legalization officer George I. Newland surveyed the scene in front of him and couldn’t have been more satisfied. Nervous-looking applicants streamed steadily to the counter to hand in their paper work and fees, but the pandemonium predicted for the final day of amnesty was not materializing.

“Boy, if it stays like this it would be just great,” Newland said.

Depending on where you stood Wednesday, the last day of amnesty meant a lot of different things.

When Tavera left Mexico for the United States, hunger crossed the border with him.

In Mexico, Tavera had heard vague talk about la amnestia and was encouraged. After crossing miles of torrid Mexican desert and then sneaking onto a train, Tavera arrived in Orange County nearly two weeks ago only to learn he did not qualify.

Since then, he has worked only three days, uprooting trees or breaking concrete with a pick and shovel for $5 an hour, just enough for a daily ration of beans and tortillas.

“When you make little money you get little food,” Tavera said with a chuckle. “If you raise some extra money you can buy some chicken.”

For Tavera and other illegal aliens waiting along Chapman Avenue for employers to hire them, the end of amnesty means the beginning of even harder times trying to get work.

Employers are now very cautious in hiring workers without papers, said the men, milling around a shopping center parking lot. With the amnesty period over and the Immigration and Naturalization Service less worried about scaring potential applicants away, the men fear the agency might crack down on employers and employees who continue to violate the new immigration law.

“I am just going to try to raise enough money to get back home,” said Gerraldo Errera, 22, who shares an apartment with Tavera and four other friends. “It is just too hard here.”

Tavera, too, has given up hope of finding a better life here. “In Mexico you are accustomed to everything and at least there you don’t have to worry about getting picked up by la migra ,” he said, looking over his shoulder at an Orange police patrol car that was parked nearby.

He shrugged as he described how he entered the country only to find out he could not stay.

Tavera and two other men began their journey by walking across miles of desert in Mexico, “dying of hunger, dying of thirst,” he said. “We almost got lost and didn’t know which way to go.”

Hiding Under Sand

After crossing the border somewhere in Texas, Tavera and the other men jumped on a northbound train and hid in a boxcar full of sand, he said. The three men buried their entire bodies in the sand, uncovering only their noses to breathe, so that the authorities could not find them.

“All I wanted was a steady job and a nice house where I could go for a good meal,” he said. “I knew it would be hard to get a job but I did not think they would treat us like robbers.”

“I should have done it a long time ago,” said the soft-spoken Norma Ivarra, accompanied by two of her children, Brandon, 1, and Chantille, 3. Three months pregnant and separated from her husband, the 19-year-old Ivarra receives monthly welfare checks for the children.

“The kids were born here,” she said. “They have the right to be in this country. I’m not going to take them to Mexico and suffer. In Mexico you can starve.”

Ivarra, who last worked a month ago at a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant in Corona, hopes amnesty will bring a brighter future to her life too. She had to leave her last job when supervisors began asking employees for Social Security cards.

Offered $3.35 an Hour

“Wherever I went I couldn’t get more than $3.35 an hour,” she said, adding that if she is granted legal resident status she would return to school and “go for real estate.”

Jennifer DeLima, the program supervisor at Catholic Charities where Ivarra had gone for counseling before applying for amnesty, described the young mother as “a typical end-of-the-line case.”

“She’s had all kinds of problems, and she thought she didn’t qualify,” DeLima said. But welfare payments for her dependent children would not disqualify Ivarra, she said.

“I told her: ‘Don’t even worry about (the welfare). If you have to have it, go back and get it,’ ” DeLima said. But Ivarra will still have to prove that she is not likely to become a public charge herself, DeLima said.

Born in Mexico City, Ivarra came to the United States with her family in 1972. Soon after arriving, her father went back to Mexico, deserting her, her mother and five sisters.

Mother Died Recently

Her sisters and a brother who was born in the United States live and work in Stanton, Ivarra said. Her mother died recently.

Ivarra did not know if her sisters had applied for amnesty, and she did not ask them for help. “They’ve got their own families,” she said.

Amnesty, Ivarra said, “makes a difference because I’m going to be working, and I’ll be able to raise my kids a little better. . . . I can’t be depending on my husband right now. I can’t depend on nobody.”

At the Santa Ana legalization office, George Newland propped his feet up on his desk and reminisced about a year’s work.

“There was the day when 43 strawberry pickers from the field across the street came in to apply,” Newland said. “We used to watch them through our windows when we were getting ready to open.

Englishwoman Was Illegal

“Then there was that old gal from England, she was 88 years old, thinking she was here legally all the time until her son died and she found out she was illegal. She came in and got her employment card and said, ‘I don’t need this.’ ”

Newland, 60, spent 22 years with the INS before he retired from government service in 1979. For seven of those years, Newland patrolled the nation’s borders--a U.S. Border Patrol cap hangs on his office coat rack--and for 15 years he worked in INS investigations, uncovering fraud and busting up marriage scams.

He came back to the INS to head up the Santa Ana office. A provision of the new immigration law allowed the immigration service to hire retired employees for 18 months. Newland, along with scores of others in similar circumstances, must leave Oct. 3.

But by then he will have helped almost 50,000 people he once might have arrested gain legal resident status in the United States.

“That’s a pretty good-sized city,” said Newland, who grew up in tiny Emmetsburg, Iowa.

A Confrontation

As he wandered out into the crowd of applicants, a concerned Leticia Villasenor, 26, confronted him.

“If I apply and don’t make it, will they come looking for me?” asked the slight, well-spoken woman, eye to solar plexus with Newland. Now a maid in Laguna Niguel, Villasenor first came to the United States from her native Mexico City in 1979. Her brother finally persuaded her to put her fears aside, walk into the office and apply, she said.

Newland was reassuring.

“Whatever information comes into this office never leaves here,” he said. “No other part of the INS will find out where you live or work. That’s not to say that one day you won’t be walking down the street and they’ll get you, but it won’t have anything to do with your applying here. So you might as well take the chance.”

Villasenor looked relieved.

“I just do housework right now, but if I could get this, I’ll study and get a better job.”

For Newland, there probably won’t be another job. In two years he will be eligible for Social Security, and he said he plans to travel through North America when his term at the legalization office is over.

“You might get bored working someplace else after going through this,” he said.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Hugo Martin on Chapman Avenue in Orange and Carlos Lozano in Santa Ana.