Inside The Mexican-American Middle Class : Success Stories : Voices From an Emerging Elite

A STUDENT AT Princeton University, a Mexican-American, tells me he hasn’t decided whether to write his senior thesis on the Chicano novel or on Thomas Pynchon. What’s missing from the Chicano novel, he says, what we really need, he says, is a “novel about a Mexican kid who grows up in the suburbs; who hangs out at the mall.”

I can sympathize. For most of my life I have sought a novel that could reflect my own life. There are ethnic novels. And novels of education. There have certainly been attempts to mythologize middle-class life. I have read them all.

Only recently have I gone in search of Mexican-American lives that might inhabit an imaginary novel.

It is interesting to me. It is interesting to us.

A friend of mine tells me I should have been in town a few weeks ago--the Rufino Tamayo opening at UCLA. What a scene! Mexican-American money. The orange ladies. The black cars.

Describing herself in a crowd--picking out other Mexican-American women--Jessica Ramos tells me: “It’s a curious thing to look at someone similar to yourself.” Indeed.

What does it mean to be successful and Mexican-American?

I am walking with Elsa Banuelos toward her Beverly Hills office. She says some Chicanos tell her she has sold out because she is a corporate lawyer.

“I don’t apologize.”

She points to the Bistro Garden on the other side of Wilshire Boulevard. “We take clients there for lunch a lot.” She will be sitting at a crowded table in the Bistro Garden with clients and other lawyers when someone will require a transaction with the busboy. Ice water. Bread. More coffee. “But the busboy doesn’t speak English. So everyone turns to me.

“I’m tired of translating,” she says.

Today’s success is measured against the memory of failure. Our parents came from Mexico--poor Mexico--her land stolen, her resources siphoned, her politicians corrupt. California was once Mexico. Mexico was defeated here. Mexico withdrew. Our parents were thus newcomers to California but partisans in an old antagonism, representatives of an old defeat.

In “North from Mexico,” his classic study of Mexican-Americans, Carey McWilliams wrote: “One who achieves success in the borderlands is ‘Spanish,’ one who doesn’t is Mexican.” Jessica Ramos from Santa Monica tells me her Anglo friends wonder why she doesn’t just say she’s Spanish. Save herself the trouble. “They seem to be more comfortable identifying me with something they understand--with Europe, I guess.”

Most Mexicans have come to this country in this century. They came in the early decades--during Mexico’s bloody Revolution--and they have been coming ever since. In the 1980s, Mexicans are the largest immigrant population in the United States; we are also the most notorious illegal immigrant population.

The perception of Mexicans as poor is thus constant in California because a new generation of lower-class immigrants has succeeded an earlier generation: wave after wave, year after year. The cliche never changes: We don’t speak English. We drop out of high school. We live on some wrong side of town. We work as maids or as gardeners.

Henry Ramos, Jessica’s brother, says he faced no discrimination growing up in Santa Monica. “What I got instead was the duty to explain: “ ‘Why are your people the way they are?’ ”

Ramos remembers problems at University High when Chicanos were bused in from across town. The principal organized a meeting, a chance for Chicanos to air their grievances to school administrators. The principal pressed Henry Ramos to join the discussion.

Henry Ramos found himself cast as a “broker between two societies that speak a different kind of language.” When the Chicano students were not forthcoming, Ramos says, “I can’t say that I understood their anger, but I began to speak up.”

According to government statistics, a larger percentage of U.S. Latinos live below the poverty line than the national average. Again, according to government statistics, only 2% of U.S. Latinos hold postgraduate degrees. But 2% of 19 million is a lot of stories. This is by way of saying that the upper middle class remains pretty thin air for Mexicans. But there are pioneers: the first ever to be hired; the first to sit at that desk; the first ever named.

The academic most often cited regarding Mexican-American social mobility is Leo Estrada. Estrada teaches at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA. He predicts the future through demographics.

Estrada tells the story of a friend who gathered together 22 Latino Ph.D.s to look for possible similarities in their stories. Out of the 22, 21 were Protestant.

What does it mean?

Success is perhaps always a mystery, always as much luck as logic. But Estrada thinks it means “you cannot break out of the culture of poverty unless there is something unusual about you.” Protestantism in a Catholic community could be one of those things. Or “success could have to do with whether or not your parents took you out of the neighborhood. Whether or not you had Anglo friends at an early age.” Success becomes a violation of the community’s habitual way; success becomes an eccentric step.

What I have assembled here are voices suggesting a possible novel. Each voice is the sum of a particular journey. Each voice has become the example it sought but did not find. Each voice exemplifies a phenomenon--Mexican-American success--which is something new under the California sun.

I HEAR THIS FROM several women: Latinos (they mean men) tend to “marry up” (they mean blonde). Most of the women I interview have never married or have not married Latinos. Success isolates them, they say. In law school or business school, there are no unmarried Latinos around.

Many women confess to an ambivalence toward Mexican family life. Success means breaking free of the cloister of Mexico. They may have been encouraged to go to college, but the idea of going away to college--leaving home unmarried--was a problem. Some say it was harder for them than for their brothers to break out.

Irma Ramirez-Tom is an exception. “In a way,” she says, “life in the barrio was easier for me as a girl than for my brothers. The neighborhood was more of an influence on boys.”

Irma Ramirez-Tom remembers working alongside her father in a field in Texas. Clouds raced overhead. She remembers blisters on her hands. She remembers the migrant camps--Quonset-hut cities. She remembers tortillas with salt pork and gravy. She remembers how women formed a circle in the field when one of them “had to go to the toilet.”

Her father ransomed the family from the migratory cycle of farm work by taking a job on a dairy. It was terra firma. Later, he heard about a better job in New Mexico and he moved his family there.

She went to high school in Santa Fe. Because she did well in school, she tended to associate “with the white kids who lived up on the hill”; she was the one who came home with Big Ideas. Even now, when her sister-in-law starts spouting opinions, Irma Ramirez-Tom’s brother complains: “You’re just trying to act like Irma.”

Her father struggled to give his family security. Irma Ramirez-Tom wanted the freedom of the sky. She was considered the old maid in the family because she was still unmarried at 18. She had cousins who were teen-age mothers before they were wives.

She set sail. Her two brothers stayed close to home.

She went to the University of New Mexico. As a freshman, she planned to major in home economics. She ended up in sociology. Eventually, she became a welfare case-worker. “I found a lot of people who live on welfare are content with that little bit of money . . . that little world.”

The world grew broader as she entered into it. She married the son of a wealthy New Mexican Spanish family. She moved to California with her husband. Once here, they separated, later divorced. In California, she did graduate work in business. She now works as a financial analyst for Merrill Lynch in San Francisco. “There is not another Latina who works for a full-service brokerage firm in my capacity.”

In San Francisco, she met and married Steven Tom--” mi esposo, el Chino .” “My Chinese husband is more Mexican than I am,” she says. “He has more Latino records, knows more of the music. And he has studied in Mexico. He loves the culture.”

Ramirez-Tom factors the equation: “His culture emphasizes hard work to get ahead; mine emphasizes hard work to survive.”

She does not want to be misunderstood. Although she is moving toward some new California, she does not reject the past. She loves her heritage, her family. She loves her brothers (“still very macho”). There is much in Mexican culture that Ramirez-Tom admires--such as the protective impulse instilled in young boys that is the generous side of machismo. But, she says, “my Chinese husband knows how to put me in my place without humiliating me. The Asian men I’ve known are very secure. They have no trouble washing the dishes.”

FOR SOME of the people I talked to, education was a round-trip ticket. In the 1960s, affirmative-action policies assumed that a Latino leadership class would improve the condition of the entire population. People spoke of “going back to the barrio.” In 1988, there is a reluctance to formulate publicly any distinction between the elite and the poor.

Jeannine Jaramillo and Alejandro Jimenez are engaged. She is finishing business school at USC. He is a corporate lawyer. She is 28 and he is 27. They live in a large apartment complex overlooking Highland Park. She says they used to live on the Westside two years ago and “it was nice, but it was like living someone else’s life.”

He calls their present neighborhood “the barrio.” He frequently reverts to the ‘60s, as when he talks about “changing the system” or “selling out.” He says he was influenced in high school by one teacher particularly--”a socialist.”

Jaramillo is light-skinned. She has dark hair. She says people are often surprised when she tells them she is Mexican. She “grew up identifying as Mexican-American.” She grew up in Albuquerque, N.M. She went to school in the late ‘60s. There was friction among the racial and ethnic groups at school. She remembers police cars escorting groups of kids home after school.

Her family was “dysfunctional.” Later, she uses the word alcoholic .

In high school, she worked as a waitress and also at phone sales.

Alejandro Jimenez was born in Guadalajara; his parents came north “because in Mexico you starve.” His family lived for a time in Watts. He remembers one summer in Watts when “it seemed like the streets were on fire.”

He went to UCLA on scholarship. “Twenty or 30 years ago, we would have been unable to get into the Stanfords and the Harvards.” He attended Harvard Law School.

She says she’s never been to Mexico. Not really. “I’ve only been to the border towns.” She is curious about Mexico.

She tested high in school. A friend of hers was accepted at Brown University in Rhode Island. Jeannine Jaramillo looked at a map. She applied to Harvard because it was near Brown. She says she had never heard of Harvard.

He says he grew up in a home that never “validated” him.

He went through his first year at Harvard in tennis shoes, he says.

She got on the plane for Boston; she’d never been anywhere before--well, once to Las Vegas. She had $85. All across the country she worried about getting a cab at the airport. Do you just get in? How much does it cost? Do you need exact fare?

“When I got to Harvard, I learned the system quickly,” she says. “That’s what comes from being in an alcoholic family. I learned long ago how to read adult behavior.”

She says she knows that there are some kids who use the minority label to get into Harvard. At Harvard you are Latino if you say you are. She says there are instances of students misusing affirmative action. “But it doesn’t help to fight each other about it.”

They met at a folklorico dance club at Harvard.

He says he had a reputation at Harvard as a womanizer. He is good-looking. He works out with weights--”a working-class sport,” he says. Whereas most of the men in his Westside firm play softball or basketball, he says.

She says they are working against the odds--two brown, successful people--already “we are going against traditional Latino sex roles that say the man alone should earn the money.”

He says he needed to grow up. A lot of Latinos need to grow up. “I’ve seen lots of Latino executives who would rather marry a blonde secretary than look at a Latina. It breaks my heart.”

His ambition, his goal in life, is to be a good father, a good husband. And “to ensure that in Los Angeles, Latinos control their own destinies.”

He says, “I have a computer, yes, but we have Mexican pottery at home.”

Someday he wants to make policy--”like immigration policy, that touches the lives of Latinos.”

His fear is that they will have children “who are not angry.”

RICHARD SOTO bites into a $7 cheeseburger, replaces it in its nest of fries, wipes his fingers with a paper napkin. The waiters are Mexican muscle boys, Ganymedes from Pasadena.

“When I was a little boy, my name was Ricky. Then I became Rich. Then Ricardo. Now, I’m Richard.” Ricky Soto was a middle-class kid. He didn’t understand what it meant to be Mexican in the middle class.

Richard Soto’s father (“a perfect immigrant”) worked the steel mills of the Midwest. When the war came, he fought in the Pacific; he was wounded at Guam. After the war, the family settled in California, in Los Angeles--”the first Mexicans on the block.”

Ricky went to Our Lady of Grace grammar school in Encino and he resisted any distinction from his classmates. “The teachers kept trying to give my name a Spanish pronunciation--Saw-toe. No, no, I’d say. It’s Soe-Toe--that’s how middle class I was.” He was in junior high when Mexican kids were bused in from across town. “I really didn’t belong with them,” he felt; even so, his old friends began to regard him differently--as a Mexican. “I became a liability to my friends.” His best friend, Roy, drifted away. He wonders what happened to Roy.

So Rich started hanging out with Chicanos.

He began to get into trouble. His father moved the family to Guadalajara to cure the barrio out of his son. And it worked. Mexico gave Richard Soto memory, art, architecture, an older world. Mexico taught him what America never had--that you don’t have to be poor to be Mexican. Ricardo remembers entering an architect’s room in Guadalajara, remembers entering the baroque room, remembers thinking: “I want this room to be mine.”

Richard Soto, 42, works for himself; he is a film maker; he shares a small office in downtown Pasadena. His wife is not Mexican. They live in Mt. Washington. “Most of my children’s friends are Vietnamese and Chinese.”

Alone among the people I talk to, Richard Soto places himself at a reflective, perhaps an artistic distance from his own middle class. He says: “When you become middle class, you want to get what you missed. Mexican-Americans head for the suburbs. Buy a BMW. Send the kids to private schools--maybe Catholic schools.

“If the Chicano keeps any of his Mexican-ness, it is in cliche ways. Fountains in the patio or archways when they remodel their homes. At cocktail parties they serve Mexican cuisine--authentic nachos.

“They take down the Paul Klee and put up the Tamayo. They search the record stores for authentic Mexican sounds. I know a guy who tore up a perfectly good bathroom to put in genuine Mexican tiles.”

Four years ago, Richard Soto produced a PBS documentary about Miami. Miami taught Richard Soto what Mexico had taught him 20 years earlier: You do not have to step down socially to claim your ethnicity. “Miami is a ‘what if’ city. What if Latinos could be middle class, light or dark, be lazy or not.” Except that Miami does exist. “In a way, Los Angeles is becoming more like Miami--greater numbers, less compulsion to apologize.”

But then he catches himself. Los Angeles is not Miami. Cubans are different from Mexicans. The Mexican immigrant comes from a folk culture, from a village--different from the cosmopolitan city rich Cubans remember. “Miami’s Latinization was economic--the Cubans own the city. . . . Mexican-Americans may buy into L.A., but they will not remake the city.

“L.A. will never be Miami because the immigrants who replenish L.A. are the poor.”

BECAUSE THE POOR keep coming, Mexican-American success is haunted by the memory of poverty. Douglas Patino sees the gift of Mexico as not apart from her poverty but within it.

Douglas Patino lives in Marin County, in northern California, in a section of San Anselmo called Sleepy Hollow. At 49, he is president and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, the third-largest community foundation in the country. In a Chinese restaurant, in a waterfront shopping center with architectural allusions to New England, Douglas Patino remembers growing up along the Mexican border, a son of poverty.

He was born on this side of the border; he went to school on this side, in Calexico. But he belonged to family on the other side. As a boy, he shuttled back and forth between Mexicali and Calexico. On the California side, he worked 48 hours a week after school in a drugstore. And he often got beat up by the Mexican kids in Mexicali--in their eyes he was pocho (gringoized). He learned to evade them by getting off the bus at a later stop and backtracking, toward the border, on foot.

Patino’s view of the world still seems to take its dialectic from the border. “In America we confuse poverty of the mind and soul with poverty of the pocketbook. A family in Mexico can be dirt-poor, but a family in Mexico has culture and values. Americans do not understand.

“In Mexico, you can be very poor. But in Mexico there is a strength that comes from living in a country where you belong.

“In Mexico, even though we were poor, we were impeccably dressed, always starched.” Patino remains impeccably dressed. He has good looks, an elegant manner, power.

“Mexico has an earthy value system--Mexico values children, Mexico values family, Mexico values people over results.” He is not speaking ironically nor is he speaking romantically--this man of influence who celebrates the virtue of poverty. For Douglas Patino, being in touch with Mexico is not a matter of going back to the barrio, but it is a matter of recognizing the moral value of Mexico as her true legacy.

“I miss Latinos very much,” Patino says, chopsticks poised over a platter of sweet and sour. “I’m on the phone with my sister every Sunday.”

His wife is from Germany. Their son is 14 years old. When his son was much younger, mother and son spoke German together; it was their private language. But now the boy has forgotten his German. He does not yet know Spanish.

Patino admits that he looks forward to the time--”how wonderful it will be”--when his son learns Spanish. Already, the two of them plan to visit Mexico. “We’re going to spend a month. I want him to walk the streets, know people’s suffering. I want him to know Mexico’s perseverance. I want him to know Mexico.”

WHEREAS DOUGLAS PATINO argues that the poverty of Mexico informs the virtue of Mexico, Jesus Arguelles believes that the coming Mexican-American wealth, the new financial power of Mexican-Americans, will redefine the hemisphere. After a season as an investment banker for Sutro & Co., Jesus Arguelles has left to open his own firm, Arguelles & Co. On this, his last day at Sutro, he sits at a blank desk. Behind him, on a partially cleared shelf, is a picture of a little boy, his son. To his left, a precipice--the illogical view from the 34th floor of the Bank of America Tower in downtown Los Angeles.

Arguelles is 40, tall, restless, twice-married, twice-divorced. He was born in a small Mexican town called Durango. He remembers a hard life--milking cows, the constant barter with the desert. “In Mexico, you learn the love of uncertainty, the love of hunger.”

He thinks true leaders are created from such experiences, such hunger. And yet Mexico has no leaders, he says. Mexico has politicians.

One day in Mexico his father--”very macho”--declared to the family at dinner: “We’re going.”

And with that the family moved to the United States. Jesus attended Clifford Elementary in Silver Lake. Kids beat him up and they mocked him. Cholo! Mexico scorns the Americanized pocho , Mexican-Americans in turn scorn the cholo --the hick, the greenie, the Mexican rube in America.

Jesus Arguelles remembers the pain of those first years in Los Angeles and comes near to tears as he describes how Chicano kids at school taunted him. “ Mojado , they called me. Wetback.”

“I felt like I was in concentration camp.”

In junior high, he had one good teacher--Polish. There was otherwise no support. His parents were busy working.

At John Marshall High, he was a B student. He got a D once in English. He was unhappy. Fat. “This universe . . .” (he indicates the view from the 34th floor) was a mystery beyond the 10-mile radius of his first unhappy decade in America.

High school counselors advised trade school. He married at 17, “as much to get away from home as from love.” Days, he sold shoes. Nights, he went to Los Angeles City College. He did not live in a world of great expectations. He says he saw “white people” getting ahead and he realized that he would be left behind if he didn’t start to make choices. Once he was a street cleaner on Broadway. He can see Broadway from his office.

He got a divorce. A friend of his had gone to University of California, Santa Barbara. So Jesus Arguelles decided to go there too.

“Santa Barbara was hard; I was alone.”

His roommate was a “white guy”--a doctor’s son. Arguelles had trouble with the Chicano student organization. “I’m very systematic. They were fatalistic. They could not tolerate differences.

“Several prominent psychologists have done studies on that word--fatalism. Here is my theory about the fatalism of Mexicans, no, my scenario. I think in Mexico . . . we do not have enough positive experiences to draw on. Mexico, however, at least has a few heroes--Hidalgo, Benito Juarez; here in the U.S., we don’t even have these few.” Which is why, he says, Chicanos so often see success as a betrayal--a sellout. “Chicanos tear each other apart.”

He graduated with a degree in economics; he went to graduate school at USC. His second wife came from New England.

Arguelles thinks that because the Mexican-American has not perceived himself as successful, no one else equates success with being Mexican-American. Arguelles remembers that when he first put on the blue suit of success, people started asking if he was Italian.

America’s expectation has been that Mexican-American success would follow the lead of politicians and activists. Arguelles says his own generation is not going into politics but into business. “As people who came from Mexico, we do not trust the political system.”

Arguelles intends to set up his own international investment banking company. He wants offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in Sacramento; in Quito, Ecuador, and in San Antonio. He wants to pull hemispheres together on a line of credit. On the one hand, he will offer Latin Americans advice on American investments; he will also offer Latin American access to American businesses. “We want to become the No. 1 firm for establishing manufacturing plants along the Mexican border.” He also wants to tap the economic strength of Latinos in the United States: to teach Latinos how to use money in a capitalist economy. “Equity-wise, we are very rich. We don’t sell our houses. We have billions of dollars available to us.”

Jesus Arguelles predicts that the Mexican-American, for so long a disgrace in the eyes of Latin America--an underclass population, without culture, without pride, without even memory--may soon become the model for the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. We will have money.

OTHERS MAY WORRY about salvaging the past or constructing the future. James Blancarte’s past and future are as solidly coupled as freight cars. James Blancarte reminds me of my older brother, also a lawyer, also untroubled. “There is only one minority group in this country,” my brother says--”blacks.” So why am I always chewing on my Mexican-American rag? What’s the big deal? What is there for me to wonder about? Why should success be such a problem?

The first time we talk, Blancarte is on his cellular phone, driving down Olympic Boulevard: “How do you get ahead if you’re Mexican-American? You win the lottery or you work your butt off.” James Blancarte does not live in an ambiguous world.

When I show up at his office, he is late for our appointment, and he will be late for his next. Six o’clock, he is due at a reception for Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. Seven o’clock, a meeting of the Mexican-American Bar Assn. At 10, drinks at the Comedy Store--”a client.”

James Blancarte is a partner with Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, a Century City law firm. His client list is mostly entertainers. He is 35. He is built like a linebacker.

He grew up in South Pomona. South Pomona was “tough.” At Sacred Heart grammar school, “the Anglos were in the minority.” He remembers “white kids” wishing that they had been born Latino. It wasn’t until high school--Damien High in La Verne--that Jim Blancarte was “subjected to the notion that Mexicans weren’t the majority.”

He played football. His Catholic school team “beat the bejeezus” out of the public-school kids who “might otherwise have wanted to beat me up on the street.”

“I was fluent in Spanish as soon as I was fluent in English.” He was an only child. His father was Mexican-American; his father worked as a welder. His mother was born in Mexico. Mexico was never very far away. “We used to load the ’55 Merc station wagon with toys and clothes. We couldn’t get to Mexico fast enough or stay long enough.” Roads, villages, houses--even today, Blancarte says, he can make his way around his mother’s home state of Aguascalientes.

“Mexico was my mother and America was my father.”

His father died when James was a teen-ager.

In America, the nuns at school were determined on Blancarte’s success. “The nuns made sure you learned the fundamentals. In high school, the Jesuits took over the job.”

He went to Pomona College because his high school teachers wanted him to go there. In the ‘70s, at Pomona, “some students wore their ethnicity on their sleeves, they didn’t know they wore it on their faces.” It was a time when Chicano students were proclaiming their heritage, “going through an identity crisis that I was spared by my parents,” he says. Blancarte had grown up intimate with Mexico.

And yet, Blancarte was himself a Chicano protester in those years. “We closed down the school to remind the administration what it was like to be denied college.”

He recalls Pomona as a place full of “kids whose family names are on the things we buy in this state.” Blancarte kept his own path--”my social world was 10 minutes away”--home, the street, friends he’d kept from his boyhood.

After Pomona, UCLA law school. The idea of law school came from watching Perry Mason. “I assumed I would go back to Pomona and open my own firm or work in public-interest law.”

Instead he became a corporate lawyer. “It was bucking the traditional party lines that said minorities don’t go into big firms. I felt my sphere of emphasis and influence would be more broad-reaching (with a bigger firm) than if I was out there on my own with just a secretary and a phone.”

He paces the room with energy. Never Hamlet. He points to glossies of his clients, Latino movie stars and athletes on the wall. “I also represent clients like the Comic Relief Show on HBO. That’s not an ethnic show unless you think it’s a Jewish show.”

Blancarte says Latinos are at a moment of “crossover”; he facilitates the merger. He belongs to the wider world. James Blancarte believes that one can--one must--live in two worlds.

He married Mexican. They have two kids. They live in Cheviot Hills--a “ ‘Leave It To Beaver’ neighborhood.” He plays golf. “The day I’m going to worry about it is the day I get back to Pomona and my cousin George is uncomfortable hanging out with me.” George pours concrete for a living.

When the “obviously Mexican-looking” valet parks his car, “I treat him like someone I can have a beer with.” No problem.

I prod Blancarte. Does he worry that his own children may lack his bicultural ease, his thick skin? Nope. His 4-year-old daughter is bilingual. If she puts on airs, she has cousins who will call her on it.

“This thrilling city . . . 10 years from now, we’re going to have Latinos all over this city.” He has himself been approached, encouraged to enter politics. All things are possible, he thinks.

He notices my frown. It is not that I don’t believe him exactly, I say. It’s just that he makes it sound too easy.

Easy? Why don’t I see for myself? Come on over to his house and meet his family. Come to the Comedy Store. Paul Rodriguez will be there. “I want you to see that everything I say is true.”

“I have another appointment,” I say.

“Cancel,” he says.

But instinctively, I back away from his determination to prove something. What would I see at his house anyway? His daughter speaking Spanish? The Latina housekeeper? A swimming pool? What I wonder about James Blancarte I will never be able to test by seeing.

As we wait for the valet to deliver my car in the basement, I ask a final question, something like: Isn’t he ever embarrassed by the motes of irony that swim in front of his eyes?

“Sorry,” he says, “I don’t get embarrassed very often.”

WHEN I CALL Celia de la Rosa to ask for an interview, Celia says, “You really should talk to my mother; she’s the one with the story to tell. She works as a housekeeper in Ojai.”

Celia’s mother agrees to talk to me. Celia will be there too. Two generations. A Saturday morning.

In a rainstorm, I find the small house in Ojai. (A woman’s face smiles from the kitchen window; she waves as I come up the walk.)

“Sit down and have some breakfast, Mr. Rodriguez,” Elizabeth de la Rosa says. A place has already been set. Fruit. Biscuits. Flowers. The dining room is lined with bookcases. I notice that these are fine books. A real library. There is a fire in the fireplace.

In the adjoining living room, a pale man (Elizabeth’s mentally retarded son) watches cartoons. “Please turn the TV down.” Elizabeth hollers. The pale man doesn’t move. Next to him sits Celia’s son, 6 years old.

Elizabeth de la Rosa is in her late 50s. Her face is dark, an Indian face. A strong face. She works as a housekeeper for a “benevolent couple in Ojai.” Twenty years ago, her employers put an ad in the paper: Wanted. Woman to do hard, dirty work. $2 / hour.

Celia had said that she is writing a biography of her mother. Celia is very proud of her mother. “I want to give you my mother as a gift,” she had said.

As I sit in this comfortable room, listening to the voices of mother and daughter, listening to the disparate strains of Mexican-American success--incident, theme--begin to fugue. I will find what Celia says to be true: Elizabeth’s life contains a novel.

Elizabeth’s parents came from Mexico in the 1930s. Her father drove a taxi. Her mother wanted to be an actress. “Look”--a photograph of Elizabeth’s mother--”Clara Bow bangs . . . isn’t she beautiful?”

Shortly after Elizabeth was born, her father went back to Mexico. Elizabeth’s mother converted to evangelical Protestantism when Elizabeth was a little girl. “This is it,” Elizabeth remembers her mother saying, regarding Protestantism.

Elizabeth’s mother became a preacher. Elizabeth remembers her mother preaching on Olvera Street. “The Mexicans used to come from all over to hear her.”

“My mother would go to Mexico; my mother was not sentimental; she took clothing for the people, but she made them buy. She did not believe in giving things away, or in having the poor get something for nothing.”

“Look.” In another photograph, Clara Bow has become an old lady who wears black, who stands on the beach, who does not smile.

Elizabeth’s mother remarried. Her stepfather was from an old California family. He was Mexican, but what he said was that he was Spanish and French. Her parents made money in real estate. Elizabeth grew up in Inglewood. The other Mexican kids used to call Elizabeth “the Alleluia” because of her mother.

Regarding Mexico, Elizabeth remembers her mother saying, “ Somos Aztecos .” Whereas Elizabeth’s stepfather always advised: “Marry light, marry tall.”

“I knew if I married a Mexican I would never make it.” Elizabeth says.

Elizabeth married a German-American, an engineer. Elizabeth’s German husband wanted Elizabeth to say she was Italian. Still, he gave her “the good life.” They lived in Manhattan Beach. Elizabeth used to clatch with other Mexicans who had married Anglos. “We had the safety of our Anglo mates. We could talk about our children and say: We’re raising a new people here. My children were my trophies.”

Celia. The only daughter and the oldest of five children. Celia is 31, fine-boned, light-skinned.

Celia remembers Manhattan Beach as “beach boys and convertibles.” Celia remembers her grandmother speaking Spanish.

The family moved to Woodland Hills in the ‘60s. Elizabeth lived in upper-middle-class suburbia. She had her children, her trophies. But the decade was beginning to unravel in some other part of town. The ‘60s saw the beginning of a new Mexican-American activism. And Elizabeth wanted to be part of it.

Is it enough to say that this was a case of the Mexican romance with downward mobility? Or was Elizabeth rushing toward life? By the end of the ‘60s, Elizabeth had left her German husband and their house in Woodland Hills. She had taken the housekeeper’s job to support herself and her children. She had remarried--”I fell in love with my Czech.” She had also become an activist.

Elizabeth credits her spirit to Protestantism. She is Presbyterian. “Mexican Protestants were always the gutsy ones. The Catholics couldn’t do anything till they checked with Father or Sister.”

Somewhere in the ‘60s, Elizabeth’s political interest shifted from voter registration--the power of adults--to the necessity of educating the young. There was that day in the ‘60s when Chicano students barricaded themselves in an administration building at Moorpark College. Elizabeth was well known enough as a community organizer that the school board turned to her for help. Elizabeth went straight to the college, dressed in her white uniform.

Celia watched her mother enter the barricaded administration building on the 6 o’clock news. Elizabeth muses, “Lots of those same kids are yuppies today--that’s fine, that’s fine.”

In the ‘60s, Celia was Celia Kruse--her father’s name. In those years, Celia told people she was a Chicana German.

In Woodland Hills, Celia had not been aware of being Mexican. In Ojai, as the daughter of a housekeeper, “all of a sudden I became a ‘dirty Mexican.’ I was flabbergasted. What do you mean, dirty Mexican? I washed this blouse myself.”

Celia says she is not sure why, but “in the ‘60s I grew to admire the Jews. I read everything I could find.”

Celia went to Mills College in Oakland. Celia tried to join the Chicano student organization. “It was the first time I was confronted by the arrogance of Chicanos.”

“We’re looking for Celia Cruz,” said one of the Chicanas, referring to her rush list.

“I’m Celia Kruse.”

But the look on their faces! “The rejection; I’ll never forget the rejection.”

Elizabeth listens. “ Hija , tell them we come in all colors and shapes . . . . Mr. Rodriguez, I told Celia: Be strong! I remembered what it was like to be a Protestant in a Catholic neighborhood.”

After college, Celia worked for an uncle in East L.A. “I became more mexicana .” (Her 6-year-old son approaches to whisper something in Celia’s ear. Celia sends him away with a kiss.)

Celia married. “I finally got my Jew.” A doctor’s son from the Central Valley. Joe.

Celia echoes her mother: “When I married Joe, I thought we were going to create a whole new race.”

“Look at the wedding pictures,” Elizabeth says. Celia is embarrassed. In the photograph, Elizabeth’s employers sit next to the bride.

The marriage did not work. Celia de la Rosa went to Mexico for a time--”a divorced woman looking for my roots.” On her return from Mexico, Celia took her mother’s maiden name. “When I’d go to buy something in a department store, all of a sudden I’d have to show lots more ID.”

When I ask Celia what she would like to say to young Mexican-Americans, middle-class kids, who might be reading this, Celia is taken aback.

“I have German relatives in Minnesota. My son’s grandparents are Orthodox Jews. . . . My son will have everything to gain from his association with the culture of his mother and that of his father.

“I don’t know what to say to all Chicanos. I can speak to a Chicana who grew up in Woodland Hills. We would understand one another.

“I’ve been criticized as . . . someone who sold out. But L.A. is not just East L.A. Not every Chicana grew up in Boyle Heights. A lot of us grew up in Pasadena. In Santa Monica. A lot us grew up in Orange County. All I can say is that it’s possible to be Mexican-American from Ojai.” Celia’s eyes rest for a moment on her son watching TV in the next room.

The rain has stopped. Elizabeth wants me to see her garden--”my Mexican garden.” In her Mexican garden, I ask Elizabeth about the future of Mexican Americans.

“It’s OK. It’s OK. I was talking just this morning to a Mexican man. Mexicans keep coming. I still see them coming up the highway, walking up the street.”

WHEN I FINALLY meet Professor Leo Estrada at UCLA, our meeting is rushed. Leo Estrada sits at a small table in the new student union on the north side of campus. With him on this late Saturday afternoon is his son, 6 or 7 years old. The boy appraises me with the darkest suspicion.

“ Papi, papi . . .”

Each time his son interrupts, Estrada will patiently turn-- mi amor? --to promise his son that the interview will not take long; they will be leaving soon.

Leo Estrada sees Mexican-Americans caught in a paradox at a crucial moment in their history. The people who are in a position to become leaders are “those least related to the community.”

Texas-born, Texas-educated Leo Estrada thinks that Texas may describe a solution for California. Texas has an older, a longer settled Mexican-American population. The Mexican-American civil-rights organizations were formed in Texas. Texas has Henry Cisneros and Texas has a Mexican-American Catholic archbishop.

“ Papi, quiero ir al video. “ ( Papi raises a finger to his lips.)

Leo Estrada points to El Paso as one place where a cohesive Mexican-American middle class exists. By contrast, in Los Angeles, the emergence of a Mexican-American bourgeoisie has come more recently. In El Paso, Estrada observes, Mexican-Americans used the system to get ahead as individuals. But they went on to create public institutions that could sustain their children. (A polystyrene intergalactic warrior begins a space walk up Papi’s sleeve.)

Estrada says that in California “we are creating a very vulnerable middle class. We find ourselves unable to pass our advantages to our young.” In the 1970s, there were statistical warnings: “A higher dropout rate from high school for middle-class children than for the working class.”

Listening to Estrada, it occurs to me that we are at least a generation away from understanding the implications of Mexican-American success. All I have now are stories. Unfinished. And more stories: The Mexican-American woman who became an architect. A Mexican-American Presbyterian minister who has three degrees from Yale and practices law during the week. The lawyer who left for Wall Street to escape being stereotyped by other Mexican-Americans in California. . . .

Leo Estrada believes that there is wisdom in rituals such as quinceaneras , the traditional public celebration of a Mexican girl’s coming of age. Quinceaneras are expensive--nearly the cost of a wedding--what with fancy dresses, flowers, a Mass, a banquet for several hundred. Proud papa pays. But without such customs, papa himself cannot come of age. Without a tradition of success, success is bound to be isolating.

“Mexican-Americans did not get into the country clubs; the mistake is that we did not create country clubs for ourselves.”

“Papi, Papi.”

“Momentito, mi amor.”

“Our protection has been to move back to the constraining community, to reconnect to the barrio, rather than say: ‘We are going to create an elite.’ ”

Mi amor is finally impatient of the future; he tugs at his father’s jacket. His father stands up.

The 18th-Century novel belonged to the city. To Paris. To London. A new middle class, separated from pastoral memory, found itself alone in the city with an eccentric story to tell of misfortune and marriage, of blunder and blindest luck. The reader will scarcely credit how I find mys e lf here . . . .

Now a Princeton student waits to recognize himself in a novel. A novel about a boy whose grandmother spoke Spanish to him on the plaza of a suburban California shopping mall. The new Mexican-American novel may well turn out to be the story of Los Angeles.

I sit alone at a table in the student union at UCLA, as mi amor leads his papi away by the hand toward el video store.