A Light Shines in Lennox : Storefront Social Agency Is a Beacon for the Immigrant Poor

St. Margaret’s Center is an outpost on an urban frontier.

The frontier is Lennox, a small island of unincorporated county territory surrounded by Inglewood, Hawthorne and Los Angeles International Airport. Lennox is the first stop for many immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba and other Latin American countries.

Almost half of the 7,200 households in Lennox earn less than $15,000 a year, according to United Way statistics. Many recent immigrants, some of them undocumented, subsist on the economic margins. They take to the streets to sell corn, bread, tortillas, sunglasses, stuffed animals, cologne. They bus tables and wash dishes. They clean houses, office buildings, washrooms, even airplanes--the ever-present jets that descend relentlessly a few thousand feet above Lennox en route to the airport, raining down noise and fumes.

On an infamous corridor of Inglewood Avenue between Imperial Highway and Century Boulevard, drug dealers have staked their turf in front of fences, telephone booths and walls covered with mosaics of graffiti.

There is more to Lennox than poverty, blight and drugs, as evidenced by the tidy homes on some streets and by the busy shopping areas on Hawthorne and Lennox boulevards. The Lennox Elementary School District has gained a reputation for excellence in educating a student body that is more than 80% Latino.

Few Institutions

But few institutions serve the considerable economic and social needs of the community’s 18,000 residents. In addition to the school district, there is a Los Angeles County sheriff’s station and a county government branch office that opens once a week.

And in a storefront office on Hawthorne Boulevard that is too cold in winter and too hot in summer, there is St. Margaret’s Center.

Named for an early queen of Scotland who devoted her life to the poor, the center is run by Catholic Charities, the national social services agency administered by the National Conference of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. It was created two years ago by two parishes, St. John Chrysostom in Inglewood and St. Joseph in Hawthorne. The center’s 2-member staff, along with 15 part-time volunteers from the churches, serve the poor and homeless of Lennox, Hawthorne and Inglewood.

They provide free food through a food pantry. They find emergency housing. They offer immigration counseling. They help the needy pay gas bills in cold weather. They help people find work, and help working people make ends meet.

“If you have a family of five and the father is working as a busboy at minimum wage, things can get tough,” says Mary Agnes Erlandson, the former secretary who runs the center.

Every day, she sees the faces of Lennox at St. Margaret’s Center. Faces of despair, strength, hope. Faces that tell stories.

Maria did not want to come to the United States.

As she tells it, her husband had been working on and off in this country for years, returning periodically to their village in Guatemala, San Antonio Suchitepeques. Maria stayed there, tending a family that has grown to five children.

After several years working as a cook in New York, her husband came to Lennox, where he sold bread on the streets and in factories.

Two years ago, he persuaded her to bring the family to join him. A year later, he abandoned them, including a newborn baby. He said he was going back to Guatemala, and told Maria he had a second wife and family there.

“He was an older man, he was about 60,” Maria, 39, says in Spanish, holding her 1-year-old baby girl against her blue embroidered shawl. She sits in one of the sparsely furnished, white-walled offices of St. Margaret’s. Her tired smile reveals gaps between teeth. “He didn’t have the character to raise the small children.”

Here Illegally

Maria and four of the children are here illegally, having entered the country on tourist visas. The baby has become a lifeline; she was born in this country and is therefore a citizen eligible for welfare.

Erlandson helped Maria maneuver through the public assistance bureaucracy and obtain welfare for the child, insuring the family an income of $340 a month.

In addition, Maria earns a pittance in the business she learned from her husband, buying bread from a neighborhood bakery and reselling it on the street.

“Sometimes I make money, $200 a month at the most,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t sell enough to make anything.”

For a while, the family shared a single room near the part of Inglewood Avenue that swarms with drug dealers and gang members. “I don’t fight with anyone,” Maria says, recalling long walks through the gantlet of loiterers to get to the bakery. “I ignored them.”

Maria was forced out of the apartment when the rent went up to $400. She now lives near Hollywood Park race track in Inglewood, where crowded, fading apartment complexes bear fanciful names such as The Internationale and The Metropol. Years ago, airline flight crews stayed in that area because of its convenience to the airport. Now, police say, many buildings are rife with drugs and crime.

Maria and her family rent a room in the apartment of a Guatemalan woman. They were referred to St. Margaret’s by a Lennox school counselor after teachers discovered the children had lice.

“They needed everything,” Erlandson said. “Clothes, food, everything.”

St. Margaret’s food pantry is federally funded, but also receives donations from parishioners of St. John and St. Joseph. People whose income is near or below the federal poverty guideline of about $700 a month for a family of two are eligible. The aid is supposed to be temporary and recipients are interviewed periodically to determine their progress in becoming self-sufficient.

Maria, who comes to the center several times a week for food, is nowhere near that goal. She has had to stop selling bread because there is nobody to take care of her children. And recently the woman who rents Maria the room told her to find somewhere else to live by next month because the space is needed for relatives.

So the hunt for a home has begun. If necessary, Erlandson can provide emergency housing vouchers at cheap hotels through a federal program. Maria, a devout evangelical Christian like many of the Central American immigrants in Lennox, remains resilient. She discusses her plans to resume selling bread once she has found a baby sitter. Friends have told her there could be money in selling beauty products as well, she said.

Maria says she has thought of returning to Guatemala but will not. “The children go to school here. The future of the children is here.”

The first thing to make clear about Mary Agnes Erlandson is that she is not a nun.

People constantly make that assumption about the director of St. Margaret’s Center because her name combines that of two saints.

“At least once a day I have to tell someone I’m not a sister,” she says with a laugh as she sits beneath an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

But the tall, blonde Erlandson does have a devoutly Catholic, spiritually based sense of mission.

“She is doing great things there,” said Hector Carrio, a school board member who is a volunteer at the center and serves on the food pantry’s board of directors.

Erlandson, who has no academic background in social work, handles the daily onslaught of hardship with serenity. She has an apparently inexhaustible reserve of sympathy; discussing a recent newspaper story about an elderly homeless woman who spends her nights on city buses, she exclaims, “That’s so sad. “ She says it with all the conviction of someone who doesn’t hear stories like that every day.

Instinct Essential

Yet street instinct is as essential to the work as sympathy. Erlandson says she can sense when people are lying or trying to hustle her. The hardest part of her job is turning those people away.

Erlandson, 31, grew up nearby in Westchester. She studied English literature and Spanish, a language she describes as “my first love,” at Loyola Marymount University. Her first contact with Lennox came when she waited tables at airport restaurants and befriended workers there, many of them from Lennox.

Erlandson decided to go into Spanish-speaking social work after she traveled in Mexico and Ecuador as a student and saw cultural beauty and economic misery side by side. She got a job as a bilingual secretary with Catholic Charities.

In 1986, at the urging of the two churches, Catholic Charities recognized the needs of a growing constituency in the Lennox area by creating St. Margaret’s Center. Catholic Charities’ regional director, Father Gregory Cox, said he selected Erlandson as director despite her lack of formal training.

“She may not have the academic background, but she has the heart and soul,” Cox said. “She is completely dedicated to serving God and the community.”

Erlandson moved to Inglewood when she took the job because, she said, it was important to her to live in the area she serves.

“I’d like for us to become a fixture in the community,” she says.

She and Cox have plans for an anti-gang program, an after-school program for neighborhood children, a job placement service in both English and Spanish, and an embroidery cooperative for the many women of the area who do needlework at home.

But funds are limited. The food pantry has served a maximum of 150 people a month since it opened; she would like to serve 500.

Given the small staff--the only other paid employee is secretary Connie Rodriguez--there are physical limits to what can be done. Burnout is an occupational hazard.

“You have to be involved, but you have to know where to draw the line,” Erlandson says. “A lot of our cases are ongoing, people who are chronically unemployed or underemployed. All you can do is try to make things a little better.”

Erlandson quotes a passage from James Joyce’s novel, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” At one point the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, returns home to discover that his 10 brothers and sisters are impoverished and hungry.

“And he says, he felt that if he stopped to look at them, he would drown,” Erlandson says. “You have to shut something off inside. If you get personally involved, you have to make sure you won’t drown.”

On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Saul Serna holds court.

He is a wily, dignified senior citizen, a retired laborer. He has combed-back gray hair, a gentlemanly mustache, and bifocals. People line up outside the front office in St. Margaret’s Center to see if Senor Saul has a job for them.

The center has a county-funded job training grant for disadvantaged Lennox youth. But many other people need work. Serna has developed an informal job bank to serve them. He did it mainly by scouring the phone book for employers.

“Employers give me a hard time sometimes, they tell me not to bother them, they yell,” Serna says. “But who pays attention? More and more people are coming in. People need work.”

A couple enter Serna’s office. Victor and Wilma Rauld are in their 30s, cheerful, dressed in simple but clean clothes. They moved to Hawthorne from Miami three months ago. Victor is Chilean and Wilma is from Guatemala.

Serna looks deliberately at the applications they place in front of him.

“So the only kind of work you’re interested in is cleaning buildings, sir?”

“Well, you see,” Victor says, leaning forward, his hands laced in front of him. “I need something soon. I need a job now, any kind of work.”

Serna says: “From your application, I see you have experience as a dump truck driver. Doesn’t that interest you any more?”

Caught in Dilemma

“Of course,” Victor replies. He explains that he has not been able to look for truck-driving work because he has no truck to use for the California licensing test and can’t afford to rent one.

“Well, let’s see what we can do.”

Serna rummages through papers. He announces: “I’m going to give you the address of a gentleman in Long Beach. Tell him I told you to ask him the favor of borrowing his truck for the test. He’s Nicaraguan, I believe. He’s good people. I bet he doesn’t charge you a cent.”

The Raulds thank Serna profusely.

“The first time we came here we were looking for toys for our kids for Christmas,” Victor says afterward. “And now it looks like we’ll find work. They do beautiful work here.”

Times are tough, Serna says. But he remembers the Depression. It was true then and it is true now, he insists: There are jobs for people who want them.

“Some people honestly need help,” he says. “Others don’t. They are chisel people (chiselers).”

Serna clearly enjoys his new-found calling, dispensing phone numbers, addresses and advice in his courtly way.

“Senora, get a copy of this document,” he tells one job-hunter, who clutches an Immigration and Naturalization Service letter that serves as her work permit. He tells her to treat it as her most valuable possession.

At the edge of a prairie of vacant land and abandoned, graffiti-scarred buildings near the path of the future Century Freeway, a woman wearing a baseball cap sells chicharrones --deep fried pigskins--from a pushcart.

Her name is Maria Melgare. She and her husband are from Mexico. They live on the income they make selling chicharrones in the winter and Popsicles in the summer.

“It’s barely enough to make a living, my son,” Maria says in Spanish.

In the desolate cityscape behind her, children play on dirt mounds in a lot speckled with broken glass and dotted by weeds and bushes. Planes descend majestically overhead, airline emblems from around the world shimmering on fuselages, the roar of engines growing and fading.

After many years of living as undocumented immigrants, Melgare says, she and her husband qualified last year for the government’s amnesty program. They go to English and civics classes four nights a week in order to apply for citizenship. They breathe easier now.

Maria and her husband make ends meet with the food they get from St. Margaret’s Center.

“They gives us fruit, vegetables, bread,” she says. “That’s how we pay the rent.”

While the harsh economy of the streets has not improved, she says she does not resent the competition.

“There are a lot of people out here selling,” she says. “But everybody has a right to be here fighting to make it.”