Missionary of the Word : At East L.A. Center, Sister Jennie Lechtenberg Works With Families in Crusade for Literacy

Maria Martinez has worked most of her life in an East Los Angeles sweatshop, sewing ball gowns and wedding dresses for the more fortunate. Now, in her retirement years, Martinez is striving to realize a personal dream, to speak the language of the country in which she lives.

“It is very difficult,” she says haltingly. “Sometimes I understand nothing.” Yet her face, etched with indeterminable age, is alight with happiness.

“I try, I insist, because I want to talk English. I don’t say no.”

Silvia Gallardo, 33, taught elementary school in Mexico for 19 years before she and her husband came to Los Angeles eight months ago.

But without English, Gallardo could not find work even cleaning houses. “I felt blind and mute and very unhappy,” she says.

Now, she recites an elated litany of ways in which her life has changed: “I can read a shop sign and know what’s inside. I can go into a restaurant and order and know what I’m going to eat. I can take the bus and not get lost. I can buy medicine at the drugstore and know how to give it to my family. I can help my children with their homework.”

Rosa Soto was born in the United States and attended school in East L.A. until the 11th grade. Yet Soto, 33, was functionally illiterate in English.

“I’d tell my teachers, ‘You know, I have a problem, I can’t read.’ But they’d tell me, ‘Well, don’t worry about it. As long as your attendance is good, we’ll keep passing you.’ Now Soto is able to describe her plight, writing on a computer in a reading lab, “I find myself divorced, with five children, and trying to make it in life.” She adds, “I want to learn to read and write so bad!”

“There’s a stereotype of Hispanics that they don’t care if they learn or not, that they’re lazy, that they’re criminals because they’re foreigners, that they’re here from Mexico for an easy life on welfare,” says Sister Jennie Lechtenberg, director of the Puente Learning Center in East Los Angeles. Sister Jennie’s mission is to change that perception. In an old brick building in Boyle Heights she shares with community bingo games and corrective courses for drunken drivers, Sister Jennie has gathered three generations of Latinos, from ponytailed preschoolers to octogenarians, to teach them English.

Educating the extended family means that Martinez, Gallardo and Soto, their parents and children, their uncles and cousins, can take control of their lives and communities.

To Sister Jennie, bringing the generations together seemed only common sense--children whose parents read will learn to read more easily themselves. But in education circles across the country the concept is being hailed as a cutting-edge solution to the nation’s learning crisis. The new buzzwords are inter-generational literacy, and Sister Jennie is at the forefront, courted by schools, corporations and publicists who look to Puente as a model for family learning.

This month, Capital Cities/ABC and PBS will feature her in their public service spots as their Unsung American, working with the country’s youth. “They said my face would be on television more than the President’s,” she says, laughing.

But Puente (People United to Enrich the Neighborhood Through Education) is a community effort, she stresses.

“I love the people here,” she says. “You show them how to do something and they’re willing to help out, they’re willing to learn, they’re willing to work.”

At 53, she has a sprinkling of gray in her short dark hair--a legacy of her work at Puente--and her face, free of makeup, is often crinkled into the parentheses of a grin. A gold band of her French Canadian order, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, encircles her finger, and a picture of the Virgin, her eyes humbly lowered, hangs over her office desk.

A lifelong friend, now deceased, dubbed her General J.D. (Jeanne Dominick), using her religious name. “She was forever giving orders and getting things done,” says another friend.

Sister Jennie acknowleges her determined nature, crediting it with helping steer her toward her goal.

“As long as people are dependent on someone else, they aren’t whole,” she declares. “People need the dignity of being able to provide for themselves.”

The beginnings for developing self-sufficiency were not auspicious, however. A teacher for 30 years, Sister Jennie learned the Boyle Heights neighborhood during a decade spent at St. Mary’s Parochial School. During this time, she volunteered at the local youth rehabilitation center. “I’d walk around the yards and talk to the kids, and I thought, ‘No, this isn’t where it’s at. I’ve got to get back out there and stop this (juvenile deliquency) from the outside.’ ”

When Tony Rios, director of the neighborhood’s Community Services Organization for Latinos, asked Sister Jennie if she wanted to tutor difficult students in the local schools, she immediately accepted.

After a year and a half teaching in book storage rooms and curtained stage spaces, she started Puente as a CSO project in the spring of 1984, moving into the auditorium balcony of the brick building, a former Masonic Temple, run by Rios.

Her first class was composed of some 50 youngsters from the schools where she tutored and 20 adults from local evening courses. The idea of dual generations breaking the family illiteracy cycle sprang into being. “I wanted parents to work with the children,” Sister Jennie says. “By having the parents with them and knowing they were giving up their time, somehow the children absorbed the idea that education is important.”

When the group outgrew the balcony, Sister Jennie took over a barbershop downstairs, then a warren of medical offices, and, last summer, a series of upstairs rooms, remodeling them with the help of a friend. “I can put up dry walls, lower ceilings, install windows, patch and paint,” she says.

Last September, with corporate contributions, she opened computer labs for adults and children, and since then has found her school catapulted to the center of the national education effort as a model of vision and technology.

The sudden high-profile of the nation’s startling illiteracy rate, long neglected, is due, say educators, to several occurrences--the literacy campaign by First Lady Barbara Bush; acknowledgement of widespread illiteracy, brought about by English requirements for Latinos applying for resident’s status through the amnesty program; and the awakening of corporate America to a future in which an increasingly technological job market will be filled by a population that is less and less qualified.

According to accepted figures, roughly 25 million Americans are unable to read at the fifth-grade level, while a University of Texas study revealed 56% of Latinos ages 16 and over cannot read well enough to participate in normal daily life, and Latinos comprise the largest immigrant segment of the population.

“There’s a tremendous skill gap,” says James Figueroa, head of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Division of Adult and Occupational Education. “A growing percentage of the work force is Hispanic. And they will have to continue our country as a world competitor.”

Using a recently formed consortium of industry and education as a funding catalyst, Figueroa hopes to set up a minimum of 10 inter-generational learning centers, with the first one scheduled to open in Watts in September.

“We want to take the (Puente) model and replicate it throughout our district,” he says.

Still, the concept of Puente has not achieved slam-dunk acceptance. IBM, which has supplied computers and software for 5,400 installations nationally, including Puente, says conservatively that it is “watching the barometer” of inter-generational education.

Fred Romero, a policy adviser with the Latino advocacy organization, the National Council of La Raza, was instrumental in getting SER (Service, Employment and Redevelopment Agency), a national Latino employment and literacy program, to set up 12 inter-generational centers, but still he is circumspect. “It didn’t work,” he says bluntly of the cooperative effort between local schools and Latinos. “There’s a lot of animosity existing between Hispanics and the public schools. You can’t have a 40% dropout rate and not know something’s wrong.”

Romero nevertheless finds inter-generational education essential to staunch the hemorrhage of Latinos quitting the school system. “If you don’t get the Hispanic family involved,” he warns, “the majority of children in school right now are doomed to failure.”

He praises Sister Jennie’s personal approach. “So much of this stuff that’s funded is mechanical,” he says. “Sister Jennie’s expression of love and affection is what her success boils down to.”

Adds John Mann, who directs IBM’s literacy program: “I’d bet my money on her if I were on a race track. If we could clone her, we wouldn’t have all these problems with illiteracy.”

On a typical day, Puente’s brick school house is alive with sound. “P-p-p,” goes a youngster, her ears clamped with earphones, as a bright pink pig pops up on her computer screen. “Ch-ch-ch,” says a circle of adults, drilling in phonetics difficult for Latinos.

Learning a poem full of prepositions, a class claps and sings to a rousing Mexican folk tune. Across the hall, beginners cluster in facsimiles of extended Latino families, calling out, “He is my brother, she is my daughter, you are my uncle.” In the sole Spanish literacy class, a youth, a gold chain draped over his bared chest, slowly forms large rounded letters, then carefully pronounces his ouevre, “Monica canta bonita” (“Monica sings beautifully”).

Employing the logic by which language evolved, students use computers first to write their thoughts and from them learn to read. Computer programs, written for illiterate English-speakers, are supplemented with work for special Latino needs, and neither teachers nor computers ever say “incorrect”; academic spelling is known as “the book look,” and phonetic spellings are tolerated for beginners.

“It takes a lot of courage to walk in the door,” says Sister Jennie. “If you put people in a situation where they fail, you lose them.”

Running her school with the skills of a CEO, a German hausfrau and the nun she is, Sister Jennie checks daily on each class, throws a friendly arm around whomever she talks to, forbids chewing gum and carved-up desks, and decorates the walls with such artifacts as Latin American textiles, a Mexican flag and the Gettysburg Address.

The results are striking: In five years the school has grown to include 10 full-time teachers and more than 700 students, 60 of them preschoolers; the voluntary dropout rate is zero; and, with their computer program, IBM states, schoolchildren read one to two years above the national norm, while adults can achieve over a year’s progress in 100 hours.

But for Sister Jennie, even this much is just a start.

“Do you know what my dream is?” she asks excitedly. “I want to incorporate in our program, classes to teach people how to begin their own small businesses.

“Many of our people are domestics, many of our people are mariachis, many of our people work in sweatshop sewing factories. If I could develop classes where people learned skills in management--say, if we get 10 people who are interested in sewing, so we set them up with their own shop, and through this co-op they begin to bring in their own income. This would roll over so they’d begin to own their own community. There would be no more big businesses coming in and big money going back out and the people still here with nothing.” She pauses.

“We can’t solve the problems of the whole blessed world, but here on the East Side we can better our own community.”

This summer Sister Jennie wants to start remodeling to install an office skills program; ultimately, she wants to make Puente financially sound so it can be taken over by the people of the community. Sister Jennie then would launch other programs throughout the barrios.

But all of this takes money. Sister Jennie wants to incorporate Puente, currently run with a financial patchwork of funds from the CSO, the school district, religious groups (though not the Roman Catholic archdiocese) and corporations.

“I know there’s money out there, but I need more education myself on how to find it,” Sister Jennie says one day in her office.

She glances at a watercolor of a Mexican chapel, a souvenir from a visit to a rural hamlet.

“In the evenings we’d sit outside these huts,” she muses. “The little kids were playing baseball with a stick and a rock. The parents were sitting around watching. There was no running water, no cars. We went to the next village on horseback. The people shared everything. It was the best two weeks of my life.”

She is waiting for Puerto Rican-born singer Rita Moreno to drop in. Coca-Cola has talked about giving a grant to Puente in Moreno’s name, she explains. An Atlanta PR firm has just phoned about publicizing the school, and she fidgets over a logo design for business cards.

This spring, the 14th city council district and the city attorney’s office presented her with awards for 20 years’ educational service in Boyle Heights, but, she says, the community has recognized her all along.

The firemen across the street fixed dinner when she was remodeling, the hardware store owner got her security gates and windows at cost, the local high school lets her use their copier and the students have given her two new typewriters to kick off the office skills program.

“I have something that God’s given me in my personality that gets people to work together,” she says.

For the moment, Sister Jennie talks about networking and funding more than prayer. “You don’t just ask for something, you go out and get it done,” she declares.

Still, a major stumbling block to her progress was recently removed with the help of a higher power, she says. “All my life I’ve never been able to speak in front of a group. My heart would beat fast and I’d pass out.

“There’s a friend of mine who’s about 90 years old; six months ago I was going to have to give a talk, and I said, ‘Sister Margaret, I’m scared stiff.’ And she said, “Well, I’ve prayed every day of your life that you’d have the courage to do whatever would help the project you’re working on.’

“Do you know I gave that talk and I didn’t have one flutter. It was a little miracle.”

Does this mean she’s ready to take on the talk shows? Sister Jennie fixes her interlocutor at eye level and answers: “Yes.”

Toward mid-afternoon, Sister Jennie descends the broad wood staircase that leads to the school’s adult classes. Since morning, she has dealt with projects to set up a summer program for local YMCA latch-key children, discussed her desire for writing a computer reading program for Latinos, fixed a cranky air conditioner and waited for the single outside line to make her business calls.

The daily effort is wearing. As she gets older she tires more easily, she admits. And she worries about her students and how she will keep them going.

“It takes these people so long to learn English. The classes are too big. . . . It’s horrible to keep saying money, money, but. . . .”

Outside, the day is deepening into golden colors. “Let’s go to the beach,” Sister Jennie says with sudden energy.

For a moment the idea lingers tantalizingly. Then she heads to her office. “I don’t want to sound holy. But I love this place. A few extra hours don’t really make that much difference.”