A <i> ‘Chiquita</i> ‘ Escapes the Cocoon : Culture: As a young Latina, Bettina Flores dreamed of a good life away from the grape fields. The dreams--and a subsequent book--have paid off.

Bettina Flores grimaces when she recalls her life as an 8-year-old.

She is stooping alongside her widowed mother and six siblings in a field outside Fresno. She is picking grapes--for 2 1/2 cents a tray--and dreaming about living in an air-conditioned home, wearing pretty clothes, playing with a mountain of toys, jingling a pocketful of quarters she will use to buy candy.

At 12, Flores moved a step closer to her dreams. She packed her possessions in a cardboard box and left her home in the barrio and her summers in the fields.

At the time, Flores says, the only thing she knew was that she wanted out of her mother’s cocoon, an existence defined by poverty, a large family, the tenets of Catholicism and long dusty days of grape-picking.

Flores had answered a classified ad for a mother’s helper in an Anglo household. She earned room and board and $5 a week and found herself living in an upper-middle-class world of new clothes, shiny shoes and an abundance of toys. She worked for a number of well-to-do families during her teen years.

But despite a young life of servitude, the exposure to better schools, to luxuries and new opportunities, strengthened her resolve for a better way of life. Flores knew that one day her own life would include an air-conditioned “castle,” a husband with a briefcase, college-educated children and, most important, a book about her struggle to break away from the confines of her traditional Mexican upbringing.

Now, at 48, Flores, who attended Fresno City College and Fresno State University, has achieved her goals: a five-bedroom, three-bath house (which she doesn’t clean herself), a 24-year marriage to an attorney, four children ranging in age from 18 to 30--two of whom are in college--and a book that is raising Latina consciousness across the country.

The self-published author of “Chiquita’s Cocoon” (Pepper Vine Press; $13.50), Flores writes about how she, as a chiquita or young woman, flew away from the “cocoon” that imprisoned her mother and other Latinas for generations.

The 12-chapter book has many messages: Latinas must reclaim their self-esteem, delay marriage for an education and a career, practice birth control and stop serving others first, especially macho men. The book includes a “Know Thyself” questionnaire, a work sheet on how to plan careers and 10 pages on career opportunities and salary scales.

The book, which started out as an autobiography and took five years to complete, also includes vignettes from 200 Latinas from ages 14 to 70.

Like Flores, the women she interviewed were conditioned at an early age to believe that poverty was a virtue, that education was unimportant, that a man would provide for them.

“I had to deal with my own conflict. I had to break out of that cycle,” Flores says. Other Latinas, she adds, also want to break out, but they don’t know how. That’s why she wrote the book.

Reaction from readers, professional women’s groups, educators and book distributors has been positive. Since publication about six months ago (B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Brentanos and soon K mart Stores in Los Angeles), “Chiquita’s Cocoon” is in its second printing and has been picked up by 10 national distributors, including Baker & Taylor, Quality Books and Bookpeople.

Flores, who lives in Granite Bay, a suburb of Sacramento, also has been in demand as a speaker at women’s conferences, high schools and universities. She spoke Sunday at the National Organization for Women’s state conference in Sacramento, and in September she will address the Gender Equity Conference in Sacramento sponsored by the California State Department of Education.

Monica Udvardy, an anthropologist at the University of Kentucky, has ordered 50 books for “The Family in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” an intensive four-week class she will teach this summer.

“Bettina Flores conveys a respect for the retention of the positive aspects of Latina culture and provides a simple method for Latinas to improve their lives,” Udvardy says. “And this point of respect for her own culture is one of the cornerstones of anthropology.”

Julie Chavez-Bayles, a business teacher at Montebello High School, says she quoted passages from “Chiquita’s Cocoon,” while serving as a speaker at a recent gathering of Adelante Mujeres, a group of business and professional Latinas.

“Even though I’m educated, it made me open my eyes because those cultural obstacles on a personal and professional level still come back to haunt me. As a Latina, you have to really reclaim yourself over and over again,” Chavez-Bayles says.

Montebello High School librarian Bernice Ewing says she has ordered 10 books for teachers to review. She is certain that “Chiquita’s Cocoon” will be in demand and that orders could soar to 200 because more than 90% of the school’s enrollment is Latino. “Beside, you don’t have to be a female Hispanic to get something out of this book. It cuts across all lines. Cultural oppression is universal,” Ewing says.

Flores is thinking back again.

She is watching her aunt in Barstow--where Flores spent most of her childhood summers with her 13 cousins, nine of whom were boys--making tortillas.

“My aunt was a young woman, but she looked very matronly at a very early age. She waited on those boys hand and foot. She’d go from the stove to the table, from the table to the stove, from the stove to the table,” she remembers.

“No one ever helped her do anything. I see her so clearly. They were poor people. She’d go outside and get the wood for the stove and make those great big fat tortillas. And none of those boys would lift a finger. That was all there was to her life. Period.

“Even when the boys got their paychecks, there was not, ‘Well mom let me help you, here’s some money.’ And she never asked. She served. She came last.”

Says Flores: “There are women who are still living like that. From kitchen to the table, from table to the kitchen. . . . We are living proof of the Cinderella complex.”

Flores doesn’t mince words. She acknowledges that “Chiquita’s Cocoon” may not be for every woman and that she probably has detractors. A few of her own family members, including a sister, disagree with her message.

Still, she encourages women to make changes “which requires a lot of courage because others have to change around you as well.”

She doesn’t advocate giving up all traditions. Instead, Flores suggests abandoning what she believes are the negative aspects of her culture and accenting the positive.

“I never gave up my Spanish. I never gave up being Latina,” she says. “I gave up the poverty. I gave up living in a small house. I gave up having 10 kids. But I didn’t give up my menudo (a Mexican soup) and my mariachis.”

She doesn’t want Latinas to lose their sense of self.

“It’s sad to me because most women feel they don’t have any other options. And I worry about the talented Latinas out there. . . . They feel they can’t do anything with their talent because first of all they don’t know how and, secondly, they are too afraid to tell a husband or parent that they would like to go and try something different.

“They are afraid because they haven’t been taught to be assertive and they are taught that they are only going to do two things in life as a woman: get married and have a lot children. Why should Latinas be satisfied with that?

“You have to have the desire to change. You need to declare, ‘This is what I want’ and throw away the si Dios quiere (“If God makes it happen”) attitude that holds us back.” And she says the time to make that change is now, “not manana (‘tomorrow’).”

Flores sits at a restaurant table at La Golondrina Mexican Cafe on Olvera Street, where she will sign copies of her book on May 5. She empties the contents of her purse, looking for a favorite affirmation card--a piece of paper with a goal written on it, a symbol of her philosophy. She often tells Latinas to make their own cards with their own goals “because they keep you focused on what you really want and really need.”

She finds the card tucked between family photographs and credit cards. “Money likes being in my purse,” she reads. “Money belongs in my purse.”

“I keep this one in my billfold to remind me that prosperity is one of the things I want in my life. Remember,” she stresses, “Latinas don’t have to be poor. We want health insurance, nice clothes, a nice house in a nice neighborhood, an education.”

Latinas who want to be more than wives and mothers, more than mere survivors, deserve that option, she says. They should set “deserve” levels for themselves and ask for help in attaining them.

And dream. She is already thinking about a follow-up book based on Latin men.

Thinking back to her youth, toiling in the grapevine fields of Fresno, she says, “You have to dream. You have to dream to live your life, not just be a survivor.”