Feeding the 12,000: Nuestro Hogar’s Mission Impossible

Early in the morning, in those brief, promising hours between the sun’s rising and the smog’s descent, they begin to stir.

In the filth beneath the freeway bridges, in the abandoned, vermin-infested buildings that abut Skid Row, in the reeking alleys around MacArthur Park, they rise to renew their daily struggle for survival.

They are among the poorest of this city’s poor, and they are children.

They are undocumented immigrants and their families are far away. They are teen-age boys, mostly from Mexico, some from Central America; a handful are adolescent girls. By some estimates, they number as many as 12,000 in Los Angeles alone.

Here, their restless lives are lived in one of those deep, unseen eddies of desperation roiling beneath the great wave of immigration that has swept over Southern California in the last decade.

On most mornings, they will make their way south to one of the casual labor markets that dot the corners along Pico and Olympic boulevards. But three days of every week from 60 to 100 of them will make their way to Nuestro Hogar (Our Home), the drop-in shelter run by the Missionary Brothers of Charity in the Pico-Union district southwest of downtown. The brothers are members of the Roman Catholic order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. According to her precepts, they do their work without government assistance or organized fund raising. All expenses, including this shelter’s $850-a-month rent, are met by individual donations; all labor is voluntary.

Nuestro Hogar is the last in a row of sagging clapboard houses on a side street just off Union Avenue. It is marked by a small sign beside the door and the only open gate on the block. The house provides shelter for 10 boys and, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, showers and a meal for any others who come in. After lunch, there are English classes for those who want them; once a week there is free medical treatment.

Brother Joseph McLachlan, who runs the house, is a genial Scot. As a boy at home in Dumbarton, he dreamed of working as “a missionary among the people of Latin America.” As it turned out, he chuckles, “that’s exactly what I do--but in Los Angeles.”

As the boys--and a couple of girls--drift in, Brother Joseph adds their names to a list. They will be called in turn to use one of the two showers. Meanwhile, they join the earlier arrivals to drink coffee, watch television or simply nap on one of the sofas scattered about. It is a quiet, gravely courteous group.

“They’re really a good bunch of guys,” says Brother Joseph, who opened Nuestro Hogar three years ago. “The only difference between us is that we have what we need and they don’t. They have to fight to survive and we don’t.

“The majority of these guys support themselves through day labor--when they can get it. A few hours here, a few hours there. It’s a very tough life. They fall into things--stealing, drugs, prostitution--through necessity. I’ve often thought, ‘What might I do myself if I were hungry?’ Would I steal? Would I sell drugs? Would I sell myself? It’s easy enough to say no. But I’ve never gone days without a meal.

“These guys all come with great intentions--find a job and send a bit of money home to their families. Some will get work but continue living on the street just so they can send a little back. One young guy told me that when he left home, his family was living on tortillas and salt. Now he has a job and sends nearly every cent he makes back, where there still are eight or nine children.”

Esteban (not his real name) has been in Los Angeles about three months. At home, in Sonora, he heard there were many jobs with good wages here. He has found work four times, never for a full day. Twice he was paid less than promised; twice not at all. Yesterday he did not eat. He is thinking of hopping a freight to Oregon, where, he has heard, there are jobs in the fields. The worst thing about his life here is that “nobody is good to me or shows respect.” At home, he was “poor, but a person.” Here, people treat him “like a dog.”

The meals at Nuestro Hogar are prepared by the women of various Catholic parishes and brought to the house. Today, through unavoidable circumstance, the volunteers are late. The hours drag on. Usually, the house closes at 1, but at 2:30 there still is no food.

There are no complaints. In a life of unfulfilled hopes, perhaps resignation is the bridge from one disappointment to another. Perhaps long practice with their own difficulties simply has made these boys patient with the problems of others.

Finally, Lourdes Serrano and her niece Juanita arrive with the food: potatoes with chorizo, rice, fruit salad, tortillas, bread and a sweet punch. There is more than enough for everyone. Lourdes and Juanita are from Mariana Parades, a working-class parish, mainly Chicano, in Pico Rivera. Lourdes keeps house for the parish priests and, on her days off, prepares meals for the destitute. Working in this fashion, she and three friends, along with an older couple who collect discarded food from supermarkets, feed more than 400 people each week.

You have to be careful not to put too much on each plate, she tells a visitor pressed into service. “Boys this hungry will take more than they can eat, and there is waste.”

I tell Brother Joseph and Lourdes Serrano that President Bush has proposed that voluntary efforts like theirs take the place of many federal social programs in a transition from the Great Society to what Bush envisions as a “Good Society.” They are bemused.

“No voluntary effort ever would be enough,” Brother Joseph says. “There’s not enough people to do the job. What we do is a drop in the ocean. Most people in this city never notice the poor. Even good people only have a few hours here and there to give. They have jobs and families of their own, after all. But the poor are here every day and not just on the weekends.”

Lourdes Serrano has her own, practical notion of what stands between her society and goodness. “It is not right,” she says, “that those who are hungry must depend on people who can feed them only on their days off.”