Unlikely Path to Success Paved by a Gift for Caring About People : Personalities: Rose Castaneda was once a divorced mother of four living on welfare. Her activism has led to a job as top district aide to Rep. Howard L. Berman.

Rose Castaneda recalls that she was seeking emotional refuge from the violence that plagued the northeast San Fernando Valley when she first went to work for Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) as a receptionist in 1986.

She took a pay cut to leave her job as a social services director in the Van Nuys Pierce Park Apartments after attending a funeral for a young man felled by gang violence. On a sweltering August morning, she sat in a Pacoima church with five sorrowful mothers, each of whom had buried a son that year.

“I was getting a little burnt out in the community,” Castaneda said. “I felt I had gone to one too many funerals. I was numb.”

But Castaneda’s sense of involvement was only temporarily quelled. Six months after Berman hired her, she began helping people solve problems with the federal government as a caseworker. And, this year, Berman promoted her to administrative assistant to run his home office in Panorama City.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Castaneda said, looking back on the unlikely path that she has traveled to her sixth-floor office with a panoramic view of the East Valley.

“She just showed me a tremendous capacity to deal with people, care about people, follow up, master complicated areas,” particularly immigration, Berman said. “She earned it.”

Castaneda, 44, who lives in Pacoima, is one of the highest-ranking Latino government officials in the Valley as Berman’s $44,000-a-year administrative assistant. She succeeded Fausto Capobianco, who left to take a public relations position with the Los Angeles community college system.

Friends call her tough, committed and deeply loyal.

“In the projects,” said one who’s been there with her, “she’s almost saintly.”

Yet she has, at times, antagonized some community activists. Some complain that she has favored blacks over Latinos. She says her critics include Latino men who have trouble accepting an assertive Latina who “broke all the rules.”

Castaneda’s promotion represents the latest step in a career that began when she demanded improvements at the crime-ridden San Fernando Gardens housing project where she and her children lived more than two decades ago. She traces her initial activism to a police captain to whom she complained.

“If you don’t like it, change it,” she said he told her.

Up until that point, she recalled, hers was “a typical young, unmarried Hispanic mother story.” Her father, a butcher, had moved his wife and five children to San Fernando from Texas in search of work. She left school in the 11th grade. She had her first child when she was 15. By the time she was 20, she was newly divorced, on welfare and the mother of four.

Her efforts at San Fernando Gardens included organizing a Christmas program and caroling for children. She arranged funding for baseball uniforms so that gang members could get into a league. Eventually, she was hired by the Los Angeles Housing Authority as a community liaison.

After a year, she was offered a post with the YMCA helping schools with gang problems. In 1978, she became social services director at the federally subsidized Pierce Park Apartments, where she oversaw educational, health and counseling programs for eight years.

“She has a serious commitment to the community and puts her all into whatever she’s doing,” said Marie Harris, the honorary mayor of Pacoima and former executive director of the Pacoima Chamber of Commerce. “And she’s a very genuine person.”

Nevertheless, by the time Castaneda found herself in Guardian Angel Church in Pacoima in 1985 for yet another funeral, she thought: “It stops here.”

All six funerals that year were for young Latinos. All had died violent gang-related deaths.

So she joined Berman as a receptionist. But she was soon back in the community dealing with the question of whether undocumented aliens should receive federal housing subsidies. Six months later, she began specializing in housing issues. Shortly thereafter, Berman made her director of casework, dealing with everything from Social Security and immigration to defense contracts.

“It dawned on me that I could help people at a higher level,” Castaneda said. “People have to feel they have control of their lives and, in doing so, take control of the solutions. It’s not ‘I can do this for you.’ It’s ‘Let me show you what you can do for yourself.’ ”

In August, she began a program with a gang at the still-troubled San Fernando Gardens--the Project Boyz. At her initiative, 40 or more gang members gather each Wednesday evening at Pacoima Park to air their concerns and to listen to speakers discuss employment, education or other programs.

Castaneda runs the meetings, but the youths set the agenda and make individual presentations. She said the weekly sessions have led to jobs for several participants and a city-funded paid internship in Berman’s office. The group has also embarked on various community projects; on Saturday, gang members painted Pacoima School.

“It has become an alternative to crime and drugs,” said Castaneda, who has reached out to gangs in various positions for many years. “If we don’t work with the youth of our society, we’re creating a lost generation.”

Berman’s district, as redrawn under reapportionment, will be more than 50% Latino after the 1992 election. But he said this was not the major reason for Castaneda’s promotion.

“There’s an aspect of the symbolism that’s useful, but it was not in any way the critical factor,” Berman said. “I would not put somebody in that position I didn’t trust could do the job.”

Former San Fernando Mayor Jess Margarito, now city recreation and community services director, has known Castaneda for 30 years. Although she has “a lot of credibility in the community,” he said there is “a rift between some of the activists and Rose.”

When problems arose between Latinos and blacks in Pacoima in the past, Margarito said, citing one example, activist Latinos “felt she was more responsive to the needs of blacks.”

“I’m responsive to the needs of all poor people,” Castaneda responded. “I thought the only way the two minorities in the community were going to accomplish anything was by working together rather than by fighting. . . . Poverty knows no color.”

Richard Alarcon, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s Valley area representative, who has known Castaneda since the late ‘70s, said there is concern in some quarters that, as a result of her work with gang members, “perhaps she sides with them or she’s overly sensitive to them.” He said he does not share that view.

In her new post, Castaneda oversees a staff of six in an ethnically diverse district that has more than its share of poverty, drugs and gang violence.

“The balancing act as a representative for a congressman with different interests is going to be a challenge for her,” said Marc Litchman, a Democratic consultant who previously served as Berman’s administrative assistant.

“Latino, black, white and emerging Asian communities are not united in any way, shape or form. They are different and competing interests. But I think Rose is equal to the task.”

Castaneda is contemplating a political career herself. She is considering a race to succeed Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who has said he does not plan to seek reelection when his term expires in 1993.

“What he has done has to be expanded upon and augmented,” said Castaneda, who adds that she has not made up her mind. “I don’t know if we’re going to come up with another Bernardi.”