Finding Music in Their Stories : The winning tale in a contest about the Latino experience will be turned into an opera.

Maritza Ortiz and Christine Melendez, both 11, are writing a story about how they feel when people say, “Go back to Mexico, where you belong.”

David Ramirez, 10, is writing a story called “Trouble at the Border,” about his mother’s long journey to the United States.

Rudy Ramirez, 11, and Luis Ixta, 12, are writing about Cinco de Mayo.

These children from Carver Elementary School are putting finishing touches on stories depicting the Latino experience in the United States. And on Friday, the stories will be entered in a writing contest with an unusual first prize.

The winning entry will become an opera.

The story-writing contest, open to all Orange County children in grades 4 through 8, is sponsored by Opera Pacific as part of its community outreach program. The winner will be announced in October and the resulting opera will be presented in April of 1994.

“Conceivably we could get thousands of entries,” says Kevin Crysler, Opera Pacific’s director of community programs. “I hope we at least get a few hundred.”

All 32 children in Joellyn Cicciarelli’s fourth and fifth grade combination class at Carver Elementary School in Santa Ana will enter the contest. “I’ve used it as part of our writing program,” says Cicciarelli, who admits the contest has been a challenge. “When we first started I was a little worried about the kids handling a paper like this.”

But Cicciarelli and student teacher Joel Kupperstein say the stories are shaping up better than they expected. “It’s beyond expectation,” Kupperstein says. “It really stretches them. When I thought of them writing eight to 10 pages, I didn’t think it was possible, but this is an amazing class.”

Florinda Mintz, who chairs the Opera Pacific Hispanic Advisory Committee, came up with the idea for the contest. She says she is pleased that teachers such as Cicciarelli are responding so well. “I think we will have lots of entries,” Mintz says. “Teachers have been very busy on the project.”

Mintz, herself a writer, says she came up with the idea because her committee for a long time has wanted to do an opera for children.

“We didn’t know how or what we wanted to do,” she says, “so we decided to have these children write about their American experiences from a Hispanic viewpoint. These children are really in two different worlds. They have to grow up in this society, and there are some very interesting stories out there. I am eager to begin reading some of them.”

Sponsors of the contest expect a lot of those stories to come out of schools such as Carver, which is in the Santa Ana Unified School District, where 85% or the 48,000 students are Latino. “Percentage-wise we have an even greater population (of Latino students) than L.A.,” says John Bennett, assisTant superintendent of the district.

Bennett, who serves with Mintz on the Hispanic Advisory Committee for Opera Pacific, says the contest makes a good classroom exercise because it gives purpose to a writing assignment and allows children to tell a story that is meaningful to them.

“It allows children to express their feelings and their understanding of events in their lives, (to tell) about their parents coming here to start a new life. And often those stories reveal great hardships,” Bennett says.

Because the children are being asked to write a story (and not an opera), Bennett says just about any pupil can tackle the assignment. “If you went to many of our students and said ‘opera,’ I don’t think they would have any concept.”

Crysler points out that children don’t have to understand the concept of an opera in order to write A meaningful story. “They can write a story about their family or neighbor of something that has happened to them,” he says.

Professionals at Opera Pacific will then take the story, turn it into a script, and fashion it into a libretto. Los Angeles composer Hector Armienta, who wrote the music for South Coast Repertory’s premiere of “Marisol’s Christmas,” has been commissioned to compose the music.

When staged, the opera will run about one hour, according to Crysler. The work will be performed in both Spanish and English in Southern California schools by Opera Pacific’s Overture Company, which has been presenting musical theater works in area schools for seven years.

Crysler emphasizes that the contest is not limited to Latino children but is open to any fourth- through eighth-grade pupil in the county. The story topic, however, should deal with the lives of Latino Americans. Pupils may work individually or in groups, and the five- to 10-page story may be written in Spanish or English.

Judges will read the stories this summer and pick the best entry from each school. Those finalists will then be invited to a ceremony in October, when the winner will be announced. All finalists will get to attend a rehearsal of the Spanish opera “El Gato Montes,” starring Placido Domingo on Jan. 13 at the Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

To pupils who submit stories, Opera Pacific will invite all contestants to the Sept. 10 dress rehearsal of “Faust,” which opens the organization’s eighth season. In addition, all children who enter the contest will receive a certifiCate.

As the contest draws to a close, Crysler says he is looking forward to reading the entries. “I hope it will give me further insight into the community, to better understand that group of people by reading the stories.”

Promoting such understanding between cultures is one of the main purposes of the project, he says. “The idea is to share their culture with the rest of us so that other children not of Hispanic origin can see and better understand children of that culture.”

Another important purpose, according to Mintz, is to encourage children to write. “It is valuable when children find out they have special talents,” she says. “I think writing is very inexpensive. Everybody has a pen and a piece of paper at home. All they have to do is be aware of what their mind tells them.”