The Elder of East L.A. : For Nearly All of His 83 Years, Frank R. Duarte Has Been a Wise Warrior and Mentor for His Fellow Latinos

“Let me tell you a story,” says the silver-haired man.

There are these two fishermen fishing for crabs. In the boat they have two large barrels. One barrel has a top, the other does not. One fisherman says to the other , “The crabs we’re putting in the barrel without the top, they’re going to climb out.” Says his friend , “Don’t worry. These are Mexican crabs.” The other guy asks, “What does that mean?” And the fisherman explains: “Well, as one starts climbing to the top, the others will pull him down.”

The storyteller leans forward. He uncrosses his legs, puts his hands on his knees, clears his throat.

“I tell this story to show how ignorance blocks progress,” he says. “Sometimes we don’t want to see others succeed. But if we help each other out, then there will be three or four of us who can make it--Hispanics who can climb the ladder of success. But we have to work together.”

He pauses.

His eyes twinkle.

His friends say that when his eyes twinkle he’s thinking about his love for his people.

Then he shares his motto for living: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

The Elder of East L.A. has spoken.

*

For nearly all his life, 83-year-old Frank R. Duarte has been an adviser, counselor, peacemaker, networker, innovator, father image and friend to the people of his community.

He is affectionately regarded by leaders and residents of East Los Angeles as the Godfather of East L.A., Mr. East L.A. and the Statesman of East L.A.

At fiestas, he is swarmed by women. At parades, children beckon “Senor Duarte!” At rallies, politicians vie for his attention. And at community meetings, many seek contacts--from employment centers to health services to Social Security office branches--from the man who is a virtual walking Rolodex. His name, people say, opens doors because he never bad-mouths anyone, even those who take credit for his work.

As the senior community relations liaison for the county’s Department of Health Services, Duarte--the oldest county employee--has been one of the Latino community’s biggest advocates for affirmative action and health services to Latinos.

His full-time job includes helping many secure work--as custodians, doctors, nurses and administrators--at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the largest public hospital in the nation. The center employed only 732 Latinos in a work force of 9,000 in 1973, when Duarte began his work there. Today, its 10,000 employees include more than 2,400 Latinos, many of whom got their jobs with Duarte’s help.

From AIDS brochures printed in Spanish to educational projects about alcoholism and Latinos, and services for disabled Spanish-speaking youth, Duarte has created many health projects for his community.

His resume includes two pages listing memberships on various commissions, committees and boards, including the Los Angeles Police Commission, American Red Cross, AIDS Planning Council and the East Los Angeles Health District.

He helped found the Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Assn., the Department of Health Services Latino Managers, the Los Angeles Hispanic Managers Assn. and the Medical Center’s Hispanic Festivities Committee, which named a scholarship after him six years ago.

This attention, Duarte says, left him grateful but embarrassed.

He prefers to stay in the background, going about the business of hooking people and groups together to solve problems in the community.

“When you get to where you want to be in your job, career and life, please turn around and help someone else,” he says. “Give back.”

Many of Duarte’s proteges have.

“He has taken his bumps along the way but Frank Duarte has been a vigilant warrior on all issues important to the people in our community,” says County Supervisor Gloria Molina. “When I was a young Chicana feminist, Frank provided guidance in an empowering way. He shares his skills. He welcomes the energy of young people. He imparts information, education. . . . One of the admirable qualities about him is that he is there--a wise man in our community.”

Richard Amador, president of CHARO, a nonprofit East Los Angeles community service organization, says Duarte’s role in the Latino community is invaluable.

“He has been helpful in making sure that we in the Latino community look at all perspectives and not just our own, especially when it affects the community,” Amador says. “If he hadn’t been there for us mediating, a lot of relationships would not exist today and a lot of programs for the community would have been killed.”

Adds Adelaide De La Cerda, County-USC’s public information officer and a friend for more than 20 years: “He is a mentor and a great elder in East L.A. Mr. Duarte turned my life around. He made me see that as a Latina I could get ahead. He showed me many avenues that would not have opened if he had not stepped in. And the only thing that he has wanted in return is for us to help another Latino or Latina achieve and succeed.”

Sitting in his downtown office, Duarte--in his natty suit, vintage tie and suspenders--is humbled by his friends’ comments.

“Please take all those comments with a grain of salt,” he says toward the end of a day that began at 5 a.m. with a walk in his East L.A. neighborhood, followed by a 7 a.m. breakfast meeting, an 11:30 a.m. community gathering and an afternoon staff session.

“I’m not a great elder. There’s no such thing as great. People come to me for advice and counsel because I care. I’ve been very lucky that I have learned so much that I can pass on to others.”

It is true, he acknowledges, that when he talks, people listen.

“I guess they respect me,” he says. And the feeling is mutual. Respect for elders, parents and children--qualities passed onto him by his parents--”were the main focus of my life,” he says. “So every time there is a chance to help or assist any one of those three, I will do so because that is the way I was brought up. That’s the way of Mexican life.”

Duarte was born in 1910 in the pueblo of Santa Rosalia de Camargo in Chihuahua, Mexico. A year later his parents emigrated to the United States, fleeing the Mexican Revolution. His father worked on the railroad, a job that took him throughout the country and finally landed the Duartes in Los Angeles, where they lived for almost nine years before returning to Mexico.

The revolution had subsided by then. The family returned to Parral.

“My dad’s family was embedded there,” he says. Parral also was Pancho Villa’s territory and on the morning of July 20, 1923, as Duarte headed to school, he witnessed Villa’s death.

“I was 13 and walking to school with my cousin when we heard shots. We ran toward the shots and Pancho Villa had just been killed,” he says. Villa had been ambushed while driving his car.

“When we got there, his flesh was still trembling. One of his lieutenants got shot right in the forehead. We got blood on us.”

The experience, Duarte says, was one of the most important events not only in Mexican history, but in his own life. The blood of a Mexican on his own hands taught him that “we should never be one against the other.”

A year later Duarte’s family returned to Los Angeles and settled on Macy Street, near Union Station. Duarte had finished high school in Mexico and even began classes at a prepatoria , or junior college. In Los Angeles, he helped his mother rear the younger children and took odd jobs in construction and at a paint factory.

During the Depression, he worked at a hosiery plant.

“I became an expert at making ladies’ hose, silk hose with the seam up the back,” he recalls. In 1934, his union went on strike. Duarte remembers giving a rousing speech at an East L.A. street corner, employees surrounding him, cheering his words to “fight for equality.”

Eventually, the union lost the fight and Duarte, his job.

“But I was considered a leader after our strike,” he says. His expertise in repairing hosiery machinery eventually took him to Mexico City.

“One of my dreams was to go to Mexico and teach the industry,” he remembers. “But the Mexican union didn’t want us there because we were coming from the U.S. They called a meeting and didn’t tell me or my two friends who had come with me. I said, ‘This is baloney. They are going to talk about us. We have to be there.’ ”

On impulse--and unnoticed--Duarte and his pals sneaked into the meeting attended by 400 union members.

“They were calling us dirty names, berating us, saying we were gringos. I stood up. I told them--and I remember this clearly--’First of all we are not gringos, we are Mexican born. And we did not come here to take anybody’s job. Our contract calls for us to fix your machines.’ They didn’t know what the hell to say. One guy finally stood up and said, ‘You see, my friends, you don’t have to wear huaraches (sandals) to be a Mexican.’ ”

A year later, Duarte was elected head of the union and remained at the helm for the next four years. After World War II broke out he returned to the United States and signed up with the draft board. He was never called to serve, but says “It would have been an honor and privilege to have done so.”

It was in those days that he became a heavy drinker and, eventually, a recovering alcoholic.

Duarte says he began as a social drinker in his 20s. The drinking progressively got worse. In 1954, he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

“Here I was a grown-up and I had never heard anything about AA. I was the only Hispanic there. I didn’t drink after that. That’s why it is important to get information to the people about it in their own language. Drinking is a big problem in our culture. There is a lot of denial.”

His commitment to battling alcoholism in the Latino community has included 17 years of service on the California State Advisory Board on Alcohol-Related Problems, where he has developed resources and obtained government support to initiate programs essential to the community.

After he quit drinking 39 years ago, Duarte decided to become a naturalized citizen.

“As a Mexican you come here to the United States and you think that someday you are going to go back and help, but quitting drinking showed me that I was not going to go back. When I quit, that’s when I decided I was going to stay and continue to help my community here.”

Duarte soon got work with the state in job development with the East Los Angeles employment office in the early ‘60s, but saw a need to do more.

He helped found the East Los Angeles Community Improvement Assn. and the East Los Angeles Job Clearing House with a grant from the Ford Foundation. He guided CHARO, which provides on-the-job training and other services primarily in the Latino community.

In 1973, when Duarte was set to retire from CHARO, county health officials asked him to help them reach Latinos.

“I lost about $400 to $500 a month coming here. But I took the job because my task is to recruit Hispanics for any positions they are qualified for. It has not been easy because when you start bringing in your own, the others (non-Latinos) start getting bad feelings about it. But my defense has always been that I’m not anti-anyone. I’m pro-Hispanic.”

And it’s his duty, he says, to speak up when necessary, and to challenge those who won’t go to bat for the Latino community.

“I don’t wait to say, ‘I wish I had said this or done that.’ That has happened throughout my life. I’ve been called a greaser and a bean ball and a damn Mexican. And in those instances I have acted real fast and that’s what has counted.”

For more than 50 years Duarte has battled on behalf of the Latino community with the support of his wife, Josephine, to whom he has been married for 58 years, and his children, who he says “are even more outspoken than I am.”

“At this age, I know I’m not going any place. I have nothing to lose. In fact, it’s the other way around. I come out a winner. I come out gaining for the community.”