EL MODENA : It’s No Gang--Just Busy Work Crew

Cindy Ramirez was sitting outside her El Modena apartment with neighborhood boys recently when a police officer pulled over, thinking they were a gang.

That was nothing new in this unincorporated, largely Latino community outside the city of Orange.

But the teen-agers and young adults who hang out with Ramirez, a youth coordinator for the El Modena Pride Assn., are too tired to get into trouble these days.

Instead, they scrape, sand and paint houses all day and most of them collapse in bed long before their peers even begin to party.

Their paychecks come from a county grant intended to teach trades to youths.

But the young men also represent a far-reaching effort by the community’s adults, who organized as the El Modena Pride Assn., to gain control of their neighborhood.

“People from outside have always wanted to run El Modena and always have run El Modena,” said Pride Chairman Lupe Hurtado.

He and other community leaders formed Pride last year so they could credibly bid to manage the area’s public services.

Last month they had some success, convincing Supervisor William G. Steiner that they deserved a $50,000 county grant to rehabilitate and run El Modena’s homeless shelter, outbidding three reputable nonprofit organizations in the process.

“The reason I picked El Modena Pride is they represent the community directly,” Steiner said. “They live within the community and they have made a diligent effort to commit themselves to this work.”

Pride is still organizing management of the shelter, but right away the directors decided to hire neighborhood kids to paint and repair the buildings.

Bob Pusavat, the county’s director of housing and redevelopment, thought that was a great idea. He goes by the adage “It’s cheaper to send them to Yale then to jail,” he explained.

By the time the shelter was ready for painting this week, Ramirez’s crew also had completed 13 painting jobs in homes in the neighborhood, earning the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour and holding to the demands of a regular job.

“Some of these kids are real young--their parents don’t even tell them what to do,” said Martin Escobedo, a supervisor who at 21 is one of the oldest of the 25 crew members.

Many of them have had to adjust to the concept of arriving on time, keeping breaks to 15 minutes and taking orders from their four bosses.

Escobedo and his brother Tony, 18, who is also a supervisor, had learned the trade by helping their father each summer since they were in grade school.

“It was different teaching guys my age instead of having older guys teach me,” Martin said. “You have to have patience.”

Ramirez said her role is as much a counselor and mother as a supervisor. And she hopes for her flock’s future.

“Some people are scared because they dress the way they dress and they look the way they look,” she said of her crew. “Somebody down the line has got to give these boys a second chance. They have hearts, too.”