Changing the Image of Public Housing : Longtime Aliso Village Resident Strives for Renter Empowerment as Newly Appointed Commissioner

In the 1960s, my father came here from El Salvador and worked in a factory assembling forklifts. He was a hard-working man who had worked in a bottling company in San Salvador.

My mother, my three sisters and I came to the United States to join my father in the early 1970s. My mother went to work in a garment factory.

We all grew up in Aliso Village. My parents eventually moved out into their own home, but I still live here.

I don’t intend to move out until I see the changes here that I want to make happen. I want to see more programs for the kids and I want to change the image that people have about public housing. Everyone thinks that people who live in public housing are dumb or something.

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I want us all to come together and show the rest of the people that we can do things for ourselves--that we don’t need help. It’s going to be a hard thing to do, and I don’t know how to do it, but that’s my dream.

I started working with the president of the Aliso Village residents’ group in 1991. We both worked in a local school cafeteria. One day I got a flyer from the residents’ group and the Spanish translation was misspelled. I took it to her at work and told her it was poor. I said I couldn’t understand it. So, she asked me if I could help out by doing the translation for her.

The residents of Aliso Village are 90% Latino. When I started spending time in the office and they found out I spoke Spanish, a lot more people started coming to the office. Pretty soon I found I was working there 10 hours a day.

I was appointed to the Housing Commission by the mayor on City Councilman Richard Alatorre’s recommendation. It is a volunteer position, but it takes a lot of my time. I am representing 21 developments from East Los Angeles to South-Central to San Fernando, plus a small site for senior citizens.

I have found that if people have a problem, I have to go there and work on solving it with them. Mostly, people don’t want to come forward with their problems. They’re afraid to report it because they don’t want other people to find out. They have more confidence if we go to them.

The racial tensions are bad at some of the developments, though not at Aliso Village because there almost everyone is Latino. Once I helped a South American family whose apartment was torched because of a racial dispute. We got them moved into another building in a different development.

I find I have to be a negotiator in family disputes and neighbor disputes. They call me every day, probably because many people feel more comfortable with me

because of my Spanish.

I am very interested in seeing the youth become more involved in the community. They need more education, they need job training so they can be more productive than destructive.

At Aliso Village we have some programs for the youth that are working well. I hope these programs can spread to some of the other developments.

This summer, I supervised 15 kids in a summer youth program. They beautify the community and remove graffiti. It keeps them busy and out of trouble and gives them a job.

I have a lot of faith in these kids. They trust me and I trust them, and I know they’re not going to let me down.

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We just created a Youth Advisory Council for kids 14 to 21 years old. Their goal is to create a day-care center and a playground for Aliso Village, and they want to do it themselves.

For all the people in this development, we don’t have a playground here. There’s a park across the street, but most of the younger children are too little to cross the street and their parents are afraid to send them over there because of the violence.

The kids are going to write a proposal and hopefully they’re going to get some money to start the project.

For the first time we are also establishing youth groups, like a 4-H Club and a Boy Scout troop, here at Aliso Village. The teen center at Aliso Village used to be open from 2 p.m. to 9 in the evening, but it had to be closed because we didn’t have enough volunteers. I want to see that reopened. It gives the kids something positive to do after school.

We are using the teen center now as an alternative school, so some of the kids who have had problems in the local school won’t drop out but can take their classes at the center.

Now, it’s time to get the parents more involved and educate them about what’s going on with their teen-agers.

There are so many things I want to do. I am in this job until 1996, and I hope I can really make a difference over the next two years.