A Mother’s Struggle to Overcome : Social issues: Growing poverty besieges California. One woman tells her story of trying to support a daughter on a part-time job while fighting sickness and depression.

Nivia Burmudez is in the midst of an animated conversation, recounting to visitors a rocky, unhappy marriage that nevertheless produced a happy, beautiful daughter, when a loud rap echoes from the screen door of the small Eastside apartment that mother and daughter share.

A truancy official has come by to ask why 8-year-old Crystal, playing with her pet parakeet on the front room floor, is not in school.

The account Burmudez gives--ill health that hampers her ability to get the child off to school, underemployment that barely meets her family’s needs, lack of money for day care or baby-sitters, an inner-city school in a rough area that her daughter resists attending--reflects many of the challenges faced by California’s expanding population of poor and low-income residents.

Their plight has proved a stubborn thorn in the side of state leaders, who once again this election year must grapple with the dilemma of expanding poverty and a growing demand for services amid a long-depressed economy.

The protracted fiscal and social problems besieging the state seemed at their worst two years ago as Los Angeles erupted in rioting that became the worst U.S. civil disturbance of this century.

But in the wake of that upheaval, plans to reform welfare and health care, improve education and schools, retrain the work force and rebuild inner cities remain elusive goals, the stuff of campaign rhetoric.

According to the most recent census estimates, 18.2% of Californians live below the poverty level, struggling to maintain families, homes and dignity in an economic and social climate that has buffeted even the most well-off.

The plight of the poor resonates up and down the state, with poverty infecting the soil of California’s rural heartland as well as its cities like a drug-resistant disease. While Los Angeles County, California’s most populous, has a staggering 1.3 million poor residents, Imperial County has the highest poverty rate of all, with one quarter of its residents living below the threshold.

The plague that has afflicted poor residents, urban and rural, is persistent unemployment and underemployment that has exacerbated housing, food and health problems. And as the state’s economic climate has worsened, health and social service programs that serve the state’s most vulnerable populations have been targeted for deep cuts.

For residents like Nivia Burmudez, a native New Yorker who migrated to California more than 18 years ago, the upcoming governor’s election pitting incumbent Pete Wilson against state Treasurer Kathleen Brown provokes both hope and frustration.

Both candidates talk of improving the economy, which Burmudez knows will help the overall condition of people like herself. Yet she also has the sense that no one is really interested in addressing her concerns, that the everyday lives of the poor barely register on the political radar.

“Politicians have never had to live at the level that I have and survive, so they don’t understand,” says Burmudez, a small woman whose feisty energy and accent announce her New York roots.

She is sitting in a waiting room of a clinic in Long Beach, her first visit to the doctor in about two months because of complications with her medical coverage. Medi-Cal will not cover some of the medications she has been prescribed--one of which costs up to $150 a month--so she has tried to pay out of her pocket or has simply gone without.

In the examining room, Burmudez tells the doctor her mood has been down, that she can’t sleep at night.

“Depression amplifies pain a lot,” he tells her. “I want to work on that. If we can, I think we will have success.”

Burmudez’s circumstances in recent years have fostered enough emotional turmoil for a lifetime, but also have stirred a fierce survival instinct and sense of political awareness she had not known before.

“The problem with a lot of reforms that are being proposed is that the children suffer,” she says, sitting now in her small living room cluttered with boxes of clothes, shoes and papers. She moved into the apartment five months ago after living in a succession of homeless shelters.

“The children are not the ones taking drugs or having babies,” Burmudez continues. “Children need to be protected in California. This is such a rich country.”

It is a warm, pleasant morning, and Burmudez has her door open to let in a breeze, when the tap, tap is heard.

The woman at the door, Margarita Rojas, is from Sheridan Street Elementary School, only a few blocks away. Crystal, she says, is frequently absent, and when she does go to school, she is often half an hour to an hour late.

“Let’s see if we can improve attendance and tardiness,” says Rojas. What time does Crystal get to bed, she wants to know.

Crystal--a shy but bouncy third-grader with expressive brown eyes who already has attended five different schools--says she stays up late sometimes watching television.

“9:30 p.m. or 10? That’s too late,” says Rojas, grimacing. “You have to be able to study. Go to bed at 8 o’clock.”

Before Rojas leaves, she tries to explain some of the problems she faces. The school’s Boyle Heights neighborhood is a “hard-core area,” a recruiting ground for local gangs. “There are a lot of drugs and dysfunctional families.”

Burmudez is neither offended nor embarrassed by Rojas’ descriptions.

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“I know there’s a certain amount of dysfunction in my life, but I’m trying to find ways to overcome that,” she says. “It’s so much easier when you have two people in the home, because the other one can pick up the slack. On the surface it looks like negligence, but not when you get into somebody’s life and see what’s going on.”

For many of California’s poorer residents, finding a good job, decent health care or even a home is increasingly beyond their reach. The state’s protracted economic slump has allowed more and more people to slip into poverty, while seeming to suffocate those already at the bottom.

Between 1988 and 1992, the percentage of California’s children living below the poverty line rose by more than a quarter, to 25.3% from 20%. The percentage of two-parent households receiving welfare jumped 12% in 1993 from the previous year. In Los Angeles County, 24% of all children were on welfare in 1992, the latest year for which data is available.

Over the last three years, meanwhile, California officials have cut grants under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program by nearly 13%. In the same period, federal Supplemental Security Income benefits for the low-income elderly and disabled have been frozen.

But the numbers do not tell the personal stories of people like Burmudez, one of seven children born to a factory worker father and homemaker mother in a Pentacostal home.

Her parents parted when she was 13 and Nivia lived a nomadic life, running away often and hanging with Manhattan street gangs. At 16, she moved to California, married a serviceman, but was divorced after a troubled marriage.

Burmudez modeled for a while, went to beauty school and tried to sell her own designer clothing. She met Crystal’s father and stayed with him for 10 years, hoping to create a stable environment for her daughter. But last year, he left and Burmudez--with few resources and unable to afford rent--took Crystal to live in a shelter.

Since then, she has been sporadically employed, forced onto welfare and has suffered bouts of sickness and depression.

But she has struggled back.

Burmudez found a part-time job with a local homeless organization and began working Saturdays at a salon. She got housing assistance and saved enough money to buy an ’86 Chevette.

Yet she still is mostly dependent on the state’s largess--aid that is subject to economic constraints and the will of politicians. Both gubernatorial candidates, for example, support increased job training for the poor. Brown also proposes allowing those on welfare to accumulate money to start small businesses. But both candidates favor further cuts in welfare grants and freezing cost-of-living increases.

Even now, Burmudez’s job poses a dilemma familiar to the poor. She could work longer hours at higher pay, but that would jeopardize her Medi-Cal health insurance and Section 8 housing aid, which pays all but $100 of her $760 monthly rent.

It is not a question of wanting to stay on welfare, says Burmudez, but of common sense. Even with a full-time job, her wages would not cover rent, health care, baby-sitting and food bills. She’d be back where she started.

Instead, Burmudez has chosen stability.

“I’m still going through a lot of trauma and turmoil from the past,” she says. “It’s like recovering from alcohol or drugs. It will always be there, but I have to learn how to cope.”

Part of that is relearning how to balance her life and set priorities. One of the most important is Crystal. And soon after Rojas leaves, Burmudez decides to visit school to talk to the principal about her situation.

Sheridan Street Elementary has a student body of 1,800 that reflects the mostly Latino makeup of its community. Principal Joan Mezori, a scholarly-looking woman with twinkling eyes, greets Burmudez warmly. Indeed, the meeting goes much more smoothly than Burmudez had expected. Instead of taking her to task for Crystal’s absences, Mezori offers ways to help.

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Several other children in Burmudez’s apartment complex also attend Sheridan, the principal says, and the school may be able to work out an arrangement for the students to walk to school together, with adult supervision. The school also has after-hours programs for children with working parents, one of which Crystal quickly joined.

A few days later, Mezori is reflecting on the problems of the poor.

At Sheridan, she says, “there are about 40 homeless kids that we have identified, but that only touches the surface. We’re working hard to create an atmosphere where parents can feel safe enough to come to us and seek assistance.”

Mezori has been with the Los Angeles Unified School District for 25 years, all of it on the Eastside. “It is a wonderful place, and (there is) nothing quite like the children,” she says. “The parents are very generous with their children. They want the same things for them that everyone else wants.”

Burmudez, too, is optimistic. She had a recent setback when her baby-sitter, beset with her own problems, had to stop caring for Crystal. She’s looking for another.

“Right now I’m trying to establish a life,” Burmudez says. “I’m sick of poverty. I’ve had too much of it.”

STATE OF THE STATE: POVERTY REALITY

* CHILDREN: More than one in five children in the state lives below the poverty line, as does one in five residents of Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and Riverside counties. Statewide, the number of children living in poverty doubled from 1969 to 1989. * LIVING STANDARD: In Los Angeles, a family of four receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children and food stamps has only 42% of the income needed to maintain a minimum standard of living, Consumers Union says. * INCOME: Adjusted for inflation, the incomes of the poorest fifth of California families declined 8% during the 1980s.

RHETORIC KATHLEEN BROWN: “I believe the single best anti-poverty program is a job.”

“California’s welfare rolls are filled with people who come from broken families. If California’s families are going to stay together and be successful, the twin problems of teen-age pregnancy and deadbeat dads must be solved.”

PROPOSALS

* Make jobs and job placement the primary focus of the state’s GAIN welfare-to-work program.

* Transform welfare offices into employment referral and placement centers.

* Impose a two-year limit on welfare benefits.

* Use the state Franchise Tax Board to collect child support.

* Allow welfare recipients to accumulate assets needed to start micro-businesses.

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PETE WILSON: “Welfare must not just be a dead-end of despair and dependency; it must become the path to a better life.”

“If we hadn’t begun to reform welfare, the system would still penalize those who choose the dignity of a job over the dependency of welfare. But we did reform welfare to finally make work pay.”

PROPOSALS

* Require teen-age mothers who go on welfare to live at home with parents or a guardian, rather than move out on their own.

* Impose a two-year limit on able-bodied adults receiving welfare, after which they must find a private-sector job.

MORE POOR

The current federal poverty line--based on a family’s ability to purchase an adequate diet--stands at $11,522 for a family of three. The percentage of Californians living in poverty has steadily grown.

Year Percent in poverty 1988 13.2% 1989 12.9% 1990 13.9% 1991 16.3% 1992 16.4% 1993 18.2%