Campaign Aide Gets a Citizenship Lesson : Election: Resident alien serves as Brown volunteer in largely Latino Santa Ana precinct and is shocked to see the depth of voter apathy. Soon to take her oath, she pledges to meet her responsibilities.

It wasn’t an altruistic impulse that led Rocio Fregoso last month to the Santa Ana campaign headquarters of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Brown.

Fregoso was there to fulfill a high school government class assignment. She figured she would work for one day and then leave.

But the Brown campaign needed volunteer workers, and the 17-year-old student wanted to earn extra credit for her class. She was persuaded to stay on and help find Brown supporters in her predominantly Latino neighborhood, Precinct 68302.

Almost overnight, the campaign became an avocation for this new precinct captain who had paid little attention to politics before.

Even if Fregoso had been old enough to vote in the Nov. 8 election, she still would have been ineligible. She is a resident alien who is in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen.

But by the time the election was over, she had witnessed the unwillingness of her neighbors to vote and in the process gained an even stronger appreciation of the right to participate in an election.

“If you are a citizen, then you should vote,” Fregoso said.

When she first joined the campaign, she said, she was anxious about the prospect of telephoning voters or knocking on their doors. “I was embarrassed at first,” she recalled.

But she forged ahead, becoming her neighborhood’s expert on who were the occasional voters and who had moved away. Fregoso and others also called the few voters on their list who had working telephone numbers, and she handed out campaign brochures to neighbors with her name and number in case anyone had any questions.

Then she discovered that many voters in her neighborhood did not want to be bothered--a feeling she picked up almost as soon as she set out on the rainy morning of the election to get out the vote.

“After all the effort we were putting forward contacting them, on the day of the election they said they didn’t have time,” Fregoso said. “A lot of people said, ‘I don’t have time to vote,’ or this and that. Others were like: ‘Don’t bug me no more. I will go when I have time to vote.’ ”

Her campaign supervisor told her not to give up. “He said, ‘Keep going and bug them and bug them,’ Fregoso said. “But a lot of people didn’t know it was Election Day.”

It was exasperating for Fregoso, who, like other campaign workers, thought the presence of Proposition 187--the illegal immigrant measure--would draw more Latino voters to the polls.

Friends at school were talking about student walkouts to protest the measure, and some neighbors shared the worry that rioting would break out once the initiative was approved.

Just the day before the election, Fregoso’s brother came home from his elementary school frightened, she said. He had heard that Proposition 187 would force his family--although in the country legally--to go back to Mexico and leave him behind in Santa Ana because he is the only U.S. citizen out of the eight members of the family.

However, for all the interest in the election, the results showed that it was mostly talk and little action.

On Election Day, Fregoso called many voters several times to remind them to vote. But she said they usually responded with the question: “Why should I waste my time?”

“We were trying to pep them up so they would go vote, and it was hard,” the young campaign worker recalled. “I told them, ‘You never know, anything could happen.’ ”

Disappointed by the low voter turnout, Fregoso said she was nonetheless enlightened by the experience and now looks forward to the day when she can vote. She expects to become a citizen in about three months.

“It makes a difference whether people vote or not,” she said. “After what I have been through . . . I learned it’s worth voting and learning (how) to be heard.”