VENTURA COUNTY NEWS : Interest in Citizenship Workshops Is Booming : Immigrants: Agency sees attendance swell at its daylong sessions in wake of voters’ approval of Proposition 187.

Domingo Cardenas’ dreams of American citizenship began to materialize Saturday when he stamped his fingerprints on the first of several forms that will change his legal status.

“I’ve been waiting for this since I became a permanent resident six years ago,” said Cardenas, a 30-year-old Moorpark resident. “It’s the beginning of a dream coming true.”

Cardenas was one of hundreds of immigrants who have rushed to the daylong citizenship workshops that have swelled in attendance since Californians adopted Proposition 187 to cut public services to illegal immigrants.

By filling out the appropriate forms Saturday, Cardenas and others in the class will be eligible to be sworn as American citizens in spring, 1996, in a ceremony at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Officials with El Concilio del Condado de Ventura said Saturday’s workshop in Newbury Park was one of three they will sponsor this month around the county to meet the demand from legal residents seeking citizenship.

The agency once received about 100 applications a month from legal residents. But since the passage of Proposition 187 in November, that number has increased to 200 to 250 a month, said Marcos Vargas, executive director for the agency.

“All of these people are legal residents, but they have no voice in the government,” Vargas said. “Since Proposition 187, they all decided that it’s time to vote, to have a voice.”

Maria de Lourdes, who cleans houses in Moorpark, confirmed that the ballot initiative prompted her to finally seek U. S. citizenship.

A legal resident for 30 years, Lourdes said, “I’m tired of not being able to vote. It’s time for me to participate in this country’s decisions.”

Although there are no official statistics, El Concilio estimates that Ventura County has 60,000 to 80,000 legal immigrants eligible to become American citizens.

Gregory Simmons, a legal assistant for El Concilio, said some of those seeking citizenship may also be motivated by a new law requiring immigrants with green cards issued before 1978 to renew their cards by March 20.

Recently, the Immigration and Naturalization Service agreed to send an officer to El Concilio headquarters in Oxnard every month to interview those who want to become citizens.

Previously, applicants would have to go to the INS office in Los Angeles for the interview.

El Concilio, a nonprofit social service organization for Latinos, has launched a campaign to turn legal residents into voting citizens.

In the past month, the agency has held a citizenship workshop nearly every Saturday in several cities around the county, including Moorpark and Santa Paula.

Saturday, despite the heavy rains, three of the agency’s staff members and 25 volunteers set up a makeshift office at the Evangelical Free Church of the Conejo Valley in Newbury Park.

There they helped the legal residents fill out a six-page application and took their photographs to accompany the complicated forms. Two Ventura County sheriff’s deputies fingerprinted each applicant. Those fingerprints will also accompany the applications submitted to the INS office in Los Angeles.

El Concilio officials said they hold the workshops to answer questions that inevitably arise while filing out the forms. Also, they want to avoid future snags by making sure applicants properly complete all the necessary paperwork.

“I’m really grateful to El Concilio for helping me with the application,” said Connie Hansen, who was applying for citizenship. “It’s a very complex process and I would have to take at least two days off work to go to Los Angeles and do the paperwork.”

Although El Concilio is primarily targeting immigrants from Latin American countries, those from France, England and Canada also attended the Saturday seminar.

“One of the greatest barriers for immigrants in this county is that they cannot vote,” Vargas said. “We have a lack of Latino representatives in our local government and we need to change that.”