Fear Drives Immigrants to Citizenship : Naturalization: Legal residents cite growing anti-foreigner mood.

Gabriel Lopez’s first trips to California were brief and strictly mercenary: He was one of the thousands of braceros who harvested seasonal crops in the 1950s and sent money to support their families back in Mexico.

Even in 1961, when an Oxnard-based company helped him get a green card and gave him a full-time job picking chili peppers, Lopez was certain he’d return to his home state of Jalisco, where his roots and his loyalty were firmly grounded.

Now, after living more than half his life in Sylmar, raising a family there and rarely returning to Mexico, Lopez is applying for U.S. citizenship. Once among the wave of braceros , today he is among the thousands of legal immigrants--many of them elderly, longtime residents--who are belatedly swearing their allegiance to the Stars and Stripes.

Growing anti-immigrant fervor, the passage of Proposition 187 and the threatened loss of his Social Security checks by a cost-cutting Congress finally compelled Lopez, a disabled park maintenance worker, to take a step he had long shunned as unnecessary.

“After Prop. 187, there was no alternative; I had to become an American citizen,” said Lopez, 59, who filed his citizenship application in March. “I see I am losing a lot of the rights I could have, like Medicaid and the vote, because I am not an American.”

Later this month, immigration officials expect to swear in as many as 8,500 people at two naturalization ceremonies in Downtown Los Angeles and Riverside, nearly double the number of previous years. Applications for citizenship have risen more than 200% in the last year, according to the local office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Immigrants have flocked to the United States and California for decades, promising themselves to eventually return to their native countries. But years slip by, children are born, houses are bought and the immigrants grow older and accustomed to life in the States.

For some, retaining the citizenship of their birth becomes a way of preserving ethnic identity. Others, like Guadalupe Jara, are so assimilated they simply neglect to make it official.

“I already felt like an American before technically being one,” said Jara, who grew up in Arleta after coming from Mexico at age 4. Only now, at 37, is she seeking U.S. citizenship.

But as a civics and history instructor and director of Mission College’s citizenship program since 1991, Jara says she felt like a fraud. She wasn’t practicing what she preached.

“My job has brought more of that recognition that I’m not a citizen,” Jara said in perfect, unaccented English. “I lived here all my life and I’m here, but it’s like I’m not here on paper. . . . I decided since I teach the class, I should take the test.”

Lopez was among those whose strong sentimental attachment to their homeland stopped them from becoming citizens. He felt he would be denouncing his Mexican heritage by doing so, and agonized for years about making the decision.

In the 1970s, he had his fingerprints taken for the process, but never went back for the exam that includes 20 written questions on U.S. history and the nation’s political system, as well as an interview. In the meantime, several family members immigrated from Mexico and became citizens.

Lopez, who has a weak heart and has suffered two strokes, said his medical needs also played a role in his decision to become naturalized. After working and paying taxes here for 34 years, he looks forward to drawing Social Security and being eligible for Medicare.

Conversely, pragmatism kept Olga (Paquita) Acosta from giving up her Honduran citizenship for 40 years, and it was a certain sentimentality about her adopted country as well as her grown children here that finally persuaded her, at 68, to obtain U.S. citizenship.

Acosta had always wanted to retire to her native Honduras. Only the country’s volatile politics and the potential danger to Acosta and her husband deterred her. Now, widowed for several years and living with her eldest daughter in Gardena, Acosta said she has no desire to leave her adopted country.

“I love and respect this country. It is the country of my three children,” the retired factory worker said. “But I don’t like the way they change the laws now against us (immigrants).”

Acosta took the citizenship exam in February and passed. She is waiting to hear when she will be sworn in.

It typically takes 12 to 18 months from the time legal residents apply for citizenship until they are sworn in, said Richard K. Rogers, director of the Los Angeles INS office.

Applicants are tested on their knowledge of U.S. history, civics and proficiency in English. Residents 50 or older, and with 20 years in the United States as legal immigrants, can be tested in their native language, said Rico Cabrera, INS public affairs director. Once they pass citizenship tests, the residents are sworn in after approximately 45 days.

Citizenship gives one the right to vote, serve on juries and hold certain government jobs. It also would ensure the right to Social Security, Medicare and welfare should Congress deny those benefits to non-citizens. Many, however, see political empowerment as reason enough to become naturalized.

“The right to vote is now an important reason to become a citizen,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials in Boyle Heights.

Vargas’ mother, Antonieta Vargas of the Pico-Union district, was so angered by the Proposition 187 movement that she abandoned plans to retire in her native Chihuahua, Mexico, and became a citizen after 42 years here so she could vote against the measure.

Legal immigrants, Vargas added, are also “realizing that their status as permanent residents no longer makes them immune from discriminatory treatment.”

Such bigotry shocked Maria Sanchez--who came from San Luis, Mexico, at age 16 and has raised seven children in San Fernando--into taking the initiative one crisp January afternoon. A man she met after a class at Mission College was talking to her in Spanish, and when Sanchez asked if he was Mexican, he said he was American and called Sanchez a mojada, or wetback.

“That night I just cried, and the next day I decided I was going to be an American citizen,” said Sanchez, a petite, 47-year-old woman with an infectious giggle.

Every day for two weeks last month, Sanchez arrived promptly at Mission College’s San Fernando branch to grab the second seat in the first row before her 8 a.m. citizenship class taught by Jara.

During class, Sanchez scribbled notes in an already crammed spiral notebook that she pored over for two or three hours a night in her “study”--a garage cluttered with laundry, a sewing machine, bookcases and seven votive candles she lights daily for her dead husband.

“This is more than just school. This is my life,” Sanchez said.

For several years after her arrival at her brother’s home in Tehachapi in 1964, Sanchez kept a suitcase packed and ready for her return to Mexico. Instead, the family moved to Bakersfield, where Sanchez picked grapes, oranges and strawberries, and met her husband.

Sanchez’s family has lived comfortably in her modest, three-bedroom home in San Fernando, where she and her husband settled in 1969. There was never a thought about being a citizen, she said. Her children and husband were all born in the United States, she had been a legal resident since her arrival and never had a problem finding work.

But now things are different. Sanchez worries that she’ll lose her husband’s pension from his Pacoima employer if she doesn’t become a citizen. Worse, she said, she fears the government might impose changes that could send her back to Mexico on a whim, as Mexicans were during the Depression.

George Lopez isn’t worried about being deported, and he’s quick to point out that he doesn’t receive government aid and is not concerned with losing benefits. What the 20-year Sylmar resident wants is the chance to vote.

“I want to count and I want to vote for someone who’s going to make decisions that I think are best for me and my community,” said Lopez, 36, who is enrolled in Jara’s Mission College citizenship class with his wife, Leticia, 35. The Lopezes, who are both from Zacatecas, Mexico, met in North Hollywood and married in 1982.

They received amnesty in 1988 to become legal residents, then had to wait five years before they could apply for citizenship. Meanwhile, they were preoccupied with their jobs as a seamstress and a general mechanic, and raising their two children, Daniela, 10, and Roberto, 7.

Increasingly hostile, xenophobic rhetoric, they said, coupled with measures like Proposition 187 made it clear to them that they could delay no longer.

“I’m sick and tired of people telling me, ‘You’re a wetback, go back to Mexico,’ ” he said. “The next time someone says that to me, I can stop them: ‘Oh, no sir, I’m sorry,’ I will say, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen.’ ”