Half a World Away, They Find That Women’s Struggles Are Universal : For seven Latinas, a global women’s conference in Beijing was a mixture of the new and familiar.

Estela Nuno’s world lies largely within the bounds of Boyle Heights: the Aliso housing project where she lives and the school next door where she volunteers her work in hopes of securing a better education for her children.

But a few weeks ago, Nuno, 29, boarded a plane for the first time in her life and began a journey that has expanded her horizons beyond her wildest dreams.

Calling themselves Latina Activists of California, Nuno and seven other Los Angeles residents, including one man, flew to Beijing with a common goal: to use the International Women’s Conference as a means to empower themselves in their work in their own communities.

For Nuno, who is working on her high school equivalency degree, the experience has been nothing short of miraculous.

“I saw all these educated women, all these women with professional titles, and I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I here?’ ” Nuno said this week, just a day after she returned home. “But I knew there was a reason, and this trip has raised my awareness and given me the strength to fight for women’s rights.”

What Nuno and the others found out was that despite their very different circumstances, they experienced problems common to women around the world.

“We’re all fighting issues of patriarchy, poverty,” said Maira Fernandez, a teacher and writer who runs a Project Best program at Utah Street Elementary in Boyle Heights. “Some of their problems are more severe, like circumcision among some African women. . . . But even as an advanced country, we have Third World problems here in East Los Angeles,” she said.

It was Fernandez who urged Nuno and other mothers from nearby projects to work as volunteers at their children’s school, and later to join the group traveling to Beijing. Two mothers, including Nuno, finally joined the group, which included a lawyer and several other educators with ties to the Latino community. Nuno and one other mother paid their way by working at the school and holding fund-raisers.

“I saw the leadership in these women [from the projects]. I saw the untapped resources there. And I thought, ‘Maybe their kids have given up, but they haven’t’, “ said Fernandez, who works extensively with parental education and has enrolled the mothers in leadership programs. The trip to China, she said, has given her renewed energy to continue her work.

It’s a sentiment echoed by fellow traveler Maria Luisa Jimenez, another educator who gives seminars for women and belongs to Mothers of East L.A.

“This conference has given me a shot in the arm,” says Jimenez, who spoke at one of the panels in China. “The obstacles I have pale in comparison to the problems of some of the women from the Third World. The stories I heard, the efforts they made to go there . . . and they are women with families, women who are brave and want to change society, not just themselves.”

Jimenez now plans to work more closely with Latinas and to propose the creation of an education project dedicated exclusively to women.

Its purpose, she said, would be “to educate Latina women . . . to help them find themselves and the value of their culture. That’s one of the reasons many cultures survive great poverty and injustice, because they know who they are. Even the poorest have a strong cultural conscience.”

The full meaning of the trip to Beijing, however, will take some time to assess and the women have decided to wait a few weeks before they get together to talk about their experiences.

For Jimenez, at the very least, the trip underscored the need for Latinos to work together to solve their problems.

“Here [in the United States] our system is too individualistic,” said Jimenez. “We feel alone, and we lose the horizon and our sense of direction. And for us Latinos it is very important for us not to forget that we are a community.”