New Immigrant Group Hopes to Ease the Way Toward Better Life

Miguel Osornio arrived here on a Wednesday 11 years ago. By that Friday, the native of Mexico City had found his first job, washing dishes at a Sizzler restaurant in Newbury Park.

He thinks he was lucky, even if his hands were immersed in dirty water for most of the day.

Osornio didn’t speak a word of English and he didn’t have any money. But he had family and friends to help him, people to show him the ropes, explain how things worked in this predominantly white suburban community.

Now he wants to return the favor through something he calls HOPE, the Hispanic Organization for Personal Excellence. The nonprofit group Osornio founded is designed to help immigrants as they settle in Thousand Oaks, which has a growing Latino population of about 10%, according to the most recent census figures.

“I’m trying to help my own people, my own community,” Osornio, 47, said. “They need a lot of help. It has gotten a lot harder to find a job here.”

HOPE will function much like the Oxnard-based Latino advocacy group, El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, Osornio said. With the help of El Concilio, the Thousand Oaks group has already hosted citizenship and English language classes. The groups plan eventually to provide job counseling, youth activities and cultural programs for Latinos throughout eastern Ventura County.

“El Concilio can spread themselves thin,” said HOPE co-founder Mario Metzger. “I think it is hard for them to cover this side of the [Conejo] grade.”

“We can’t be everywhere all the time,” agrees Francisco Dominguez, head of El Concilio. “We really recognize that local grass-roots efforts know best about what is going on in their communities. So we applaud local efforts like this.”

He said El Concilio plans to work with Osornio and the new group whenever possible. This month, the two groups will team up to help connect interested individuals with apprenticeships to develop building and carpentry skills.

Osornio is a slight man with a friendly smile. He still has some trouble with English, but speaks the language well enough to act as the informal interpreter for Nesen Motors. Officially he is a clerk at the car dealership, but also translates for Spanish-speaking customers and some employees who don’t speak English.

In his spare time, he runs the group from his small apartment in central Thousand Oaks. The first priority for the group is to find a better home, perhaps in the city’s social services building, Under One Roof.

Osornio said the idea for HOPE has been brewing in his mind for about three years. The passage of Proposition 187--which would have limited education, health and other services to new immigrants--helped stir him to action. Most of the initiative was thrown out by a federal judge last month.

Despite Proposition 187 and the discrimination he says his son sometimes encounters in the local high school, Osornio is overwhelmingly idealistic about his new country and the opportunities here.

“People come to try and make an American dream,” he said. “The biggest goal that people have is for a better life.”

Although Osornio says he is not particularly political, by founding HOPE he was thrown overnight into being the voice of Thousand Oaks’ Latinos, rarely heard from in City Hall.

When Thousand Oaks Councilman Mike Markey made a few off-the-cuff remarks in public late last summer implying that gangs are “inbred” in Latino families. Osornio felt he had to comment. So he went to a council meeting and read a statement about the offending statements. He was surprised at the reaction from the council.

“They were very quiet,” Osornio said. “They didn’t say anything to me about it.”

This summer he left questionnaires written in Spanish at area churches and the Conejo Valley Adult School to gauge the needs of the community. The more than 400 responses focused predominantly on crime and safety.

Fears about gangs are just as prevalent in Latino families, Osornio said, and part of HOPE’s goal is to help find things for young people to do to keep them out of trouble and out of gangs.

He also wants to improve relationships between ethnic groups, largely through education. Recent immigrants may not understand rules at apartment buildings, or what neighbors expect of each other, he said. HOPE may be able to break down some of those barriers, Osornio said.

“The goal of this organization is to try and make one community without discrimination,” he said.

Councilwoman Elois Zeanah said HOPE will fulfill a community need.

“Every group needs a role model and I think Miguel is that,” Zeanah said. “One reason I embrace what he is doing is we don’t want an underclass of people who cannot fully participate in their social and political environment. I think what he is doing is noble.”

Karen Livesay, a Thousand Oaks businesswoman who is a member of a women’s group called Roundtable on Diversity, said her group tried to get the City Council to approve a commission on multiculturalism in the spring of 1994, but was told such a thing wasn’t needed in Thousand Oaks.

“It would be wonderful to have some more prominent outreach go on in the community like Esperanza [HOPE],” Livesay said.