A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Literacy Class Instills Pride in Immigrants

“He was standing like this,” Virginia Rafelson demonstrated, as she held her office door open with her foot. Rafelson described how one of the students for Basic Adult Spanish Education would strain from the doorway to take notes off the blackboard even though there were empty seats in the room.

“My two little daughters are sleeping inside the car and I am watching them,” the young man explained.

For Rafelson, it’s an example of how difficult the balance between family and learning is for her clients.

Rafelson, a former cultural attache with the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, started Basic Adult Spanish Education, or BASE, eight years ago because many of the Mexican immigrants who came to her for help were too illiterate to even fill out the necessary government forms.

She started with a handful of volunteer teachers in a small Canoga Park office, although AT&T; had offered her space downtown. The Valley’s Latino community was underserved, she said, and it was closer to her West Hills home.

The organization has grown to 50 paid teachers and teachers’ assistants who have taught English and Spanish literacy for free to nearly 5,000 students at local churches and community centers throughout the city. The group also offers job training for child- and elder-care workers.

About 40% of BASE students begin as functionally illiterate even in their native Spanish. BASE instructors first teach students to read and write in Spanish before they learn English.

“But once you start teaching them, they get curious,” said Rafelson, the executive director. Students very quickly start asking how to say phrases in English.

She sees the drive to learn growing among mothers who come to classes every week and begin to have more self-respect. Likewise, fathers who work construction jobs all day still show up twice a week, dirty, hungry and often so tired that “some fall asleep and collapse during class,” Rafelson said. “They really deserve a lot of respect.”

She has been married for 25 years to her second husband, Jack Rafelson, a retired engineer and a BASE volunteer. In the 20 years of her first marriage to a Mexican diplomat, she lived in Italy, France and Japan as well as Central and South America. But her daughters moved to California and, she said, “when I came to California, I fell in love with it.”

She saw a drive to succeed within the state’s Latino community.

“Virginia is inherently an optimist,” said Arthur Avila, chairman of BASE’s board of directors. The two met when Avila was president of East Los Angeles College in the 1980s and Rafelson helped organize campus cultural events. Rafelson has been the heart of a group in which “the people are kind, organized and compassionate,” Avila said.

Rafelson and Avila say it’s at graduation ceremonies that they see the results of their work.

The pair’s memories of graduation include a 9-year-old boy who thanked Avila because now his mother could help with his homework and the truck driver who gave Avila a big hug to show his gratitude for having the chance to learn.

Many of the stories are like that of the woman who, upon receiving her certificate from Rafelson, was asked how she felt.

“To tell you the truth,” the woman said in Spanish, “for the first time in my life, I feel as if I am worthwhile.”

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