JOSE LUIS

Outside the walls of the Saint Joseph Ballet, Jose Luis Campos doesn’t talk much about his dancing. It is a part of his life he shares with a precious few: his family, other dancers, a teacher or two.

But last month, someone guessed. A football player and fellow freshman at Century High School saw the 14-year-old boy talking with another dancer outside their geography class, and remembered that both had recently been absent.

“He just starts saying, ‘Ah, you’re a ballerina. You wear a tutu.’ I made something up. I told him I went just to see [another dancer perform] and spend the day with her at Disneyland.”

Best of all, Jose Luis said, “He believed me.”

The exchange was not the first time Jose Luis has lied about his ballet dancing. “I can’t handle that very well. It’s hard for me,” he said. “Sometimes it makes me feel like I shouldn’t be doing it, but I want to do it.”

The ballet is Jose Luis’ escape from the tiny apartment on Minnie Street he shares with his parents and four siblings--his refuge from the neighborhood itself, notorious for gangs, drug deals, poverty and overcrowded housing.

“The ballet releases the pressures I have,” he said simply.

Jose Luis has lived nowhere else since he was a year old. His mother, Eloina, earns $6 an hour as a seamstress in a Santa Ana factory, where she makes fabric cat toys and covers for bird cages. His father, Felipe, out of work for a year, started a new job last month at an airplane parts factory but quit after two weeks, saying the chemicals used there would make him ill. He is looking for a new job.

The couple and their five children--Jose Luis, his younger brothers Hugo, Junior and Diego, and baby sister Valerie--share a one-bedroom apartment with Eloina’s brother, Fulgencio. They stay on Minnie Street, Eloina says, because rents in the nearly identical stucco buildings that line the street are low compared with other neighborhoods. The Campos family pays $560 a month.

At night, their small living room, decorated with maps of Mexico and floral garlands above an archway, doubles as a bedroom for Fulgencio and several of the children. Jose Luis shares a bed in one corner with a younger sibling, or carves out some privacy by curling up on the floor of a closet in his parents’ bedroom.

The burden of being the eldest son weighs heavily on Jose Luis. He frets that he won’t be able to meet his parents’ expectations: Finish school. Stay in the ballet. Go to college. Get a good job. Help the family.

“I worry that I’ll somehow give up,” he says.

At Century High and sometimes at home, a sadness envelops Jose Luis like a gray cloud that evaporates when he smiles. But at parties with friends from the ballet, his mood lifts and he laughs more easily.

Any day that he does not go to ballet, Jose Luis baby-sits his youngest siblings. He follows his parents’ rules to keep his brothers and sister safe by letting them play only inside the apartment, or just outside its door. He patiently helps the tiny sister who idolizes him, reaching down to lift her when she tugs at his pant leg.

The building’s frontyard, with its narrow strip of lawn, is off-limits, considered too dangerous for the little ones, even during daylight hours.

One warm Saturday night in April, Jose Luis stood in front of his building, enjoying the sounds of music and laughter from a party in the courtyard directly across the street.

A van drove slowly up the street and stopped almost in front of the gathering. Two men got into the vehicle, then quickly got out. Jose Luis heard shots and saw one of them stagger, then collapse against a porch railing, blood seeping from a wound in his chest. The van drove away and disappeared.

In 13 years on Minnie Street, Jose Luis has frequently heard gunfire, usually late at night, after his family was safe inside. He had never seen anyone shot before. But his reaction surprised him: “I wasn’t, like, upset. I didn’t feel scared. I didn’t really feel anything.” Not even the next day when neighborhood kids stopped to point and gape at the trail of blood on the sidewalk opposite.

A tall, slender boy who will turn 15 Saturday, Jose Luis has been dancing with the ballet since he was 11. When he joined more than three years ago, he hardly spoke to his teachers or other kids at the ballet, and never smiled.

Then, one day, founder Beth Burns heard an unfamiliar sound. Peeking around a corner into the dance studio, she saw the source: Jose Luis was actually laughing. “It was so wonderful to hear him,” she said.

In the years since, Jose Luis has changed from a short, heavyset child to a lanky teen whose talent is evident as he practices. One of only three boys in the ballet’s advanced class, he dances with an easy grace, learning even difficult steps almost effortlessly. The praise he receives nourishes his spirit.

At the studio and around his friends from the dance program, he smiles readily now, displaying a growing confidence. He even becomes playful, especially around other dancers such as Araceli Almaguer and her sister, Consuelo.

One recent afternoon at Saint Joseph, in a room set aside for tutoring, Jose Luis and Consuelo play a teasing, flirtatious variation of the spelling game Hangman, asking one another to guess the titles of oldies songs.

Consuelo, 13, figures out “Baby, I’m Yours.”

“But I’m not,” she protests, grinning, and Jose Luis dissolves in laughter. Araceli, ages older at 17, smiles from across a heavy oak table in the tutoring room, glancing up only briefly from her chemistry homework.

For the first time, Jose Luis has begun to plan for the future, cultivating the seed of a dream Burns planted last month during a field trip for a group of her dancers.

As Jose Luis waited with several other students for the curtain to rise at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Burns leaned close to his ear.

“One day,” she whispered, “I’m going to pay $25 to see you dance.”