ARACELI

Araceli Almaguer is indignant. Her sister, Consuelo, has just been scolded by Saint Joseph Ballet founder Beth Burns for a rebellious attitude--unjustly, Araceli believes.

“It’s like you’re never supposed to get mad,” Araceli says heatedly. “You’re never supposed to be in a bad mood. You can’t even make, like, a sad face, or somebody’s asking you what’s wrong. Sometimes you just don’t want to talk about it.”

At 17, Araceli is fiercely protective of her two younger sisters, outspoken about perceived injustices and a leader among Saint Joseph’s dancers.

Like most teenagers, she is also a tangle of contradictions, vocal at times about her desire to leave the ballet, passionate just as often about her deep need for the beauty and stability it brings to her life.

Without Saint Joseph, she adds unflinchingly, she probably would have fallen into the traps that have snared many friends: pregnancy, drugs and gangs.

“If I weren’t in the ballet, I know I would be doing stuff I regretted. I know I would have been, like, pregnant already,” Araceli says.

When she dances, she says, she feels a joy and sense of freedom that lifts her out of herself, taking her far from the stresses of her life.

“It’s just this feeling you get inside,” she says, sitting on a bed in the room she shares with her sisters, her long hair loose about her. “You feel proud. You feel happy. You feel like you’re making other people happy too when they watch you.”

When she performs, Araceli has the ability to reach deep within herself and, perhaps more than any other Saint Joseph dancer, express the ballets’ themes of dreams, sadness, violence or love, says Burns, her teacher for more than five years.

“She just instinctively understands what this is all about,” Burns says. “She shows so much motivation and dedication in staying with the ballet at this point. But she’s also doing a lot of questioning right now, making some decisions about her life and where she’s going.”

One of Araceli’s questions involves whether to stay with the Saint Joseph Ballet after this week’s performances. Araceli sometimes feels the staff is too intrusive.

“I have a mom and dad. I don’t need them to be parenting me all the time,” she said.

On the walls of the bedroom the three Almaguer girls share, magazine photos of Antonio Banderas, Madonna and other celebrities vie for space with birthday greetings, penciled sketches and mementos of teenage life.

A junior at Saddleback High School, Araceli says she plans to graduate and go on to college or a fashion design school. She pulls out a fabric-covered sketchbook. Shyly, she turns the pages, showing off her carefully drawn, brightly colored designs for sophisticated evening dresses.

She hopes to become a designer or to hold any job that would enable her to support her parents “so they could enjoy the rest of their lives.”

The tension Araceli feels begins at home, in a two-bedroom house with a neat garden in central Santa Ana.

Almost three years ago, her father, Miguel, was laid off from his job at a Santa Ana camera equipment plant. He has not worked since, other than occasional odd jobs at a friend’s car repair shop.

Her mother, Lupe, supports the family of five on the $400 to $500 she earns each week cleaning houses in Irvine, Tustin and Newport Beach. Most weeks, she works all seven days, sometimes coming home too exhausted to clean her own house or fix dinner for her family.

“I try my best, but sometimes I come home with a headache. I just go to my bed and tell [my husband] I can’t cook, I can’t clean,” Lupe Almaguer says. “I can’t do it sometimes.”

Still, Lupe Almaguer finds time to mother her own children--Araceli, Angelica, 15, and Consuelo, 13--and many of their friends.

“She’s my best friend,” Araceli says of her mother. “She’s incredible. A lot of my friends say they can’t tell their moms anything, but she’s so open, I can tell her anything. I tell her about guys, about my problems at the ballet, everything. I just love my mom.”

A sweet-faced woman who laughs often, Lupe Almaguer readily passes on her wisdom. “I tell them, ‘Graduate from school. Work in a good job. Buy a house. And don’t depend on a husband. Be very independent, even when you get married. Be like this,” she says, stretching her eyelids apart, “with your eyes wide open.’

“My girls are my life,” she adds. “Araceli, she understands me a lot. She really helps me.”

On weekends, the Almaguer home is a magnet for teenagers from the ballet. They listen to ‘60s music on the stereo, flirt, tease each other and primp before heading to one of the family gatherings that seem to be held nearly every weekend: a cousin’s first communion party, a friend’s quinceanera, another friend’s wedding.

“I tell my mom, ‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ ” Araceli says. “I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink--except for champagne at a wedding. I just like guys too much.”

Araceli joined the ballet when she was 12 and a sixth-grader at Sierra Intermediate School. Her sisters soon followed. Despite Consuelo’s recent conflict with Burns, she has remained a member too.

Angelica dropped out this year. She flirted for a time with joining a gang, but distanced herself from that temptation with the help of her parents and a new boyfriend. But she acquired a gang nickname, “Babyface,” and a tattoo--a three-dot symbol on her hand that means “My Crazy Life.”

For two days, she tried to hide the tattoo from her mother. But Lupe Almaguer spotted the bandage between the thumb and index finger of Angelica’s right hand and asked to see it.

“I didn’t want to show her,” Angelica says, as her mother listens from the other side of the table in their small dining room. “She saw it and she started crying, and I felt so bad.”

Her mother adds: “She broke my heart with that.”

“My friends were saying, ‘You should get jumped in; you’ve already got a nickname,’ ” Angelica says. “You feel like the gangsters get all this respect, nobody messes around with them. But then I started thinking about my parents, and I’ve tried to change. They just worried so much.”

Araceli says she also once thought about gangs but no longer feels their allure. “Some of my friends are involved, and sometimes I’m afraid they might get shot or killed. You never know. But I’m 17 already. I’ve been through a choice with that. I know I’m not going to do it.”