A Longer Journey to the Middle Class

Bertha Eudave was 18 when she left Guadalajara and joined the flood of migrants streaming north. Together with her 18-year-old husband and kid brother, she sneaked across the border and wound up in the San Fernando Valley.

If not the poorest inhabitants of tony Woodland Hills, the Mexican teens weren’t far behind. For five months they lived in an abandoned car, doing yard work when they could get it and searching for steady jobs.

Lacking English and job skills--having nothing to fall back on but desperation and willpower--Eudave eventually got a job at a small crafts business in Northridge. She has since worked her way up to supervisor and makes more than $9 per hour.

In many ways, Eudave’s story is that of millions of poor immigrants throughout American history. Lean and hungry, and willing to do whatever it takes to secure a better life, they often manage to claw their way into the middle class within a generation.

But for throngs of Latinos who have arrived in recent years, progress may come more slowly than it did for immigrants in the past, according to experts. They say structural changes in the economy--together with the newcomers’ sheer numbers and limited educations--mean a bumpier upward path.

During the 1980s, the immigrant population of the Valley and Glendale--legal and otherwise--exploded by more than 270,000. By the 1990 census, more than half a million immigrants made their homes in the Valley, where fully 33% of all inhabitants were foreign-born.

The influx includes a large community of Armenians in Glendale, clusters of Thais in North Hollywood, Vietnamese in Reseda and Iranians on the Valley’s southern edge. Most numerous by far, however, are Latinos like Eudave, who fled deprivation in Mexico and Central America.

Historically, the immigrant work ethic has brought speedy results. An analysis of Valley census figures by researchers at Occidental College reveals a portrait of upward mobility, with immigrants steadily improving themselves the longer they are here.

According to the Occidental analysis, about 25% of immigrants in the Valley who came to the United States during the 1980s were living below the poverty line at the time of the 1990 census. But of immigrants who arrived in the 1970s, only 12% were poor at the time of the census--a proportion not much higher than that of the Valley as a whole.

Among immigrants who arrived before 1970, the incidence of poverty was 7.6%--slightly lower than the rate for native-born Valley residents. But not even long-term residents are immune from today’s economic realities.

Gloria Contreras, who came to this country 30 years ago, was able to accumulate a modest nest egg of $10,000 working as a live-in housekeeper. But since losing her job a year ago, Contreras, 46, has had to use her savings to pay rent and other bills and help her brother support their mother.

With only a sixth-grade education, the Pacoima resident’s opportunities are limited. Even though she has become a U.S. citizen, it hasn’t helped her get a job, she said.

Contreras has been taking day jobs in housecleaning and home care, but the work is irregular and the wages are low, netting her only $50 to $100 per month.

Housecleaning, she said, “is not worth it, but I have to do it because I need the money. And I can’t do anything more because I don’t have the education.

“I’m concerned how I’m going to cover [the rent] because I don’t have any other place to go. It’s only because of my faith that I don’t do anything crazy,” said Contreras, a devout Catholic.

By contrast, Luis Flores Gonzalez has moved slowly but steadily upward. But to do so, he works a backbreaking 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

For years he had worked at a sugar mill in Atencingo in Mexico’s southern-central state of Puebla, but layoffs were common and the pay was about $30 per week.

So in the fall of 1985, Gonzalez and his wife made their way north and wound up in the San Fernando Valley. He was 35 at the time, and when his job hunt stretched into its fourth month, Gonzalez feared he’d made a terrible mistake. His three children had remained in Atencingo, and Gonzalez had no money to send to them for school clothes.

Finally, Gonzalez hired on at Sun Valley Paper Stock Inc. Now a 10-year veteran of the firm, the San Fernando resident has his immigration papers and has become night supervisor.

A short, powerfully built man of 46, Gonzalez has climbed out of poverty the old-fashioned way--by hard work. “If I worked five days, the money doesn’t stretch,” said Gonzalez, who earns $9 per hour. “The more you work, the more you earn.”

At one time, Gonzalez worked a laid-back 5 1/2-day week. Then two of his daughters started community college. One daughter plans to become a pediatrician, while another wants to be an architect, Gonzalez said proudly--adding that he does not want them working while they go to school. “I want them to study,” he said.

However, immigrants today face more barriers than in the past, according to experts. Whereas the economy was generally strong from the 1950s through the 1980s, since 1990 the region has lost a massive number of jobs.

Moreover, immigrant populations are larger than ever, and they are dominated by Latinos with limited education and job skills, which undermines their earning power.

“The economy of Southern California has changed dramatically, because back as late as . . . the late 1970s, you still had a lot of . . . assembly line-type jobs,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County.

These were “jobs for people with a high school education or maybe not even that . . . but they could earn a wage that would propel their family into the middle class,” he said.

Now demand is strongest for low-skill, low-wage work and high-skill, high-wage work--with too few jobs in between. “Because of the basic change in the nature of the economy, a lot of the paths that allowed the previous assimilation have been lost,” Kyser said.

George Vernais, director of the Rand Corp.’s immigration research center, believes the new immigrants will have more trouble gaining a foothold--and may need “three or four generations” to catch up.

Advancement of today’s immigrants is slower, he said, because of “the lower level of education” they enter the country with. Neither is the news about the children of Latino immigrants all that encouraging, Vernais said. Data on high school completion and college enrollment among Latino youths show them “lagging behind [non-Latinos] in educational attainment”--a gauge of future earning power.

Declining support for public education may also weigh heavily on immigrant aspirations, according to Vernais and Goetz Wolff, a professor of urban planning at UCLA.

Are “we going to do what previous generations did [and] invest in people’s education?” Wolff asked. “To what extent are [immigrants’] children going to have decent schools to go to?”

Times staff writer Jocelyn Y. Stewart contributed to this story.

Tuesday: How children are pushed into the work force by economic necessity.

* SHADOW OF AFFLUENCE

Along forgotten side streets and avenues, poverty emerges in Canoga Park. B1