Making Santa Ana Home

In a haggard neighborhood of rental houses and faceless apartment buildings, of rusting shopping carts, produce trucks and litter blown against chain-link fences, the rebirth of a dying Mexican village began.

Here, near 1st Street and Grand Avenue in the heart of Santa Ana, the first people from Granjenal settled 35 years ago, after two decades of following crops around the American Southwest under the U.S.-sponsored bracero program.

This is where hundreds of relatives and friends followed--some with papers, some illegally--as their town in the parched hills of northern Michoacan state emptied.

Orange County’s fast-growing suburban sprawl created a hungry job market, and Granjenal’s people developed a reputation as uncomplaining and adept at the low-skilled muscle work that was the foundation of the construction trade--digging ditches, pouring concrete, laying irrigation lines and planting sod.

Their new neighborhood was affordable and, more important, within walking distance of the Laborers Union, Local 652, where most men reported at 5 a.m. to be trucked to work at new tracts in the southern part of the county.

Newly arrived families shared apartments or houses near one another, slowly re-creating their community and cushioning the jolting transition from rural Third World poverty to urban blue-collar life.

At the same time, they helped transform Santa Ana from a city of English-speaking, American-born Anglos to one that is overwhelmingly Latino and Spanish-speaking, and increasingly foreign-born.

Their story is typical of immigrant movement from rural areas, a process known to anthropologists as network migration.

“A pioneer manages to establish a foothold in a place and then serves as the focal point for others,” UC Irvine anthropology professor Leo Chavez said. Those who follow cluster together for a generation or two before assimilating into the culture. “That’s pretty much the story of immigration.”

Joined by weddings, baptisms, funerals and Sunday Mass, by twice-a-year dances at the union hall and by soccer games that pitted them against other immigrants, the people of Granjenal held on as tightly as they could to the intimacy of a small town.

Over time, however, the immigrants learned their new community was as fleeting and illusory as the summer rains at home that so often promised, then failed, to give life to fields of corn.

They could not maintain the tranquillity and connectedness of rural Mexico in urban America, a place that Granjenal’s people found to be isolating, immoral and dangerous. With opportunity and vastly higher incomes came financial pressure, fear of crime, occasional--though still rare--divorce and unrelenting competition from others with the same dreams.

In the span of a generation, the people from Granjenal had become American.

“There are things people lose when they leave their roots, and they don’t realize it until it’s too late,” said Francisco Lopez, 59, a construction worker who settled in Santa Ana in 1962 and eventually brought his wife and eight children north.

Lopez would do it again, he said, because he had no choice. He could not have provided for his children by working his tiny plot of land in Granjenal. Still, he dreams of the easy pace of his hometown, where he knew every neighbor and where life presented fewer possibilities but was safer and simpler.

“I think of life here as a sort of slavery,” he said. “There is a constant need to work to pay the bills. . . . We have an expression for the life here: We call it the platter of gold--you can touch it, but it never belongs to you.”

Lopez is a stocky man with a soft handshake and small eyes that shine with pride when he speaks of the Orange County tracts he helped build--Mission Viejo, Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita. “Leisure World, the place with the big globe, the men of Granjenal built that,” he said.

The same look of pride dances across his face when Lopez cites his daughter’s graduation in June from Santa Ana’s Century High, in a class with six other children of Granjenal, and when he tells of his son’s recent swearing-in as a U.S. citizen.

As Americans, his children have far more opportunity, said Lopez, whose education ended at the fifth grade. That alone justifies the sacrifices he made, he said.

But the transition was hard on his generation. For 35 years, Lopez worked back-straining jobs. He endured years of separation from his family, and once they joined him here, he struggled to pay for rent, food and clothing.

Even now, he struggles.

Every morning at 6, Lopez reports to the union hall, a beige, one-story building near Chestnut and Grand avenues in east-central Santa Ana that has become a second home to Granjenal’s emigrants. In a windowless back room, he joins dozens of men from his hometown at large round tables, where he plays cards and banters, and waits for his name to be called.

Lopez, who is paid only when he works, has waited for months.

During Orange County’s three-decade building boom, he and other Granjenal men prospered. But work is scarce now, in part because more jobs are nonunion and there is more competition from younger immigrants.

Desperate for work, many Granjenal men have followed construction jobs to Las Vegas or Arizona, forming yet another set of communities and repeating the pattern of living apart from their families.

But 350 Granjenal immigrants continue to pay their $24-a-month union dues--comprising more than one-tenth of the local’s membership, according to the members.

To make ends meet, Lopez and his wife moved in with a son who is buying a home in Santa Ana. Like many of his generation, the son has become his father’s hope for the future.

Born to parents with grade-school educations, many of Granjenal’s new generation have finished high school and college. They hold better-paying jobs as secretaries, court interpreters, police officers, teachers, real estate brokers and small-business owners.

The extended Granjenal family also includes a psychologist, two attorneys and two doctors.

“The older generation wanted us to study hard and do something better with our lives,” said Robert Maldonado, 36, whose father, Epitacio, was one of the original eight men from Granjenal to settle in Santa Ana 35 years ago. “They wanted us to be more than construction workers.”

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Gregarious and energetic, Maldonado speaks English without an accent. He came north with his mother and nine siblings when he was 4 years old and remembers a childhood home filled with relatives and friends who lived nearby.

His father, who worked construction, bought a house and set down roots in Santa Ana soon after his family joined him in 1965. “People thought he was crazy,” Maldonado said. “They all expected to go back someday.”

The younger Maldonado, who is married with three children, paid a tribute to his hometown several years ago when he opened a small takeout restaurant in Costa Mesa and called it Taqueria El Granjenal.

He also sponsors one of three Granjenal soccer teams in Santa Ana--his team won the Orange County Soccer League championship in June, the second time in five years. And every year, Maldonado pays the $50 contribution expected of all 450 expatriate families to help finance the town’s two-week festival in December.

But it’s been five years since he visited Granjenal. Several years ago, he moved his family away from the old Santa Ana neighborhood and bought a house in Irvine. Better schools. Safer community. “My children come first,” Maldonado said. “I’ve got to think about their futures.”

As they move toward the middle class, scores of Granjenal immigrants and their children have left the downtown for cleaner, less densely populated parts of the city. Some have bought houses and condominiums in the same suburbs their fathers helped build.

This scattering after a generation or two is not uncommon among immigrants, said Manuel Garcia y Griego, a political science professor at UCI. “At this point, and certainly by the third generation, the solidarity is no longer necessary,” he said.

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But for hundreds of Granjenal immigrants, home continues to be a corridor of sagging rental houses and massive apartment blocks between Santa Ana’s Main Street and Grand Avenue.

The neighborhood is a grim picture of peeling paint and streets caked with oil stains but still offers hope and promise for scores of new arrivals from Mexico and Central America.

Here, lives revolve around bus lines and produce trucks, ethnic markets such as El Mexicano and Catholic churches such as St. Anne’s on Main Street, where more than half the 35,000 congregants are from Michoacan and most masses are celebrated in Spanish.

When eight Granjenal pioneers settled here 35 years ago, less than one-fifth the city’s residents were Latino and less than one-tenth were foreign-born.

But as scores of towns such as Granjenal emptied, sending workers to California, Orange County’s ethnic makeup changed radically.

The change accelerated after 1986, when the U.S. amnesty law granted legal residency to 3 million undocumented immigrants nationwide, including about 140,000 in Orange County. Many workers could then bring their family members north.

Now, according to state estimates, slightly more than half of Santa Ana’s 305,000 people were born outside the U.S., and about 69% are Latino. Countywide, Latinos have grown from 8% to 27% of the population since 1970. A new county study projects that Latinos will outnumber whites by the year 2020.

Although the migration drastically altered Granjenal, which is now virtually abandoned, the village’s people played but a small role in Santa Ana’s transformation. Immigrants estimate that 3,000 people from the village now live here, leaving only a few hundred at home.

Few who settle here return to Granjenal for more than a visit, despite a growing nostalgia for the hometown among immigrants and their children.

“After a while, you establish yourself in a place,” said Salvador Tapia, 45, who came north to join his father, Timoteo, at 13. “A lot of people have tried to go back and they can’t stand it. They got used to living here.”

Twice a year, the town’s expatriates organize a dance at the union hall to raise money for projects back home--a new house for the priest, benches for the central plaza, paved roads.

The last event, on Mother’s Day, drew 300 people who paid $15 each. Under an arch of pink and white balloons, they danced a restrained two-step on the concrete floor to a 15-piece band in white-and-blue sequined costumes.

Men wore crisp white cowboy hats, glinting belt buckles and shiny, sharp-toed boots; women dressed modestly, in dark, knee-length dresses.

Connected once again to their past and to one another, these working-class immigrants represented Granjenal’s success in the new world.

But their success came at a heavy price: Divorce, unheard of in Granjenal, already has split several families in Santa Ana. For a few adolescents, drugs and street violence have become problems. Three boys were shot dead by rival gang members.

Many children and grandchildren fulfilled the immigrants’ dreams by graduating high school and college, pursuing careers, moving into better neighborhoods and raising their children as Americans. But with their success came the erosion of a treasured Mexican tradition of extended families, and now, many older immigrants complain they are far too often alone.

“People distance themselves here. They go their own ways,” said Francisco Lopez. “It makes us think it was nicer back in Granjenal, where we saw people more, and they helped each other more.”

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A few miles south of downtown is the Country, an ironically named complex of 1970s-era apartments that covers five blocks along Main Street. For two years, it has been home to Alburio and Maura Guillen and their seven sons.

The sprawling buildings bear no resemblance to the Granjenal countryside, which Maura and her sons left behind two years ago to join Alburio, who gained legal residency through amnesty.

Narrow rows of clipped grass dotted with spindly trees run between nondescript brown apartments. Neighbors are close enough to hear each other cough, but most don’t know each other’s names.

The seven Guillen brothers, aged 12 to 26, squeeze into one bedroom. Maura and Alburio share the other.

Timid and afraid of losing her way, Maura Guillen rarely ventures outside. She spends her days tidying the rooms, dusting models of cars and horses her sons collected, cooking meals for her large family.

A soft, motherly woman with a gracious smile, Maura Guillen said she’d dreamed of coming north for years. But each winter, as Alburio left for another season of construction work, he told her to wait.

When Alburio was able to bring his family north legally, Maura and the sons didn’t hesitate. Now she’s not so sure it was a good idea.

The family is together at last. Three sons are in school and the rest are working, in factories, on construction sites, in an auto parts store. For that, Maura is grateful.

But their lives are limited by fear and isolation. Most evenings, the boys, tall and gangly, straggle home from school and work, walk through the sliding glass door and stay inside until morning. The family gathers on a black sofa of peeling vinyl and watches television to kill the hours.

Every morning, Alburio and his oldest son go to the Laborers Union and sign up for work. Most days, they return home disappointed. The family is saving for a down payment on a house, but at this rate, they could be confined to the apartment for years, said Alburio, a compact, muscular man of 56, with salt-and-pepper hair and a distinguished face.

Afraid of the streets, accosted by gang members one night, Alburio said he has another equally great fear: that for all his sacrifice, his sons won’t succeed.

One son came north with his common-law wife and two children last year. The couple soon separated. Maura shook her head and sighed. “It’s part of the life up here,” she said. “Sometimes there is too much freedom.”

Mothers in Granjenal say sons raised in California grow taller and have a greater chance of success by attending high school and college. But there are trade-offs: the ever-present fear of gangs, drugs and violence.

The Guillen sons have avoided such problems, but the price has been confinement and isolation.

“In Granjenal, you can go walking in the afternoon, you can even walk at night,” said Jose Guadalupe Guillen, 16, a junior at Saddleback High School. “Here, people look down when they walk. They all look depressed, everywhere you look. There’s so much pressure.”

Thirty years ago, when Granjenal had no electricity or running water, the advantages of moving north were clearer, said Vicenta Maldonado, who came here with six children to join her husband, Timoteo Tapia.

Tapia was another of the Granjenal pioneers. He left the village in 1943, joining tens of thousands of Mexican workers hired to replace Americans who had gone to war. He moved to Santa Ana after becoming a legal resident with the help of a Utah farmer.

Tapia brought his family north as soon as he could, and they settled into a rickety two-bedroom apartment above a Mexican food market called La Chiquita, a few blocks from the Santa Ana train station. They live there still, 31 years and 26 grandchildren later.

Maldonado, a tiny woman with a strong, plucky voice, vividly recalls the day she arrived--March 19, 1966. “I liked Santa Ana right away, a lot more than Granjenal,” she said. “For one thing, I didn’t have to make tortillas by hand anymore.”

Along with electricity and running water, Santa Ana had buses and taxis, health clinics, supermarkets and public schools through the 12th grade--all of which Granjenal lacked.

“Life is better here,” said Maldonado, who took the oath of U.S. citizenship in early July. “That’s why we came.”

The Granjenal Team

Nancy Cleeland has covered immigration and Mexico for the last 10 years, including three years as a correspondent in Mexico City for the San Diego Union. She joined The Times Orange County last year to cover Latino affairs. The stories here reflect three months of interviews and observations with immigrants from Granjenal. She can be reached at (714) 966-7828 or nancy.cleeland@latimes.com

Al Schaben has worked as a photographer for The Times Orange County for three years. His photos also have been published in many magazines, including Time, Life, Newsweek and National Geographic. He and Cleeland spent three days in Granjenal in late May. Schaben can be reached at (714) 966-7720 or al.schaben@latimes.com