Welfare Chief Tilts at Windmills of Change

In the forgotten middle of welfare reform’s great debate, between the harangues on Cadillac queens and starving immigrants, stands Fresno County welfare director Ernest Velasquez, a papier-mache Don Quixote at his side.

Over the past 15 years, he has seen the welfare rolls in his county double with the children of Latino farm workers and the arrival of a Southeast Asian mountain tribe straight out of the 16th century. Like Quixote, Velasquez imagines that he, too, is jousting at impossible windmills in a land of serfs and kings.

Here in the nation’s most productive farm county, welfare isn’t a stopgap but a way of life for nearly one out of every three residents. The five poorest cities in the state look out to the fields of America’s wealthiest farmers. Every October, as the last Thompson grape is plucked from the vineyards, the unemployment rate in Fresno County jumps to 17%. You have to go to the borderlands of Texas to find a more afflicted place, Velasquez said.

It is no wonder, then, that welfare reform has turned his world inside-out. A child of the California-Mexico border who grew up in East L.A., Velasquez now finds himself in the strange position of tilting at the one windmill he helped build, dismantling an entrenched welfare bureaucracy and refocusing its very mission.

In what seems like overnight, the 59-year-old administrator must change from a writer of checks to a purveyor of jobs. No welfare director in the state faces a bigger challenge.

“Don Quixote. I’ve always sort of identified with him,” Velasquez said, standing over the sculpture of Cervantes’ idealistic hero that he brought back from Mexico City two years ago. “I guess I’m a Romantic. I’d like to believe there’s nothing I can’t do. But this change, it’s a monumental task.”

A cheerleader for self-sufficiency whose efforts to combat welfare fraud have provoked death threats from refugee clients, Velasquez nonetheless believes the present reforms go too far. He has traveled to Washington and Sacramento to argue that elderly and disabled refugees should retain some cushion of benefits, even though they aren’t citizens.

“Some of the proposed reforms are too tough, too punitive, especially when it comes to refugees who arrived here too old to learn English and become citizens,” he said. “And the goal of moving people from welfare to jobs in only two years is not realistic in the San Joaquin Valley. This is a Third World economy we’re talking about.”

Velasquez oversees a staff of 1,400 and a budget of $350 million. He sees paradox everywhere. One of his favorite words is “incongruity.” He questions the fairness of targeting welfare when the big recipients of federal largess here aren’t the poor but the big growers who live in exclusive subdivisions far from their subsidized fields.

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He argues that politicians pandering to the “get-tough” crowd have ignored important reforms already undertaken by his county and others, reforms that have weaned large numbers off the public dole.

In the past two years, without a single dictate from Washington or Sacramento, Fresno County has reversed a long trend and reduced its welfare caseload by more than 10,000 refugees, a 5% drop.

“Fresno County and Ernie in particular have done some good stuff,” said Bruce Wagstaff, deputy director for state welfare operations. “A few years ago, Ernie led the charge statewide to adopt a program that has been successful in putting more people to work.”

Velasquez’s shaggy white mop and thick gray mustache are a touch of protest on the face of a career bureaucrat. Born between generations--too late to be a zoot suiter and too early to be a Chicano activist--he is an intriguing mix of Old and New World.

While in the Air Force, he married a woman in Holland who had never tasted an enchilada and didn’t detect his strong Juarez accent. “Our lives have been ourselves and his work,” said Elly Velasquez. “I think it’s something in his genes. His two grandfathers were senators in Mexico. His people have always been doers.”

Friends and foes say Velasquez’s belief in no easy labels or prescriptions is a product of growing up on both sides of the border. His grandfather came north at the turn of the century to work in the Arizona copper mines. The family was deported back to Mexico but not before Velasquez’s father was born in 1911. In a quirk of immigration law at the time, this bestowed American citizenship on his two sons but not his two daughters or his wife.

“Growing up in Juarez, I never thought of the border as anything but an artificial line on the same land. My father worked for Southern Pacific on one side and we lived on the other. When we moved to Los Angeles, I had a border crossing document with my picture that said, “U.S. citizen.”

From his bedroom window overlooking East L.A., Velasquez watched his father, Emilio, leave each morning to weld broken railway cars and his 17-year-old sister, Carmine, slog home after a long day in the garment sweatshops. Her paycheck went straight into the family kitty.

He came to believe in bootstrap patriotism, graduating from Roosevelt High and joining the Air Force, but he also learned that America’s promise could not save his older brother from a life of heroin addiction and prison and his big sister from a spell of welfare dependency after a divorce.

“I was very fortunate. I was younger than my brother and sister and able to graft onto the new culture,” he said. “I was stationed in Germany and got to see the world. In Holland, I found my wife.”

After his discharge, he landed a job at Lockheed working on the hydraulic system of a spy plane. At night, he took classes at Glendale City College. It was the mid-1960s and he watched from the sidelines with a sort of detached awe at the stirrings of a larger Chicano movement.

“I went to see a couple of Luis Valdez’s plays and I was sort of energized and caught in that wonderful feeling. At the same time, I felt kind of awkward--the antiwar movement and being a veteran and all.”

He returned to his old neighborhood and became a welfare caseworker in Lincoln Heights. He had a knack for working with the poor, and the promotions came fast. By 1976, he was one of 130 welfare deputies throughout Los Angeles County. To move up, he figured, he had to move away.

Two years later, he was named assistant director of social services for Fresno County. Velasquez’s arrival came at the very time that Hmong refugees were migrating by the thousands to Fresno. Slash-and-burn farmers from the highlands of Laos, they had no written language and were organized along 18 clan lines. Their culture, full of taboos and shamans, fascinated Velasquez.

As a special CIA fighting force, the Hmong suffered a high casualty rate in the Vietnam War, and they regarded welfare as redress for blood spilled on behalf of America. Complicating matters was that Hmong girls married as young as 12 years old and had an average of 10 children each.

“The Hmong presented a lot of incongruities. They were wedded to the welfare state but about 30% were working in an underground cash economy growing strawberries and Asian vegetables,” Velasquez said.

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Efforts to crack down on the fraud were met with death threats against Velasquez and his staff. Some Hmong welfare caseworkers were intimidated into looking the other way. Others pressed forward and their houses were shot at.

“Every time we tried to crack down, the clan leaders resisted. They said, ‘We don’t need to change our ways. We’re going to win our country back and return to Laos.’ I tried to tell them that no immigrant group ever makes it back. My own people didn’t make it back, and Mexico is right next-door.”

Velasquez took over the top job in 1989, and Hmong leaders praise him for showing patience with the more confounding aspects of their culture. He might have chosen to compel the courts to prosecute Hmong men who illegally marry girls under 15. Instead, he has worked behind the scenes to persuade their community that early marriage leads to welfare dependency.

“Ernie has worked on our behalf on many issues,” said Pao Fang, director of the Lao Family Community service agency. “He probably knows the Hmong better than any county official in the state.”

Even so, Fang said, Velasquez has fumbled several high-profile cases of culture clash. In one case, his department tried to force a 7-year-old Hmong boy to undergo surgery to correct clubfeet, even though his family and shaman insisted that his hobble was a badge of honor that atoned for an ancestor’s sins. After considerable grief, a judge ruled against forced surgery.

Under Velasquez’s leadership, Fresno County won permission from the state in 1987 to ease welfare regulations that were actually discouraging work among the Hmong and others. The old rule cut off benefits to those who landed a part-time job. The new rule allows them to work more than 100 hours a month and still receive medical coverage and a reduced cash payment.

“We were giving people no incentive to take a small job that might lead to something bigger,” he said. “We finally convinced state officials to relax the rule. It started here and it’s spread throughout the state and country.”

Hmong welfare dependency has dropped modestly over the past five years to about 60% of the community. Part of this reflects the success of work incentive programs and part reflects an exodus of Hmong out of Fresno County.

Citing impending welfare reform, about 3,000 Hmong have relocated to smaller Hmong communities in Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado and North Carolina where jobs are plentiful. Velasquez thinks welfare reform will only add to this exodus, which he says might mean better lives for the Hmong.

On the other hand, he argues that the reform packages now bandied about in Sacramento fail to take into account vast regional differences. He says the gap between rich and poor in Fresno is reminiscent of a banana republic.

“I’m not sure how you implement welfare reform in a place with no jobs. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but I think we’re going to see mothers bring their children to our doorstep and say, ‘You take care of my kids.’ ”

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Velasquez’s outspoken views at times have put him at odds with the county officials and supervisors.

“Ernie’s a friend of mine, but he’s a very complex guy,” said Juan Arambula, a county supervisor. “He’s done a lot of good things but can be arrogant and combative and too much a lone ranger. It’s either his way or the highway.”

But Velasquez continues to criticize local leaders, contending that they are not doing enough to create good jobs. For too long, he says, they have been satisfied with attracting Wal-Marts and Targets rather than building on the rich farm base.

“I’m not one of those who sees agriculture as the enemy. But we’ve failed miserably in bringing ag-related industry here. We grow all these wonderful crops and then we put them on the back of a flatbed and send them to Northern and Southern California for processing. It makes no sense.”