Portrait of Strength in Face of Adversity

Good thing Margie Peralta is as quick on her feet as she is with her wits. She was never sure when the band of tough junior high school girls with whom she sometimes hung out would turn on her.

She had outrun them to a nearby church in her poor Pacoima neighborhood. But it was harder to outrun her mother, who by Margie’s account would often beat her in bursts of frightening, unprovoked rages. The abuse became so severe that child welfare authorities placed her in a series of foster homes--places that exhibited their own kind of weirdness and that she describes as being like prisons.

Hers is the kind of background that might land a child in juvenile hall or on the streets or in the morgue.

But Margie seems to be destined for a future, not of utter failure, but of success. She is graduating from San Fernando High School this month with high honors. She is editor of the school newspaper. She has been admitted to UC Berkeley for the fall semester.

Life’s winners and life’s losers. Why do some people from deprived backgrounds thrive and prosper, while others don’t make it? It’s a perpetual puzzle, trying to account for the success of an Abraham Lincoln or Helen Keller, a Maya Angelou or Cesar Chavez, all of whom overcame childhood poverty or deep personal wounds to achieve renown.

Margie Peralta, only 17, is just finishing high school, but she already qualifies as an example of the resilience that keeps social scientists pondering. The Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund honored her persistence and used the accounts of this stoic girl and her parents to sketch a brief but compelling portrait that was included in its awards program:

“Margarita has a . . . mother with chronic and severe mental illness. Margarita, who has experienced long periods of emotional pain and physical abuse, has lived in various foster homes. She has returned home to care for her mother and yet has a full life at school and in the community. She takes Advanced Placement classes, edits the school newspaper and serves as secretary for the Student Government Assn. Margarita volunteers in her community to help the homeless and aid political candidates.”

Studying how people such as Margie overcome the obstacles in their lives can be enlightening, said Paul Abramson, psychology professor who has written widely on human development.

“What a lot of kids have gone through is a series of unlucky events,” he said. “In some ways, the success stories are a form of the American dream. The self-made person overcoming adversity goes to the core of the American mythic ethos. Those who fail end up in our psychiatric institutions and prisons.”

Usually it is another caring person who makes the difference between good fortune and misfortune, experts say. Within most of us lies some inner well of strength and potential that only needs to be tapped by a relative, a teacher or a friend.

‘I Was Always Serious Minded’

Margie understands. Even during the worst times, she said, there was someone close to offer support. Someone to brighten a dark day, even if only for a moment. Each unexpected ray helped her to cope with the pain of feeling like she was alone in the world.

She is a slight girl, with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes that can appear world-weary but that light up when she smiles. When talking about her life, she displays a self-awareness that is almost scary; but it is tempered by a slyly subtle sense of humor.

Asked to describe her personality she said: “I was always serious minded, since I was little. In class, the other little kids would be interested in what was on the Disney Channel last night and I would be interested in what was going on in the teacher’s mind to cause him to make that gesture.”

Despite her mother’s behavior, Margie often felt like the odd member of the family, she said. She was forceful when her older brother and sister were dispassionate, rebellious in the face of tradition-minded parents who preferred that she excel at cooking and cleaning rather than studying.

But her pluck could not completely shield the vulnerabilities of one so young. In a school essay, she laid out her plight bluntly: “I had no one to hug me, kiss me and assure me that I meant the world to them. Instead, I had responsibilities.”

For several decades, social scientists have been engaged in exploring human genetic traits and environmental factors that shape a person’s life. They have discovered nothing that can be bottled, no miracle cure that might save young people and society untold grief and misery.

But studies offer hope that many children who are subjected to chronic poverty, abuse or other stresses need not be permanently damaged and have a chance to make something of their lives.

The answers, Abramson said, also have important implications for public policy. Social experts contend that supportive programs such as preschool, health screening and parent training could prevent severe emotional and developmental problems down the line.

“All we have learned argues for early intervention,” Abramson said.

Petra Galindo agrees. She is a psychiatric social worker and consultant to the Los Angeles Unified School District who has worked with many children scarred by turbulence in their lives.

“Young people today come to school with all the problems of society--violence, poor economic situation, parents not available because they are working, medical problems--it’s very difficult to provide good basics of schooling to these youngsters,” she said. “But we can provide support for many of these problems.

“Sometimes it’s just little things but the little things are everything. That someone knows you by name in some of our big high schools can make a difference.”

‘He Made Me See My Strengths’

It was an English teacher at Pacoima Middle School who Margie said began to transform her life. One of her class projects was a daily journal that she had not much interest in at first. But as she began to scratch words onto paper, Margie began to discover herself. And the more she discovered, the more control she felt over a life that was hellish in its torments.

“He made me see my strengths instead of weaknesses,” she said of her former teacher. “Before him I thought one day I’ll go to a junior college and be OK. But he said no, one day you’ll go to a university and be successful. He changed my standards.”

School had always been a haven, she said, sitting in a small alcove that serves as the newsroom for San Fernando High’s El Tigre student paper.

“No matter how mean anybody was to me or how mean life was, school was always nice. It was always a positive thing,” she said.

That junior high teacher, Joseph Macucilli, is now an English and humanities teacher at Valencia High School. But he remembers Margie. She was not a standout student and was almost too reserved, he said.

“She was quiet and low-key to the point where it was almost frightening,” Macucilli said. “She never talked about herself other than her ambitions for school. She had the idea that because of where she lived and her circumstances, she couldn’t go to college.”

Macucilli said that when he began to engage Margie, he was more impressed.

“She was highly intelligent and it wasn’t grades or classwork, it was her commentary. She would go to the heart of an issue. We once had a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald that really interested many of the kids and that is when her organizational skills and thinking really came to the fore.”

Macucilli said he was in his third year of law school and on his way to a promised job with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office many years ago when he dropped it all to pursue teaching.

“Sometimes we think we are talking to the four walls and that nothing we do matters, but it’s not true. I’m just so proud to hear how well Margie has done.”

A recent Rand Corp. study suggests that intervention programs aimed at poor youngsters can yield substantial long-term benefits for the children and their communities, including increased earnings and lower arrest rates.

But the authors also acknowledge that there are many unanswered questions: Why do some programs work--and others don’t? Why do some children gain from early intervention? When is the best time to intervene?

Theories abound. One of the most prominent holds that if children are to be successful they must “satellize” or adopt and identify with their parents’ values, rules and culture during their middle childhood.

But even if parents fail, the most resilient children have someone in their background--often a teacher--who transmits to them the importance of work, education and social interaction. They shape our self-esteem and our attitudes toward institutions like school and government, said H. Carl Haywood, an emeritus professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University.

Human development, Haywood says, involves a series of complex interactions that begin with the genes we are born with, which influence our intelligence and personality traits, which in turn are developed by environmental influences, which then are molded by opportunity and accident.

Boiled down to its essence: some people simply are born with personalities that allow them to prevail in the most adverse circumstances.

‘A Living, Breathing, Dirty Roach’

Margie said that few at school knew of her difficult home life and that was by her design. But it made for awkwardness.

“It’s difficult because everybody expects your parents to be normal. If I got to school late, everybody would assume it was because I didn’t get up, not because I might have more difficulty getting there,” she said, pausing before the word “difficulty” as if pondering how explicit to be in her description.

Margie said she was battered emotionally and physically, and her father did little to intervene. An older brother and sister had moved out of the house just as Margie reached adolescence, leaving her to bear the brunt of the abuse.

Her mother is recovering and the family maintains a calmer relationship now, she said.

But her former hardships were encapsulated by one incident that occurred when she was about 14. She wrote about it with artistic flair in a painfully revealing essay submitted for the Children’s Defense Fund award:

“It was about midnight when I was getting ready to retire from another day that I just didn’t like. The sound of the leaky roof, the recollection of previous conversations and the rattling of my bedroom windows all echoed in my ear in unison as I surrendered my tired body to sleep. My face was cold and I could feel a faint tickling sensation on my right cheek. I ignored it. I figured it was just a hair or a piece of lint. To my dismay, it was more than a lifeless wanderer, it was a living, breathing, dirty roach. And it made its way into my ear.”

Margie described her panic, of running into the bathroom and putting her ear under the faucet before the “tiny little perpetrator” emerged. She also described how the incident woke her mother and instead of receiving sympathy she received a beating while her father “rolled over and pretended to go back to sleep.”

Yet, she said, she bears no ill-feeling toward her father.

“He always tried to remain calm,” she said. “Even though he didn’t help much he knew he wouldn’t accomplish anything and might make it worse. There’s no resentment for that. That’s just his personality.”

Margie said she was usually able to hide her bruises. But one day soon after the roach incident she was scheduled to give a presentation in class and she showed up with a red face. A teacher noticed and a social worker arrived at her home later the same day.

She was removed from her parents’ care and placed in a foster home, at first with an older woman who was nice but soon fell ill. She said living in the other two homes were like being in jail. One foster family didn’t allow her to stay after school for activities. She was forbidden to take a shower for longer than 5 minutes. She couldn’t have the light on except for certain times. Nor could she eat, except during strictly regulated meal periods.

Margie then moved in with her married sister and in-laws and stayed in these crowded and uncomfortable quarters for nearly a year before authorities said she could return to her parents. Her mother had begun taking medication that tempered her moods and behavior.

But the strong-willed teenager hesitated. She said the Pacoima apartment where the family had lived was in a decrepit building where nothing worked. A chunk of ceiling once fell and hit her on the head. She did research, searched home listings and found a small condominium complex in San Fernando. She sat down and did the math with her father.

It turned out the monthly mortgage on the new place would be $50 less than what they were paying in Pacoima. He agreed to look. She persuaded her father and mother to move.

So she returned home--into a house of her choosing--and assumed responsibility for managing the household, caring for her mother, paying bills and holding a part-time job. She was 16 years old.

‘Making Positive Things Happen’

“That’s always been the big mystery for me,” said Harold Soo Hoo, the San Fernando High School college and scholarship advisor who met Margie about a year ago. She was eager to become an officer in the California Scholarship Federation, a school honor society that promotes community involvement--eager and frustrated that her fellow students were so uninvolved and apathetic.

“We see so many kids who come from deprived backgrounds, broken homes, single-parent homes or no homes at all and they are throwaway kids that just don’t survive,” Soo Hoo continued. “But every once in a while you have a kid who excels and you find out that they come from the worst situations.”

Soo Hoo said Margie is the kind of girl who would adapt anywhere: “If things don’t come her way she will find a way of making positive things happen. It’s not like she’s there waiting for some kind of reward. She expects a lot from herself.”

Margie uses almost identical language to describe her own high expectations. She is clearly intelligent and articulate. But things like good grades did not come easy, she said. However, she knew she could improve them if she worked hard enough.

One afternoon, she plopped on her bed in an inviting and warm bedroom whose walls were decorated with front pages from the student newspaper and the many certificates of merit and school honors she had received. The award from the Children’s Defense Fund included a cash stipend, which allowed her to quit her part-time telemarketing job and concentrate on Advanced Placement courses in physics and English.

On the wall above her headboard were depictions of Baroque adorned angels that she had carefully separated from a calendar. On the ceiling she had affixed silvery stars and it was hard not to imagine some meaning in the display. But when asked she said of the angels: “They’re cute, peaceful and beautiful. I never really thought about the religious aspect.”

Her bookshelf includes Anne Rice and Stephen King. She says her musical tastes run from classical to Spanish rock to Kurt Cobain. She says she can “relate to his need to escape.” (Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, committed suicide).

Now that she’s older, Margie said she is better able to deal with her conflicted emotions toward her mother and home. Her mother has caused her pain, but she has not let it consume her. She has room enough in her heart for love and understanding, she said.

Her parents now are proud of her accomplishments. Her construction worker father struggles in English, but proclaims “what Margie says is good.”

For Margie, her departure for school next fall will mark not so much an escape as a progression, for she has managed to create an environment that ensured her survival.

She will leave without “guilt or bad emotions,” she said.

“I’m going to live, eat and breath school because I don’t have to worry about anything else. It’s the place I feel I’m going to have the most control.”

When asked whether luck has played a role in her fate so far, she pauses briefly.

“Luck? Maybe not luck. But I have always learned to see the good things in life. If somebody smiles at you or opens the door for you, you have to appreciate that.”