Minnie Street Too Has New Life

Marisela McKean was happy. To celebrate Sabado de Gloria, Minnie Street was cordoned off and the 8-year-old joined hundreds of residents of the south Santa Ana neighborhood playing games and eating Cambodian and Mexican food.

“I’m having a great time,” she said, petting a stuffed animal she won for shooting a basketball.

Traditionally celebrated in many Latin American countries the day before Easter Sunday, the holiday marks the resurrection of Jesus. This year the city of Santa Ana, Mariners Church of Irvine and other religious groups staged a street fair that marked not only the holiday, but a new sense of life in the neighborhood.

The six-block stretch of Minnie and Standard streets was once a haven for drug use, public drunkenness and domestic violence. But in recent years concerned residents have teamed up with the city and several nonprofit agencies to turn the neighborhood around.

The crime rate dropped 23% in two years, police said. Several residents said they can walk without fear at night for the first time in years.

“Sabado de Gloria is an opportunity to celebrate and unite as a community,” said Rebecca Bramlett, director of the Mariners Church Minnie Street Learning Center.

Bramlett’s learning center and another Mariners center for Cambodians in the same neighborhood have sparked some newfound pride in the area, home to about 12,000 people. Both tutor children and teens.

But amid Saturday’s tostadas and fried noodles ran a serious undercurrent: Many of the churches involved in the community are competing for worshipers.

The area is mostly Latino, and consequently heavily Roman Catholic. But at least five religious groups were represented at Saturday’s event, and all have enjoyed a growing presence in the community.

Msgr. Jaime Soto, vicar for the Latino community of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, said the Catholic Church was involved in the inception of the learning center, which he called the product of a collaboration between the nondenominational Mariners and St. Anne’s Catholic Church. He said he isn’t worried that the Irvine church will lure away Catholics in the neighborhood.

“I’m assuming that because of the original spirit of cooperation and joining of forces with a partnership like this, that there would not only be respect for one another but [also] for the religious conscience of the people who live on Minnie,” Soto said.

In fact, the Catholic Church has partnered with other churches throughout the city to help establish similar learning centers.

Of the groups, Mariners Church of Irvine arrived on Minnie Street first, renting four apartments in 1996 for its learning center, a centerpiece of its outreach effort. More than 130 volunteers from Irvine and Newport Beach provide after-school tutoring in English to Latino schoolchildren.

But since then, Templo Calvario’s Pastor Myron Yanez has started an evangelical church on Minnie, and Pastor Heap Him, a Mariners staff member, also has started a Mariners learning center for Cambodian residents.

A Cambodian Buddhist temple already exists in the same area, but Him said he wants to begin a church to serve the estimated 2,000 Cambodians.

“I already do lots of translation services, feed the poor, and also provide counseling,” Him said. “In that respect, it’s more than a church.”

Pastor Yanez, who said he split from a larger Templo Calvario church in Santa Ana, was in search of new territory. He also saw promise on Minnie.

“We wanted to come to where the people are,” Yanez said as he bit into a taco. “Look, this is an area of Hispanic people. They have problems here that many others do not, including much poverty and violence.

“Yes, many are Catholic,” Yanez said, “but we’re not about tradition. We’re giving them vision and goals. . . . We’re giving them Jesus Christ.”

Begun in August 1998, his church now has 50 regular members. He said more than 200 attended the church’s crucifixion skit on Good Friday.

Equally adamant that the community is fertile ground for converts was Joe Saragosa, whose group from On Fire Ministries in Buena Park served up 75-cent hamburgers and tostadas Saturday.

“We’re a Four-Square church denomination,” he said, adding that the ministry targets Orange County’s poor and helps build self-esteem through its Sparks Sidewalk Sunday School.

Soto, the Catholic vicar, found it commendable that so many religious groups were involved in Sabado de Gloria, especially Mariners church. The Catholic church is well aware, however, of proselytizing by non-Catholics in the church’s traditional Latino base.

“It’s been my experiences with these collaborative ventures [that] these churches from affluent areas gain grace with the contact of people who live life on the edge,” Soto said.

Many of Santa Ana’s Catholic churches are brimming with parishioners, he said.

“[But] that’s not to say as an institution, we’re not concerned with proselytizing and its negative effects in our community,” Soto said. “We are frightfully aware of that, but we have to keep that in proper perspective.”

For Guillermina Cabrera, the street celebration also marked a newfound pride.

Her son, Daniel, 8, goes to the Mariners learning center and has received excellent remarks from his third-grade teacher at Kennedy Elementary School.

“He has learned to pronounce English words correctly,” Cabrera said in Spanish. “At the center they don’t let the children speak any Spanish, only English. He’s learning so much.”