Blythe Street Spirit

Rosa Frausto recently did something she had never fathomed. She spoke openly about sexually transmitted diseases and different forms of birth control with her teenage daughter.

For a conservative Catholic Latina like Frausto, such topics are taboo, simply not mentioned. In fact, Frausto said she will never tell her husband that she and her daughter talked about sex with a group of women and girls from their Blythe Street neighborhood.

They shared what they consider to be intimate secrets in a workshop designed to prevent teen pregnancy by improving--and in many cases, initiating--communication between mothers and daughters.

The workshop, called Entre Nosotras, or Between Us Women, is sponsored by Immaculate Heart Community, a nonprofit social services group that works in an area known as one of the San Fernando Valley’s most crime-plagued and gang-infested.

Frausto said she found the meetings of Entre Nosotras, which are held every couple of months, very informative.

“I learned so much, and now I know that it doesn’t have to be embarrassing,” she said. “I really didn’t know anything about those things before.”

Located in a rundown Blythe Street apartment complex that it named Casa Esperanza, or House of Hope, the group aims to improve the lives of residents in the mostly poor, Latino neighborhood.

The key is to target women, who head the majority of the households in the two-block area and are usually the most involved parent--even in a two-parent home, Casa Esperanza officials say.

“We want to empower the women and educate them because they’re the ones running things, really,” said Maritza Artan, who became director of Casa Esperanza earlier this year.

For example, at a recent monthly Neighborhood Watch meeting called Residentes Unidos, or United Residents, 20 women and one man discussed with police safety issues and other problems among tenants of the blocks’ rundown apartment buildings.

Women were also responsible for transforming Blythe Street Park from a dirt field littered with syringes and broken glass into a scenic playground with lush grass and colorful flowers.

Encouraged by Artan to take charge of their lives and their neighborhood, several mothers of an estimated 50 children who use the park daily complained about its former horrific condition.

The discussions prompted Artan to call the city Department of Recreation and Parks, which responded by installing an irrigation control system, fresh sand in the play pit and an iron fence. Volunteers from a nearby home improvement store laid sod and planted flowers donated by the retailer.

“Now it’s a real park for the kids,” said Maria Torres, one of the mothers who took action. “It was like a dumping ground before. The kids would always get rashes because the sand was contaminated.”

The Immaculate Heart Community, a Hollywood-based organization started nearly 30 years ago by former Catholic nuns, came to Blythe Street in 1993 and offered a variety of free programs to the area’s estimated 2,500 residents.

The services included academic tutoring, sports and catechism for youths and a job referral service for adults. Other programs educate women about a range of topics, from personal hygiene and food safety to health concerns and domestic violence.

“[The women] were shocked, because a lot of them thought that just because they were married, they had to put up with domestic violence,” Artan said. “Now they know better.”

Casa Esperanza also links people according to their needs with various agencies, from food pantries to counselors and doctors. An average of 55 people use Casa Esperanza’s services weekly, Artan estimates.

“[The Immaculate Heart Community members] were on Blythe Street when other social services agencies were afraid to go in there,” said Albert Melena, outreach coordinator of the San Fernando Valley Partnership, a federally funded anti-crime education program that targets youth in the area.

“What they do--work with moms--is a big thing because, in the Latino community, women are the most important and powerful.”

Casa Esperanza has a full-time staff of two--Artan and assistant Maria Gutierrez--and operates on a $100,000 annual budget. About one-third of the funding is provided by members of the Immaculate Heart Community, the rest from private donations.

Margaret Rose Welch, a former nun and Immaculate Heart Community member with a doctorate in clinical psychology, opened Casa Esperanza in 1993 and directed it until Artan took over in February.

Welch, 74, said she had heard of Blythe Street from a developer vying for a city contract to rehabilitate housing there. When she first visited the neighborhood, Welch said, the desperate need for social services was evident.

“It was almost like a little village with thousands of poor and mostly undocumented Latinos,” Welch said. “A lot of those two-bedroom apartments have three or more families living in them. Our mission was to empower these people, to help them.”

Volunteers went door to door, asking families what services were most needed. Employment and health care were the most-requested, but over the years violence against women has become the primary concern, Welch said.

Welch chose the 30-year-old Artan to succeed her because she felt Artan, as a Mexican immigrant, could relate to many of the needs of Blythe Street residents.

Artan grew up in a poor family and put herself through college with the help of scholarships. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Cal State Northridge, in large part because of free tutoring programs, she said.

“I started high school and didn’t even speak English,” Artan said. “I thought it was impossible to go to college. I never thought I could do it, and those programs helped me do it.”

Now she wants to help kids in the same situation by implementing more academic programs at Casa Esperanza. In the next month, she said, five donated computers will be set up inside the modest two-bedroom apartment that Casa Esperanza rents.

The ground-level unit with black bars on its windows and religious symbols and art decorating the walls, is considered a friendly place by residents and a valuable neighborhood resource by police. It has done wonders for the community, police say, while also helping law enforcement.

“Their function is very important for curtailing crime through education,” said Frank Preciado, the Los Angeles Police Department’s lead foot patrol officer on Blythe Street. “They’re getting residents involved, keeping the community clean and keeping people healthy and working.”