From Her Garage to City Hall

Rose Espinoza exorcised the ghosts of elections past when she raised her right hand to be sworn in as a La Habra City Council member.

“I wanted everything to go in slow motion. I wanted to enjoy the moment as long as I could,” said Espinoza, 49, finally elected in November after three unsuccessful City Council races. She was sworn in Dec. 4.

The victory was sweet for Espinoza, daughter of immigrant Mexican farm workers, longtime community activist, founder of the Rosie’s Garage tutoring program, and now, La Habra’s first elected Latina. That it was so long in coming may reflect her penchant not to seek the spotlight, say people who know her well.

“She is the most diplomatic and tactful reformer I have ever met,” said Robert Dale, a longtime La Habra resident. “She’s going to bring in a whole new attitude. The council definitely got someone who’s going to be looking for the residents’ interests.”

Steve Staveley, former La Habra police chief, wrote in an Espinoza campaign mailer: “Rose’s work reduces crime. She shows young people there’s a different way to go. . . . She shows moms and dads how to keep their kids out of gangs.”

Her work with children, whom she sometimes calls “pollitos”--Spanish for “baby chicks”--has won recognition, but not the kind that translated automatically into political clout in La Habra, a largely blue-collar city of 54,000.

In 1991 she started Rosie’s Garage in her modest Fifth Avenue home to help children whose parents, many of them immigrants, were struggling economically and lacked the time, means or education to tutor the youngsters at home.

In a 1992 interview with The Times, Espinoza said her motivation was that “So many people see the negative things about the community--the gangs, shootings. . . . I wanted to show good things. I want to show that there’s potential in this neighborhood if we just put in the energy.”

The program, which now has an annual budget of $45,000 from grants, donations and fund-raisers, serves about 150 students a year and has earned Espinoza national acclaim. President Clinton cited her in 1994 for her work with children. In 1997, anchor Dan Rather profiled her on “CBS Evening News.”

Her dedication to the tutoring program is linked to her concern about her hometown, parts of which were once migrant workers’ camps like the one in which Espinoza grew up and that are plagued by crime and poverty.

With the help of her sisters, Espinoza has urged neighborhood children to join the tutoring program, improve their grades, stay in school and out of gangs.

“She’s had a tremendous track record of doing things, and it’s obviously the grain of what she’s made of,” said Amin David, president of Los Amigos of Orange County, a Latino activist group. “To help turn a community around the way she did shows she’s a roll-up-your-sleeves individual.”

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Espinoza, who also works full time as a medical-equipment designer, first thought of seeking public office in 1992, when colleagues in a leadership class organized by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund suggested it. Imagine how much more you could do, they told her, as a political leader.

She ran for City Council but lost decisively. Undeterred, she ran again in 1994, losing again--but only by about 100 votes. Espinoza thinks now that her opposition to Proposition 187--a measure to deny public services to illegal immigrants and their children--may have been a factor. During a televised candidates’ forum, she blasted the measure as “inhumane, cruel, unjust and unfair.”

Disheartened by her defeat, Espinoza began to doubt herself. “I thought, ‘Am I not doing enough? What am I not doing right?’ ” she said.

Her hopes were raised when an incumbent resigned from the council and she thought she might be appointed to fill the seat--among the losing candidates, she had won the highest number of votes. But someone else was chosen.

She continued her activism, in 1997 winning a $40,000 Disneyland community service award for Rosie’s Garage. In 1998, she ran again for City Council, losing this time by almost 1,000 votes. When an incumbent later resigned, Espinoza quickly collected more than 500 signatures on a petition seeking her appointment to fill the vacancy.

“I decided not to take any chances this time,” Espinoza said. But businessman David E. McCauley, who had not been a council candidate, got the job.

“It struck me that, even with all the work I displayed to them, they ignored it all and picked someone who certainly had worked hard but never in the community in the capacity that I had,” Espinoza said. “I didn’t want to believe it was a good-old-boy thing. But how could you not?”

Current Mayor G. Steve Simonian, who was on the council at the time, said there were other reasons.

“His credentials were just impeccable,” he said of McCauley. “This guy owned several businesses; he managed others. . . . He had the time and the acumen, and we felt we really needed someone with business knowledge.”

Espinoza’s response was to begin planning yet another campaign, this time going to the experts for help. She hired Eleazar Elizondo as a political consultant. Though only 28, Elizondo had recently mounted a respectable challenge to Orange County Supervisor Chuck Smith, losing but still collecting 40% of the votes, doing so with a war chest of only $12,000.

Elizondo thinks part of the reason for Espinoza’s losing streak was political naivete. For instance, a slicker political mind might have milked Rosie’s Garage for as many votes as possible, he said. Many people in La Habra didn’t realize the tutoring program had anything to do with Rose Espinoza.

“A more calculating politician would have called it ‘Rose Espinoza’s Garage,’ ” he said. Part of her campaign this year was to make the connection in voters’ minds.

A corps of youth she had met through her volunteer work helped with that, also volunteering to label and mail campaign materials.

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Another challenge was that Espinoza’s greatest support was in poorer, often immigrant neighborhoods where many people are not eligible to vote and those who can are of modest means. Most of the contributions to her campaign budget were less than $25, Elizondo said. She spent $18,000 of her own money.

“I had to convince her that there’s a distinction between people who vote and people who don’t vote, between registered voters and residents,” Elizondo said. “You have to hunt where the ducks are, as they say.”

“Rose would basically say, ‘I hear you up here in my head, but my heart says otherwise,’ ” Elizondo said.

The two forged a compromise: Espinoza agreed to target registered voters but would also put in hours in such centers of the community as churches, encouraging residents to register to vote.

“For her it was a moral issue,” Elizondo said. “She’d sit at a church and register maybe four people in eight hours. I’d always tell her, ‘You know, in those eight hours, you could have done this. . . . ‘ “

In the early hours of Nov. 8, as the election returns became clear, Elizondo called Espinoza and said, “Good morning, Councilwoman.”

She recalls the reality took a while to sink in, even as she tried to explain the significance of the City Council to some of her pollitos.

“I told them, ‘These are the people who will run your city, hopefully in your best interest,’ ” Espinoza said. “ ‘And I am one of them. Wow!’ ”

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Times columnist Agustin Gurza contributed to this report.