For Love of Learning

The 42 stairs claim her breath each time she climbs from the parking lot to the Cal State Los Angeles campus. Josephine Botello Garcia dreads them but focuses on the incentives: a magnificent view from atop the hill, an education more precious with time.

Her grace is that of quiet strength and determination, the ability to see beyond life’s long, hard climbs. She has made no plans for this day, her 71st birthday, other than to turn in a final exam and then rush home to clean house and cook for her husband.

For Garcia, who has attended college on and off for 31 years, the arrival of a new year, a new century, is no more significant than the arrival of a new day. Each should be valued, she says, and she resolves to continue her education, focus on family, the two in many ways inseparable.

She carries herself in careful, dignified balance. She describes herself as an introvert, and there is certainty in her voice, seriousness in her eyes when she describes her goals.

It is her responsibility, she says, to be a role model for her family, to work as hard in the classroom as she worked to raise her kids, to see new possibilities in each day. She hopes her family will see that true wealth is measured not by possessions, but by the vitality of the human spirit.

“Today, much that society does is in the hands of the molders of opinion, media, which seems to focus on the powerful and wealthy,” she says. “They forget that ordinary people are the backbone of the nation.”

There is no fanfare or celebration of her birthday. A daughter called and asked if she would like to go out for dinner, but Garcia declined.

“She works hard all day and needs to rest at night,” Garcia says. “I told her, ‘Thank you, but no.’ ”

Garcia maintains a steady pace up the stairs while younger students squeeze around her on the left. She has never felt uncomfortable around them, she says, and in many ways envies them for their creativity, their potential. Their speed.

For them, college is a steppingstone to careers. But for Garcia, the steppingstones were fields and factories, long hot days that seemed only to push tomorrow away.

She told herself from the time she married and quit school at age 15 that someday she would return. Education, to Garcia, is not a means to an end. It is a way to see and to live beyond the surface of life.

“It’s enrichment,” she says, “something no one can take away from you.”

As she reaches the top, she turns and pauses briefly to gather breath. At night, she says, city lights sparkle below like a field of stars. And on dew-drenched mornings, there is an earthy aroma tinged with eucalyptus.

Like the knowledge she seeks--in classes ranging from jazz appreciation to geology, psychology to art--the dew and stars enrich her life. She breathes them in.

Attending college has not been easy. She has driven through rain on tires as slick and bald as watermelons; and she has driven through heartbreak, the deaths of loved ones, the wounding of a son in Vietnam, the illness of another who remains tethered to an oxygen tank.

She took classes after work while raising a family of seven children and even now awakens at 4:30 a.m. to study. She pushes herself hard through school and life, believing there is something worthwhile at the top of every hill.

It will take more than 42 stairs to keep her away.

*

It is the end of the fall term, and Garcia is submitting her final exam for a Chicano studies class, “The Mexican in Los Angeles.” It is about history and, in many ways, about Garcia’s life.

She was born in 1928 in East L.A. Her father worked in fields, her mother in factories. There were seven children, one of whom died in childhood. Garcia’s mother would sometimes speak with heaviness about the one who died so young.

“We were so poor,” she would say in Spanish. “Not even a marker.”

The child was buried in a pauper’s field. From such meager beginnings and suffering emerged strength, Garcia says, and acceptance, the wisdom to focus on what life offers, not what it takes away. That is her mother’s legacy.

“I think what I learned from my mother was work hard, be strong,” Garcia says. “What life has to give you, you deal with.”

Her husband, Felix Garcia, 82, is retired from foundry work and truck driving. Last year, they celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. Along two shelves high in the dining room of their Rosemead home are pictures of family members, including 25 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

“We are very lucky,” she says. “Our family is very close. They are very good to us. I have no regrets. As long as nothing is wrong with the family, we’re content.”

When the children were young, she stayed home to be with them, the only exception being the Christmas season, when she worked to bring in extra money.

Not that it was really extra money.

The Garcias were wealthy in many ways, but money wasn’t one of them. Son Robert remembers getting into a fight with boys down the street when they made fun of him for having no shoelaces. He points to the shelves of family photographs. “Me and one of my brothers are three years apart,” he says, “but in our senior pictures, we’re wearing the same suit.”

Daughter Irene remembers receiving for Christmas a rocking horse with no head. There were family outings when they would pack themselves into the car along with a sack of bean burritos wrapped in foil. Once a year, when the income-tax refund check arrived, they ate at a Chinese restaurant in East L.A.

They had no health insurance, and the children recall how their father would use pliers to pull his own teeth. He went to work with cracked ribs, and once when he cut a finger, he laced it up himself with needle and thread.

Josephine Garcia strived for order, but, with seven children, that wasn’t always possible. For a few years, they celebrated Irene’s birthday on the wrong date until Garcia realized they were a couple of days off. One year, she dressed the children for Easter a week early.

There also were times when she would turn quiet and spend long hours alone in her bedroom. One such time was when son Richard was born and hospitalized with asthma. Another was when the oldest child, Phillip, was shot and reported missing in Vietnam.

“I was hit by a sniper,” he says. “When I went down, the first thing that came to my mind was my mom, my dad, Sundays, tamales from Lomita’s, menudo. I wanted to go home, and I had to get that out of my head.”

Phillip returned home, went to college, earned a master’s degree in psychology and now works as an occupational therapist for Veterans Affairs.

When grandson Chris Foster, 24, was attending Humboldt State, three times a week he would receive letters of encouragement, inspirational newspaper articles, poems written by Garcia. He kept them all, and when he spoke in May at graduation, he thanked his family, and told of his grandmother and the vital role she played in his life. She received a standing ovation.

But the Garcias do not judge one another based on education.

“If you’re going to college and getting your master’s degree, they’re proud of you,” says grandson James Hooper, 25, of Rosemead. “If you’re working for McDonald’s, they’re just as proud of you as long as you’re a decent, honest person. One thing I can say about all of us is that we all work hard at what we do, and we respect each other for that.”

In Garcia’s life, family has always come first. It always will, she says, but when she was in her 30s and her children were growing older, she began to think about her own future, the work outside the home she would do.

“I thought, ‘What do I know how to do? Make beds, wash dishes.’ So I knew I needed skills,” she says.

She began taking night classes and graduated from high school in 1964, the same year as her oldest daughter. In 1968, she enrolled in night classes at East Los Angeles Community College to learn office skills, and eventually worked for 18 years as an office assistant for the Garvey School District in the San Gabriel Valley.

It took her 14 years to receive an associate of arts degree in office management. She then enrolled at Cal State L.A. It was not an easy step. She initially was intimidated, and it did not help that she got lost on the first day of classes trying to find the campus. Then, upon leaving, she could not find her car in the huge parking lot.

As she searched the lot, she tried not to draw attention to herself, but inside she felt foolish, out of place and, indeed, lost. It was one of many times she questioned why she continued taking college classes.

“I guess it’s part of my background, overcoming, making the best of things,” she says. “No matter how hard life is, you learn. Even from adversity, you learn.”

She has amassed 230 credits, more than enough to graduate, with a grade point average of 3.6, and now takes classes every other quarter. But she has not graduated because she lacks the math requirements for a liberal arts degree.

Although a grandson has offered to take a math class with her, she remains intimidated.

“I begin to shake,” she says, “when I think about it.”

There are hills, and then there are mountains.

*

She hands Professor Francisco Balderrama her final exam to complete her work in “The Mexican in Los Angeles.” He digs her term paper out from a stack on his desk. It is worth an A-minus.

“You did a very good job,” he says to her, “a lot better than most. Your essay, unlike the others, sang in parts, but I thought the analysis could have been expanded a little bit more.”

Balderrama says that younger students benefit from Garcia’s involvement in class. She sometimes offers her life experiences, bringing a richness to discussions. The assigned essay was to write a biography about someone through interviews and field research.

Garcia wrote about her cousins, one of whom graduated from UCLA and became an aeronautical engineer. When he could not find work, he figured it was because of his Mexican heritage. He changed his name to disguise it, and soon found work and success.

“There was very intense discrimination,” Garcia says, “but when he changed his name, he became estranged from his family. When he came to my brother’s funeral last year, no one knew him except the older members of the family. So when he died earlier this year, my cousin said he didn’t want any services. He probably thought no one would go.”

Garcia has her own stories of racism and its damaging effects. There was the woman at the store who heard her accent and commented, “You sure don’t look like a greaser.” Then there was the time she and her husband went to get the vacuum cleaner repaired, and the man told them “not to vacuum grease.”

Their warm, modest home in Rosemead has three bedrooms and one bathroom. It is filled with mementos, family pictures, memorabilia reflecting Felix Garcia’s lifelong allegiance to University of California sports teams. In the rear den, overlooking the backyard where a lemon tree grows, is a piano that Felix plays when he is alone.

They were not greeted warmly when they moved into the house in 1957, Josephine Garcia says.

“Maybe this doesn’t sound right, but it’s true. There were only two Mexican families here. We moved in with so many kids, even though I never let them bother anyone, it seemed like for-sale signs started going up.”

Perhaps, she says, in this new century, attitudes will change. Decency and respect will return. The nation’s backbone will gain strength and unity. Anything, she says, is possible with each new day.

Maybe, she will even enroll in math.

Duane noriyuki can be reached at duane.noriyuki@latimes.com