Rose Espinoza Nurtures a Little Flock

Much as other people might invite you into their living rooms, Rose Espinoza ushered me into the garage that made her famous. This is where it all started almost 10 years ago, a volunteer tutoring program where students still come to study and be inspired, collecting candy or honey-roasted peanuts as their incentive to succeed.

Rosie’s Garage, as it came to be known, is a humble place of self-improvement for kids in the old migrant barrio of La Habra where Rose was raised, sleeping on the floor beside her mother, a cleaning lady.

Many people know her story by now. How she moved back to her old neighborhood and started tutoring in her garage as an alternative to gang life on her street. How she was threatened but persisted. How she recruited helpers and expanded to three other tutoring sites in north Orange County. How she won accolades, even from the White House, for her efforts to help other people’s children do better in school.

But behind this garage, away from the street and the public spotlight, Rose faced another challenge in her own home. She spent all those years struggling privately to motivate her son, Chris, now 18. Despite her community achievement, Rose couldn’t get her own child to care about school.

“I’ve told him off,” Rose said this week, looking at her bear of a boy, a former linebacker, who smiled sheepishly. “I’ve said, ‘How do you think this looks? I tutor other kids and I can’t even help my own son.’ ”

Such are the mysteries of motivating teenagers. I felt Rose was talking about my own teen. The same excuses for not doing homework, the same vague answers (“I dunno”) to explain academic apathy.

But now, Rose has reason to celebrate. Chris is graduating from La Habra High School, having pushed his grades from Ds and Fs to a B average in his senior year. He plans to attend community college, he told me, then study fashion design.

“I wish I would have worked harder,” he said. “I guess I was one of those people who realized it too late.”

The lesson for Rose both at home and in her community: Don’t ever give up.

Next Saturday, Rosie’s Garage will hold its second annual 5-kilometer run/walk through the streets of La Habra. The event, from 8 a.m. to noon, is a fund-raiser for the after-school clinics that operate on a $45,000 annual budget. (For more information call (562) 694-3330.)

Rose works full time as a mechanical designer of medical equipment. In her spare time, even during lunch hours, she manages the after-school centers with no pay.

On Wednesday after work, she hopped in her 1997 Honda Civic and rushed to her second tutoring site in La Habra, located in a high-crime area. She arrived 20 minutes early. Already, four girls were waiting in the front yard of the neighborhood center--her “communiversity.”

“Oh, my God, they’re here already. Ay, Diosito,” says Rose, getting out of her car with her briefcase and two boxes of Planters peanuts, the day’s treats.

The girls run past rosebushes to greet her.

“Hi, Rosie,” says one.

“Rosie, my mom knows you,” offers another proudly.

“I’ll help you,” says a third, taking the briefcase. “I’ll take your keys.”

From the outside, the center looks like any other home on the block, only a bit newer. It has no exterior sign, but the kids swarm to it on their own. Once inside, they all get busy right away. The girls take a round table in the kitchen and start their homework. Other children arrive, unload their backpacks on a long table in the living room and get to work.

At 4 o’clock, Rose’s homework center officially opens. She’s already got 17 kids.

For two hours, Rose is like a den mother, or a mother hen. She calls the kids her pollitos, her little chicks, because they’re always following her around.

Rose, I’m done with my work. Rose, can I have my candy? Rose, please check my math.

“Rose, do you have a calculator?” asks Oscar, a 10th-grader.

“Are you allowed to use a calculator?” she asks, before fishing one out of her briefcase.

In a rear bedroom, the young man gets to work on problems from an algebra text. I asked him why he comes here to do his homework.

“I don’t know,” he says, offering that stock teenage answer. “I guess because I cannot think when I’m at home. I’ve got a lot of little brothers.”

Surprisingly, Rose has had trouble finding and keeping college-age tutors. So she started recruiting help from the neighborhood. Like Anahi, a straight-A student at Sonora High School. Or like Cristina, a 17-year-old dropout who’s expecting a baby and who, Rose prays, will find her own incentive to return to school.

“We have to look beyond the blight and find the beauty of the kids,” says Rose as she goes over the tutors’ time cards.

She pays them an hourly rate, depending on their age. She hands out white envelopes stuffed with the cash stipends, usually in dollar bills to make it feel like more money. Rose also rewards the student tutors for their grades.

At home, too, she tried imaginative incentives to inspire her son.

Rose would go through the daily newspaper and mark articles she wanted Chris to read. She rated them by writing a value by the headline, from 50 cents to perhaps a dollar. Her son would earn his allowance by reading the stories, priced as marked.

“I came up with so many ideas for him,” says Rose. “It was not boring.”

Her husband, Eliazar, worried at first that his wife was spending too much time on her volunteer work, and her two unsuccessful campaigns for City Council. He was the oldest of nine children who went barefoot and hungry to kindergarten in his native Torreon. He never made it to the first grade. By age 6, he was roaming the streets as a shoe-shine boy to help his mother raise the family.

He was working as a busboy and dishwasher at the International House of Pancakes when he met Rose, then 21, at a Mexican dance at the Hollywood Palladium. She didn’t speak much Spanish and dubbed him Alex by mistake when she misunderstood his real name.

“Por que te apuras de los otros?” Alex would ask his wife. “Why do you worry about others?”

Maybe because by helping others she could help her son. Maybe it was the barrio environment that was dragging him down. Maybe it was hard for him to study because he could see other kids out on the street playing after school. Maybe she could raise his sights by raising the community’s aspirations.

Yet, even Chris started to resent his mother’s time-consuming mission.

“You don’t love me,” he once told her. “You’ve got all these kids that you’re helping.”

“My God,” answered Rose. “I changed the neighborhood for you. If that’s not love, I don’t know what it is.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com