A Lifetime Putting a Family Back Together

When Hilda Pacheco got married recently, she made sure to invite a special group of guests: the orphan children of La Mision.

They held a treasured place in her heart, these lonely souls from a small town between Tijuana and Ensenada. She had worked with them for the past eight years, persuading her Irvine employer and other donors to help refurbish their crumbling orphanage, La Puerta de Fe, which means door of faith.

Pacheco can honestly say she knows what it’s like to be in their shoes. For eight years of her own childhood, she lived at the Door of Faith. She entered as a young girl and left a young woman, passing through adolescence without her parents. They had not died, but marital problems and poverty had left Pacheco and her siblings without a home.

Yes, she knows the sorrow of growing up without a family, just like the children she has watched grow up at the orphanage over these past few years. Those children are teenagers now, around the age Pacheco was when she left La Mision to rejoin her mother in Santa Ana.

What future lies ahead for them? What hope do they have to make something of themselves, these castaways scarred by the hurt of being abandoned or unwanted?

Pacheco invited them to the wedding so they could imagine new possibilities. So they could see that love and commitment between a man and a woman are possible. That having a family is possible, even for children who have never known one.

The children gathered for the wedding Sept. 23, along with Mexican peasants and prosperous Americans representing both sides of this new union. It was held at a humble shrine at the end of a dirt road in a lovely vineyard in Baja’s Valle de Guadalupe, where Hilda’s mother died early last year.

A Fateful Meeting

Ironically, Pacheco owes her marriage to her labor of love for the orphanage. She met her husband eight years ago next month, when she started her fund-raising campaign. Jim Taylor, an executive with a Long Beach shipping company, had been a volunteer at the orphanage since the mid-1980s. As a board member of the struggling children’s home, he had knocked on doors to raise money to pay the electric bill and had helped one orphan girl get treatment for leukemia in California.

Around that time, Pacheco had returned for the first time in years to the campus-like complex of dormitories where she grew up. It wasn’t the place she remembered. It had been a caring place where children ate three good meals a day and where she got to sleep on her own bed, a luxury for a girl born in a one-room home with dirt floors and a single bed for the whole family.

Instead, she found buildings with collapsing roofs and children poorly fed. She decided to do something to prevent La Puerta from closing, and she was referred to her future husband. The couple scheduled a lunch at Irvine’s El Torito near the offices of California Training Cooperative, a private consulting firm where Pacheco works as government funding director.

That meeting marked the birth of their relationship and of the Door of Faith Foundation. Based at her company, the nonprofit seeks to aid a network of independent orphanages in Baja California that depend on private donations.

This weekend, foundation board members were scheduled to visit several shelters in Mexico as part of a campaign called SOCAL50, aimed at matching each orphanage with a sponsoring company. (For more information, call [949] 476-1144, Ext. 311, or visit the foundation’s Web site at https://www.doff.org.)

In an interview Wednesday, Taylor recalled the first time he met children at La Puerta: “One look into those big, brown eyes and I was hooked.”

When he met Pacheco, he was amazed that someone of such warmth and intelligence could have emerged from that upbringing. Volunteers never find out what becomes of children after they leave the orphanage at 18, Taylor said. Meeting Pacheco gave him a glimpse of the possibilities and renewed his sense of purpose.

“Holy cow, maybe our work there does help,” he concluded.

In Mexico, parents too poor to support their kids have the painful option of leaving them at an orphanage. That was something Pacheco’s mother swore she would never do. But when her husband left the family in Ensenada, she found herself a single mother with scant education and four children to support.

For a while, she sent the kids to live with their grandmother, also a single mother raising her own large family on farm worker wages. When they became too big a burden, the four siblings were sent back to their mother, who earned a meager living making tortillas.

As the oldest, Hilda was expected to take care of the younger ones. She was 7.

One day, an accident changed their lives forever. Hilda’s brother Juan fell into a reservoir outside the house. She remembers seeing the boy’s bulging eyes under water, and feeling helpless. She remembers watching him taken unconscious to a hospital, and feeling guilty. She was sure her brother had died and it was her fault. She was supposed to be caring for him while her mother was working.

The boy survived, but the family did not. The accident convinced Pacheco’s mother that the children would be safer in an orphanage. Hilda and her sister were placed at La Mision; for lack of room, her two brothers were placed elsewhere temporarily.

Their mother was allowed to visit once a month. But the visits stopped after she moved to Orange County, where she got a job doing laundry at a Tustin convalescent home.

For Pacheco, life at the orphanage was pleasant and safe. But it wasn’t home. “This is really great,” she recalls thinking, “but what I really want is my family again.”

On Dec. 23, 1977, Hilda Pacheco turned 15 at La Puerta de Fe. Like most Mexican girls, she dreamed of having her quinceanera, a grand coming-out party. On that day, her mother returned from Santa Ana and got permission to take her daughter out for a modest ceremony. She bought the girl a pretty dress and crown, “like a princess.” She took her to church and gave her a party at her aunt’s home.

For that day, Hilda felt like Cinderella. But when it was over, she had to go back to the orphanage, not knowing when she would see her mother again. That was a hard goodbye.

The following year, after completing ninth grade, the girl decided it was time to rejoin her mother and fulfill another dream: putting her family back together. She was released from the home and crossed illegally into the United States, as her mother had done before her. She got a job at a hamburger joint in Santa Ana, and later she worked at a downtown restaurant and a jewelry store.

Soon, she arranged to bring her brothers and sisters north, too, including three half-siblings. Finally, the family was together.

*

Only one person was missing: Pacheco’s father. About four years ago, she started looking for the man she hadn’t seen in 25 years, since the day he had left. By chance, they found him in Mexicali, Pacheco said, where he had started a new family.

In 1998, Pacheco, along with her brother and sister and their families, rented a 16-passenger van and drove to the border for a wrenching reunion. She recalled that the old man apologized and “cried like a baby.”

Pacheco told me her tale over lunch this week on a sun-drenched patio at Irvine’s Il Fornaio restaurant, a genteel location in contrast to her harsh history. In a sign of her ingrained independence, she didn’t allow me to open the restaurant door for her. She also ignored the waiter who pulled her chair out, preferring to seat herself.

“I’ve had a life of not waiting for anybody to do something for me,” she explained. “I just do it. It comes with the territory, when you’re the oldest and you’re the one in charge.”

Until now, Pacheco avoided getting married, though she has two children. Her rationale: “I won’t have a husband, so I won’t have to deal with him leaving me.”

“You know how warped that is?” she asked.

Pacheco keeps framed photos of her beautiful children in her office. Tony, 15, is pictured in his football uniform; Victoria, 10, in her ballet costume.

By getting married now, Pacheco says, she wants to be a role model for them, showing them what a whole family can be like. After three generations, no more single mothers.

“It’s kind of a cycle,” said Pacheco, who turns 38 next month.

A cycle that starts with the men, I interjected. Doesn’t she feel any anger toward her father?

She said she used to cry every time she talked about his leaving. It had shattered her security. Wasn’t she lovable enough? Wasn’t she a good kid?

Yet she learned that what happened doesn’t necessarily mean anything about her.

“People make mistakes,” she said. “And he suffered too. . . . I could choose to be mad at the world, or be mad at every man that I see. Or I could choose to do something that makes a difference.”

That she has.

At Pacheco’s “fairy-tale type wedding,” where she made an entrance on a horse-drawn carriage, her father was by her side. She had asked him to give her away.

“That was my dream,” she said, “to be able to unite my two worlds and have harmony.”

*

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