An Immigrant Learns to Stand on His Own

For years, I’ve seen him at my children’s school every morning, waving parents into the carpool line, stopping traffic for children hurrying to class, guiding buses through the parking lot.

I never thought about him much--he was just Alfonso, the maintenance man--until my daughter came home from school with a story that revealed his unconventional other side.

Alfonso, it seems, doesn’t just trim trees, direct traffic, make sure classrooms are swept and bathrooms are clean. He also writes poetry, practices yoga, studies philosophy and travels annually to India to study spiritual healing.

And one afternoon a year, he teaches meditation to the school’s suburban seventh-graders, who are always more than a little surprised by the renaissance man hidden beneath his janitor’s garb.

“Who would have thought?” my daughter said, after her class. “Alfonso . . . traveling to India . . . to meditate! I didn’t even know he spoke English,” she said, as if that were a prerequisite.

Turns out there’s a lot we didn’t know about Alfonso Otero. And sometimes what you think you know says less about the subject than it does the stereotype.

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His is not the face of immigration that fuels fiery political debate. That belongs to the guys hustling work on the corners, to the brown-skinned children who fill classrooms.

But the reality is that immigration in California is changing. “They” are becoming “us,” just as generations of immigrants have before. A study released by USC last week shows that the pace of immigration to California has slowed and poverty among immigrants is on the decline.

Otero was among that flood of immigrants who came here during the 1970s and ‘80s, pushing the proportion of foreign-born among California residents up by 153%, to one-in-five by 1990.

That group’s successful assimilation accounts for a dramatic drop in immigrant poverty, the USC study shows. Immigrants in California are increasingly long-term, deep-rooted residents, with steady jobs and mortgaged homes, who both contribute to the state’s economic growth and share in its prosperity.

At 65, Otero could be the group’s poster boy. Twenty-two years ago, he came here with his wife and two teenage sons from Colombia, where the dominance of drug cartels there made it difficult for anyone “without connections” to attend college, he said.

They moved in with relatives in the San Fernando Valley. The boys attended Canoga Park High. Otero--a pharmaceutical salesman in Colombia--went to work as a janitor at a small private school.

After six months, he pulled his sons from bilingual classes. “We had to fight everybody at the [school] district to enroll the boys in English classes,” Otero recalled, “but we wanted them to have every opportunity this country offered.” During summers and after school, his sons accompanied him to work, where they helped clean toilets and polish floors.

Today, both sons are UC Berkeley graduates--one an architect with a master’s degree, the other a nuclear physicist with a PhD.

His wife, Elba, has earned one college degree and is working on a second. Otero has had a chance to indulge a passion for yoga and meditation he developed as a young man in Colombia. He is still on the job he started, but that tiny private school has grown into a bustling campus with a busy summer camp, and Otero is head groundskeeper, supervising a crew of 15.

In his early days at the school, Otero’s new bosses--school founders Howard Wang and Mick Horowitz--helped his family get on its feet. “I couldn’t speak English, but somehow we managed to communicate,” he said.

They gave him a car, helped him get an apartment. They had to teach him the rudiments of maintenance work; he’d never done a laborer’s job before. “They helped me with everything, every problem, every paperwork,” he recalled. “They guided me in the American way, so I never felt like I was alone.”

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Wang remembers those early days. What Otero may have lacked in skills, he made up for in determination. Today, Wang says, “he’s the soul of this place. We can count on him for anything. You might not know it to see him, but I don’t think there’s a more intellectual, well-read person on this campus.”

Most of the workers Otero hires now are immigrants too, natives of rural towns in Mexico and El Salvador. He mentors them, helps them buy cars, find homes, manage their money and their children’s needs. He is bringing them into the mainstream, just as Wang and Horowitz--both sons of immigrants themselves--ushered him in through the years.

“This is the greatest country in the world,” Otero likes to say, and there is a reverence in his voice. “Americans don’t know what they have. . . . In so many countries, you just try to survive. Here, you have so much opportunity to learn, you can be anything.”

And he measures his success not just by his new home, his sons’ college degrees on the walls, but by the fact that he is able to stand on his own.

“Howard and Mick, they used to give me their [old] cars, because I couldn’t afford my own. Now, they have an old car, they tell me how much it costs. I pay them for it. They don’t give it to me, because now I can afford it. I will always appreciate their help, but I like it much better now.”

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.