Teenage Mother Clings to Dream

Bakersfield

We stop in front of the small wood-frame house, and Maribel Galvan goes inside to ask if I’d be welcome to ask some delicate questions.

Two sisters and their family live here. The 18-year-old got pregnant three years ago, and Galvan’s job as case manager for Clinica Sierra Vista is to keep the 15-year-old from making the same mistake.

So I sit in the car, thinking about something state Sen. Dean Florez had told me about California’s Central Valley, where low wages, limited opportunities and a large Latino population combine to produce a teen birthrate rivaling those in Third World countries.

“Our No. 1 crop is not agriculture,” Florez had said. “It’s babies.”

I knew the 18-year-old with the child was undocumented, and that 40% of the births in California are to foreign-born women. While waiting in the car, I think of all the ways the 18-year-old and her boyfriend -- by making a baby -- have burdened themselves, their families, the child, the state.

I’ve learned by now how complicated these stories can be. But it’s hard not to dwell on the impact of runaway hormones on overcrowded schools, choked highways and clogged emergency rooms. In the year that ended last July, 524,000 babies were born in California. Immigration only accounted for 288,000 new residents, roughly a third illegal.

Galvan reappears and waves me inside, where the mother of the teen girls greets me and apologizes for the mess. The family is remodeling and painting.

The 18-year-old isn’t home yet from her job at a fast-food restaurant, but the mother and the 15-year-old sit with me in the living room. I ask Mom if she had talked to her daughters about sex.

“Yes,” she says, and though she is smiling, her eyes begin to fill. “All the time.”

When the mother leaves the room, the 15-year-old tells me her older sister has advised her to stay away from guys altogether.

“All guys think about is sex, drugs and fights,” she says. “Guys my age think they can control girls.... My sister, she got pregnant her first time. I never liked him.”

The family came up from Mexico several years ago, she says, and they are all undocumented: the two sisters, their preteen brother, their mother, their stepfather, their grandmother. The only one in the house who’s legal is the 2 1/2-year-old, who was born here.

This is now so common in California the family is perfectly comfortable sharing the information. Why not, given the mixed signals the U.S. government puts out?

Despite the charade on the border, illegal immigrants are here because it’s easy to get to the United States, where they can legally attend school or go to the county hospital. And there is no end to the number of employers gladly offering low wages that beat anything south of the border.

In this house, everyone has at least one job, including the grandmother, who cleans offices in the evenings after caring for the toddler. We hear footsteps on the porch now, and here comes the tyke’s 18-year-old mother, pushing through the front door.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says.

She sits next to her younger sister on the sofa and the mother comes over, too. The pretty, smooth-skinned mother has something in her eyes -- something sweet and pained -- and she has passed this on to her teenage girls.

All three are holding hands before long, and a storm of emotions passes through the room, leaving all of them in tears.

I know what’s wrong, but I ask anyway.

“She was perfect,” the 15-year-old says of her big sister. “I mean, not that she isn’t now. But she was the straight-A student, always did everything right. Nobody expected this.”

How did it happen? I ask the 18-year-old.

The family is very close, she says, because that’s the way their culture is. And yes, her mother told her not to fool around. But her mother is of a different world, and neither her love nor her wisdom prepared the girls for the world they confront each day. In a way, the sheltering makes them easy targets.

She sees friends of hers falling into the same trap all the time, the 18-year-old tells me. So many parents are out of the house, working multiple jobs, and their kids are left with time on their hands, drugs on the streets and a culture that celebrates large families and traditional gender roles.

“I started to learn things from this guy, and I got too much into it,” the 18-year-old tells me of the boy who got her pregnant. He was three years older.

“I realized there were things I didn’t know about the world. My family hardly ever went out. I’d never had a chance to experience things on my own, and we started ditching school together.”

So why didn’t they use protection?

“I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything because I thought he would leave,” she says. “I could have spoken up, and I feel like a coward for not doing it. I could have done something, and I didn’t, so I’m responsible.”

She hid the pregnancy until she was several months along, then she cried, told the truth and made a vow that she would not be ruined by this. She would not let one mistake, one moment of abandon, ruin her life.

Her son enters the room and jumps up on the sofa to hug her.

“I don’t see it as something bad -- it was an experience, and now he’s my motivation,” she says of her son, whose father recently began coming around now and then to see the boy.

She decided not only to stay in school, but to put herself on a college track. One teacher in particular was a big motivation, she tells me. Not because of his encouragement, but because of his rants against immigrants.

Her mother and grandmother bring out photos of her recent graduation and hand them to me proudly.

She graduated on time, with honors. She got a scholarship, too, and has already enrolled in community college for the fall. She wants to be a lawyer.

I came into this house assuming you and I would end up supporting this young woman, and was about to leave thinking we may all be working for her one day. She may be a rare exception, but she’s also the dream that draws people north.

Her little sister looks at her with admiring eyes, and now they’re all crying again while the little boy climbs up for a hug. The 18-year-old tells me she set up her college schedule so she can still work and also help care for her son.

“I don’t want to have to depend on anybody,” she says.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve

.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at

latimes.com/lopez.