Immigrant faceless in death? She decides not

Julie Alexander saw the three-paragraph item in The Times on Nov. 14 that described the gruesome death of “Jose Garcia, 34, of Santa Ana” and thought, “Nah, no chance.”

There must be dozens of young Jose Garcias in Santa Ana. What were the chances of it being the Jose Garcia she’d come to know and greatly admire from the English-language classes she’d taught in Santa Ana? The one who was coming to her home in a few days to give dance lessons to some of her other students?

Sometimes, reality clamps down on you really hard and does not let go. In the next day or so, Alexander would feel that in the pit of her stomach. The victim -- robbed and beaten as he walked to work in Orange at 1:30 a.m. and then run over by a hit-and-run driver -- was the Jose Garcia she knew.

He died a week ago Monday. Alexander learned it was him that Wednesday. At home that night, she didn’t change out of her clothes. Instead, she went to the computer and began writing about Garcia, whom she’d met in the summer of 2005.

She stayed up all night, she says, the words and her thoughts coming out in fits and starts. Somewhere in the thinking process, she says, came the idea that she didn’t want the death of this otherwise anonymous and invisible illegal immigrant to go unnoticed.

The man she knew, she says, deserved more than three paragraphs.

“He was so young,” Alexander says, sitting in her living room next to her daughter, Adriana, 26, who teaches with her mother in downtown Santa Ana and who also knew Garcia well. “His life was just beginning.”

Sometimes, the mother, a 58-year-old retired elementary school teacher, defers to her daughter as they talk about Garcia. His death is too fresh for them to be “celebrating” his life; they’re still coming to grips with the brutality of his last minutes alive.

“I felt like I was his connection to mainstream society,” Julie Alexander says, softly, almost reverently. “He was just an undocumented person working the night shift. He was really coming into his own. He’d bring in people to the center [where she and her daughter teach]. Half of them, he’d brought in. He became the focal point of the center.”

Unmarried and without children, Garcia lived with his sister’s family in Santa Ana. Alexander remembers his passion for wanting to learn English well -- even the mechanics of perfect and pluperfect tenses -- and asking her to order for him the textbook she used in class. Besides English, he also took dance classes at the center and had agreed to strut his stuff later that week at the Alexanders’ home in north Santa Ana.

“We had moved the furniture in the house. We were ready for the dance,” Alexander said. “Instead, we had a vigil.”

The incident occurred in the 300 block of West Taft in Orange, not far from the laundry company where Garcia was to begin his overnight shift. Police said Wednesday that the investigation remains open but that no suspects -- neither the robbers nor the hit-and-run driver -- had been found.

Alexander says she was surprised by how hard Garcia’s death hit her. Obviously, she wasn’t expecting him to die violently, but it was more than that. In a way that other people no doubt would find off the mark, her family sees him as embodying the best in America -- namely, an engaging, hard-working person who overcomes cultural and language obstacles to improve his lot in life.

He came to America 10 years ago, she says. At his funeral, the Alexanders met some friends and other siblings. They were surprised, they say, to learn of his “other” life with people at the education center where he took English and dance classes. “They asked, ‘Did he step on your feet?’ ” Adriana says of a relative who didn’t realize he was a good dancer. “I said, ‘No, he was a good dancer.’ ”

Garcia will be buried in his home state of Guanajuato in Mexico. Some people at the El Centro Cultural de Mexico, where he took classes, came up with about $1,000 to give to his family, Alexander says. The women hope to expand their volunteer teaching at the center into a larger operation and, someday, name it after Garcia.

They know the feelings of sadness and futility and emptiness will recede, in time.

But not this week, not now.

“He would have just been forgotten,” Julie Alexander says, in explaining why she wanted to talk about him for a story. “When I go through Santa Ana and I see people at a bus stop, it seems like they’re all Joses, and they don’t deserve what could happen to them. I don’t think mainstream society understands that they have so much value and a dignity, and I didn’t want him to just go under ... as if it were nothing. Part of a crime wave that nobody would be interested in.”

I suggest that the laundry worker who could dance cumbia and who was trying to figure out the pluperfect tense would be touched by their efforts.

Julie Alexander agrees. “He would be amazed,” she says, “that he had this kind of effect on people.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.