Complex reality at street level - training immigrants as garment workers

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 12, 2001 by Arthur Jones

Los Angeles center battles for immigrants -- and trains them for sweatshops

It's a storefront on drab East Seventh Street in Los Angeles' hustle-bustle garment district, just a couple of blocks over from rough-and-tough Skid Row. The door opens, a young woman or man looks in, covertly, cautiously. Ava Castorena is invariably there. She's asked a quick question or two, and the inquirer, deeming all is safe, enters.

The Los Angeles garment district will soon have another pair of hands sewing shirts, blouses and pants for the fashion industry. Castorena is the instructor.

"It's mainly word of mouth," said the Rev. Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest and former Catholic nun, as she explains how newly arrived immigrants hear of Las Familias' free sewing lessons. Callaghan two decades ago founded Las Familias del Pueblo as a community center for garment workers and their children (and 25 years ago was on the front page of NCR when she left the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus for the Episcopal church).

The average sewing trainee -- they're in their 30s or younger, with a couple of children -- is newly arrived in the United States and doesn't speak any English. If the trainee has any skills, said Callaghan, "we might see them twice. Others we see for several weeks. Then they've found a job."

Not that Callaghan helps them with skills -- she can't sew a stitch. But then, when she started Las Familias, she couldn't speak a word of Spanish, either.

There's a modern art sculpture outside the center that once held a sewing machine aloft. Late one night someone wrenched it off, and the statue remains bereft. Inside, though, there's still the rank of sewing machines at which Castorena shows the immigrant women and men how to use the industry-style equipment identical to that in the nearby sweatshops and sewing factories. A retired factory owner, Eve Vollmer, began the program.

Recruitment is healthily haphazard. "We could have three people this week, one person next, and 12 the week after that," said Callaghan.

To some, preparing a person to work in a sweatshop might seem a retrograde step. The petite, peppy Callaghan dismisses such sugared notions: "First find ways to help them get work, get some money coming in, feed those kids, get somewhere to live -- then worry about next steps."

Las Familias is full of next steps -- English lessons, legal aid, after-school drop-offs and programs for the children. (The ice cream man times his visits to coincide with the arrival of the 100 or so young children who come thundering in around 3 p.m. daily once school is out. They stay until their parents' stint is finished at their garment district job.)

Doing something useful

To the battling Callaghan, who's usually confronting some government or business agency on behalf of the immigrants or the inhabitants of nearby Skid Row, the noise of the kids is angel music. She's also extremely protective of their parents who, she says, would be intimidated at the thought of being interviewed, even anonymously.

Worrying about the immigrants' future is a step up for Callaghan compared to 20 years ago, when she was anxious about their immediate safety. Those were really the bad old days when immigrant families were ending up in Skid Row's flophouses.

It's been some odyssey, recalled Robert Wyckoff, retired president of oil giant Atlantic Richfield Company, and for 20 years chair of Las Familias' board.

The pair met at All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena where, for eight years, first "Sister Alice" and then "the Reverend Alice" did homeless outreach in the city.

Wyckoff credits Callaghan with "helping me find ways to do something useful for other people. She's just incapable of seeing an injustice or a wrong without doing something about it. She decided she wanted to spend some time just walking around Skid Row to figure things out."

(The term, Skid Row, comes from 19th-century logging jargon. Skid Road was the track logs were sent down. Later -- before entering urban slang as any city section that draws the unemployed, the hobos and society's cast-offs -- Skid Row meant the place unemployed loggers congregated. At 50 square blocks, 11,000 inhabitants -- 7,000 of them living in 65 single-room-occupancy hotels -- Los Angeles' Skid Row is perhaps the nation's largest.)

Born in Calgary, Canada, Alice Callaghan was raised in Los Angeles and Orange counties, joined the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus and, in northwest Pasadena in the early 1970s, with a couple of other sisters, started an alternative school in an old Methodist church. "Loved kids, hated teaching," she summarized.

Her involvement with All Saints Episcopal Church came through its Peace Center Against the Vietnam War. "I asked them for a job. `I don't cost anything,' I said, and as it was a job that didn't really exist." She added social outreach programs for the homeless --meals in the park, and Union Station, now the largest of all the homeless "missions" in Pasadena.

During that time at All Saints, she made three decisions. One, to not be a nun. Two, to pursue ordination. Three, to see if she could make herself useful around Skid Row, Los Angeles, 12 miles away.