01 Mar 2012

Citizenship For Some, Catch-22 For Others

Rosario Marin helps Zeferino Presiado prepare for his U.S. citizenship test

Rosario Marin lived and worked in Pescadero for 26 years under a green card. She met her husband and raised two children here. Becoming a U.S. citizen wasn’t an afterthought, but it could have felt that way. Instead, it was momentous.

On December 14, 2011, Marin, 40, stood under a brightly-lit atrium with hundreds of other new U.S. citizens – from countries like Japan and Nicaragua – and pledged her allegiance to the American flag at a swearing-in ceremony with her husband, Enrique, looking on. She wore a specially bought blazer and trousers for the occasion. It was a little overwhelming, and more than a little emotional.

“It’s just the satisfaction of knowing that I am a citizen. I belong here. Also, now I can register to vote,” said Marin, who worked at Pescadero flower nurseries before taking a job as a cook at Duarte’s Tavern.

Marin landed in the U.S. with a green card at 14, thanks to the now-defunct Bracero Program, which enabled her father to gain legal papers as a seasonal farm worker and bring over the rest of his Mexican family.

Marin first sought citizenship in 1997, but gave up when she realized how expensive and onerous the process would be. (It just got more expensive). Then last year she found out that Puente had vastly expanded its immigration and legal services, thanks to a generous $30,000 grant from the Grove Foundation of Los Altos. Puente helped her file her papers for free under a USCIS dispensation for low-income residents, and helped her study for her citizenship test.

Puente has extended immigration services to 36 participants since the program’s inception, including citizenship and visa/green card renewals. Another 16 participants were assigned Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs), an IRS program that allows people without Social Security Numbers to file federal tax returns.

“Often people don’t apply to become citizens because they don’t think they’ll pass the test or they can’t afford the fees,” said Rita Mancera, Program Director for Puente. “It’s important for people to know that we want to help them become citizens. By becoming a citizen, they change the chain of benefits their relatives can have.”

Volunteers are needed to help mentor South Coast residents who are studying for their citizenship. For more information, contact Rita Mancera at rmancera@mypuente.org — or 650.879.1691 ext. 102.
01 Mar 2012

Japan Tsunami Anniversary: Is Pescadero Ready For the “Big One”?

Ranch foremen receive CPR training from Puente

March marks the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of Japanese – and put California emergency officials on high alert. Since that time, Puente has been busy making sure that South Coast residents are prepared for “the big one” when it hits – whether flood or earthquake.

In the pre-dawn hours of March 11, 2011, San Mateo County emergency officials watched the devastating tsunami on the Pacific Rim and issued an evacuation order for homes in low-lying coastal zones. Their first call to the South Coast at 4:45 AM was to Puente executive director, Kerry Lobel.

Ultimately, the tsunami produced no discernible crisis on the South Coast. Far more dangerous was the confusion and panic that morning as people woke up to television footage of a towering wall of water that ripped, Godzilla-like, through Miyagi Prefecture. Officials eventually canceled the evacuation notice, but many Latino residents – especially those living in farm worker housing along Highway 1 – had already fled to higher ground above La Honda, with improvised emergency kits. The county’s automated messages were in English and most people weren’t signed up to receive them. Puente staffers came to the office at 5 a.m. and made dozens of personal phone calls to Spanish-speaking families, but reached and evacuated less than two dozen of them.

“There was a lot of misinformation, and families weren’t prepared to act in the case of emergency,” said Rita Mancera, Program Director for Puente.
Puente helped Red Cross volunteers staff the shelter at Pescadero High School for 100 people – only a fraction of evacuees stayed in town. A group of CERT-trained Puente youth stepped in because the Red Cross didn’t have bilingual staff members to translate.

Mancera ticks off some of the other problems that arose that day: “The Red Cross shelter was not stocked with food or water or diapers. CERT-trained volunteers were not activated.”

Local youth receive CPR and First Aid training from Puente

The South Coast Citizens Corps Council (SC4), along with Puente, have met along with San Mateo County officials to identify several areas of improvement in a debriefing after the tsunami, and Puente is working with the Red Cross and county emergency officials to ensure that communication gaps are filled next time around.

After the tsunami, Puente obtained a $55,000 grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to train 60 key community members including business and school leaders, ranch and nursery foreman, and others in CPR and First Aid (Another 40 Puente youth and staff members also have First Aid and CERT training). Trainings were held in Pescadero, La Honda and at Moon Ridge/Main Street Apartments in Half Moon Bay.

Pescadero resident (and Puente staff member) Veronica Ortega was among those that received the training.. On March 11, she and her husband awoke to a panicked phone call from her aunt, who told her to evacuate. They packed their two young children into their car at the crack of dawn and drove to Skyline Boulevard. “We knew that Pescadero is an area that floods,” she said (Much of Pescadero is in a flood zone, although few of its residents would have been affected by a tsunami) “We knew if something happened we were not going to be safe.”

At the time, the family didn’t even have an emergency kit set aside. Now Ortega says she feels much more confident.
In real emergencies, South Coast residents have learned to take care of their own. But there is a need for a clear plan for the whole community, according to Peter Chupity, an amateur radio operator who lives in La Honda. He would also like to see more volunteers step up to learn how to operate ham radios, and practice using them. It may be the only way to reach the Sheriff’s Office in a disaster.

“We pretty much only have a couple of routes in and out of the area. If we have major weather, slides, or trees down, the roads can be closed for a long period of time,” he explained. “We don’t have gas lines or water lines, so when the power goes out it also means we’re out of water, too.”

Puente, along with its partners at SC4, are meeting monthly to put together such a plan. Fortunately, for our community, March 11 was not a real emergency, but rather a wake-up all to take more action.

For more information, contact Alicia Vega at avega@mypuente.org— or 650.879.1691 ext. 114.
01 Mar 2012

Teen Drinking and Drug Use Impacting South Coast Youth

Pescadero High School students present their ideas for a town mural at at meeting of the Pescadero Municipal Advisory Committee (PMAC)

Valentin Lopez is 16. Some of his friends drink or use drugs, but he doesn’t. He’s seen what happens to people when they get hooked. One close family member has been using for years, and it troubles Lopez a lot.

“He drinks, he smokes, he uses drugs,” said Lopez. “My dad says, ‘You see what this is taking your family to.’”

Lopez, a student at Pescadero High School, joined an alcohol and drug prevention youth group this year, principally to fight what he sees as a growing trend toward troubling behavior among kids his age and younger. He’s been where they gather to drink and do drugs, the space under a bridge in town that’s covered in swear words and gang graffiti.

“Kids feel alone so they try to distract themselves,” he explained.

Puente founded several new alcohol and drug prevention youth groups in 2009 in addition to school based youth groups in 2011 to help students in the La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District (LHPUSD) talk about and cope with issues surrounding illegal substance use. Trained clinicians conduct the group meetings with students aged 10 to 18, using curriculum geared toward prevention and early intervention. The program was developed by Project Success and made possible by a grant from San Mateo County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services (BHRS), and is made possible because of a strong community partnership with LHPUSD, which has had a long history of providing drug and alcohol programming to its students.

Pescadero and La Honda are small towns – small enough to know what kids are doing. But Jorge Guzman, Director of Prevention Services, says people don’t understand how serious the problem has become. Guzman, 27, grew up in Pescadero and describes how much things have changed since he graduated from Pescadero High.

“Back then, high school meant marijuana. It meant some people doing meth and drinking,” he said. “Now it’s weed, meth, cocaine, pill popping, alcohol – and heroin for some.”

More than 60 percent of 9th grade students in the La Honda-Pescadero School District say it has become “very easy” to find alcohol and marijuana, according to their responses to the 2009-2010 California Healthy Kids Survey. Thirty-nine percent acknowledged getting drunk or high on school property at least once.

How could so many drugs be circulating in such a small community? And where are the parents? Guzman says most of the drugs come in from towns like Watsonville, and the absence of any dedicated police presence means there’s little deterrent to drug dealing. Some parents condone what they see as ‘typical’ youth experimentation with pot or ecstasy. Others will allow their kids to drink at home, because they figure at least they know where they are.

That reasoning is both false and dangerous, contends Guzman.

“It’s not okay. It’s not something that can continue to happen if you want to see kids go out there and do things for themselves… People have become accustomed to accepting it as a part of the culture,” he added.

The prospect of changing that culture is what motivates Guzman. He believes the real problem is that kids feel trapped in rural Pescadero. With support from a BHRS community partnership grant, a group of youth, including Lopez, recently started designing a town mural that depicts hope and resilience with the image of two palms cupped together releasing a flock of doves. The mural will read: “We dream with strength and courage and we succeed together.” The teens hope it will send a message to everyone about new beginnings.

“We’re trying to make this mural to ‘restart’ Pescadero – to make the bad image into a good image,” Lopez said.

For more information, contact Jorge Guzman at jguzman@mypuente.org— or 650.879.1691 ext. 142.