Tales of Horror Help Immigrant Pupils to Cope

The drawing shows blue sky, green grass, a green tree and a pink house. The people are stick figures. Some are vertical and some horizontal, marked with little blotches of red.

The artist is an 11-year-old girl named Candida Jaco, a student at Western Avenue School in Southwest Los Angeles. On the back are a few lines scrawled in Spanish. Translated, they read:

This is what happens in El Salvador. In the countryside they kill poor families and they steal their corn and what they farm. This is what happens.

Another girl from El Salvador, 16-year-old Norma Dominguez, studied the child’s

drawing and nodded in agreement.

“When somebody wants to be president,” she explained to a visitor, “they do that.”

For more than 70,000 children in the Los Angeles Unified School District, summer school means a chance to make up a class or speed the path to a diploma. For Candida, Norma and 8,000 other students, it means lessons in how to understand a new land.

To understand a new land, the thinking goes, it helps to cope with the old.

“Every child suffers some kind of trauma just coming to a new country,” said Lila Silvern, the district’s director of the federally funded program. In Los Angeles, the program reaches only a fraction of more than 62,000 immigrant children who are eligible, Silvern said. Even so, 105 countries are represented.

Los Angeles, for all of its problems, represents an improvement for many.

What does Candida like best about her new home? Teacher’s aide Graciela Davalos, acting as interpreter, delivers the response: “She says she likes it here because it’s safe and nobody can come and kill them.”

National borders do little to erase memories, good and bad. For that reason, the immigrant classes provide special counseling. It is most important, officials suggest, for children from war zones. “The kids from Southeast Asia, Central America, Iran--they all have horror stories to tell,” Silvern said.

Mary King, a teacher at Foshay Junior High School, can see the difference in attitudes in her class. About half of her students are from Mexico; they are the outgoing ones. The remainder are from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. The Nicaraguans, she says, seem the most withdrawn, especially a boy named Jimmy.

Jimmy is a sweet 15-year-old boy who gives his teacher mangoes but seldom speaks of life back home. In a group discussion one recent day, Jimmy told of how he watched Sandinista soldiers handcuff and beat his mother. Two brothers in the same class then told of how their uncle was shot to death behind his house by Sandinista soldiers who suspected him of being a Contra. The family moved because they think their father is a Contra. The boys asked for anonymity, saying they feared reprisals against their family.

Counselor Richard Halladay encouraged the students to express their memories in art. The works are being compiled for a planned show at the Los Angeles Children’s Museum.

Not all their pictures depicted horror; some were just pretty landscapes. A girl from Mexico who had no war stories to share drew a picture of the border at Tijuana. Halladay was struck that she drew Mexico with bold, vivid crayons, the United States in the dull gray of a No. 2 pencil.

In his drawing, 11-year-old Deibis Martinez, a Salvadoran, depicted a full-scale battle with soldiers, tanks, helicopters and jet fighters. The Western Avenue student also offered political commentary, labeling government forces as “bueno,” the rebel FLMN (Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front) as “malo.”

Two Salvadoran teen-agers at Foshay, a boy named Tony and a girl named Beatrice, considered Deibis’ drawing and expressed problems with his politics.

The rebel soldiers, Tony declared, were the good ones.

Beatrice disagreed with both Deibis and Tony.

“There cannot be good soldiers and bad soldiers,” she said. “They are all the same.”