SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

December 2, 2006

A family struggles in adopted country

Farmworker group offers help

By Erika Pesantes
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Lake Worth · The sweet scent of corn tortillas swirls inside Maria Francisco Manuel's kitchen well before the sun peeks through the boards covering the window broken last year by Hurricane Wilma.

On the stove, a large pot of hearty chicken soup, generously overflowing with string beans and potatoes, brews before breakfast.

Manuel, from Guatemala and a single mother of three, tends to gardenias, bougainvilleas and other flowers in Wellington's equestrian fields and nurseries.

But life for her is anything but rosy.

The Farmworker Coordinating Council of Palm Beach County helped the struggling family with food and clothing donations and with the $850 rent and utility payments.

Manuel, 38, and her family can't survive off the $310 she makes at the nursery each week. So, in the American entrepreneurial spirit she adopted, Manuel sells lunches she prepares by 5:30 a.m. to co-workers. She also offers other day laborers who live in Lake Worth rides to Wellington.

"There's no money," Manuel said quietly.

The cooking and carpooling help Manuel bring in an extra $200 each week. All this, she says, is for a more promising future for her children, Mercedes, Gerardo and Cristina.

"I'm going to fight for them. They're beginning to enjoy their lives," said a somber Manuel in Spanish. Her dark eyes are glazed with sadness as she remembers losing her son, Samuel, about six months ago.

Samuel Ramos, 20, was beaten so badly in June by someone he knew as a friend that he died five days later at Delray Medical Center. In a drunken rage, Arnoldo Garcia-Perez kicked Ramos in the face with his steel-toed work boots until Ramos passed out, according to a police report. The blows to his head caused a blood clot that killed him.

Lake Worth police charged Garcia-Perez with second-degree murder. He is in jail on a $100,000 bond and awaits a trial set for Jan. 3, six days before his 24th birthday.

For the first time, Manuel returned to her mountainous homeland she left more than 15 years ago to bury her eldest son. Ramos, raised by his grandparents in Guatemala, had to be laid to rest near those who saw him grow into a man, Manuel said.

"He couldn't live without talking to [his grandparents]," she said, sometimes talking about her son in the present tense.

Lake Worth Police Officer Oscar Cardenas helped the family after Ramos' death. Cardenas, who had never made funeral arrangements for anyone before, helped Manuel arrange to transport her son's body to Guatemala, he said. He also referred Manuel to the Farmworker Coordinating Council, which assists farm workers who often shy away from needed social services because of their legal status and language and cultural barriers.

Manuel's youngest child, Cristina, 14, wants a job "at Burger King or Publix," anywhere she can make a few extra dollars so she can pitch in for the household, she said. But Manuel doesn't want her daughter, who would like to be an immigration lawyer, to lose focus on schoolwork.

"She means a lot to me. Sometimes she'll be gone for a few hours. When she's not home, I don't eat," Cristina said. "Without her, I can't live."

Cristina and her sister, Mercedes, share a bedroom and a full-sized bed with their mother. Although Cristina would like the luxury of owning a computer and of having her own bedroom, the tight quarters are not her biggest concern, she said.

She wants to live in a neighborhood where she can walk out to the mailbox feeling safe, where fights don't break out and robberies aren't commonplace, Cristina said.

"I want to find a place, if God allows, a place that is secure," her mother said.

Manuel is looking for another home in Lake Worth to celebrate the holidays, one close to family, one where the windows aren't shattered. Her apartment's living room on North C Street is mostly barren save for a lone chair in the middle.

The family gathers for meals at a table adorned with a tattered, plastic tablecloth topped with three bottles of hot sauce. But no one ever has time for breakfast as the sun rises.

"It's already late," Manuel tells Mercedes at 6:22 a.m., as she finishes flattening balls of dough on a prensa, a cast-iron utensil. The fried tortillas are prepared and wrapped in aluminum for the lunch meals. Outside the bathroom, family members wait in line toting toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Mother and daughter float around the cramped kitchen, avoiding stepping on two pet cats, Pepito and La Niña, next to the rust-speckled refrigerator.

Outside, a passing train howls in the distance. And next door, as the sun stretches above the horizon, neighbors blast banda, a brass-based form of traditional Mexican music. The singer wails: "Esta vida mejor que se acabe, no es para mi, pobre de mi."

"This life of mine, it's best that it end, it isn't for me, oh, poor me."