RUPERTA AROCHE
2018 marks the 30th anniversary of Ruperta Aroche’s arrival in East Los Angeles, a place she’d never thought she’d see. She recalls her first few months -- even years in the states as ones filled with surprise at every corner.
Her apartment on Lorena Street and Cesar Chavez was simple. Small, but workable for the freshly transplanted 22-year-old making her first few dollars in America as a textile worker. The job itself was taxing as she was paid in the amount of feet of fabric she was able to cut per day. As difficult as it was, she had no other choice. What she once viewed as the promised land was starting to seem more like a ‘compromise’ land.
However, this isn’t to say the city lacked a sense of magic. There were the bright lights, buildings so tall you had to crane your neck back to see the tops of them, and the never-ending traffic, which pulsed a sense of of life into the city. The majestic looking freeways that seemed to endlessly snake around the state had no signs of pot holes and were so very clean and well-kept in her eyes.
What surprised her the most though, were the people. She had never seen so many men fashioned in Pendleton flannels and baggy khaki Dickie’s pants. The women from Puebla, her countryside home town in Mexico, did not tease their hair or line their lips in dark colors. While she respected the identity and style of her new neighbors, Aroche felt as if she was neither from Los Angeles and too far from home in a melting pot to associate with Puebla anymore.
Aroche’s move to East L.A. in the late 1980’s was coincidentally when the county’s gang violence was at one of its highest. According to a 1992 archive from the District Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, gang violence in the city was the worst in the nation at this time. While the loud noises and constant police sirens scared her, Aroche couldn’t complain. She was one of the lucky ones.
Puebla, Aroche’s birthplace, was a tranquil farming community in southern Mexico. Her parents, a farmer and owner of a tortillería had built a life for them there. She recalls walking down the dirt roads and saying hello to each of her neighbors. It was the type of environment where people were born and raised, until little by little, they started to trickle away. The foundation that her parents fought tooth and nail for swayed beneath them as Aroche and her siblings grew older. Jobs were few and far between. Even Aroche, who had a degree in business, could not find work. The clock was ticking for Aroche and her older brother, who is ten years older than her. It echoed in their minds with each passing day.
The decision to leave was meticulously planned. Pangs of anxiety vibrated through Aroche’s mind. She had always followed the rules. Two plane tickets to Tijuana marked the first steps of a long journey. Her and her brother, who had nothing but the clothes on their backs, prepared to cross into the United States illegally from Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad. If they were caught, they’d have to return empty handed back to Puebla, which had them empty handed in the first place.
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They were with a group of ten other hopeful souls, who viewed California as dreamily as they did. It was a chance for them to start a new life. One where they could send money back to their families, see cities beyond their wildest dreams, and eventually, if they were able to make it that far, create a new foundation for the children they’d have someday.
The blazing sun made the trek hard, but the motivation to get to the southernmost tip of California enabled them all to put one foot in front of the other. There wasn’t much conversation because everyone’s focus was on taking care of their own. There were no breaks. Aroche admits that the amount of steps were so dizzying, it’s hard to remember certain parts of the walk.
When night hit, pitch black darkness devoured the dry land around them. Aroche was afraid that her heartbeat was so loud, border patrol would hear her and whisk her or her brother away. Step. Step. Step. The air grew cold and suddenly the footsteps stopped.
“El mosquito! El Mosquito! Corren (run)!”, the coyote who was guiding them through the canyon yelled. Each member of the group dispersed into the darkness, trying to find a bush or hole to crawl in so that helicopters patrolling the border didn’t shine their blinding lights on them and whisk away their chances of a new future.
Aroche held fast to her brothers arm and hid with him in the closest bush they could find. She never saw the other members of the group again, let alone the coyote that was supposed to lead them to safety. When the panic subsided and helicopters disappeared from their view, they adjusted their eyes to the dark and kept walking in the way they had been, one step at a time.
Aroche said it was some kind of miracle, but they stumbled across a new group of people and the coyote leading them said he’d be more than happy to help her and her brother out. She smiled softly at the memory.
“We would be nothing without him,” she said.
Aroche’s memory begins to blur after finally taking her final steps near San Diego. She faintly remembers getting in a van, stopping to eat, and heading straight to Los Angeles, with nothing but those dazzling freeways surrounding her. The journey she thought was over had really just begun.
Now a U.S. citizen, she chuckles when she recalls her beginnings in Los Angeles. “It never really got easier,” she said.
29 of her years have been spent working in textile companies, which she still spends forty hours of work at to this day. In addition, she spent ten years as a housekeeper to make ends meet, driving as far from the South Bay region of Los Angeles to Riverside to make others’ lives easier.
Her hands, pictured above, show a history of hard work many like herself took upon themselves to build a life once deemed impossible. What aren’t pictured, her feet, symbolize the courage of those brave enough to leave and strong enough to take the steps many of us could not imagine having to. The journey Aroche was once anxiety ridden to embark on paved the way for her daughter Jennifer, 26, to graduate from UCLA with a degree in theater, and her son Steven, 24, to finish his studies in graphic design from CSU Channel Islands.
“I can rest now,” she said.