Message to Santa Ana: For a Better Job, Learn English

Chamber Promotes Classes in City of 150,000 Immigrants

An ad at a bus stop urges Spanish-speaking residents of Santa Ana, Calif., to learn English at free classes. The city has 150,000 immigrants. (By Don Kelsen -- Los Angeles Times)

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- "Two jobs?" blares a poster at a bus shelter here. The words are in Spanish over a picture of a tired-looking Hispanic woman in a janitor's uniform. "Work and Work but You Still Can't Get Ahead?" reads another ad on a bus shelter down the street. At the bottom, the small print: "Free English classes . . . in 60 locations.

The ads are part of an unusual campaign by the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce to spur the city's 150,000 immigrants to learn English. Here in the most Latino big city in the country -- where fewer than one in five residents speak English at home -- business leaders decided that simply offering free English classes was not enough. The chamber is spending $4.5 million to cajole residents to take the classes and get English workbooks into their hands.

It's an economic development plan, not a political statement, said Michael Metzler, president of the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce. After surveying the city's manufacturing, service and transportation businesses, among others, he said, the chamber realized that employers "could not find enough qualified employees, because when they found somebody who had enough qualifications, they didn't speak English."

The three-year campaign includes outdoor ads, door-to-door outreach and radio spots. The chamber is also buying kits that include a simple computer, which people can use to learn English on their own. The kits are distributed to parents of schoolchildren and to businesses.

In the first two months of the campaign, which started in late January, nearly 1,000 people called the phone number on the bus-stop ads and more than 800 visited the program's Web site.

Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange County, has attracted immigrants for decades. Two hours north of the Mexican border, the city of 340,000 is centrally located in the county, has a strong manufacturing sector and is one of the few places in an area of sprawling tract homes to offer affordable apartment rentals.

The percentage of immigrants here has ticked up quietly for decades, and now half the residents are foreign-born. The city is 79 percent Hispanic, mostly Mexican, and 8 percent Asian, most from Vietnam, according to census data.

One of those immigrants is the city's mayor, Miguel Pulido, who came from Mexico when he was 5. When he arrived, Pulido said, he was the only Spanish-speaking kindergartner at his school. Now he leads an all-Hispanic city council.

Most immigrants want to learn English, Pulido said, but "culturally, there is a disincentive" in Southern California. "I can go to the bank in Spanish, the store, the laundry, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, watch TV -- all in Spanish," he said. Even many Asian immigrant merchants speak Spanish. Workers can build houses, trim lawns, cook in restaurants and work on assembly lines for years without speaking a word of English.

"Where the problem occurs is if people want to go beyond what that subculture allows," Pulido said. "Your ticket into a better job is, do you speak English or not, and can you read and write it."

At Coneybeare Inc., a Santa Ana employment agency that places workers in jobs from manufacturing to white-collar management, there are "absolutely" high-skill jobs that go unfilled because prospects lack English skills, said Victoria Betancourt, the company's president. "The only jobs that are available to somebody with limited English is an unskilled labor or assembly job."

Those are the kinds of jobs monolingual Spanish or Vietnamese speakers do at FSSI, a check-processing company in Santa Ana with 150 employees, chief executive Jon Dietz said. A machine operator can earn up to $12 an hour there without speaking English. But a lack of language skill is "going to limit their mobility in terms of the organizational chart, because the management of the company is in English," Dietz said.

The company has been trying unsuccessfully to hire an account executive to work with clients in English, Dietz said. The job pays $50,000 per year.

On a recent morning in an advanced English class at Santa Ana College, Martin Melgarejo sat in the back looking over an exercise involving a job performance evaluation.

Melgarejo, a 27-year-old from a small town in central Mexico, worked as a carpenter in Orange County for 10 years before he started taking English classes. After an injury that required back surgery, Melgarejo had to quit carpentry, but he said he "liked that work" and wants to go back as a foreman. "I'm here to get more education, so maybe in the future I can get a better job," he said.

The Santa Ana program is thought to be unique now, but it probably won't be for long, said Metzler, the chamber president.

"I've had a number of calls from across the country from people interested in doing something like this. Certainly from California, but also from Iowa, Illinois, New Jersey."