In 1985, a 5-year-old Mexican girl was orphaned by a devastating earthquake in Mexico City. Two years later, she was adopted together with her three sisters by a family in La Canada Flintridge, and on New Year's Day 1988, she watched proudly as her oldest sister represented their native land on the Red Cross float in the Tournament of Roses.
On Friday, that little girl, 18 now, will ride in the 1999 Rose Parade--as a princess in the Rose Queen's Royal Court.
Yvonne Bisgaard, now a senior at La Canada High School, is one of six young women chosen from 801 hopefuls.
"It's the finishing touch to a fairy tale," says Constance Towers Gavin, an actress who appears as a wicked woman on the soap opera "General Hospital" but who, in this story, is the fairy godmother.
The story began in March 1986 when Chris Bisgaard, a prosperous attorney in L.A., and his wife, Sharon, read a news story about Project Connie. Under the program, Gavin, wife of then-ambassador to Mexico John Gavin, hoped to find adoptive homes for youngsters orphaned by the earthquake, which had taken more than 6,000 lives.
The Bisgaards were particularly touched by the plight of the Torres Mendoza children and by Constance Gavin's pledge to their father, Jorge, who was dying of leukemia at 35. He had sought her out and begged her to use her influence to keep his girls together and find a home for them in the United States. She promised to do her best.
Goals Set Aside to Make Room for the Girls
Then in their late 30s, the Bisgaards had a 14-year-old son, Christopher, and a 13-year-old daughter, Lara. Soon Chris and Sharon would have been empty-nesters, free to travel, to pursue personal goals long deferred (in Sharon's case, getting a master's in social work and resuming the career she'd put on hold). But they always had wanted more children. They had love to share, not to mention a spacious home with a pool and a guest house.
"The Bisgaards were everything, if not more, that I had dreamed of finding," Gavin said at the time.
The adoption process was to be beset with obstacles placed by the Mexican government, which generally is reluctant to have children adopted out of the country. But by Christmas 1986, Gavin was able to bring the girls--12-year-old Claudia, 10-year-old Sandra, 6-year-old Yvonne and 2-year-old Jennifer--for a holiday visit with the Bisgaards.
The following April, the Bisgaards flew to Mexico City, where the girls were boarders at a convent school. Chris and Sharon signed the papers and brought the girls home with them.
Yvonne, now 18, recalls with a laugh that when that she first saw her new home in La Canada Flintridge, "it was so big!" She thought it was a government building. The only home the girls had known was a one-room apartment at the end of an alley; it had been the best that Jorge, a blue-collar worker, and his wife, Arcelia, a cleaning woman, could provide.
The girls had shared a bed with their parents. There was no running water. The bathtubs at the Bisgaards' were such a novelty that a second water heater had to be installed to accommodate the girls' penchant for multiple daily baths.
Still, the melding of the Torres Mendoza and Bisgaard clans seemed fraught with peril. Here were young children who'd lost both parents and been transported by a strange new mama and papa to a strange home in a strange land. The emotional wrenching was particularly hard for Claudia, who'd had to face the horror of identifying her mother's body in the earthquake rubble and then had become de facto mother to her siblings.
But the Bisgaards were determined to make it work.
Language was a basic problem. The girls spoke no English, and the Bisgaards had only the Spanish they'd picked up in school, which they hadn't tested in years.
"I didn't have a vocabulary of feelings, of the intangible," Sharon says. "I had 'brush your teeth,' 'sit down,' 'be quiet.' I couldn't ask them, 'How are you feeling?' 'Are you lonesome?' 'Are you sad?' "
The language barrier caused a little scare early on when Claudia and Sandra, who'd never had a brother, rebelled at young Christopher's teasing and came running to Sharon to complain that he "nos esta molestando."
Imagine Sharon's horror--until she realized that molestar is the Spanish word for "bother."
Outside the home loomed the specter of prejudice. How would these girls be accepted in a community that is both affluent and overwhelmingly Caucasian?
Early on, as she shepherded her four little girls, speaking to them in Spanish, blond, blue-eyed Sharon evoked stares aplenty.
"People just could not figure [this] out," she recalls. Sometimes people would ask, in front of the girls, "Is their father very dark?"
"I don't know," Sharon would answer, hiding offense behind a sweet smile. "I never met him."
But Yvonne says that from the start, "I've really felt at home, not like I was different. I don't think I've ever been treated differently from my peers."
