Cultural Conflict

"It's a real conflict of cultures because you have parents who are traditional and monolingual and want to raise the children the old way, the way they were raised," said Gil Carmona, a clinical supervisor at Families of Costa Mesa. "But the kids are growing up in America and are experiencing the Americanized way. We have to work with the family to teach the parents that the kids are being raised in urban cities where they want to do what the Romans do. With the kids, we have to deal with temper. They become infuriated with the parents."

But few, if any, are suicidal, said Carmona and other youth workers across Orange County. While Latino teenagers express distress over the culture clash, they do not seem in any more despair than members of other ethnic groups, several social workers said.

Suicide rates in Orange County among teenagers follow national trends, according to a county report. Of the 223 people who committed suicide in 1997, 10 were 19 or younger. One was a Latina.

In the year that Diana Sanchez has been running the mentoring program at the Save Our Youth Center in Costa Mesa, where Maria Sanchez and other teenagers meet to do their homework, workshops have run the gamut of topics concerning adolescents. Not once has suicide come up, said Diana Sanchez, whose primary goal is to steer teenage girls from becoming mothers by introducing them to other choices.

"The girls growing up nowadays are more assimilated than ever before," she said. "If anything, today's Latinas are more strong-minded and are able to combine the best of the two worlds they live in."

Finding out how the experiences of Latino teenagers locally relate to the behaviors reported in national studies presents one of many challenges for specialists in the field. Even as the CDC report and other studies reveal what some consider worrying trends about Latino teens' mental health, other questions surface that may not have an immediate answer.

Most would agree that the transition from childhood to adulthood is not an easy time for anyone. But above and beyond the normal adolescence pressures, Latino girls may face a different set of issues, said Jane Delgado, president of the Washington-based National Coalition of Hispanic Health and Human Services Organizations.