Hardship City

In the early 1970s, a used-car dealer on Santa Ana's First Street beckoned shoppers with a jaunty sign: \o7We speak English! \f7It was a wry acknowledgment of the city's emerging image as a somehow foreign, forbidding place. Among the sunny, sedate suburbs of Orange County, the city of Santa Ana could come across a little like big, bad Los Angeles, complete with barrios, gangs and crime.

Year after year, Spanish speakers had arrived by the thousands, mostly from Mexico, to seek work in the county's robust economy, with or without legal authorization. With wages low and rents high, they packed into Santa Ana's bedrooms, living rooms and sometimes garages. Many stayed and started families, intensifying and expanding the urban character of the county seat. Portable classrooms claimed school playgrounds. Cars crowded the curbs on streets shaded by sycamore, elm and jacaranda trees. Apartments bulged with people; the only sizable California city more densely populated is San Francisco. The 2000 census would reveal another startling fact about my old hometown: More than 150,000 of Santa Ana's 350,000 residents come from Latin America. Nearly three-quarters of its population \o7habla\f7\o7n Espanol \f7at home, the largest proportion in the nation.

Latino immigration also would help Santa Ana achieve a perplexing distinction in 2004--as America's No. 1 "urban hardship" city, in a study by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. Even the institute's director expressed surprise that Orange County could harbor the winner (or rather loser) over Newark, N.J., and other usual suspects in the matrix of wages, housing costs, crowding and education.

Significantly, though, this quality-of-life analysis didn't factor in crime. And even though Santa Ana has long been considered dangerous by Orange County standards, it ranks low--3,436 incidents per 100,000 residents, less than half the crime of, say, Sacramento--in the FBI Crime Index for a city its size. This is all the more remarkable given the abundance of poor, young people (the median age is 26.5) living in tight quarters. The city has serious problems, but it's hardly as hopeless as the hardship study suggests.

If the prime-time soap "The OC" distills the mythology of wealthy, white Orange County, then perhaps a \o7telenovela\f7 could dramatize Santa Ana--or "SanTana," the spelling that the OC Weekly's "Ask a Mexican" columnist sometimes uses to emphasize the three-syllable Spanish pronunciation (\o7sanTAN-ah\f7). Then again, viewers might not want to spend a vicarious hour with the masses who mop floors, change diapers, weed gardens and then retreat to cramped rentals, where sometimes they have to line up to use a single bathroom.