Land of Opportunity

Rocio quit the plant manager job. At 35, she now works 20 hours a week as a consultant, doing inventory spreadsheets and moderating employer-worker disputes.

Though the workers have a love-hate relationship with her, it’s Rocio they call when they land in jail or need to borrow money.

Gallery Rocio Ortiz meets with workers at a local factory to discuss whether they will take May 1 off from work to campaign for immigrants' rights. Ortiz, who rose from a worker to plant manager to consultant, still works partime at the factory where her hard work ethic and intensity have helped create a highly successful business.

In late April, the week before the national Day Without Immigrants protest, she held a staff meeting, asking for input and interpreting for the boss. After intense debate, a consensus was reached:

Though the employees had considered joining a public protest, they changed their minds, fearful of attracting attention, and took the day off to stay at home, without pay. (Plant employees receive free individual health insurance, and the average wage is $10 an hour.)

“They decided that it’s better to be 'please’ and 'thank you’ with the country,” Rocio said. “If immigration officials are not bothering us here now, why make protest?”

She tries to funnel most of her energy into the business she and Carlos opened last year, a grocery/restaurant/money-wiring business on Melrose Avenue called El Charly and Family.

When you enter the store, “You are in Mexico,” she says. It’s an all-Spanish oasis where construction workers come to wire money home, shoot pool and watch soccer and Spanish-language soap operas.

Video On a cool spring afternoon, drywallers Manuel Perez, Santiago Martinez and Carlos Martinez (left to right) enjoy hot bowls of Caldo de Pollo and Caldo de Camarones for lunch at El Charly and Family. Because many of the workers only have a half-hour for their lunch break, some phone their orders in so the food is waiting on the tables when they arrive.

After doing paperwork at the plant and delivering lunch from her restaurant to the plant workers, who pre order and pay for the food, she works most afternoons at El Charly.

She’s still hard on people, she admits. She gets mad when the plant workers refuse to stay after work for free English classes. “The boss will even pay them for taking the class!” she rants. “But they complain they are too tired!”

To confirm her suspicion that they were not studying on Saturday mornings as promised, she even drove by one of the worker’s houses and, as expected, there were no extra cars there. Thus setting off another rant.

Worst of all: A few weeks before graduation, Rocio was in daily contact with administrators at Hidden Valley High School. Roberto, now 18, still aced his tests, but he was routinely skipping classes, and there was a chance he wouldn’t graduate.

Rocio threatened to station herself in a lawn chair outside his classroom door.

It’s her goal one day to be buried with a college diploma in her hands, and she can’t understand why that’s not her son’s goal, too.

“He is so brilliant and people love him,” she says. “He can be a lawyer if he wants to, but he is too lazy.”

In the weeks leading up to graduation, she said repeatedly that she was so “scary” that he wouldn’t graduate — one of the few English words she still messes up.

And yet she praised Roberto for avoiding drugs and alcohol, for translating for his dad and other Hispanics at the store.

It’s hard to be the son of the woman with the monster, she knows, although she is trying her best now to chill: She put an old recliner in her store office. She tries to nap there every afternoon, with her blanket and a pile of stuffed animals.

“I try to relax, but I still feel like Rocio the Illegal Immigrant who has to do more, more, more,” she says.

“I have too much energy on my soul.”

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