By Sara Burnett
Daily Herald Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Eighteen-year-old Nadia Tovar is not only sheltered from the sun as she harvests asparagus in Guanajuato; she's also sheltered from a lifestyle most young American girls take for granted. Nadia quit school at age 12.

RANCHO SANTA ROSA, Mexico - Lupe Schoffstall's earliest memories of Rancho Santa Rosa are filled with just-butchered chickens, cows with protruding rib cages and daily treks to the river for water.

As a girl, Lupe, now a bilingual teacher in Palatine, never heard of a place called "school." She never saw a book until she was 7 or 8.

Back then, there was a drought in this part of north-central Mexico. People were hungry, and even the tiniest hands were put to work.

"They made us kids clean out pig intestines for sausage casings," Lupe recalls, "because it was the dirtiest job."

Lupe, now living in Cary, was able to cross back into the United States at age 10 because she was born in Chicago.

It was only then that she learned to read and write.

Each year, thousands of Mexicans follow her path to the United States. Some are legal immigrants. Many are not.

In 2002, more than 1.1 million Mexicans lived in Illinois, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 40 percent of them were women.

For many of those women - particularly the recent arrivals - the life they find here may as well be a world away.

Without a breeze, the heat quickly grows oppressive in Rancho Santa Rosa's one-room schoolhouse.

The six families still living on the ranch teamed with the government in the 1980s to build the concrete-block structure.

It is in the center of the ranch, a few hundred feet from the five concrete homes where the families live. About 50 feet away is the old chapel. Next door is a pen for roosters and sheep.

Seven-year-old Yesenia Martinez sits inside the school, elbows on the table, the children's book "La Ronda de los Cornudos" ("The Horned Serenaders") inches from her face.

She sounds out the words slowly. Flies buzz around her head and her older brother, standing over her shoulder, blurts out the more difficult words before she can put the sounds together.

She ignores both.

Yesenia is one of only two young girls on the ranch. Her only classmates are her male cousins: Jaime, 5, Samuel, 10, and Rafael, 12. Cousin Yaheidi, 4, is too young to go to school.

They study phonics, math, reading, writing, science and art much the way early Americans did in rural schoolhouses. One teacher - a different one each year - travels to the ranch each day, teaching each child individually while the others work on their own.

Yesenia is just learning to read and is eager to show off her skills, though it takes more than 30 minutes before she reaches the end of the book.

Lupe Schoffstall didn't even know what a book was when she moved to the United States at the age of 10. Now she's a bilingual teacher at Winston Campus school in Palatine. Here she works with student Raul Hurtado, 13, of Palatine.

"Fifteen pages," she boasts, as though she hardly believes it. "That book was 15 pages."

Next year, Yesenia's brother will travel to a nearby town to attend the Mexican equivalent of high school. The year after that, cousin Rafael will follow. Then Samuel.

But not Yesenia.

Like her mother, her older sister and many of the women in Mexico's rural areas, the little girl will not continue her education beyond six years.

The reason, her father says, is that it simply isn't done.

The girl can read books and study at home, like her older sister, Yesenia's mother adds.

In other areas of Mexico, women may leave school to help in the fields or the home. They may get married or have children.

Between 1993 and 1997, 64 percent of Mexicans were enrolled in Mexico's three-year secondary school, the program that follows six years of primary classes. In the United States, 97 percent of youths were enrolled in secondary school - or grades seven to nine - during the same time period.

Federal law requires Mexicans attend school for nine years, an increase from six years approved in 1992. Yet the law is largely ignored. In 1995, the government announced its graduation rate - those who complete the full nine years - was just 62 percent.

It is a fact of life that doesn't bother Yesenia.

Instead, she is far more preoccupied with growing big enough to milk cows, the sure sign that a girl has become a young woman.

"My hands are too small," the doe-eyed girl explains, holding up her tiny palms, her mouth turned down in a pout.

As family legend goes, Lupe Schoffstall's grandmother came to the United States from Mexico tied to the bottom of a boxcar, eight months pregnant and with a young son in each arm.

Somewhere in rural Nebraska, she thought she might go into labor, so she untied herself and found a place to live.

A few days later, she gave birth to Lupe's mother.

By the time Lupe was born in 1944, her mother had moved to Chicago and married a second-generation Irishman, only to see her new husband sent overseas to fight in World War II.

A young Mexican girl waits patiently for a photographer on the day of her Quincinera, a celebration of a girl becoming a woman held on or around her 15th birthday. She was waiting in the lobby of a hotel in Morelia, Michoacan.

Within weeks of her husband's departure, Lupe's mother decided she couldn't work and care for a daughter.

So she sent Lupe to live with an unmarried aunt on Rancho Santa Rosa.

By age 3, Lupe was betrothed to a young boy named Julian who also lived on the ranch. They were to be married once Lupe reached 13.

"If we waited until 15," Lupe explains, "I'd be considered an old maid."

Even now, women in Mexico marry young. Only 5 percent of women in the United States are married between age 15 and 19, according to the 2002 Women and the World study. In Mexico, it is 18 percent.

That wasn't the only difference between life on the ranch and life back in Chicago.

There was no school at Rancho Santa Rosa then, no classes for the children or books to read.

Then one day, a strange woman came to visit.

"She had something in her hand," Lupe recalls. "It was hard. She opened it up and started saying words. I didn't know what it was, but it looked interesting because it had pictures."

It wasn't until Lupe's grandmother brought the girl back to Chicago in 1954 that someone filled in the blanks.

The item with the pictures, she learned, was something white people called "a book."

Just as in the United States, the 1970s brought a period of social change for women in Mexico, particularly in its urban areas and wealthier states.

Women like Estela Cepeda of Mundelein, then living in Mexico City, started attending college and getting jobs.

Part of the reason was a failing economy - more and more women had to get jobs for the family to make ends meet. Others, like Cepeda, began acting on a belief that women needed to be independent.

Lorena Martinez, 17, stands in the doorway of the one-room school on Rancho Santa Rosa, while her younger sister, Yesenia, reads inside. Lorena quit school after six years and now studies by reading books at home. Ye-senia will do the same.

Even so, Cepeda credits her father for insisting she attend college, then medical school.

"I'm very proud of him," says Cepeda, now the executive director of Open Door Clinic, a resource center for Hispanics in Mundelein. "He most of the time said 'You have to study, you have to. If you don't have a good husband, you can take care of yourself.' "

At the time, women made up about 15 percent of the Mexican work force, according to the U.S. Library of Congress' 2002 country study of Mexico.

By 1990, the number had doubled. By 2002, about 42 percent of all women worked outside the home.

The majority of those women, though, still are in urban and wealthier areas.

Women from rural, poor areas - the women more likely to emigrate to the United States - do not have the same independence or education levels.

In 1998, the most recent year for which data is available, babies born to Hispanic mothers made up about 19 percent of all babies born in Illinois, but nearly half the babies born to women without high school diplomas, according to the state department of public health.

In Kane County, 64 percent of Hispanic mothers who gave birth in 1998 had no high school diploma. In DuPage County, Hispanic mothers made up just 14 percent of all births but 68 percent of those to women without a diploma.

Uneducated and dependent on their husbands for transportation and money, they often are unwilling to complain if there are marital problems or if their husband turns violent.

"I tell them, 'You have to learn to drive, you have to learn the language,' " Cepeda says. "'What is going to happen if your husband dies? Or if they leave you, what are you going to do with your family?' "

Lupe Schoffstall's teeth were rotten. Her mother had to shave her head to kill the lice. She needed glasses, and she was malnourished from years of poor nutrition.

But Lupe was going to catch up, her mother insisted.

At home, they spoke only English. Lupe's mother would give her food only after she learned the word and could say it without an accent.

Lupe started kindergarten at St. Mary's of the Lake on the city's north side in the spring of 1954.

At 10, she was twice the age of her classmates and by far the biggest kid in the class.

She was a target for ridicule, picked on for everything from how she spoke, to the way she made the sign of the cross.

Like the other kids, Lupe made the sign from forehead to chest, and shoulder to shoulder. But following Mexican custom, she also included a fifth "stop," this one on the mouth.

"They thought that was funny," Lupe recalls.

Antonio and Yesenia Martinez are framed by an old building on their ranch. The now-crumbling adobe building is similar to the kind Lupe Schoffstall would have lived in during her time on the ranch some 50 years earlier.

She completed kindergarten by the end of the school year, starting first grade in the fall and finishing it six weeks later.

By the time the family moved to the south suburbs in the spring of 1955, she was finishing sixth grade.

Lupe's family moved several times during her junior high and high school years, finally settling in Rolling Meadows, where her mother managed a Brown's Chicken.

Lupe enrolled at Arlington Heights High School. There were no blacks in the school and only seven Hispanics. Lupe was the only one whose parents didn't work at Arlington Park racetrack.

Midway through her junior year, Lupe took an aptitude test to determine what her future career should be.

The results, her counselor said, suggested she try something repetitious.

"Like working in a factory," the counselor said.

Lupe didn't like the sound of that.

"I said 'Fat chance.' "

Reluctantly, the guidance counselor handed over information. A community college would be best, she said.

This was before Harper College in Palatine, so Lupe had to take a train and two buses - a 1¨-hour trip - to visit Wright Junior College in Chicago.

Her mother, as adamant as she had been about Lupe losing her accent and assimilating to the culture, had other, more traditionally Hispanic ideas. They involved getting married and having babies, perhaps working for a few years.

There was no way her daughter was going to college.

"She said boys do not like girls who are too smart."

Some 200 hundred miles to the southeast of Rancho Santa Rosa, 18-year-old Nadia Tovar is bent over in a field, cutting asparagus.

There isn't enough work for everyone on the ranch where Tovar lives. So every morning, she and about 40 other residents load into a truck and go to work other people's fields.

They wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts and scarves or hoods to block the sun. On ropes around their waists are plastic buckets; in their hands, they carry small sickles.

For eight hours a day, they bend at the waist, select and then cut the stalks ready to be harvested.

A university graduate walks the streets of Zacatecas with her family on graduation day. Although many women in Mexico -- particularly its rural areas -- don't attend more than six years of school, this young woman plans to be a teacher.

LaMena corporation, the company that owns this land in rural Guanajuato, pays them about $8 per day.

Nadia, like the other women on her ranch, quit school after age 12 to go to work.

This job isn't too bad, she insists. It pays better than the factories, where women may work for only $4 or $5 a day.

"We don't work that hard," Nadia says. "We do, then we stop for 10 or 15 minutes for a break. We drink water."

Nadia's friend, Maria, admits she may have liked to have been a teacher.

But Nadia is more pragmatic. "You can only do so much. Your parents struggle to make money to send people to school, they cannot send everyone."

Lupe Schoffstall worked three jobs to save enough money to go to junior college, despite her mother's disapproval.

At school, she joined the cheerleading squad and met the handsome captain of the football team, Harry Schoffstall.

Lupe's mother never warmed up to the idea of her daughter going to college. So a few months into the year, she kicked Lupe out of the house.

It turned out Harry didn't have a place to go either. So the couple did the only thing that made sense: They got married.

"Harry went to find an apartment," Lupe recalls. "I went to find a priest."

The decision to marry may have been rash, but the couple's goals were clear.

"We started young, very poor, but we knew what our goal had to be," Lupe said. "To stay in school and get an education."

Harry got his degree from Wright College. Then the family moved to California, where both Lupe and Harry eventually qualified for free in-state tuition. There, Lupe and Harry each earned bachelor's degrees.

In 1981, Lupe and Harry - now accompanied by four children - moved back to the Northwest suburbs, where Harry got a job with Palatine Township Elementary District 15.

Seemingly without a care in the world, Yesenia Martinez swings beneath a tree on her family's ranch. Her older brother Ricardo watches behind.

Lupe was a substitute teacher until the district hired her to be its third bilingual teacher. Today the district has about 70, she said.

Over the years, Lupe -a teacher at Palatine's Winston Campus - has worked with charity groups and formed her own one-woman mission she calls "Mother Murphy's Miracles," after her mother.

Through it, Lupe has raised money to take poor Hispanic residents food at Thanksgiving and presents at Christmas. She once bought a bed for a student who was struggling in school because he had to sleep on the floor. Just last year, she paid for a former student's dental surgery and helped another girl, whose mother was dying of cancer, pay rent.

She has been known to meet her husband at the store and insist they drop $100 on groceries for one of her students.

Harry thinks she's crazy.

Lupe says there's another reason.

"I had nothing and I know what it feels like," she said. "I feel so blessed, it would be a sin for me not to share."

Back in California, Lupe recalls, she would drive past the grape fields of the Simi Valley, just north of Los Angeles.

She would watch the migrant workers, many of them from Mexico, bent over in the fields and think about how far she had come, what her life could have been.

Every day, her conclusion was the same.

"I'd look out at them and think to myself, 'There but by the grace of God go I.'"