A member of a Gresham-based Latino parents' group on school issues, Tomasa Mendez usually sits quietly while more outspoken leaders discuss their children's education. 

At a recent meeting, when facilitator Francisco Lopez of El Programa Hispano asked her opinion, her eyes crinkled in laughter and she melodramatically ducked her head into her hands to express her reluctance. 

Lopez waited. Eventually, Mendez spoke, in Spanish: "People say about this group: It's not my problem; I don't want to come. I think we should all bring someone next time, so we can grow." 

Excellent idea, Lopez said, and then asked each parent in the room to bring someone to the next meeting of the Latino Alliance of Families for Education. The year-old grass-roots group formed under the umbrella of El Programa Hispano, a Catholic Charities service agency with centers in Gresham and Canby. 

One person at a time, one meeting at a time, the relationship between organizations such as El Programa and the Latino communities they serve is changing. Once regarded primarily as service agencies to help immigrants fill out forms and get housing and food, the programs are evolving as the area's Latino population becomes more settled. 

Migrant workers who used to travel between Oregon and Mexico are putting down permanent roots here, and finding year-round work. People who used to rely on centers to get by in a foreign land are taking an active role in a place they now call home. They are learning English, working toward better jobs and seeking a voice in their schools and communities, organizers say. 

The change has been documented at Centro Cultural, a nonprofit community center in Cornelius, said Sabino Sardineta, executive director. 

In 1992, his first year as director, Centro Cultural served 20,000 to 25,000 hot meals. In the most recent fiscal year, 11,000 meals were served. 

"We are a proud community," Sardineta said. "Once people become stable, I don't see them coming to take advantage of the kitchen." 

With fewer basic needs to fulfill, Centro Cultural has shifted its energies toward efforts such as helping organize a showing of nearly 70 parents, many of them farmworkers, at a Cornelius City Council meeting. The meeting earlier this month addressed a proposal for a Migrant Head Start Center, which had been denied by the planning commission. The council overturned the decision. 

"From the beginning, since its founding in 1972, people never thought Centro Cultural was going to be about giving people food, blankets or heaters," Sardineta said. 

But changes in immigration and amnesty laws, combined with an economic downturn in Mexico, brought a flood of migrant farmworkers in the 1980s, most of whom scraped out a meager subsistence in camps. As a community center, Centro Cultural had to respond to the needs of its community, he said. 

"Our focus was in that direction at the expense of our original goal of the empowerment of people and the development of economic opportunities. But we never really forgot about that," Sardineta said. 

In fact, Centro Cultural always had programs with self-sufficiency in mind, such as a program started nearly 10 years ago with Tuality Valley Centers to train farmworkers in electronic assembly. In three years, 45 workers were placed in local companies. Centro Cultural even started a small electronic assembly company, Sol Manufacturing, which today has seven employees and contracts with area businesses. 

Along the same vein, Centro also runs a 2-year-old cooperative called Adelante Mujeres, or Forward, Women, that brings immigrant women together to learn and produce folk arts to sell to local stores, churches and bazaars. 


"They are listening" 
Just as Centro Cultural adopted a new role in organizing community activism when people's concerns reached critical mass, El Programa Hispano began bringing together school parents because they were ready to take action. 

Now nearly a year old, the Latino Alliance of Families for Education presented a list of demands to officials from the Reynolds School District in Gresham at a meeting last fall that drew nearly 500 people. As a result, the district now sends notices home in English and Spanish and has interpreters available when parents call or visit. 

"Now, we want to work to have more information for Latino students and their parents to prepare them for college," said group founder and organizer Adrian Risendiz, whose grandchildren are in the district. "We are organized now, and the district is seeing that we have force. They are listening." 

Though El Programa Hispano, which opened 18 years ago, still helps people fill out immigration forms and find housing, the way those services are provided has changed. 

For example, Lopez said, someone recently called the Gresham center asking for help filling out IRS forms. In the past, a staff member may have filled out the form for the caller, but instead Lopez directed him to the IRS' Spanish-language help line. 

While he has encountered some resistance from those who were used to relying on El Programa to hand-hold them, Lopez said more immigrants are eager to become more self-sufficient. "People want to take a role in what they do. They don't want a social worker to speak for them. It's a change in mentality." 

At the most recent Latino Alliance of Families for Education meeting, parents were asked to list what they thought were the most pressing problems in the schools. Concerns included consistency in the curriculum, communication between the schools and parents, as well as gang and drug prevention. 

Parent Juana Vargas, however, wanted to tackle a deeper issue. She stabbed her marker in the air, pointing at the Spanish word "discriminacion" on her list. Next to it she had drawn an unhappy face and a stick-figure cartoon of a donkey. 

"There are stereotypes of Latinos that we are like burros," she said in Spanish, her eyes hard as people in the room muttered sounds of agreement. "Teachers think that we only know how to work, but not to excel." 

Alvaro El Maya Gongora, a machine operator and one of the group's organizers, told the parents -- whose ranks include carwash and restaurant employees, as well as farm and construction workers -- not to get discouraged. 

"I think we shouldn't assume we know nothing. We are always learning. It doesn't matter if we have money or not, everyone has the capacity. It doesn't matter if you are wearing a suit or tie or not."