My god, but this is a telling article from last weeks LATimes. Almost as surprising: It was produced from that liberally slanted publication.
Anyway, let’s take a look at this piece by staff writer, Sam Quinones.
6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence
An illegal immigrant couple with six children were already living in poverty. Then the quadruplets arrived. They’re still in a daze.
Of course, the sub-headline already reveals that the family is here illegally, but the beginning of the article approaches the Magdaleno family’s predicament without revealing that information for several paragraphs, which is actually quite effective.
With two teenage daughters at home and triplets still in diapers, Angela Magdaleno’s family overflowed from a one-bedroom apartment in South Los Angeles that they strained to afford.
Diapers had to be changed 15 times a day, feedings held every three hours. One triplet, 3-year-old Alfredo Jr., needed special attention because he was born with liquid on his brain and partially paralyzed.
Even simple events — like going to the store — required complex orchestration.
And that was before the quadruplets arrived.
On July 6, Magdaleno gave birth to two boys and two girls, drawing national media attention as a bewildered mother of 10 (with nine living at home). Now, she and her husband, Alfredo Anzaldo, 44, must figure out how to provide for everyone on Anzaldo’s maximum pay of $400 a week as a carpet installer.
Angela is obviously not happy at all to have brought four more children into her already bloated family.
As cameras flashed two weeks ago, capturing the 40-year-old mother with her newest progeny, she appeared dazed, even morose. They’d have to leave their $600-a-month apartment for something bigger. They’d have to buy a minivan with room for four more car seats.
“I was afraid,” she said. “I still feel like I can’t believe it.”
U.S. immigrants’ stories often are about reinvention and newfound prosperity, about leaving behind poverty and limitations.
But that is not Magdaleno’s story.
Both Magdaleno and Anzaldo are illegal immigrants, settled for years in an immigrant enclave. Magdaleno has the same number of children as her parents, who were peasant farmers in Mexico. Like her parents, she is living in poverty and struggling to provide for her family.
Angela, along with her husband Anzaldo, have ensured that their peasant lifestyle and culture in Mexico be brought with them here to Los Angeles. Come here illegally, do nothing to improve your way of life in the process, struggle to support your family, and produce more children that will place even greater stress on lives.
“It’s not sweet,” said her 36-year-old sister, Alejandra. “It’s very sad. The life for girls back there in Mexico is the same as the one Angela has now. They marry and have children, and that’s their lives.”
That was Alejandra, Angela’s sister. You will want to read further to discover her fate.
Neither Magdaleno nor her husband speaks English, though she has been in the United States 22 years and he 28. Even her teenage daughters speak mostly Spanish; their English vocabulary is limited.
Jesus Christ! Twenty-two and 28 years and they still haven’t learned English? None?! What’s even more frightening is the fact that their teenage children barely speak English as well. This is very sad. To me, it speaks volumes on Mexican familial culture–how improving oneself is simply sneaking across the border and continuing a genealogy that one was trying to escape in the first place.
Here in the land of the free though, one can leach off the taxpayers of the state and the country.
Yet all of Magdaleno’s 10 children are U.S. citizens. The triplets receive subsidized school lunches. All the youngsters have had their healthcare bills covered by Medi-Cal, the state and federal healthcare program for the poor.
Alfredo Jr. had been hospitalized all his life until recently. He’s had three state-funded brain operations and will require several more, the family said. The couple receive $700 in monthly Social Security payments to help with his medical needs.
“I thank this country that they gave me Medi-Cal,” Magdaleno said. “There’s nothing like that in Mexico.”
Yes, there’s nothing like that in Mexico. Thank god they’ve come here to have litters of children. I love it when my tax dollars, and yours, are vacuumed up in the illegal alien black hole.
And before anyone becomes overly heated because I have no heart for Alfredo’s condition, please forge ahead further into the article to discover how the triplets were conceived.
Magdaleno’s existence contrasts sharply with that of her younger siblings, who followed her to Los Angeles but then left. They have settled in Lexington, Ky., had no more than two children each and built better lives than they had known before. Four bought houses. Their children speak English fluently.
Magdaleno’s sisters struggle in vain to understand her. “She still thinks like people in Mexico — that’s what I think,” said her 38-year-old sister, Justina. “You have to think first of your living children instead of thinking of having more.”
As stated, this is Angela’s sister. It may be difficult to believe for those of us living in Southern California, and particularly Los Angeles, but this is a Latina making this statement. She used to be illegal, but she applied for legal status, becoming an American citizen years ago. Fuck anyone who claims anti-illegal immigration supporters are racist. Angela’s sister was illegal, and she makes statements that illegal immigration activists claim are racist.
Magdaleno struggles to explain. She said she was wearing a birth-control patch to keep from getting pregnant, then took it off when it made her nauseated.
“I didn’t want any more children,” said Magdaleno, who used fertility drugs to conceive the triplets but said she did not use them in the case of the quadruplets.
I do not believe that statement at all.
“Four is too many. I’m still trying to believe this happened to me.”
SURPRISE! Not.
Angela Magdaleno’s story began as many Mexican immigrant stories do: in a village where work was scarce and wages were low.
She grew up in Los Positos, in the central Mexican state of Jalisco, the eldest of 10. For girls, life consisted of hard work, little schooling, no birth control and thus, said Alejandra, raising “all the children God gives you.”
Angela and Justina left school at fifth grade to work in fields and tortilla shops to help support their family.
In 1984, hoping to make more money to send home, the girls were the first Magdalenos to cross illegally into the United States. Angela was 19. The sisters found work in sewing factories, and apartments in the growing Latino immigrant communities of South Los Angeles.
Over the years, their eight siblings followed them.
Angela married, had two daughters, then divorced.
Wait! You can’t do that. You’re Catholic! Bad! Bad!
In 1990, she met Anzaldo, an immigrant from the state of Nayarit, Mexico, who had three daughters from relationships with two women — one in the U.S. and one in Mexico. Anzaldo was working in auto shops.
To me, it just sounds like Anzaldo is a horny mother-fucker, and again, not a very good Catholic.
The couple married in 1992 and had a daughter together.
Magdaleno then had a tubal ligation. She thought she was done having children. But a few years later, things changed.
Anzaldo had only daughters, and the couple were getting older. He saw his chance at having a son slipping away.
“I wanted a son,” he said, “because I didn’t have one.”
Instead of bringing forth yet another welfare child into this world, I would like to give you a punch to your mansack, sir. How about that?
Magdaleno too had always wanted a boy. Anzaldo paid for an operation to reverse Magdaleno’s tubal ligation. The couple thought they might return to Mexico after the child was born.
Anzaldo paid for the operation? I seriously doubt that.
But for several years, she didn’t get pregnant, Magdaleno said.
So she asked a woman who returned periodically to Mexico to bring her back fertility drugs. The woman supplied her with various pills and injections over several years, Magdaleno said.
“I took a lot,” she said. “I don’t remember what they’re called.”
Finally, in 2002, Magdaleno got pregnant — with triplets.
And then there were six.
Talk of returning to Mexico ceased when their son, Alfredo, was born with hydrocephalus.
Their life became cramped and chaotic, with seven people crammed into their one-bedroom apartment.
Gee. I wonder how that happened.
Joanna, Magdaleno’s oldest daughter, now 20, dropped out of high school and moved out with a boyfriend about the time Magdaleno became pregnant with the triplets. She now works in a factory making dolls for Disneyland, her mother said.
It warms my heart to know that Angela and Anzaldo want the best for their children.
Now here is where the article becomes very interesting. We’re going to discover what happened to Angela’s sisters after they moved from Los Angeles to Kentucky. I don’t see how they honestly could survive. I mean, these were illegal-immigrants who had no grasp of the English language. They were strangers in a strange land. They would be outcast. Their lives would become a shambles as Kentuckians, filled to the brim with their proud southern heritage and known for their racist ways, would surely drive the Mexican immigrants from their great state. Surely.
As Angela was having children, her siblings were undergoing a transformation of a different kind. They were slowly leaving Los Angeles.
Her sister Alejandra was the first to leave. In Los Angeles, she and her husband were barely able to make ends meet. As in Mexico, “there was little work and it’s poorly paid,” she said.
Eight years ago, she and her family moved to Kentucky, where a friend said there was more work and were fewer Mexican immigrants bidding down the wages for unskilled jobs.
While illegal immigration activists are shouting that illegals do not drive down wages, here is one who matter-of-factly speaks the truth. Yes, illegal aliens drive down wages. But be wary, dear readers. It gets even worse for Alejandra.
In Kentucky, Alejandra picked tobacco. The work was hard and she didn’t know the language. But soon, life improved. Over the years, she invited her siblings to join her. One sister married a man who managed a Golden Corral, a chain of all-you-can-eat buffets. Soon several Magdaleno siblings were working in Golden Corrals. Their husbands found work installing windows and as farm-labor contractors. They went to night school to learn English because few people in Lexington speak Spanish.
Today, the Magdalenos in Lexington earn more than they did in Los Angeles, in a city where the cost of living is lower. Kentucky is now their promised land, and they talk about California the way they used to talk about Mexico.
Well, it didn’t get worse. The Kentucky Magdelenos have done quite well for themselves. Why? Because they made a choice to assimilate. They had to conform to the standards of the community in which they were residing in order to survive. And guess what? Their lives have improved significantly because of their assimilation. That doesn’t mean that they’ve abandoned their culture. It simply means they wanted to better themselves in their new home. The Kentucky Magdelenos are living proof that assimilation is not difficult if illegal immigrants from Mexico abandon their peasant culture.
“What we weren’t able to do in many years in California,” Alejandra said, “we’ve done quickly here.
“We’re in a state where there’s nothing but Americans. The police control the streets. It’s clean, no gangs. California now resembles Mexico — everyone thinks like in Mexico. California’s broken.”
Again, a former illegal from Mexico spoke those words, and she speaks the honest truth. If anyone believes we are not being invaded, simply make a trip to downtown Los Angeles. There you will see how Mexico has been brought to this country piece by piece. That’s just the way it is. But it doesn’t have to be, as Alejandra and her Kentucky sisters have proven.
Justina was the last to leave Los Angeles, about the time Angela was pregnant with the triplets.
She and her husband wanted better schools for their sons, 15 and 9.
In Lexington, she said, “at the school there are just people who speak English. It’s helped my children a lot.”
Congratulations Justina. You are awesome.
Justina, who came to the U.S. with Magdaleno, applied for legal residency under the 1986 amnesty law and is now a U.S. citizen. Magdaleno never applied.
The sisters say they have urged Angela to come out to Kentucky — at least to visit. She said she hasn’t because her son has been hospitalized so much.
*Sigh*
This next portion of the article is another telling piece of skewed ethnological retention and culture shock, and once more, reveals how dishonest (or at least how out of touch) illegal immigration activists truly are.
Last year, however, she sent her daughter, Kelly, 17, to Kentucky for several months. Though American born and raised, Kelly hadn’t been outside South Los Angeles.
In Lexington, school was hard because few people spoke Spanish, and the city “barely had one Spanish radio station,” Kelly said.
God forbid! You mean there are places in the United States where the predominant language isn’t Spanish? That’s incomprehensible.
Her cousins, she said in English, “use more educational words than here. My cousin is 7 years old, and he has a better reading level than me. He don’t see picture books or drawings or anything like that. He just likes books with pure letters.”
Illegal aliens, and illegal immigration activists, take note of the above. Amazing, huh?
Girls from Mexican-immigrant families in Kentucky, she saw, were in their mid-20s and still didn’t have children.
“I said, ‘Damn, that’s weird,’ ” Kelly said. “The girls right here in Los Angeles are like in Mexico. There are girls that are 14, they got kids.”
That makes me very sad.
The family in Kentucky “is more in the United States than” her mother, Kelly concluded. “They want a better education for the kids. With less kids there’s better possibility of you having something.”
It would make me very happy to see Kelly take this experience and try to improve herself based upon what she learned from her family in Kentucky–to see her assimilate and cultivate a life apart from Mexico and what she knows of her Los Angeles existence. The American dream is not an illusion. It is attainable.
Magdaleno, meanwhile, was raising six other children and using a variety of birth control methods — the latest being the contraceptive patch.
She said she was stunned when doctors told her that she was carrying quadruplets.
“She didn’t do this on purpose,” said Dr. Kathryn Shaw, who delivered the couple’s triplets and their quadruplets. “She was not at all elated, and not excited about the fact that they were quadruplets.”
Regardless, it seems fairly evident that Angela, whether she was fully aware of it or not, was still partaking in some sort of fertility program. Perhaps she and Anzaldo only wanted one additional member of their family (by the way when do you realized you must stop?! When you follow triplets with quadruplets? Is that finally enough fucking kids?)
All are healthy, Shaw said, but weighed between 3 and 4 pounds at birth. They remained at White Memorial Medical Center in East Los Angeles long enough to gain weight, then came home this week.
Now Denise, Destiny, Andrew and Andrey are with the rest of the family.
For Angela Magdaleno, their arrival — 22 years after she left Mexico and entered the United States hoping for a different life — has brought her full circle. Her older daughters, like girls in Mexico, have been drafted into helping raise the new children.
“I don’t have anything,” she said. “Just children.”
And is that the Latino ideal of wealth as I’ve been told before? Apparently not, as Angela here seems like she’s about ready to put a gun to her head.
Anyway, if anything, this article holds true to the idea that immigrant assimilation is the best means to achieve success in a foreign society. There is no better testament to the contrary than the epic story of Angela, Anzaldo, and their brood who continue to suck from the state health-care, education, etc. teat, while simultaneously emptying legal residents’ pockets in the process.
I applaud the Magdeleno Kentuckians. They did it right (apart from initially crossing the border illegally) and have become successful, contributing members of American society.
For Angela and Anzaldo, all I can offer is my pity. You’ve already got my money.
We Have Seen Better Days 