"California now resembles Mexico — everyone thinks like in Mexico. California's
broken."   (Guess who broke it?)

This is a typical L.A. Times article, relating the sad saga of an illegal immigrant
family and pointing out what they need (i.e., larger home and minivan), obviously in
the hope that someone will step forward and wave a magic wand...AAC

Captions under two of the photos shown which accompanied this article.

VISITING: Anzaldo, Magdaleno and daughters Hayley and Katherine, both 3, at White
Memorial Medical Center before the quadruplets were released. They’re in need of a
larger home and a minivan.
(Genaro Molina / LAT)
Jul 17, 2006

CROWDED HOUSE: Anzaldo watches TV with Hayley, 3. They share the one-bedroom
apartment with 10 other family members.
(Genaro Molina / LAT)
Jul 17, 2006

From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
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.
By Sam Quinones, Times Staff Writer

July 28, 2006

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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."

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.

"Four is too many. I'm still trying to believe this happened to me."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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."

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.

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

We are allowing Mexico to export their poverty problem
to America.....

The majority of immigrants (illegals) in this country are welfare
class; uneducated, untrained and a detriment to our communities,
turning them into one giant barrio after another....AAC