Haydee has poise.
Everybody says so: "Haydee has poise." Or, "Haydee has matured nicely." "She is steady." So forth and so on.
People cluck over her, older people unrelated to her who have watched her through the years. They cheer her on. They tsk, tsk, tsk reprovingly if she disappoints them.
Her full name is Haydee Marilu Rodriguez de Leon. She arrived in this country from Guatemala on Jan. 1, 1979, four days before her 13th birthday, and moved in with her grandmother. Her parents had broken up, and she became the foster child not only of abuela Delfina Pereda, but, in effect, of the then-minute Hispanic community of Baltimore.
She is 32 now, a young woman with many people still watching her as she evolves into one of that community's leaders. She is the new chief of Centro de la Comunidad, the East Baltimore charity that offers social services to Hispanics. For this, Haydee Rodriguez will need her poise. She will need all the help she can get.
The Hispanic community in Baltimore has grown possibly by 100 percent in the past eight years. It also has been transformed in every other measurable way. As it has gotten bigger, its complexion has changed; its education level has plummeted, it has gotten poorer and its needs have multiplied dramatically.
Haydee Rodriguez will be one of the key people in the city trying to meet those needs.
She has narrow dark eyes, short hair; her hands are small, and she keeps them still in her lap. Her voice is very young, especially on the telephone, and a little weepy. She is notably intelligent, manifestly soft -- but may be tougher than she appears.
When Orioles general manager Pat Gillick last May ascribed Armando Benitez's bad behavior in beaning a New York Yankee to his more "emotional" Latin culture, Haydee Rodriguez shot back from her office, then in City Hall: "If he's going to make that sort of observation, then he would have to comment on the temperament of people in England and Germany, where we have seen people crushed and trampled to death after a soccer match," she told The Sun.
Marliese Diaz, head of the local branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, has known her for a long time. "She has grown as the community has changed," Diaz says. "All of us who knew her as a young woman are very proud of her."
So who is Haydee Rodriguez, and what is she all about? How did she get where she is today?
She is a woman who may have had the perfect experience for the job she has undertaken, including a life-transforming experience.
Haydee Rodriguez came from a country at war with itself for the better part of 30 years. A violent, atrocious conflict it was, and though she lived safely in her grandfather's house in fluorescent Guatemala City, the war darkened the background of her early years.
She had a blind great aunt, and she was charged with reading the newspapers to her. She remembers the stories about young people disappearing, "pages and pages of them." One remained in her mind: a 16-year-old student who disappeared and was later found dead, tortured.
It was something for a young girl to brood about, and she did. But once she got to Baltimore there were other demands on her attention. "My first three years were years of adjustment, learning the language, adjusting to my parents' separation and such."
Expectations developed early on about Rodriguez, maybe because her grandfather, Carlos Efrain Rodriguez, had been a pilot and diplomat who served as secretary to three Guatemalan presidents, or maybe because her grandmother, Delfina Pereda, was a community activist -- she'd founded Baltimore's first Hispanic social organization. But the young immigrant grew up without giving off much in the way of precocious indications. She went to a Catholic middle school, then Seton High and Loyola College. She studied modern philosophy. She did the usual volunteer work of a concerned student. She graduated.
In 1986, while she was still a sophomore at Loyola, she was re-introduced into that violent atmosphere that had shadowed her youth. A delegation of clergy and students was organized by Chester Wickwire, the former chaplain at the Johns Hopkins University, to visit Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador. All of these countries were being steadily reduced by civil wars, and the United States had a hand in it.
To say the visit affected Haydee Rodriguez is an understatement. For a month the group toured refugee camps, relocation villages. In every country they encountered the meeker victims of these wars, the weak and helpless rendered utterly abject.
Of a camp in El Salvador, she said: "It was the most depressing sight I have ever seen. They were primarily women and children. They were there because they had been forced there, and it seemed to me, from the look on their faces, they were lost. They had absolutely nothing, and they had been placed in these camps. Nothing."
It changed her life.
When she returned to Baltimore and her studies, she had difficulty reconciling the jarring contrast between here and there. She began to think that human progress was a myth. She began to ponder "the sheer inability of men to improve their condition."
"It seemed to me we keep making the same mistakes over and over. It seemed to me that we talk so much about learning from our past, but never do."
After her graduation in 1988, she worked for a summer as a telephone counselor at a Baltimore sexual assault recovery center, then landed a job at the Hopkins library. After a year, she took time off to think about her future, then signed on with the mayor's Highlandtown outreach station in 1991.
Then something else happened to change her life. While she was working in the outreach station, handing out old clothes to the down and out, the new stadium at Camden Yards was going up. Leaders from the construction gangs showed up at City Hall to complain of Hispanic illegals penetrating their ranks. Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke suggested they call the police, advice that didn't sit well with Schmoke's own Committee for Hispanic Affairs. The committee made known its disapproval. The mayor clearly needed help. He was told about a young Hispanic woman in East Baltimore.
A voice of the mayor
Haydee Rodriguez became widely familiar as the mayor's spokeswoman on Hispanic affairs. She learned how to handle herself in the difficult arena of public life, how to take criticism, how to implement policy, keep her focus. She was the voice of City Hall to the community, but not the reverse. About this, some complained.
"She has been effective in carrying out Mayor Schmoke's party line, but that is not necessarily best for the community," said Javier Bustamante, editor of El Coloquio, a local Spanish-language newsletter. "We had no forum to express ourselves. The only potential forum was the mayor's Committee on Hispanic Affairs. She had been very effective at muzzling it."
Others criticized her for playing favorites among the various Hispanic groups, helping direct public money to some while neglecting others, and thereby dividing a community already riven along lines of class, nationality and legal status.
But in the end, Bustamante conceded, she did the best she could under the circumstances and endorsed her as the person to run the Centro.
After seven years with the mayor, Rodriguez decided it was time to move on. She had other things to do, other goals to meet.
A lot of people think she left to run the Centro because the pay was better. It is. It is also widely thought she needed an atmosphere of reduced pressure and more time to finish her studies at the University of Baltimore's law school, where she has just finished her first year. She does.
Will she get it? Not likely, and this has to do with those other changes Diaz referred to, in the community itself.
"The community evolved mostly through professional people," Diaz says, "but now the majority are people who are not professionals." It has a new face and many, many more voices.
The 1990 census counted 28,538 Hispanics in the Baltimore area. Two years ago a census estimate turned up 47,400, a 66 percent increase in six years.
People close to this community say even that figure is low, people like Angelo Solera, whose job is to go out for the City Health Department and find Hispanics to inform them of the health services available to them. He estimates there are 40,000 in the city and 20,000 in the suburbs. Many are illegal and uncounted.
It is a young population. They are appearing in neighborhoods outside their traditional preferred locale, East Baltimore. They are on Reisterstown Road, in Waverly and South Baltimore, in Charles Village below 25th.
Their presence is reflected in the proliferation of small businesses. The few Hispanic-owned shops or restaurants in Fells Point five years ago have grown to more than 30. The one or two Protestant Pentecostal churches, reflecting immigration from El Salvador and Guatemala, have grown to eight or 10. At least three Spanish-language newspapers are published in the metro area.
More Hispanics are coming into Baltimore all the time, says Solera, and not just from Latin America. They come from California, Texas, Miami, New Jersey, "because there's work here and Baltimore doesn't have so many Latinos."
Latinos, he says, are sought-after as workers: They will work longer hours for less pay.
"They have their needs. They have families to support. If you have a person who is illegal, he says to himself, 'If I work hard for this or that person, he will keep me here.' If you go into Little Italy, I guarantee most of the people in the kitchens are Hispanics. Who are doing the landscape work? The construction? I think most are Hispanics."
Anybody who doubts this might want to check out some of the established helping agencies for these people. The Spanish Apostolate on South Broadway, for instance, which offers free English lessons to Hispanics (actually, to any non English-speaking foreigner), has seen its client rolls increase 89 percent in the past six years; 33 percent of that growth came within the past year.
The Education-Based Latino Outreach program, which offers academic tutorial services to Latino children and English instruction to adults, has watched its roster grow by more than 100 percent in the past five years, according to its director, Jose Ruiz.
The Centro, in existence only since 1995, registered a 180 percent increase in its caseload in the first two years. The average person who walks into the Centro's offices, says Haydee Rodriguez, "came to the United States within the last five years, has an education of six to eight grades, comes from Central America or Mexico."
Most of the men are looking for work, any kind of work. Most of the women are looking for children's services. This population, then, is made up mostly of the struggling poor. The era of the Hispanic doctors, lawyers, architects who once characterized the community are long gone.
That means more work for Haydee Rodriguez, not less. More fund-raising, more seminars, more phone calls to find jobs for desperate young men, more counseling to ameliorate the stress on families under the siege of poverty, trying to find their way in a land whose culture is frequently antagonistic to them.
But most of those who know Haydee Rodriguez have confidence. "If we had 10 more Haydees," Solera says, "we'd be well-off."
Making connections
As she sits in her office at the Centro, a box-like brick building on Pulaski Highway (an ironic location, a block from a statue honoring veterans of the Spanish-American War), Rodriguez makes a connection between what many in the community here have to deal with day-to-day and what took place years ago in Central America. She sees the same lost look on many of the people who walk into the Centro that she saw in Central America. She calls it a "look of social alienation."
"These are people who don't have language skills, who came to this land of opportunity and face this alienation. I see families who have left children behind, people who want to learn English but are working 16 hours a day at minimum wage."
She does not equate them with the people from the ruined towns of El Salvador, but she does regard them as refugees. "But for the war," she says, "these people would not be here."
The wars in Central America faded out about 10 years ago, more from exhaustion than from the pacific inclinations of the antagonists. Also, as Communism died in Europe, the United States lost interest and stopped pouring materiel into the region.
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala are at peace. But many of the national assets and much of the infrastructure are destroyed, and there are still refugees, internal and external, people who have yet to find their places.
Wars tend to do that, live on. In Colombia a civil war broke out in 1948 and left the country a political wreck for two decades, inculcating the habits of violence that characterize that country today.
It is knowing all this -- how bad it can be -- that prepares Haydee Rodriguez for her task. And she has exemplars, people who have shown her what is, and what isn't, worth living for.
There was Ignacio Martin-Baro, a Jesuit. She only met him once, during her visit to El Salvador in June 1986. He impressed her with his "level of commitment to people who would otherwise be forgotten." He was there to stay, amid the chaos; a Spaniard, he become a citizen of El Salvador.
One night in 1989 Martin-Baro, five other Jesuits at the Catholic University in San Salvador and two women attached to the university were murdered by Salvadoran troops.
Haydee Rodriguez wrote in this newspaper that she wouldn't cry, just try to tell as many people as she could what kind of man he was, and the advice he gave anybody who came to ask him how things were. This was, "Believe your own eyes. Believe your own experience. Go where the real people are "
Which is where Haydee Rodriguez is today, among the real people.
Pub Date: 8/18/98