Citywide

For Helper of Immigrants, a Tale of Loss and Destiny

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

Ruth Ford runs a center named after her aunt and another nun, who were killed in El Salvador.

By DAVID GONZALEZ

Published: December 31, 2007

It was August when Ruth Ford realized her resistance was no match for a nun’s persistence. For weeks, Sister Mary Burns had been after her to take over the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center in Brooklyn, where immigrant women learn English, finish high school and develop job skills. Ms. Ford was looking for a job in journalism, but Sister Mary wanted her to lead the center she had founded in 1993.

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Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

The Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center in Brooklyn draws several hundred women each year to learn English and other subjects.

“After a while you stop saying no because it gets you nowhere,” Ms. Ford admitted. “You just say yes.”

Persistence of memory was just as responsible for her decision. The center is named after her aunt, Sister Ita C. Ford, and Sister Maura Clarke, two Maryknoll missionaries from New York who were among four North American churchwomen raped, tortured and killed by soldiers in El Salvador on Dec. 2, 1980. The women had gone there to work with the poor.

Her arrival at the center was the latest stop on a complicated personal journey, considering that her aunt had become an icon whose smiling face and pixie haircut was now portrayed in everything from posters to devotional cards. Granted, her family link to Ita would help raise not only the center’s profile, but also much-needed funds for its programs. But it also made her feel a little uncomfortable, as on the September day when she was welcomed by teachers and students with hugs and prayers.

“They prayed over me,” Ms. Ford recalled. “I was so flabbergasted, I thought I was going to break into tears. It was very overwhelming. I’m related to Ita by blood and fate. I could be anybody. There is respect for me that I have not earned. Yet.”

Sister Mary had no such reservations.

“I sometimes wonder if I was waiting for something like this to happen,” she said. “It seems so right. It has come full circle.”

For Ms. Ford, 41, it is not easy living up to the memory of her aunt and the others who made such enormous sacrifices.

“Sometimes it is hard to relate to Ita as this iconographic figure,” she said. “You don’t want to feel like you have this saintly scold hanging over your head.”

So she keeps nearby a photo of Ita, taken in Chile in 1973, her laughing heartily. Often she wonders what Ita would have done had she lived. She reminds herself that sometimes one has to savor the small victories. In that, she is guided by the words of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating Mass in San Salvador a few months before the churchwomen were killed.

“He said you can never do everything,” she said, paraphrasing him. “Instead you should do the small things you do well, because that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are prophets of a future that is not our own.”

The future is a big thing at the center, where several hundred women go each year for classes. Some of them also work in cooperatives that sew clothes for dance companies or bake cookies for parochial schools.

Most of the women (and a handful of men) arrive eager to learn English so they can help their children with their homework. Many of them are from Mexico, where the economy has long prompted parents to head north to take menial jobs in restaurants and factories with the hope that their children will escape that fate.

Teaching English, it turns out, is not such a small thing after all.

“To me, they are tremendously motivated,” said Sister Eileen Trainor, the center’s associate director for education. “They are devoted to their children, and they will do anything for them.”

Sister Eileen, whose father lived nearby when he arrived in Brooklyn from Ireland, bemoaned the current political debate on immigration that casts the area’s newcomers as an economic and security threat to the country. The center, she said, does not ask whether someone is here legally.

“Immigrants have always been around,” said Josefina Carbarin, who obtained her high school equivalency diploma at the center and now plans to go to college. “Since ancient times human beings have looked for a better place to live.”

She found it in Brooklyn, where she has lived since leaving Mexico three years ago. Her husband is a cook at a hamburger place. She cleans houses on Long Island. One of her five children is a champion at chess and in class.

“No. 1!” she said in English, which she learned at the center. “In school, No. 1. He got 4.0.”

These accomplishments have not gone unnoticed by her sister-in-law, Cristina Sanchez, who followed her to Brooklyn two years ago. Her husband got a job delivering burgers. She works weekends as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant. She comes to the center to learn English. Though she is still getting used to her adopted tongue, she has learned to use it at the local public school her sons, Jorge and Armando, attend.

Last year she was unhappy with how her eldest son, Armando, was doing in first grade, where he had been placed in a bilingual class.

“But he learned nothing,” Ms. Sanchez said. “In English or Spanish. So I decided to change him into regular classes. The teacher said he would have to repeat first grade, but I promised him I would help him.”

Though she herself was learning English, she encouraged the child. Sister Eileen helped him master his lessons, too, she said.

“By May the teacher said he had learned a lot,” she said, smiling. “He turned around!”

Armando is in second grade, which might not seem like a big deal. But don’t tell that to his mother.

“He and Jorge know so much more than I do now,” she said. “I keep telling them to keep on learning so they can teach me.”

Such comments are typical of the parents, though Ms. Ford thinks the mothers sometimes sell themselves short. Some of them have talents they can use to earn a living and have some measure of control over their lives. She is trying to help one woman find studio space where she can make Mexican-style pottery. And she is searching for other dance companies to purchase clothing made by the sewing cooperative.

Seeing the women and their children inch forward into unfamiliar territory gives Ms. Ford a sense of accomplishment, too.

“When I am in my office, I’m applying for grants, and there is an air of panic about that,” she said. “But when I am around these women, it feels hopeful.”

That is especially so in December, a month that starts with a painful anniversary, but ends with the promise of a new beginning. Before closing for the Christmas holidays, more than 100 students and relatives packed a classroom at the center, where they sang carols. In another room, tables were stacked with dolls, games and toy cars that were donated to the children.

There was a Nativity pageant, with Cristina Sanchez portraying Mary, kneeling and cradling a plastic baby Jesus. There were songs about angelic heralds and guiding stars. And there was the expectation that in a few more days, the Magi would grace even Menahan Street.

Ms. Ford stood to the side and took it all in. Not too far from her was a portrait of Aunt Ita, along with Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel, all of whom lived to work among the poor. Their smiles were frozen in time.

“This is always an emotional month,” Ms. Ford said. “You would think after almost 30 years you would not react anymore. But you always do.”

She recalled attending a memorial service on the 10th anniversary of the murders, where she saw portraits of the churchwomen held aloft on banners.

“As a Catholic, I think I finally had a comprehension of the Resurrection,” Ms. Ford said. “So many people believed and still believe in what they did. When I saw those banners, those faces, it struck me. Of course they’re not dead.”