Life of Activism Pays Dividend

Josie Montoya is so used to giving help she had trouble asking for it.

The Anaheim community activist has been suffering from worsening health problems that have strained her monthly budget of $700 from Social Security. Her arms had turned black and blue from repeated punctures for her twice-weekly dialysis treatments, the result of decades-old diabetes. In less than three months, she had undergone five operations to keep her blood properly filtered.

She takes seven pills a day. As we’ve all been hearing in the presidential debates, people can’t always afford their costly prescriptions. Now Josie, 59, a founding member of United Neighborhoods/LULAC, couldn’t even buy the Tums tablets she must take with every meal.

Then she got hit with the dreaded utility notice. The electricity in the small bungalow she shares with her granddaughter, Angela, was going to be cut off for nonpayment.

“I was ready to give up,” she recalled this week, with tubes still sticking out of her neck where doctors tapped her jugular vein. “I had to fight very hard to keep going.”

A friend urged her to appeal to Los Amigos of Orange County, the community group that holds town-hall style meetings every week over breakfast at the Sizzlers on State College Boulevard. Josie, a regular at the meetings, was almost unable to get out of bed that morning three weeks ago. Ironically, she was roused and driven to the meeting by her friend, a woman she is mentoring through serious domestic troubles of her own.

A Little Help From Her Friends

Los Amigos often lends a hand to people in distress. This time, Josie would be the one standing before the early rising Samaritans with her hand out. But she couldn’t talk without gushing tears. So she privately approached the moderator, Amin David, and opened her purse. It contained the $10 she had left for the rest of the month, and the utility bill for $155.

“I need help,” she got herself to say.

She went to the rear of the restaurant while David made the pitch the group has heard so may times before--somebody needs their assistance.

“I’m starting the fund off with $100, and I want $500 by the end of today,” said David in his commanding voice. “It’s Josie I’m talking about.”

In less than 10 minutes, the group had raised $750. Their cash defused her financial crisis; their goodwill chased away her doldrums.

“What touched me the most was the spirit in which it was given,” Josie said. “It was an outpouring of support that validated the work that I do.”

This week, Josie was back in fighting form--hounding Anaheim officials over a complaint of alleged police abuse arising from an incident at a residence in July.

“I think we’re being too passive, polite and waiting,” Josie said about the pending complaint. “They’re just stalling.”

See, Josie’s feeling a lot better.

She was back to her old self at Los Amigos Wednesday, promoting a local march in tandem with a National Day of Protest Against Police Abuse on Oct. 22. The next morning, before yet another debilitating dialysis session, Josie was helping distribute free food to residents of the low-income Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood near the Disneyland Hotel. The food giveaway was started three years ago by the community group founded by Josie and other Anaheim activists.

Infighting Led to Splinter Group

I learned recently that the group had suffered a bitter rift last year, which ended in a splinter group breaking away. The behind-the-scenes conflict arose during a much-publicized fight with local school officials over a plan to bill Mexico for the education of undocumented immigrants. Josie’s leadership became the focus of dissension.

Critics accused her of being too hungry for power and not progressive enough politically. The internal battle got ugly and personal and was almost as discouraging as her chronic illness.

This week, I felt the lingering tension between the two leaders when I went from Josie’s modest home to the nearby residence of her toughest critic, Seferino Garcia of Solevar, another community-advocacy group.

“She doesn’t believe in solidarity,” Seferino told me. “She just believes in herself.”

Josie returned the complaint in kind. These two are so good at disparaging each other politically, they should be running for president. Yet, it’s no joke. Democrats and Republicans can afford to tear each other down. But Latino community leaders don’t have that luxury because they don’t hold real power, especially in Anaheim.

“It’s so typical of us Latinos,” Josie acknowledged. “We just don’t know how to work together very well.”

Mayor Tom Daly was also once a critic of Josie and her cohorts in United Neighborhoods. They were “long on rhetoric and short on true problem-solving,” he was quoted as saying in 1997.

Today, the mayor has changed his mind about Josie a bit.

“We’ve both mellowed,” he told me by telephone Friday. “I’ve gotten to know her better and she’s gotten to know our police department better, too. . . . I think she’s able to speak for people who don’t know where to go to express their frustrations and their concerns.”

That’s exactly how Josie sees her role--somebody who understands both the system and the people who feel left out of it. Josie explains for them how things get done--the steps they need to take, the agencies they need to call, the people they need to see.

“Power is not something you give yourself,” said Josie, the mother of two grown children. “Power is obtained through information that achieves results.”

Josie says she understands the poor because she’s always been poor herself. She’d be homeless now, she adds, if it weren’t for her federally subsidized rent.

Josie raised her son and daughter as a single mom in the 1970s, following a marriage which she described as “seven years of hell.” She said she was verbally and physically abused and had to go into hiding temporarily to keep her children away from her ex-husband.

“I became this wimp who was afraid of life,” she recalled. “I was thoroughly brainwashed to feel that I was worthless.”

Today, she gets daily calls from parents caught in child custody cases, wives whose husbands are in jail and need a lawyer, students struggling with a teacher at school.

“I can’t go out there and change the whole system,” Josie said. “But I can make a difference one person at a time.”

What goes around, as they say, comes around.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com