For Six Immigrants, the Constitution Is More Than a Document

Arthur Carter spent four years toiling in the rice fields of Cambodia, where freedom was a forgotten luxury.

Hauled away from his small town by communist invaders, he was part of a labor crew living in tents and tattered clothing, working from dawn till night in the rain and the scorching sun.

He saw the complainers being dragged away to be killed. He remembers watching one field worker desperately plead for his life as marshals clubbed him and slit his throat. “You cannot speak something wrong,” Carter said. “My family’s the lucky ones, because nobody got killed.”

Seven years later, Carter and his family quietly operate the Good Time doughnut shop, a tiny brick establishment whose name bears special meaning in the vast commercial sprawl of Los Angeles. These are indeed good times for the 12 Cambodian refugees, who, like thousands of other United States immigrants, are proudly seeking the new title, U.S. citizens.

With his mother, father, brothers and sisters, the 33-year-old Carter is living an American dream. He has discarded his old name, Wu Be, and now calls himself after the top-ranking American at the time of his arrival--former President Jimmy Carter. He is the first in his family to take citizenship classes, to pass the federal exam and to be sworn in as a citizen. He has also earned a trade-school degree in gemology.

Pouring coffee and tending racks of doughnuts, Carter envisions a day when he will deal in diamonds and precious stones, acutely aware of the rights and opportunities guaranteed him by the U.S. Constitution.

“Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of (the) press--that’s very important,” Carter said. “Over here, we can say what we want if we think it is right, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. That’s very important.”

Carter is far from alone in his views or his background. The number of immigrants sworn in as U.S. citizens last year exceeded 100,000 in Los Angeles and surrounding urban areas--more than 40% of the total number nationwide, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. The numbers for Los Angeles have more than doubled in the last five years.

“This is it--this is the new Ellis Island,” immigration official William Carroll said.

For the most part, the newcomers express an appreciation for American freedoms far beyond what they are taught in citizenship classes. Uprooted from their homes, often in lands of squalor or political unrest, they talk gratefully and knowledgeably about the constitutional rights they now hold. Often, their English is broken--but their hearts and spirits are not.

Uma Dave, 40: She was born in Bombay, India, into a society where men dominate--and where, in many of the smaller villages, women still cover their faces and walk several paces behind their husbands.

“In some parts of India they don’t even educate girls,” Dave said. “Parents decide who (their daughters) will marry. I have seen people suffering . . . if they don’t have a happy marriage. Divorce is not possible. It’s too much frustration for the woman. It’s torture.”

She and her husband, Khiten, did not share the traditional Indian view of the woman’s role, which is one reason they were attracted to the United States, Dave said. In 1969, they visited Dave’s sister, a doctor, who was here on a work visa. For years afterward, she said, they continued to hear her sister’s glowing reports on life in this country. Finally, she said, in 1984, they packed up their son and belongings and moved here permanently, settling in Downey.

Although India is a democratic country, the freedoms under law mean little there, she said. If you speak out on an issue, “nobody will put you in jail,” Dave said. “But it won’t come out . . . in the newspapers or on TV. Your opinion is not really wanted.”

Steve Orozco, 37: Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, he was abandoned by his father and reared in poverty by his mother and older sister. “We were so poor,” he said, “we were sometimes unable to get shoes, even if we really needed them. My mother wasn’t even able to keep me in school.”

Seeking a new start, his mother brought the family to the United States in 1967. They settled in Huntington Park. His mother worked as a maid. Orozco got a part-time job in a bakery, earning $1.25 a day--”enough to go to a movie,” he said.

But it was a start toward modest success: Now a carpet installer, he now owns a van, a pickup and a home in Los Angeles for his wife and two children.

Last year, as city officials pressed ahead with plans for a huge trash-incineration project near his neighborhood, Orozco joined the political process, writing letters to state representatives. “A lot of people started to write letters,” he said. “They stopped the project.”

That kind of public outcry never would have made a difference in Mexico, said Orozco, who is now applying for U.S. citizenship. He has just finished his three-month citizenship class. “I’m proud of those people who made the Constitution,” he said. “Those amendments, they protect anybody.”

Manuel Topete, 53: A compelling discussion in his recent citizenship class centered on the Constitution, as originally adopted 200 years ago, Topete said.

“One person said, ‘It wasn’t too good because they had to make a lot of amendments.’ ”

Topete and others disagreed.

Like a good car, capable of changing lanes, the document and the elected representatives who preserve it are flexible, he said. “I think that’s good. The times change. They (enacted) all those amendments because they needed them.”

A former farmer and small-businessman in Guadalajara, Topete first arrived in the United States in 1957. He has spent 30 years maintaining ties with both countries, but more and more he has seen himself as an American. Now a machinist in Los Angeles, he talks proudly of his eldest daughter, now a junior at UC Berkeley. Five other children may someday follow in her ambitious footsteps.

“I feel much better poor over here than rich . . . in Mexico,” he said.

Topete, who is taking classes to improve his English, said his wife also is learning the language and applying for citizenship. He hopes they will get it soon. “It’s a wonderful country,” he said. “I want to vote for the new President.”

Angie Verrico, 20: Growing up near Toronto, Canada, Verrico listened to her Italian-born parents tell stories of the Old World.

Her mother talked about World War II--how the Germans “would shoot people right in front of them”--and about the bravery and compassion of the American soldiers. “She felt like when the Americans came everybody was safe,” Verrico said. The soldiers “brought food for them, made sure they didn’t get hurt.

“She lived out in the country, in the farm areas. Even the littlest things helped.”

Verrico is being married this month to an Italian citizen who came to the United States as a U.N. interpreter, she said. Her parents now run an Italian restaurant, D’Angelo’s Trattoria, in Laguna Hills.

After six years in the United States, she is about to take the oath making this country her home--partly because of the stories her mother told. “I never thought I would like to fight for any country,” she said. “But the more you hear these things, the more you want to fight for the country where you live.

“It makes you feel good to be American.”

Marcia Chen, 24: She said she felt like a second-class citizen in her native Tokyo because of her Chinese ancestry. Her grammar school--reserved for visiting Chinese--carried a social and academic “dark cloud” that might have kept her from attending a four-year university in Japan, Chen said.

So her family left soon after her 10th birthday, looking for greater freedom and opportunity in the United States. They found it, Chen said. After graduating from high school, she earned a biology degree at UC Irvine and went on to spend a year teaching in China, where some of her relatives still live.

Comparing the different cultures has caused her to think deeply about the advantages and responsibilities that come with freedom, Chen said.

“People in the United States think, ‘If it works for us it’s a great thing--why don’t other people use it?’ ” she said. “But in China . . . people would take advantage of it. They wouldn’t know how to use it. You’re looking at a country that has closed its doors the last 35 or 40 years. It wouldn’t work like it works here.”

Chen, who lives in Whittier and analyzes California demographics for a nonprofit firm in Los Angeles, said she found many of the younger Chinese, under burgeoning Western influence, becoming materialistic and unsure of their values.

“You have to learn to have . . . a sense of appreciation for it,” she said of the American political system. At the same time, Chen said, many Americans have the opposite problem: They take it for granted. “They don’t know the value of it,” she said.