Santa Ana’s Latinos Have a Champion in Officer Vargas

Two distraught couples stood waiting for him one early morning last fall outside his cubbyhole in Santa Ana City Hall.

“Are you Jose Vargas? Are you the man whose picture is in the newspaper? We have something to tell you about this place that took our money,” the new immigrants said. They explained in Spanish how an employment agency had charged them and dozens of others $40 but provided no jobs.

Officer Vargas dispensed with the police report. He wrote out a note on City Hall stationery that politely instructed the agency to return the money. One couple took the letter to the business and got their money back.

Vargas then went to see his friend, an assistant editor at Excelsior--the Spanish-language newspaper in which the employment agency had advertised. The paper pulled the ad.

He also called his friends at Channel 34 and 52, two Latino television stations in the Southland and faxed a bulletin to Spanish-language papers and radio. In a week, the employment agency went out of business.

“That’s the end of it,” Vargas says.

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At 60, Jose Diaz Vargas is the oldest of some 400 officers in Santa Ana’s police department. He holds other distinctions: the first Latino affairs officer in the state; the first former undocumented immigrant known to become a police officer; one of the nation’s top 10 police officers in 1978 as selected by the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police.

For 21 years, Vargas has been battling fraud and other crimes against Latinos in this city.

His voice can be heard twice a day on KWIZ, where he gives his pithy advice to new arrivals. “If your Christmas tree is by the front bay window, don’t leave too many packages under it,” he warned in a recent two-minute spot. “At this time of the year, people come around selling nonworking television sets and VCRs, boxes with rocks in them.”

His smiling face can be seen weekly in Rumores, a Santa Ana-based paper in which his columns appear. His essays, in English and Spanish, on everything from “eating the worm inside my tequila” to father-and-son tales (he has eight sons), are regular features in other Spanish-language media.

“I work eight, nine hours at the department. I go home and hit the streets. I just float around, talk to merchants and ministers,” he says.

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Vargas knows the alleyways in the barrios and the first names of gang members. He has been a counselor on a Spanish-speaking hotline for teenagers. He lectures at English classes for new arrivals. Once, he developed a bilingual “Barney the Talking Police Car” presentation for elementary schools.

It has all paid off. Immigrants, whether legal or undocumented, are more apt to report crimes in Santa Ana than many other ethnic communities, authorities say. Newcomers also are better forewarned about all the scams that entrap immigrants.

“They are my own people,” Vargas says, sitting in his makeshift office a few steps from the third-floor elevator.

“I consider myself just one more foreign-born,” he adds. “I know what it is like to be hungry, to be chased by the border patrol.”

In fact, Vargas was chased and deported by the border patrol 15 times. The first time he was 15 years old, and he fell face first in the gravel at the foot of immigration agents. When he was 20, he married a U.S. citizen and became a legal resident. At 25, when he was an Anaheim trash collector he returned to high school. He got his diploma at age 30 and headed straight for Fullerton College.

Then came the pivotal day in his life: On March 17, 1969, in two swearing-in ceremonies, the former tomato picker from San Martin Hidalgo, Mexico, became an American citizen and a member of Stanton Police Department.

That first year in Stanton, he was named Officer of the Year. In the ensuing years, he has earned more than 50 awards and 400 commendations, many of which he keeps in boxes under a pool table at his home in Santa Ana. “My basic policy,” he says, “I will not tell you a lie.”’

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Vargas has been described as a Mexican “Colombo,” the way he moves around like an absent-minded professor, sometimes wearing black denim pants (department store tag still intact) and white sneakers. He drives a 1983 gold Mercedes-Benz.

Twice divorced, Vargas lives with his 23-year-old daughter, Jeanette, a college student and part-time Disneyland employee, in a five-bedroom house in the northeast part of town. On his half-acre property, Vargas grows cactus and corn, and raises chickens and, he jokes, “one tiny illegal rooster that doesn’t crow.”

Vargas has no plans to retire, though he is now studying to be a minister. For all his successes, Vargas sees no end to the fraud against immigrants.

“Remember the freak shows back in the ‘40s,” Vargas begins, snickering.

“There was the human with the face of a snake, the two-headed women. People knew it wasn’t real, but they would keep on coming. One day, someone asked P.T. Barnum [the circus operator]: What’s your secret? You know what he said:

‘There is a sucker born every minute.’ ”