Bilingual vocational programs assist immigrants by teaching trades and English together.

By Daniel Hernandez
Times Staff Writer

Alejandra Casado doesn't fit any old stereotypes of a welder. She is in her 40s, a mother of three, and an immigrant from Guadalajara, Mexico. Her voice is even and soft.

Leaning against a metal gate she helped piece together at Cerritos College, Casado pulled up the sleeves of a purple sweater recently to proudly reveal an impressive collection of scars from welding sparks.

"Look at my ladies' hands!" she said in Spanish, laughing, showing off a fresh scab. "Look at my horrible nails."

But, she added, shrugging: "When you like your job, when you see you're doing something positive, you keep working."

Casado learned her new trade in a growing field of education: bilingual vocational programs. Cerritos College in Norwalk, in particular, has gained recognition for filling a special need in the immigrant communities of Southern California by teaching trades and English together. The goal, being copied by more two-year colleges, is to get new English learners into the job market faster.

Introductory courses in such programs — commonly referred to as vocational English as a second language, or VESL — concentrate on teaching workforce terminology in English, with help in native languages. By the time students are in advanced coursework for their trade, instruction is fully in English. Most VESL programs are geared to Spanish speakers, but some also accommodate immigrants who speak Asian languages. The courses are typically noncredit and free of charge.

Being a welder is something Casado said she never imagined as a career for herself. She arrived in Los Angeles years ago with bakery skills, but got her first jobs in factories.

Six years ago, she and her children found themselves at a Whittier shelter, homeless after a difficult breakup with her husband. After hearing of an adult vocational program at Cerritos College that targeted immigrants ready for an intensive introduction to a new trade, Casado signed up.

Now she is a full-time welder working on a Department of Water and Power project at a plant in Long Beach. Pulling in a $31-an-hour salary, she owns a car and a three-bedroom home in Rowland Heights.

Welding isn't the only trade that has generated success stories like Casado's. In Cerritos College's Adult Education and Diversity Programs, English-learning immigrant adults pursue trades as diverse as plastics and pharmaceutical technician. This year the college plans to expand the programs to include English as a second language health classes in such fields as phlebotomy and electrocardiography.

Vocational bilingual programs are often designed to accommodate local industries such as welding or hotels that are "currently hiring a high number of immigrant workers," said Norma Kent, vice president of communications at the American Assn. of Community Colleges in Washington, D.C.

"They need to be able to understand some basic English phrases. It's more functional than grammatical," Kent said. "A goal is to move people as far up the ladder as they can go."

For example, at Cerritos, welding instructor George Guzman recently flipped open his welding mask to ask beginning students blasting away at a piece of sheet metal, "¿Esta bien? ¿Todo bien senores? (Good? Everything good, gentlemen?)"

Guzman then went into a detailed explanation of the machinery before them, switching between Spanish and English.

The bilingual aspect makes it much easier to move to a new career, students said.

"I'm fluent in both, but I see men here whose instinct is to talk first in Spanish. When they explain things in Spanish, you feel more confident about it," said welding student Jaime Sanchez, 33, who attends Cerritos at night and on weekends while working for FedEx.

Student David Ramirez, a 52-year-old immigrant taking a break from behind his heavy leather welding garments, said: "If you don't know English, or are learning, this helps. You're learning the codes, the material, in English, but they speak to you in Spanish."

Whether students learn their trades in English or Spanish or both barely matters to such local industry employers as Greg Stuck, who has been hiring Cerritos College welders for his stainless-steel sealing company in Paramount for three years. Stuck said that there's been a shortage of well-trained welders in Southern California, but that the Cerritos vocational program is filling the void.

The Cerritos graduates "speak the terminology of the industry well enough, and that's what they need," said Stuck, who currently employs five welders from Cerritos College at Columbia Specialty Inc. "You've got a lot of losers in the welding industry because you've got people who don't take it seriously. The people who come out of Cerritos that I've been affiliated with, they live to weld," he laughed.

Graciela Vasquez, a Cerritos College official who started the adult education and diversity programs through a state grant in 1998, said the college wanted to serve the adult immigrant population in southeast Los Angeles County.

"We saw there was a large need in our community among adults, not only for ESL. They needed work skills, but couldn't wait to learn the language," Vasquez said.

The Cerritos program started with 128 students in 1998 and had enrolled more than 550 by the 2002-03 school year, the most recent available statistics.

Although there is no central count statewide or nationwide, experts said the offerings in such classes are increasing. That is especially the case in states with large Spanish-speaking Latino populations, such as California, Texas and Florida, Kent said.

The San Diego Community College District, for example, runs eight VESL evening labs for about 300 students, who among them speak 80 different languages, said Jim Smith, a district vice president.

In the Los Angeles Community College District, which serves one of the largest Spanish-speaking student populations in the country, six of the nine district campuses offered a pilot VESL program last fall that enrolled about 100 students in such fields as security guard and food service.

Many students were placed in jobs through connections between instructors and their industries, and the Los Angeles district hopes for more county funding to help offer the program again later this year, said Diane McBride, the district's dean of workforce development.

Community college officials acknowledged that skeptics occasionally raise eyebrows about the bilingual nature of VESL programs. But the colleges, they said, have managed to operate outside the hot-button political atmosphere that has characterized bilingual education in K-12 public schools.

That is because training in English as a second language for adults is considered separate from bilingual education, which was restricted in public K-12 schools with the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998.

"With immigrant adults who have a goal — a better job and a better life — they see clearly that some kind of job skills are a way to get there, and they need to get there as quickly and as efficiently as possible," said Nick Kramer, Cerritos College's executive dean of community industry and technology education, whose office oversees the bilingual vocational programs.

Casado, who performed so well early in her time at Cerritos that she became a teacher's assistant, agreed. "All of this scared me when I first saw it," she said of the hot welding procedures. When her first instructor asked her why she had enrolled in the class, she said she replied: "I don't know, but I want to learn."

The moral, she said, smiling: "It's never too late."