Silicon Valley One - Summer 2008 - (Page 14) Cultural Capital Immigrants don’t just work in Silicon Valley; they also bring rich artistic, musical and cultural additions to their new home. Communities and organizations embrace those additions. The Multicultural Arts Leadership Institute, or MALI, an initiative of 1stACT Silicon Valley, fuels diversity in the arts. MALI connects and builds community across cultures and strengthens multicultural arts leadership. Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, or MACLA, in San José offers gallery space for artists and even poetry slams for high school students—reaching Latino and nonLatino audiences alike. Other activities, from skits by Vietnamese-American students to Indian dance classes, bond immigrants internally and bridge them with the larger community. Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley examined the value of these participatory arts by immigrants in a 2004 study. “The prevalence and diversity of these voluntary community activities indicate a rich undercurrent of social capital and artistic creativity,” the report said. Ismael Flores and the Puente Resource Center provide services—and even refurbished bikes—to immigrants in Pescadero. precise, Lee notes, the requirement is that they speak Cantonese. Most of the 30 Chinese seniors meeting in the church’s ground-floor social room came out of southern China following the Communist victory in the late 1940s. Members of the senior group include a former herb doctor, an engineer and even a tailor, Larry Soo, well known for crafting suits for San Francisco’s elite. The group, arranged around a long table, breaks out into a tuneful version of the hymn “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” Friends for years, many members of the group can no longer drive and would miss the twoTuesdays-a-month get-togethers if they weren’t picked up by the church van, paid for by a grant from Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The van is key to the field trips that take the elderly group to places like San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the San Francisco Zoo and Santa Rosa. These journeys, varied and highspirited, keep the members spry and excited about life. The other side of the Valley It is a Sunday afternoon in April, and Bay Area daytrippers are gathering in the charming shops, stores and galleries along Stage Road, Pescadero’s main drag. Just a hundred yards away, a very different sort of gathering is taking place. Half a dozen weather-beaten men make their way into the spare social hall of the Pescadero Community Church, a popular gathering place in this coastal and ranching community about 50 miles west of San José. They are some of the hundreds of migrant workers who provide the agricultural muscle for the ranches, farms and nurseries that range across isolated coastal San Mateo County. This evening, they have come for a spaghetti dinner prepared by Ismael Flores, a painter and sculptor who has taught art to inmates at some of California’s toughest prisons and reformatories. The graying, charismatic Flores is outreach director of Puente de la Costa Sur Community Resource Center. Puente, meaning “bridge” in Spanish, provides health care, immigration, legal, transportation and other social bridge services to the area’s immigrant workers. Puente’s goal is to improve the conditions of the predominantly Hispanic men whose labor is key to the agricultural bounty of the 160-square-mile triangle delineated by Año Nuevo, La Honda and San Gregorio. The Puente Resource Center was the dream of Wendy Taylor, a Protestant minister who moved to Pescadero in 1998 to serve the area’s migrant workers. What evolved is an organization that hosts diverse programs, including an ESL class for young mothers, computer literacy training, citizenship instruction, tax 14 o n e innovation through philanthropy www.siliconvalleycf.org http://www.siliconvalleycf.org
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