The other day I was driving down Echo Park Avenue, and I drove past a woman I recognized. She is Latina, on the short side, nice-looking, tidy-looking, with her hair pulled back, jeans, jeans jacket, walking with another woman. There was no reason to take notice, except that coincidentally I had met her near 8th and Bonnie Brae the day before (Thursday), and I had asked her a question that made her cry. When I met her we were in the offices of Centro Latino for Literacy, where I had gone because I was curious and because I had been told that the center had students from Echo Park; Centro Latino founder, Marcos Cajina, lives in Echo Park (he first taught literacy as a young man in Sandinista Nicaragua); he owns a tile company -- if you've been to Intelligentsia, the new coffee house in Silver Lake, you've seen his tile designs. Melanie Stephens, the center's director and co-founder, also lives in EP.

Founded in 1991, Centro Latino for Literacy (aka Centro Latino de Educacion Popular) teaches reading and writing to Spanish-speaking adults; it also offers English-language classes and is affiliated with child-care programs.

I met the young woman, a mother of two, at the storefront offices on 8th Street, and she told me she'd lived in Echo Park for 18 years. She is taking both English as a second-language and literacy classes. (My Spanish is good enough for very basic conversation, but we also had translation from Melanie Stephens). She said she was raised in Guanajuato, Mexico, and went to school until she was seven years old, when she stopped schooling in order to work. She cleaned houses. Also, her mother wanted her to carry lunch to her father who worked on a farm. Lunchtime came at lunchtime, and she was too embarrassed to show up in the afternoon to begin her school day. She never went back to school, until recently, at the center. As an adult, she left Mexico, and she joined a couple of her siblings here in Echo Park. She met her husband here, worked and started a family. Her sons are now 11 and 7. She started to cry when she told me about not being able to help her children with her homework -- she had to tell her son she couldn't help because she didn't know how to read or speak the language.

When she started taking literacy classes, she asked her older son if he was embarrassed that she couldn't read, and his answer -- he said no, he wasn't embarrassed -- gave her courage to continue.

Stephens later told me that the primary motivations for many of their students are: 1) To help their kids, 2) Get a job, 3) To manage their own money and pay their bills as many are at the mercy of relatives and neighbors for bill-paying. She told of one student who let her bills pile up and go into arrears because each time she showed up for "help," her neighbor would give her a dressing down about how she hadn't yet learned to read.

I tried to imagine the isolation -- from the larger society (of English speakers) and from the literate society of immigrants and how difficult it would be to live well under the weight of such a double isolation. Not that every individual experiences it that way, but still.... Stephens told me that at least 10 to 15 percent of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S. are unable to read and write (these mainly drawn from the rural poor who succeed in getting here). That is a fat, challenging number, and it's too big to employ the metaphor about good people slipping through the cracks.