Merced Sun-Star

We're poor here in the Valley. The county we live in, Merced, is poor. Still, most of us don't technically qualify under today's poverty yardstick - a family of four, including two kids, making less than $22,000 a year.

But because, as the Bible said, you always have the poor with you ... and because, as the poet said, no man is an island, apart from the main ... and because most Mercedians are good people at heart ... For all those reasons, whatever our income, we're poor. We're poor because some of us - nearly one in five - are poor.

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This is how it smells when you're poor.

Musk. Dust. Dried sweat. Wood smoke. Tobacco smoke. Bad breath. Body lotion. Spanish rice. Cooking oil.

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Bernice Bojorquez, a single mother of two, felt at ease with the life she was scraping together eight years ago.

Although she lacked job skills, she was earning $10.50 an hour during harvest season to sort watermelon and asparagus inside a Turlock packing plant.

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LE GRAND -- Jo Hernandez harbors no delusions about the 500-square-foot Le Grand home that her children lovingly call their shack. She admits they're right.

The one-bedroom, one-bathroom house that she, her five children and her mother all call home was built in the 1920s from the scraps of an old barn. It has no heat or air conditioning.

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If a life could be summed up within the pages of a book, then the chapters of 19-year-old Antonio's would mostly be about a Merced boy growing up poor.

One chapter would be about what it's like for eight kids and a single mother to share a two-bedroom apartment, in an area rife with drugs and crime.

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Art washes away from the soul, said painter Pablo Picasso, the dust of everyday life.

Plenty of dust, both literal and figurative, fills the air in Merced County. And Mercedians have posted a mixed record on using art to wash away the dust of everyday poverty.

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