Rose Arzola was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. When she was 18 years old, she and her sisters left Texas on a train bound for Los Angeles, hoping to find broader job opportunities than their hometown afforded. Rose cleaned homes and cooked for several families in Los Angeles, but increasingly experienced signs of mental illness, which interfered with her ability to work. As her symptoms grew more severe throughout her 20s, Rose was in and out of mental hospitals. Ultimately, the closure of these facilities left her on the streets.
Despite her
adversity, Rose’s exceptional resourcefulness aided her in building a life for
herself on the street. It was very important to Rose to remain clean, and
so she created a bathing ritual that started with filling her pails with water
from a city faucet and leaving the water to warm in the sunlight. She
propped cardboard up around the perimeter of her shopping cart for privacy and
inside the cart sat on her milk carton “chair” to bathe with the warmed water in
her pails. At night, Rose laid her cardboard down for friends to sleep on
in exchange for their promise to watch out for her. One of Rose’s
pleasures was cooking for her circle of friends on Skid Row on a stove she
fashioned by placing bricks over a fire.
In
1975, a group of men with whom Jill Halverson had been working as a social
worker introduced her to their friend Rose. Jill visited Rose in the
parking lot where she had settled, stopping by to say hello or chatting over
coffee. Jill saw in Rose a bright, loving, interesting woman with a keen
sense of humor who persevered despite being unable to sufficiently fulfill her
basic needs of cleanliness, safety, and shelter. Deeply moved by Rose,
Jill used her savings set aside to purchase a home, to establish a different
kind of home -- the Downtown Women’s Center. Rose’s courage not only inspired
Jill to found the Center for women in need, it inspired thousands of women on
Skid Row to get help as well.