Rosa's Story

Rosa 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.  Rosa 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, Rosa was in and out of psychiatric hospitals.  Ultimately, the closure of these facilities left her on the streets.

Despite her adversity, Rosa’s exceptional resourcefulness aided her in building a life for herself on the street.  It was very important to Rosa 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, Rosa laid her cardboard down for friends to sleep on in exchange for their promise to watch out for her.  One of Rosa’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 Rosa.  Jill visited Rosa in the parking lot where she had settled, stopping by to say hello or chatting over coffee.  Jill saw in Rosa 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 Rosa, Jill used her savings set aside to purchase a home, to establish a different kind of home -- the Downtown Women’s Center. Rosa’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.