By just surmounting the challenges of her meager childhood and persistent economic duress, Lia Margolis would have won an honored place in Mujeres de Conciencia (‘Women of Conscience’), author Victoria Alvarado’s celebration of 70 Latinas in California. But Margolis, a 39-year Pacific Palisades resident, rose beyond her difficult circumstances to become a leader in the delivery of healthcare in Los Angeles and a mentor for young Latinas who are pursuing their place in the community. Alvarado’s elegant coffee-table book pairs a black-and-white photograph of each woman with a one-page biography. From novelist Isabel Allende to community physician Aliza Lifshitz, the author honors women whose common denominator is the impact of their collective work on the communities they serve. A native Californian whose parents emigrated from Mexico and Central America, Alvarado focuses on Latinas whose knowledge and efforts have affected the well-being of communities in need. These women mirror the rich and varied ethnic backgrounds of the populace of Latin America. Some are the great great-grand-daughters of Mexicans who lived in the Southwest; others have roots in Central and South America and in the Caribbean. Many of these women forged their social conscience and values from personal and family experiences. Such was the case for Lia Ordaz, who spent her early years living with her family at the Simons Brickyard in East L.A., the point of entry for many Latino immigrants. The brickyard, founded in 1905 by Walter Simons, was a self-contained immigrant community equipped with company stores, a church, school and even a post office, until it was closed in 1934. It was there that Margolis attended school and church until her parents bought a small home in the City of Commerce. When she was nine, Margolis’s father moved to Arizona for health reasons, having suffered from silicosis, but leaving her mother and nine siblings to support the family. ’All the kids went to work; there was no welfare in those days,’ Margolis recalls in an interview with the Palisadian-Post. ‘My mother continued her work with entertainer Gis’le MacKenzie, who had employed her first as a maid and nanny and eventually as her seamstress. My sisters and I would wake up early before school and make tortillas, which we sold in the neighborhood. We also crocheted and took in ironing.’ At 13, Margolis went to work, and it wasn’t until she was 21 that she completed her GED at night and applied to college, recalling her father’s belief in the value of education, even for women. No doubt her recollections about the lack of healthcare for poor families like hers influenced Margolis’s chosen field. ‘When I was a child, there was no healthcare, we went to County General or the Ferris Clinic in East L.A.’ In 1973, while attending the University of Redlands, Margolis started working at a clerical job at the Los Angeles Health Department. It wasn’t long before the physician she was working for noticed her intelligence and willingness to learn. Soon she expanded her duties to full-charge bookkeeping and grant-writing, skills that have proved vital in her work today consulting with nonprofit organizations. Margolis continued to earn a series of promotions from staff assistant in the emergency room to becoming the first female associate executive director of the L.A. County and USC Medical Center, one of the largest healthcare networks in the nation. Twenty years of experience in the L.A. County Health Department provided an important component of Margolis’s successful work with nonprofit health clinics. In 1998, she started her own consulting business focusing on the most underserved as her clients. The Southside Coalition of Community Health Centers in South L.A. offers a prime example of her philosophy in working with nonprofits. ‘I wanted to help these seven clinics come together so they would make more of an impact and at the same time help them generate more interest in what they were doing,’ Margolis says. ‘Over the years, I worked almost for free. I remember receiving seven little checks, but eventually I helped them raise $2.8 million.’ For the California Medical Association Foundation, Margolis helped launch the group’s first big project’removing tobacco from the front counters in local pharmacies. The effort was a success, resulting in 85-percent participation throughout the state. Today, the foundation funds major programs in combating obesity and cervical cancer, as well as ongoing health and nutrition education. Margolis believes that behavior changes when people from diverse populations with differing perspectives on a problem work together. ‘That’s how things happen, getting people talking together.’ Currently, Margolis is working on such an endeavor, designing a program to assist doctors in addressing women’s health issues. She is interviewing more than 50 women in positions of leadership in the health field to build a broad consensus”women such as Kim Belshe, Secretary, California Health and Human Services and Carmen Nevarez, M.D., a longtime champion of the public’s health and president of the American Public Health Association. While she hasn’t finished her interviews, Margolis has discovered some major components to providing healthcare to underprivileged communities: overcoming difficulties in transportation, the lack of the patient’s educational understanding, and the central role women play in health decision-making. ‘There is also the distressing disconnection between physical and mental health,’ she says. ‘This is especially troubling in times of stress.’ The roots of Margolis’s altruism are easily traced to her parents. ‘My mother was a giving person. She’d give a pot of beans to another if they were in need. She sewed all our clothes, painted and instilled in us a sense of community: ‘Pay it forward.” Ironically, Margolis lives in a family of men. Her husband, Ben, whom she calls ‘the most phenomenal man I’ve ever met,’ teaches law and ethics at the USC School of Pharmacy and serves as a judge pro tem for the Los Angeles County Superior Courts. Their son, Jonathan, graduated summa cum laude from USC, earned a law school scholarship, and is currently an aspiring screenwriter. ’Women of Conscience,’ published by Floricanto Press, is available at Village Books on Swarthmore.
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