COLOR HER CARING, DETERMINED; SHE HELPS POOR CHILDREN TRANSFORM LIVES OF DESPAIR INTO PICTURES OF HOPE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Back when she was teaching the offspring of L.A.'s powerful and privileged, instead of Mexico's destitute and despised, Carolyn Ramos made an unsettling discovery.

Many of the affluent youngsters in her weekend classes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ``were disturbed,'' she says, because ``they didn't get attention'' at home.

Now, here is Ramos - urbane, opinionated, easing comfortably into her sunset years - paying rapt attention to a group of children many visitors to this elegant colonial-era citadel barely notice at all.

An Arcadia resident for 32 years, and a former art instructor at Citrus College in Azusa, Ramos spends two hours every Saturday morning at Casa Tatic, a private, nonprofit community center that serves the poor in this metropolitan area of 1.5 million about 1-1/2 hours south of Mexico City.

Not far from the site where, 500 years ago, Hernan Cortes torched a native village and yoked its inhabitants to the Spanish crown, Ramos now teaches Indian street-seller children how to draw.

No, correct that: not to draw, Ramos emphasizes, but ``to invent.''

``I'm not trying to impose dark and light, shadows,'' says Ramos, 74, shuffling through a narrow sunlit classroom where a dozen children are quietly coloring with felt-tip markers. ``I'm just trying to get them to realize that this is your magic world, and it's up to you to fill the space.''

Playtime is a luxury for these indigenous children, who spend most of their lives selling handmade crafts and colorful trinkets to the U.S. tourists and Mexico City daytrippers who flock here on weekends.

Nearly all of them rural Indians, street-seller children are a constant, if semi-invisible, presence throughout Mexico's larger cities and resort towns. Bill and Patty Coleman, a married U.S. couple who run Casa Tatic and its U.S.-based nonprofit parent, the 12-year-old VAMOS! Inc. (the name means ``Let's go!''), estimate that there are 2,000 such children in Cuernavaca alone.

From dawn until 10 or 11 at night, you'll find them in this picturesque provincial capital's zocalo, or central plaza, lugging their wares on their backs, or strung across their shoulders with cord. They proffer handmade straw baskets, exuberantly painted clay pottery, whimsical animal figurines and musical instruments. Most objects cost far less than they would at a U.S. imports shop.

Starting their careers as early as age 3, the youngest children sell small boxes of Chiclets, which they may try to thrust into your unsuspecting hands or sneak into your pockets when you're not looking. Then the 8-year-old salesman will step back, fixing you with wily, imploring eyes in hopes of eliciting a few pesos.

Many of Cuernavaca's street sellers live three hours away by bus in the neighboring state of Guerrero, in impoverished villages where the ancient Nahuatl language, not Spanish, is the principal tongue. Children come to Cuernavaca with their parents, who lay their wares on the sidewalks, then turn their sons and daughters loose to work the crowds.

The children stay on their feet all day, trolling the public areas and doing their best to stay out of the way of the heavily armed, omnipresent local police. By nightfall, it's not uncommon to see children swaying in their tracks, virtually sleep-walking with exhaustion.

``It's hard for people in the States to realize this terrible dichotomy,'' Ramos says of her adopted country, ``how poor you can be. And how rich.''

Ramos first started teaching street-seller children about three years ago, after meeting the Colemans and visiting Casa Tatic. It had taken months of negotiating to persuade the street sellers' parents to spare their children for a few hours to take classes there. Attendance for many is necessarily sporadic, but the Colemans say a number of children now attend reading and math classes regularly. As an incentive, each week Casa Tatic provides several hundred of the children with free breakfasts and lunches.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, and educated at USC, UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles, Ramos is a trained art historian who helped launch the pre-Columbian art program at Citrus College and has written a book on the subject. She also taught and worked as a guide at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for 25 years.

She moved to Mexico from Arcadia in 1990, after her husband died, in order to be closer to her younger daughter, who had married a Mexican man - just as Ramos herself did ``umpteen years ago.''

``I thought, `What am I doing? I've got this house on a fifth of an acre and I'm entertaining friends,' and meanwhile a big part of my family was in Mexico,'' Ramos recalls.

A few summers ago, when seasonal rains made Cuernavaca's sewers overflow with garbage, a board embedded with a rusty nail struck Ramos in the foot. The local doctors mistreated the wound, she says, and an infection spread and attacked some of her tendons.

Between her bad leg and ``these klutzy shoes,'' Ramos moves a bit slowly as she bustles about her classroom. Clustered at tables of four or five, beneath pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Belle from Disney's ``Beauty and the Beast,'' the children smile when Ramos offers an encouraging word in Spanish, which she speaks fluently.

``They (the children) didn't like me for the first six months because I wasn't a mestiza, I was still a gringo,'' Ramos says, laughing. ``Now they can make fun of me and joke.''

Ramos' art classes are one of 61 programs that VAMOS! (www.vamos.org.mx) operates in Cuernavaca and the state of Morelos. Offering free reading, writing and computer instruction, free day care, a part-time medical clinic, sewing and brick-making cooperatives, and a kitchen that serves 150,000 free meals a year, VAMOS! provides a last resort in a country that lacks an established safety net. The organization also supports human rights networks and water purification projects.

The Colemans estimate that VAMOS! projects reach about 10,000 people.

``(Patty and Bill) are really what people should be,'' Ramos says. ``I've never seen them turn away anybody.''

Both veterans of the U.S. civil rights movement, the Colemans stress that there are no handouts at Casa Tatic. Instead, children and adults who come there to study receive credits that are redeemable at a small store in exchange for used clothes, shoes, games and toys. VAMOS!'s local board of directors is made up of volunteers from Cuernavaca's urban poor, ``so should anything happen to Patty or me, the work goes on,'' Bill Coleman says.

While the bulk of its contributions comes from individual donors, last year VAMOS! received several large donations from companies such as Mattel Toys of Mexico, Kraft Foods of Mexico, and Johnson & Johnson. Also last year, Wellington Webb, the mayor of Denver, Cuernavaca's sister city, met Ramos when he visited Mexico with his wife. Sometime later, the Denver city attorney came to Cuernavaca and dropped off several boxes of felt-tips, Ramos says. For days afterward, ``everybody's noses and hands were colored.''

Then, last January, working through a high-placed local official, Ramos persuaded Cuernavaca's new mayor to allow a weeklong exhibition of paintings by street children in a downtown government building. Nothing like that had ever happened in Cuernavaca before.

Yet Ramos knows it will take more than felt-tip pens for Mexico's indigenous poor to invent a new future. A recent story in the Wall Street Journal reported that, while Mexico's economy grew at a 4.8 percent rate last year, consumer purchasing power has dropped 39 percent since the 1994 devaluation of the peso, and the number of workers earning less than $2 a day has grown by 4 million in two years. Meanwhile, the price of food staples such as tortillas has soared.

A few months ago, an article in the influential U.S. journal Foreign Affairs predicted a violent revolution in Mexico within two years if present economic and social conditions persist.

Yet change is seldom easy to forecast, as the name Casa Tatic implies.

``A tatic is a moral leader of a community,'' Bill Coleman explains, ``and a community may go 20 years without a tatic, and then all of a sudden they discover they have one.''

Back in class, an older girl with long black hair fills a white sheet of paper with images of great plumed birds and powder-blue pyramids. Later, she says that this is the first art class she's ever had in her life.

``I don't give drawing classes, as you can see,'' Carolyn Ramos says. ``I give them security, and the materials.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--2) Former Arcadia resident Carolyn Ramos offers encouragement to a young Indian street-seller girl, above, who attends Ramos' Saturday art class in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Street-seller children receive meals and reading and writing instruction at Casa Tatic, a nonprofit community center in Cuernavaca run by a U.S. couple. The drawing, below, was made by a young Indian girl attending her first-ever art class.

(3) `It's hard for people in the States to realize this terrible dichotomy, how poor you can be. And how rich.'

Carolyn Ramos, who moved to Mexico from Arcadia in 1990

Reed Johnson/Daily News