2001-03-11 04:00:00 PDT Cambridge, Mass. -- Every month, his hardworking parents send Rogelio Garcia Jr. about $200 in walking-around money.

It doesn't sound like much, but the 20-year-old junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has an inherited knack for making a little bit stretch a long way.

The credit goes to his parents, Yolanda and Rogelio Garcia, who live in a cramped one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment and also support a daughter at the University of California and a son in high school.

Often starting after midnight and working 14 hours every day, rain or shine,

Rogelio's father steers his old white truck through the back alleys of Los Angeles neighborhoods so he and his wife can gather thousands of cans.

"We're working 365 days a year," said Rogelio Sr., 53, a quiet, skinny native of Oaxaca, Mexico. "There's no rest."

For more than a decade, the couple have vied with other foragers to collect about 45,000 cans a month, earning them on average between $1,400 and $1,600.

Not a penny is wasted. What doesn't go toward food, gas and rent goes to their 19-year-old daughter, Adriana, at UC Riverside and to Rogelio Jr. at MIT.

Their son works just as hard as his parents. In Cambridge -- a city so far from home his parents thought they needed passports to visit -- the bespectacled student stays up until 2 a.m. almost every day, amassing a different kind of wealth: studying aeronautical engineering and laying the foundation for a career that may soon allow his parents to retire.

"My parents always said, 'Work hard, keep studying, and don't worry about the money,' " he said. "They always told me that I could do anything I wanted if I worked hard."

His parents grew up together in the same small town in Mexico. His father worked as a baker and made Oaxacan style jewelry; his mother worked as a government secretary. The two later met and married in Los Angeles, after both took separate buses to the border and illegally dashed into the United States on foot.

They moved to an unincorporated section of Los Angeles called Venice, and both worked odd jobs. Rogelio found work as a restaurant dishwasher and meat cutter, earning as much as $9 an hour. Yolanda also worked various jobs, including one paying $7 an hour making pens at a factory.

Things went well until 1985, when Yolanda was laid off. That's when she got the idea to collect cans. Seven years later, also laid off from his job, Rogelio joined his wife's expeditions.

The work -- arduous, demeaning, and sometimes risky -- has never been ideal,

and they must work hard to beat their competition to their quarry.

The first time Yolanda stuck her hand into a Dumpster she wasn't sure the money was worth the work. "I felt horrible," said Yolanda, 51, a small woman with callused hands and a bright smile that exposes her missing front teeth.

But the couple never lost sight of the goal. They didn't accept welfare, believing it would somehow block Rogelio Jr., Adriana, and their 14-year-old son, Angel, from qualifying for financial aid. They also mistakenly believed that accepting public assistance would harm their chances for citizenship, which they eventually gained.

On one point, however, they didn't err. Their first born, Rogelio Jr., had a gift. From elementary school, it was clear he had a knack for math and science. The problem was making sure that their son didn't turn away from his talents and give in to the cruelty of his peers, who frequently teased him.

"He was always at the books, never in the streets, never running wild with friends," his father said.

On weekends, after finishing his homework, Rogelio Jr. would sometimes spend the day with his parents collecting cans. He would watch his father fetch a battered bicycle from his truck, which his mother would ride from one Dumpster to another. If at first he was embarrassed and kept his parents' occupation a secret from his friends, Rogelio learned to live with it.

"Kids could be very cruel, and the emotional stress was sometimes unbearable," he said. "But I got over it. I knew what my parents were doing, and why."

Though his parents pushed him, Rogelio needed little motivation. He watched them lose their life savings twice, once when a bank foreclosed on a $25,000 down payment they had made for a duplex after they couldn't make the monthly payments, and another time when a friend borrowed $20,000 and refused to repay them. As a freshman in high school, he glimpsed his ticket out of poverty when a senior became the first student in his school to be accepted at MIT.

"It was really huge news that someone from Venice got into MIT," he recalled. "No one really knew where it was or what it was."

The odds of an impoverished Los Angeles Latino getting a coveted spot at the nation's top technical college improved when Rogelio Jr. aced his SATs. But even with high scores and a grade point average surpassing perfection -- including advanced placement courses he had a 4.2 GPA -- he doubted he would ever be accepted.

The competition was one obstacle; the price was another. The $33,000 annual tuition is more than twice his family's annual income.

Rogelio Jr. sent applications not only to MIT but to Princeton, the California Institute of Technology, UCLA, the University of California at Berkeley, and Carleton College in Minnesota. In March of his senior year, he hadn't heard from any of them.

He was starting to despair when MIT called and accepted him. "I was like, 'Who is this? Don't joke with me,' " he recalled.

MIT's generous package of grants, work-study, and low-interest loans didn't guarantee an easy life. Even with the $200 his parents sent him each month, he often lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and had to save enough money from his job working at an MIT lab to buy a winter coat.

The stress wasn't just about money. A child prodigy back home, at MIT Rogelio struggled to maintain a B average.

"My first year here was incredibly difficult," he said. "I didn't think I would make it."

Nearly three years later, lugging a large sack of books and wearing baggy blue jeans, black clunkers, and trendy, oval glasses, Rogelio is comfortable in Cambridge and indistinguishable from other college students.

The MIT upperclassman is over the hump. Though he still struggles with his humanities classes, he hopes to work soon for a company like Raytheon, where he can help build spacecraft equipment.

His parents will visit for the first time when he graduates in a year and a half.

"I miss my family a lot," he said. "But I know they are very happy for me."

On a recent day in Venice, Yolanda Garcia was welcomed at a hotel where the Garcias are known and respected. An employee hauled out five large bags filled with trash. Meticulously, she sifted through each one, grabbing a bottle here, a can there.

The yield: perhaps a dozen bottles and cans. She wiped them clean, packed them in her own bags, piled them in her bike basket, and rode away.

After a few hours poking through Dumpsters, the small woman wearing three layers of sweatshirts and a red knit cap pulled low to protect her against the cold and the rain wasn't complaining. With her son at MIT, her daughter doing well, and her other son primed for success, she declared, "It's the American dream."