In the subterranean hallway of a San Jose apartment building, pastor Gerardo Vazquez knocks on a door decorated with a Feliz Navidad sign from a Christmas long ago. Eva Martinez, a small, grandmotherly woman with red dye covering the tips of her white hair, welcomes him into a space no larger than a college dorm room that she shares with her daughter and several grandchildren.

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The pastor hands Martinez a paper bag full of dried beans, rice, pasta, bread and canned fruit, and she shows him her makeshift kitchen: a slow cooker bubbling with beans on a rolling cart squeezed next to a hand sink and refrigerator. Her young grandson lies on a bunk bed playing a video game.

“When I see their faces that reminds me of myself,” Vazquez says of the children he sees on his rounds.

The pastor, 46, leads a food ministry every week with members of San Jose First United Methodist Church. They pack and deliver free groceries to 87 families, or about 400 people, in the area who don’t have enough to eat. Many have undocumented family members or are working toward a green card and tell Vazquez they are afraid to go to the food bank or to apply for food stamps. They’ve heard rumors they could be targeted by immigration authorities if they do.

Vazquez left everything behind in Mexico to come here and tend to some of the Bay Area’s neediest families. It’s possible that no one else could perform this role like he does. His own experience of hunger as a child, and later overwhelming loss and sadness, called him and readied him.

“I have many, many sad stories in my life,” says Vazquez, sighing. “I know how it feels to be in all these troubles.”

The San Jose First United Methodist Church’s food ministry started about four years ago when Vazquez, along with outreach programs director Ray Castellon and minister Shinya Goto, canvassed the neighborhoods surrounding the church to see what families needed most.

Besides rent, paying for groceries was the biggest issue, they said.

“The downtown area is saturated with agencies — free lunches and breakfasts for the homeless. That’s not our focus,” says Castellon. “Because these families don’t have other resources, we think this is more of a general critical need.”

Second Harvest Food Bank estimates that 27 percent of Santa Clara and San Mateo county residents, or almost 720,000 people, are food insecure — though the food bank only serves 257,000 people per month. And San Jose is among 20 U.S. metro areas with the largest number of undocumented immigrants, based on a 2017 Pew Research Center study.

In addition to shunning food banks, Vazquez says, many newly arrived immigrant families don’t apply for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, even if they are eligible. Even though the federal benefit is available to both citizens and certain legal residents, participation in SNAP among immigrant families that have been in the U.S. for fewer than five years declined by 10 percent in the first half of 2018, according to a study from the American Public Health Association. In September, the Trump administration announced proposed changes to immigration law that would deny green cards to those who receive public benefits like SNAP.

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It took time for Vazquez to establish trust with the community. At first no one wanted to answer the door, not sure if it was Immigration and Customs Enforcement knocking. Vazquez took the time to talk to people, to invite them to weekly church dinners and free English classes. They began welcoming him into their homes, serving him homemade tamales, and telling their neighbors.

The ministry grew, even though almost all the participants are Catholic and not sure what to make of the Methodist church. Although many also come to Vazquez’s Spanish service on Sundays, most still aren’t officially church members.

The church covers the cost of a van to deliver the groceries and some money for the food, and the rest is donated.

“This is really fundamental Christianity in the good sense,” says the Rev. Renee Marie Rico, Vazquez’s supervisor. She cites a Bible verse (Matthew 25:40), where Jesus advises to tend to the “least of these” — to feed those who are hungry and to visit the sick and those in prison.

“We can’t help everybody, but we can help some families and make a difference for them,” Rico says.

On a delivery day, Vazquez steps out of the church’s white van, grasps the handles of two paper bags heavy with groceries, and begins walking toward a two-story stucco building. A large gold cross pendant inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer glints from his white polo shirt as he carries the bags up an outside staircase, where a shy woman regards the visitors from the doorway warily, partially blocking the sight of a living room crammed with furniture and neat stacks of clothing.

“Hola, Lena!” says the pastor.

The woman smiles, engulfed in the larger man’s embrace. He hands her the groceries, one bag for each family sharing the one-bedroom apartment.

“It’s a lot of help,” says Elena, who declined to share her last name due to privacy concerns. The free groceries leave more money for her family’s share of the $1,700 rent. But when asked if she ever runs out of food, the woman squints and shakes her head no.

As Vazquez walks away, he says gently, “She’s lying. She’s too proud. If she didn’t run out of food, we wouldn’t be here.”

In many ways, Vazquez lives like the people he serves. As a beginning minister, he makes the minimum wage of $13.50 per hour, and after rent and expenses he sends the rest back to Mexico.

He can’t afford a car, so he walks or takes a bus to work and the Laundromat. He spreads his arms to his sides and waddles comically as if walking while holding two huge bags of dirty clothes. “My brother will see me and say, ‘Why do you want to live that way?’”

Vazquez explains it by way of the losses he has faced. There are so many that he laughs ruefully at the absurdity of it all.

“I lost my father, my mother, my children. I am divorced,” he says. “I have training in it all.”

Sitting in his apartment — a converted garage he shares with his brother in San Jose’s Northside neighborhood — he takes out photos of his son, also named Gerardo, in front of his first birthday cake, a green party hat clashing with the serious expression in his dark eyes. There’s a snapshot of Vazquez’s parents sitting next to each other at an outdoor party in middle age; his mother smiles reservedly in a lace-collared floral dress, his father looks confident and handsome in a cowboy hat.

There are no photos of his daughter. In 2003 she was delivered stillborn when his wife was five months pregnant. Little Gerardo died six months later of pneumonia. He was 18 months old. Gerardo’s marriage ended in 2008.

Like the San Jose residents he helps, Vazquez knows poverty and hunger, too. His mother raised him and his five siblings in the village of Atotonilco El Alto, in Jalisco, where they often had no food for three or four days, even a week.

“We suffered. We were starving,” he says.

Vazquez felt the calling to become a priest when he was a 7-year-old altar boy. He was always helping people, he says. His mother would yell for him to come home and he wouldn’t hear because he was off buying tortillas for an infirm neighbor.

at the San Jose First United Methodist Church on Wednesday, July 25, 2018, in San Jose, Calif. at the San Jose First United Methodist Church on Wednesday, July 25, 2018, in San Jose, Calif. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close San Jose’s neediest families shun food banks and rely on a church’s Mexican pastor 1 / 10 Back to Gallery

But when he turned 18, his father forbade priesthood, beating him and then threatening to beat his mother until he agreed not to pursue his dream.

As an adult, he had a string of businesses — a restaurant, a clothing store, a grocery store — that failed because, he claims, he gave everything away to those who needed what he sold. That didn’t help his marriage, he acknowledges.

In 2012, Vazquez was visiting his brother in San Jose when a lay minister from the Methodist Church came to the door. They began talking, and the minister invited him to do outreach with the community’s Spanish speakers, which the church was eager to reach.

After seeing his ability to connect with community members, the church offered to help Vazquez pursue the training to become a licensed pastor and work toward a work permit. He began by volunteering for months at a time, then went back to Mexico when his tourist visa ran out. It was something he could do only because he had no one left to support, and he finally received a work permit two years ago.

“He had this passion,” says Goto about Vazquez. “I knew that if there was any way to help him get a visa that he would do wonderful, wonderful ministry.”

Every week, Vazquez cooks a dinner for his food ministry participants, what Rico call his “Thursday church.”

He limits his spending, which is covered by the church, to no more than $50 to feed 40 people.

Shuffling as he pushes the cart down the Grocery Outlet aisles, he checks which protein has the best price, eventually settling on three trays of 14 fresh drumsticks at $4.86 each. He decides that he’ll make Mexican rice and papas al ajillo, roasted potatoes with garlic, to stretch out the chicken.

Back in the church’s kitchen, he quickly puts on a black apron, pulling the waistband tight between his round back and hips. He pours oil into a large roasting pan and then begins the long process of toasting the rice, stirring with a swift, practiced motion. As he stirs with one hand, he holds his phone in the other, calling to make sure people will come.

They sit at a long table in the church’s reception room. Vazquez holds court, joking and draping his arms over the backs of two white folding chairs.

When about 15 people have assembled, they hold hands to pray and then sit down to eat.

Vazquez dreams of teaching others to start similar food ministries at other churches, and he’s begun reaching out to Bay Area tech companies for financial support.

When will he know he has helped enough people?

“One thousand,” he says solemnly. “I would like to help 1,000 families.”

How will he get enough food for so many?

“Little by little,” he says.

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan

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