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Redwood City — “Either it was hotels or it was food,” Angelica Rodriguez said. “Our decision was to stop staying at hotels because we weren’t having enough food. That was the main thing, the kids being fed.”
Angelica, 32, stood next to her gold Honda minivan. She and her partner, Miguel Mata, 36, have two boys, Brian, 9, and Martin, 11. Along with Ace, the family dog, they all lived in the van for more than a year after the family lost their housing in Daly City, her home since she was a child.
“We would try to keep the kids distracted. We would go to the park, we would go to the mall and just around bedtime we would grab something to eat, walk around with the dog and try to go to sleep,” Angelica recalled. “Martin would sleep in the middle and Brian would sleep in the back. Miguel and I would sleep in the front.”
They shuttled the van with its scratches and dings between South San Francisco’s Orange Park, Daly City’s Gellert Park and other places where they felt relatively safe. The van is an Odyssey, something of a metaphor.
The family struggled to keep the boys in school, buy ice to chill Angelica’s insulin, feed the family, find free Wi-Fi so the boys could keep up with homework, do laundry, search for housing, pay bills and draw as little attention as possible.
“I’d ask my kids, ‘Are you guys good?’ They would say ‘Yeah,’” Angelica said. “I think they said that just to make me feel better.”
After two years without a permanent home, the family in February 2025 moved into a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in San Mateo thanks to their determination and the public agencies and nonprofits that extended a safety net to catch them.
Their travails – housed to homeless to housed – shine a light on the nearly invisible San Mateo County families scraping by on the rough edges of poverty until some calamity or a combination of troubles casts them adrift.
 Angelica Rodriguiz and Miguel Mata
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