Los Angeles ? With two teenage daughters at home and triplets still in diapers, Angela Magdaleno’s family overflowed from a one-bedroom apartment in south Los Angeles that they strained to afford.

Diapers had to be changed 15 times a day, feedings held every three hours. One triplet, 3-year-old Alfredo Jr., needed special attention because he was born with liquid on his brain and partially paralyzed.

Even simple events – like going to the store – required complex orchestration.

And that was before the quadruplets arrived.

On July 6, Magdaleno gave birth to two boys and two girls, drawing national media attention as a bewildered mother of 10 (with nine living at home). Now, she and her husband, Alfredo Anzaldo, 44, must figure out how to provide for everyone on Anzaldo’s maximum pay of $400 per week as a carpet installer.

As cameras flashed two weeks ago, capturing the 40-year-old mother with her newest progeny, she appeared dazed, even morose. They’d have to leave their $600-per-month apartment for something bigger. They’d have to buy a minivan with room for four more car seats.

“I was afraid,” she said. “I still feel like I can’t believe it.”

U.S. immigrants’ stories often are about reinvention and newfound prosperity, about leaving behind poverty and limitations.

Angela Magdaleno and her husband, Alfredo Anzaldo, bond with their two boys and two girls born July 6 at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles.

But that is not Magdaleno’s story.

Magdaleno and Anzaldo are illegal immigrants, settled for years in an immigrant enclave. Magdaleno has the same number of children as her parents, who were peasant farmers in Mexico. Like her parents, she is living in poverty and struggling as a provider.

“It’s not sweet,” says her 36-year-old sister, Alejandra. “It’s very sad. The life for girls back there in Mexico is the same as the one Angela has now. They marry and have children, and that’s their lives.”

Neither Magdaleno nor her husband speak English, though she has been in the United States 22 years and he 28. Even her teenage daughters speak mostly Spanish; their English vocabulary is limited. Yet all of Magdaleno’s 10 children are U.S. citizens. The triplets receive subsidized school lunches. All the youngsters have had their health care bills covered by Medi-Cal, the state and federal health care program for the poor.

Alfredo Jr. had been hospitalized all his life until recently. He’s had three state-funded brain operations and will require several more as he goes through life, the family says. The couple receive $700 in monthly Social Security payments to help with his medical needs.

“I thank this country that they gave me Medi-Cal,” Magdaleno says. “There’s nothing like that in Mexico.”

Magdaleno said she was wearing a birth-control patch to keep from getting pregnant, then took it off when it made her nauseated.