A Late-Blooming Latina Finds Her Niche at UCLA

In August of 1963 Rosina Becerra, a somewhat restless computer programmer at an aerospace corporation in Sunnyvale, drove a friend to San Jose to take the qualifying exam for the Peace Corps. That ride proved to be a detour that changed the direction of Becerra’s life.

Her friend never did join. But within the month Becerra found herself agreeing to go to Brazil for two years as a Peace Corps community worker.

Looking back, Becerra says she would love to be able to say that she did it for God and country, but the true catalyst was the realization that in the two years since graduation from San Diego State University with a degree in mathematics, she had acquired a suspiciously spotty employment record and, she had reasoned, “What better way to leave a job. . . . “

The experience proved to be a “major mark” in her life, “one of the roughest, emotionally most difficult and most joyful experiences I’ve had”--and one that led her to abandon math as a career and go into social work.

Last July, Becerra was named associate dean of the School of Social Welfare at UCLA, which makes her the highest-placed Latina in the university’s administration.

A Late Bloomer

Becerra was, perhaps, a classic late bloomer. A native San Diegan whose grandparents were born in Mexico, she graduated from San Diego’s Hoover High in 1957 and enrolled at UC Berkeley with a minimum of enthusiasm. “The truth is,” she said, “I really didn’t want to go to school in the first place. In our family, nobody had ever graduated from high school before, much less college.”

After two years at Berkeley, family and financial considerations led her to return home. She dropped out of school for a semester and took a job in Marston’s department store.

It was an eye-opener. Said Becerra, “I remember looking around and thinking, ‘In 20 years, I will have graduated to buyer in the handkerchief department.’ ”

The next semester she enrolled at San Diego State, working part time at Marston’s en route to a degree in math. And that, she thought, would be it as far as education went--”In those days we thought of a bachelor’s degree as terminal.” So in 1961, at the age of 21, she set off for San Francisco “with my car, 15 bucks in my pocket and my great degree.”

Took First Job Offered

But the “wonderful job in mathematics” she had envisioned did not materialize. So, to pay the rent, she took the first job offered, selling display advertising for the San Francisco Examiner. She stayed a year before deciding to return to San Diego State and get an advanced degree in math.

That meant finding part-time work and she was hired by San Diego County for the night shift--10 p.m. to 6 a.m.--at Juvenile Hall. Becerra liked the work so well that she quit school and took a full-time job in the Department of Corrections.

But she found she was not entirely comfortable with that decision. After all, she reasoned, she did have a degree in math. Scanning the “help wanted” columns in a newspaper, she sent out 30 letters, which netted 10 responses. Becerra accepted an offer from United Technology Corp. in Sunnyvale.

“It was the beginning of computer programming,” she said. “Those were the days when you had to be a mathematician to be a programmer.” She was assigned to work with a group of engineers who were testing parts for space capsules in the infancy of America’s manned space flights. It was interesting, yet. . . .

Then, on that August day in San Jose, Becerra learned she would have to wait three hours for her friend to take the Peace Corps exam. When she protested that it was impossible, the man at the door said, “Why don’t you come in and take the test?”

With no serious thought of signing up, she wrote on her application that her preference would be to go to Thailand to teach math. She figured it would be a totally different cultural experience.

“Three weeks later,” Becerra recalled, “I got a telegram--’You have been selected as a Peace Corps volunteer in community development in Brazil. Please respond within three days.’ ”

It was in November of 1963, as her group was preparing to leave for Brazil, that President Kennedy was assassinated. The Peace Corps had been Kennedy’s program and Becerra remembers “the feeling one had about the mission, how much more poignant it became, to know you were the last of ‘Kennedy’s Kiddies,’ as we called ourselves. It was a very patriotic time.”

Living alone in a town 200 miles from Rio de Janeiro, working with the Brazilians to set up a health clinic and school lunch programs, Becerra found, “I learned a lot about me, what I could do.” And about what she wanted, really wanted, to do.

But pragmatism took precedence when Becerra returned to San Diego in 1965, so she took a position as a mathematician at the Naval Electronics Laboratory on Point Loma (now the Naval Ocean Systems Center). In her free time, she plunged into Cesar Chavez’s new movement, organizing food collections for striking farm workers.

Sitting at her NEL computer one day, she remembers “looking at those machines and thinking, ‘Am I going to be doing this the rest of my life?’ ” After only a few months she left to become a community agencies social worker.

She also became involved in politics, in the Chicano movement. “I worked by day,” she said, “and spent my weekends picketing.” Joining an activist group, Trabajadores de la Raza, Becerra worked to encourage more Mexican-Americans to go on to higher education. Her colleagues decided she was a likely candidate for a graduate degree and so Becerra enrolled once again at San Diego State, this time earning a master’s in social work.

There followed jobs as a psychiatric social worker at the San Diego VA hospital and as a child therapist. She found the work rewarding, but “exhausting,” and to avert burnout she decided to go for a Ph.D. She chose the Florence Heller School of Social Welfare at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she earned her doctorate in social policy and research.

“Somewhere along the line UCLA heard about me,” she said, and from Brandeis she was recruited for the faculty, reporting in July of 1975 as acting associate professor in the School of Social Welfare. Early on, she gained considerable attention with a published book on a child abuse project in which she had been co-researcher.

Recognizing that she needed some basic expertise on the economics of providing social services, Becerra thought, “I might as well get another degree.” So, she picked up a master’s in business at UCLA with a specialty in management theory.

In July of 1981 she was granted tenure, the first Latina at UCLA to be tenured (there are now three), and in 1983 she became a full professor. When Leonard Schneiderman, dean of the School of Social Welfare, was looking for a successor to Jerome Cohen, who had returned to research and teaching, he tapped Becerra for the associate dean position.

Study on Adolescents

Considered by her colleagues an expert in cross-cultural communications, Becerra recently completed a comprehensive study of adolescent sexual behavior among Mexican-American girls between 13 and 19 in Los Angeles County, comparing their sexual behavior to that of their Anglo counterparts. About 1,000 girls were included.

“What we’re finding,” she said, “is that they are less likely to become sexually active at an early age (than the Anglos). However, they are twice as likely to become pregnant.” While 34% of the Anglo subjects said they were sexually active, only 19% of the Mexican-Americans said they were and the latter were much less likely to have had more than one sexual partner.

Most of the Mexican-American subjects were Catholic, most of the Anglos Protestant. “Religiosity was a factor,” Becerra said, “the frequency with which you attend services or how strongly you feel attached to your religion.” As factors in the Mexican-Americans’ high pregnancy rate, she cited ignorance of reproduction and parents’ cultural conviction that talking to their daughters about sex is improper.

Becerra has also done research on the mental health of Latino Vietnam veterans, randomly sampling 200 veterans living in Los Angeles and finding that 40% of them reported severe mental health problems. One factor she cited as exacerbating postwar adjustment problems of Latino vets was their attitude about “manhood” and the expectation that they could handle problems without outside help.

Researched Elderly

She has also been researching the needs of the elderly, “particularly looking at the impact of social networks,” and has found mental and physical benefits for those who have a significant person in their lives--”They live longer by virtue of being healthier.” Said Becerra, “Aloneness seems to be as important, if not more so, than marital status” and a friend or a house-sharer can fill the role as well as a spouse.

As associate dean of the School of Social Welfare, which has a culturally diverse enrollment of 150 master’s students and 35 doctoral students, Becerra chooses to teach at least one course each quarter, to keep in touch with the students. She has also initiated weekly “open houses,” one or two hours set aside when students may drop in informally. “It’s a time when they can ask me things, tell me how things are going, what they’d like to see done,” she said.

Now one of eight or 10 Latinas with academic rank at UCLA, Becerra has been instrumental in bringing other Latinas onto the School of Social Welfare faculty. Her heritage is important to her and, Becerra said, if she ever needs to be reminded of her roots she can always get a dose of basic wisdom from her 85-year-old grandmother in San Diego.

Her grandmother, she said, always thought Becerra stayed so long in school simply because she was never able to graduate. “And when she found out I was a doctor,” she said, “she dragged all her friends over to tell me their aches and pains. I listened and said, ‘mmmmm, mmmm’, and they all went home satisfied.”