She’s Made It From Shelter to Stanford

After living a year in an Oxnard homeless shelter, Lupe Vasquez will see a fantasy turn real today when she starts classes at Stanford University.

The 17-year-old daughter of itinerant farm workers, Vasquez had been living at Zoe Christian Center with her parents and four brothers and sisters since they were evicted from their one-room apartment a year ago for failure to pay rent. Her mother and stepfather had come to Oxnard to pick lima beans. Now, her stepfather works as a janitor at the shelter, which is trying to find low-cost housing for the family.

“Ever since I can remember, we’ve been poorer than poor,” Vasquez said. “I would think the only way out is to get married. The only other way, my mother would tell me, is through education.”

She took her mother’s advice to heart. Vasquez always was at the top of her class, even during a childhood spent moving with her family as they followed the harvests in Arizona and California.

And this week she became a student at California’s most expensive university.

Vasquez acknowledges that many people think she will feel awkward at Stanford, where yearly costs top $21,000 and freshmen are as likely to have $2,000 computers as they are to have notebooks. But she shrugs off the school’s country-club image.

“I was there and everybody’s normal,” she said. “There are a lot of people like me up there.”

Her bangs teased high and her friendship bracelet wound tightly around her right wrist, Vasquez wears stone-washed jeans artfully ripped along the knees and back thighs. Her L.A. Gear high tops are tied with pink and white laces and she has pinned Stanford insignia on her bright green tank top.

Gets Grants, Scholarships

She has assembled a collection of state, federal and university grants and scholarships. The homeless shelter gave her a donated blue 1980 Datsun 510 and $1,000 in spending money. She worked 20 hours a week last year to replace the hand-me-down clothing that she said once marked her as poor.

She has an outstanding academic record, but she is no prodigy. Teachers at Oxnard High School, where she graduated second in a class of 397 last June, cite her intelligence and hard work rather than any extraordinary creativity or dazzling genius.

“She had the basic tools to start with and the work ethic along with that,” said Paul Orseth, her teacher in honors classes in economics and government.

These qualities served her well. She racked up so many scholarships and honors that senior awards night was jokingly dubbed “Lupe Vasquez Night,” according to the school’s principal, Ruperto Cisneros. “Students had to come up an aisle to accept the awards, and we told Lupe she wore out the carpet.”

Citing privacy laws, Stanford admissions officials declined to discuss Vasquez. But other officials there said she probably was the first homeless person to attend the prestigious university.

“I don’t know, but I would be really surprised if there had been other homeless here,” said Juan Yniguez, Stanford’s assistant dean of student affairs.

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Maria (Lupe) Vasquez was 2 years old when her parents divorced. Her mother, an itinerant onion picker, moved Vasquez and her sister in and out of a series of cramped apartments in small towns near Phoenix.

Her mother remarried five years ago, and had three more children.

In Oxnard, the family of seven squeezed into a boarding room, which accommodated only three beds and a table, in the worst section of town.

Children were not allowed there, so every time the family heard the landlord coming up the steps, they clambered out the back way and hid in abandoned cars behind the apartment house. This went on almost every day, Vasquez said.

A Relief at First

Moving to the homeless shelter, where she could count on a bed and regular meals, was a relief at first, she said.

But throughout her senior year, Vasquez lied to classmates about where she lived, preferring to say that she was from La Colonia, the barrio in town.

When she and her sister prepared to walk the two miles to Oxnard High School, Vasquez would peer around the corner to make sure the bus that daily passed the shelter on its way to a competing high school was not in sight.

“I feel uncomfortable for people to know that I live here,” Vasquez said. “It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but I feel uncomfortable with speaking of my mom working in the fields and being homeless.”

Zoe Christian Center, on the other hand, is eager to talk about Vasquez’s success, and even has enlisted her for speaking appearances in its perennial battle for donations.

“Lupe is the culmination of 11 years of working with the poor, and we finally strike gold,” said the Rev. Jim Gilmer, the center’s director. “Lupe was such a blessing to us.”

But Vasquez is the first to acknowledge that her success was not driven by altruism.

Excelling in school was at first a way to prove she was as good as the youngsters in her classes who could afford trendy clothes and personal computers, she said.

“I thought they would try to put me down because I’m Mexican and poor. I thought they’d think I wasn’t as good,” Vasquez said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do better than everybody.’ ”

But college remained a fantasy--along with her almost-constant dreams of being rich enough to have a chauffeur and maids and a mansion--until her junior year in high school.

At a meeting of a math and science club for minorities, she learned that chances were good she could get financial aid. No one had ever told her about that.

She said she “killed herself” her senior year, studying three or four hours a night in the pandemonium of the shelter to get ahead in her four honors classes. She joined clubs to beef up her college applications.

Meanwhile, she returned to the shelter at night.

With other residents, she did assigned chores such as cleaning the bathrooms and helping cook meals. Later, sitting on the couch in the center’s conference room, she tried to do her homework, tuning out the sounds of the pick-up basketball games outside and ignoring center residents wandering in and out.

The center houses about 130 people, 60 of whom are children under the age of 12.

Women share one bathroom and a group shower. Men use two light-green portable toilets. Meals are eaten in a cafeteria.

“It is the best place I’ve ever lived in,” Vasquez said. “If you come at the right time and God’s with you, you get a room.”

Accepted by Six Schools

But in her senior year, she was intent on getting a room elsewhere.

She applied to six colleges, including Stanford, and was accepted by all of them.

Vasquez said she has chosen to live in Ujamaa House, the black “theme house” on campus, so she can learn about other cultures. She plans to major in engineering and then go on to graduate school for her Ph.D.--jamming in somewhere along the way the social life she denied herself in high school.

“I want to have my freedom,” Vasquez said. “I want to have fun.”