Hispanic Women Urged to Pursue Education, Careers

The young Latinas, some with their mothers, filled the auditorium at Woodrow Willison Middle School Thursday.

They had come to hear educators and career women talk about the importance of continuing an education and pursuing a career.

On stage were teachers, a lawyer and a broadcast reporter. School officials had invited the women to demonstrate the path to career success.

Schoolteacher Rocio Weiss asked the young women if they realized that their Aztec and Mayan ancestors had been architects, engineers, and astronomers. Weiss told them that some people do not believe that Latinas are smart enough to stay in school, and she implored the audience to prove them wrong.

Julie Martel, a resource teacher at Wilson, said she wanted the meeting to focus on young Latinas “because I hear so many of them say they want to get married and have children. I want to show them that there are alternatives.”

Each of the career-women guests told of her own climb to success.

Teresa Gonzales had been a gang member in Los Angeles. Now she is a supervisor at Wilson. She urged the young women to stay in school.

Eloiza Cisneros was the first member of her family to graduate from college. Today she is an assistant superintendent of San Diego city schools.

“How many of you have parents who don’t speak English?” Cisneros asked the young women. More than half raised their hands.

“When I was your age, I didn’t know I was going to (continue) in school,” Cisneros said, but teachers encouraged her to go on. Now she has a doctorate.

Encouragement was one thing that Lorenza Calvillo Craig, a former teacher and now a public defender, received from her farm-worker family. She told the young women to make sure that they use two precious gifts: their Spanish language and their family.

They must learn English, she said, because “speaking only Spanish will not help you in this country.” But she advised them to also cultivate Spanish.

Ana Martinez, a newscaster for KGTV, Channel 10, was asked how she got her job?

Martinez said she started in the business as a weather reporter at a local station in her home town in East Texas. After her first broadcast, the station received racist phone calls about her. That night, she thought she would quit. The she set out to prove that she could handle the job. She stayed at the station four years, then kept moving to larger markets, she told the girls.

Afterwards, the mothers gathered outside the auditorium. One of them said she liked the examples the women set.

“I wasn’t going to come,” said Elena Garcia, a mother of six. “But I thought, ‘if I want her to be interested in school, then I must be interested too.’ ”

Garcia said her daughter, Lydia, wants to be police officer. The mother also plans to pursue her education.