Latino Honorees Are Proud to Be Role Models : Recognition: A teacher, businessman, conductor, community activist and sound wizard will receive awards.

Carmen Cortez remembers distinctly the only Latina teacher she had while growing up poor in a family of nine children in La Colonia, a working-class Latino neighborhood in Oxnard.

“She stands out in my mind, because she looked like me and sounded like me,” said Cortez, a reading specialist with 11 years of teaching experience in Oxnard.

Although she studied under the teacher for only four months, Cortez said the episode taught her that she too could be a teacher and did not have to work in the fields like her parents.

“I would wish for teachers to expect the most from a child’s capacity to learn and be a successful individual,” she said.

Cortez is one of five Ventura County residents who will be presented the 1991 Latino Leadership Awards on Friday in recognition of their community service, youth leadership and contributions to business, the arts and education. El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, a Latino advocacy group in Oxnard, will honor the winners at the second annual Latino Awards Dinner at the Doubletree Hotel in Ventura.

Like the other winners, Cortez, 34, believes that Latinos have made impressive strides in Ventura County over the past 20 years.

“There was a time when society didn’t care about educating Latinos,” said Victor Salas, a founder of the Santa Paula Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce. “I wondered when the time would come that I could go to a Mexican-American doctor or a Latino lawyer. This is finally taking place.”

Salas will be presented the leadership award for business. Cortez will be recognized for her leadership in education. The award for community service will go to Al Soliz, a past president and longtime member of the Oxnard Boys and Girls Club. Frank Salazar, founding conductor of the Ventura County Symphony Orchestra, will be presented the award for leadership in the cultural arts. The award for youth leadership will go to Orlando Larios, an electronics wizard who, at age 14, operated the sound system at a concert by singer/songwriter Jackson Browne.

In their own communities, all five have gained success with little fanfare. El Concilio officials said the awards are designed to bring the winners some of the recognition they deserve.

“The Latino community has tremendous leadership, unfortunately they usually go unrecognized,” said Marcos Vargas, executive director of El Concilio.

The youngest of the winners is Larios, a 19-year-old Hueneme High School graduate who learned very young how to manage complicated sound systems from his father, Bernardo Larios, a professional bass guitarist.

In addition to the Jackson Browne concert at Ventura College, Larios operated the sound system for Grammy award-winning singer Buffy Sainte-Marie in a concert in Oxnard when he was 13 years old. When he was 16, Larios operated the sound system at a concert in Montecito by country singer Kris Kristofferson.

Larios, who was raised in Oxnard and graduated with honors from a high school program for gifted students, said he is considering a career in law enforcement, possibly as a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy.

Ventura County, he said, is lacking in Latino role models, and he hopes that Latino youths can look to him for inspiration. “I consider myself a good role model,” he said.

The most renowned of the five Latino leaders is Salazar, who founded the Ventura County Symphony Orchestra when he was 22 years old.

Salazar, now 63, said he doesn’t consider himself a role model but hopes he can encourage young Latinos to be interested in classical music.

“Instead of picking up a rock and throwing it at someone, I say write a line of poetry,” he said.

Salazar grew up in Albuquerque, N.M., and gained a love for music from his mother, who was a piano teacher and a church organist.

Because of his family’s cultural background, Salazar said he grew up listening to Mexican folk songs and corridas along with selections of such classical artists as Chopin and Mozart. “It never occurred to me that this was different music,” he said. “To me, there are only 12 notes, and beautiful music is everywhere.”

After studying music at the University of New Mexico, a conservatory in Rome, the Juilliard School of Music in New York and the University of Southern California, Salazar decided that he wanted to conduct an orchestra.

“I asked my professors where I could go, and they said, ‘No one is going to ask you to conduct,’ ” he said. “ ‘You are going to have to go somewhere and start your own orchestra.’ ”

In 1950, Salazar moved to Ventura and assembled the county’s first symphony orchestra. Five years later, he recruited the best musicians from local high schools and formed the Ventura County Youth Symphony.

Since then, Salazar has served as guest conductor for symphonies across the United States, Mexico and Spain.

Soliz, a retired construction worker, has dedicated his life to encouraging youngsters in Oxnard to become involved in sports.

For more than 25 years, he has been actively involved in the Little League program in El Rio, a mostly Latino neighborhood in Oxnard. He has also played key roles in organizing the El Rio Boys and Girls Club and the Oxnard Boys and Girls Club.

Soliz said he acquired a love for baseball when he was a catcher for the Oxnard High School team.

Raised in a family of seven in La Colonia, Soliz said youth programs might have kept him off the streets when he was young.

“In my youth, we never had anything like we have now,” he said. “I was a street fighter in Oxnard when I was growing up.”

Because he believes young Latinos in Ventura County need more role models in places of influence, Soliz said he has been active in several voter-registration drives to increase voter participation among Latinos. Soliz was a member of the Ventura County Fair board from 1977 to 1982.

Soliz, who completed high school while stationed in Germany during World War II, said he also tries to encourage Latino parents to get involved in the education of their children. “My parents didn’t have time to attend PTA,” he said. “Let’s face it, without an education, you can’t go anywhere.”

Cortez, a teacher at Norma Harrington Elementary School, agreed.

She said her parents left Mexico so that she and her brothers and sisters could get a better education in American schools. “My mother also taught us to be proud of our culture and heritage, and to earn and demand respect from everyone,” she said.

In high school, Cortez was a Latino activist. She was editor of the Chicano newspaper and participated in Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a political organization for Latino students, she said.

Cortez received her teaching credentials at UC Santa Barbara in 1980. In 1987, she was named outstanding educator of the year in the Oxnard Elementary School District.

In 1989, she was elected president of Oxnard’s Assn. of Mexican-American Educators, and last year, she became regional vice president of the state’s Assn. of Mexican-American Educators.

Cortez said young Latino students can only succeed in school if they have the support of their parents. “Education is not confined to the classroom,” she said.

Because of her convictions, Cortez said she helped form a Latino parents organization called Padres Unidos. Like the PTA, Padres Unidos is designed to encourage Latino parents to become involved in the education of their children, she said. The organization began two years ago with a handful of members, she said. Today, 175 Latino parents are active members.

Salas, a former trustee on the Santa Paula High School District Board of Education, said he believes that role models are important for Latinos in Ventura County.

Salas, 57, was raised in Santa Paula with his nine brothers and sisters on the salary their father brought home as a fieldworker.

A graduate of Ventura College, Salas earned a degree in engineering at San Diego State University. With the money he has made from his job with Santa Paula Water Works Ltd., Salas opened Salas Manufacturing Co. in 1979. The company makes gopher traps, he said.

Salas said he helped form the Santa Paula Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce in 1985 because he believed that Latino business owners in Santa Paula needed to become organized like their Anglo counterparts. The organization has 52 active members, he said.

“It seems like a chamber of commerce is about as American as hot dogs and apple pie,” he said.

Salas was a member of the Santa Paula Planning Commission between 1971 and 1978. He also organized an annual career fair at the Santa Paula Elementary School District. The program is designed to bring community leaders to the schools to answer questions about students’ career goals, he said.

Because many of the students in Santa Paula are Latino, Salas said he has scheduled several Latino community leaders to speak.

While a member of the Planning Commission, Salas said he began a campaign to name new streets in Santa Paula after Latino residents. He persuaded city officials to name five streets for Latinos.

For example, in 1977, the city named Vela Court after Asencion Vela, the former owner of a sand- and gravel-mining company that provided free labor to install curbs and gutters throughout the city in the early 1900s, Salas said.

“No one really knows who Vela was,” he said. “He was one of those Latinos that was behind the scenes.”