Hispanic Caucus Serves Some Inspiration to Student Leaders

At age 18, Jaime Mercado found himself sprawled face down on the concrete with a police officer holding a gun to his head. He was a passenger in a car involved in a drive-by shooting. Mercado, a 10th-grade dropout, was going nowhere in life and he suddenly realized it.

“I knew I had to get out of the streets and go back to school,” said Mercado, who is now the principal of Mar Vista High School in San Diego, the same campus where he had dropped out as a teen-ager. “There were a million reasons for me to fail and only one reason to succeed. I knew I had to believe in myself.”

Mercado was one of 10 speakers Saturday at a youth leadership panel sponsored by the Hispanic Caucus of the California School Boards Assn. at the Le Meridien Hotel. Their goal was to inspire local students to continue their education and overcome whatever disadvantages they face. About 100 students attended.

The speakers did not sugarcoat the statistics on Latino students and education. The numbers are too staggering: 28% of California’s Latino high school students drop out before graduation. Nearly 50% drop out of high school nationwide. The numbers have changed little in two decades.

Instead, the speakers, who ranged from mural artists to actors and scholars, told often dramatic stories of how they leaped over daunting obstacles to become successful.

Attorney Lorenza Calvillo Craig recounted how she grew up in a family of nine children. They watched their parents--farm workers--sweat under a scorching sun to put food on the table. The second-oldest child, she supplemented her family’s income by picking grapes and cotton until she was 16.

School was harsh. Teachers did not like Latino students to speak Spanish, she said, and those who did were punished. There were not many role models. Craig looked to her family for inspiration and her parents pushed her hard to study. She made it to a community college and then to UC Berkeley, where she obtained a teaching certificate. After several years of teaching, she returned to school and earned a law degree. She is now a public defender in San Diego, representing abused children.

“You have to be aware of your place in history and how your family fits into this country,” Craig said. “I know where my family fits. They were part of the laborers who helped built this country. Maybe they didn’t make the history books, but I know where they fit and how important they were. Now you, as students, will be the ones making history toward the end of this century and the beginning of the next. You must know where you fit and where your family fits.”

Mural artist Mario Torero told the students how he and his friends often found school discouraging because there were so few role models to emulate.

Now Torero is an arts commissioner for the city of San Diego. He helps decide who should get art grants. Torero has also been invited to Czechoslovakia to paint a mural that would depict the ongoing changes in the world.

He told the students they too can represent America.

Santa Ana student Karla Simental, 17, a senior at Mountain View Continuation High School, said she has often felt discouraged in school. Now she feels inspired and wants to be a teacher.

“We need to know that there are people who can climb out of the very low and make it to the very top,” Simental said. “They proved to me that I can be someone and I can get somewhere even with some disadvantages in front of me.”

Zolin Westerheidy, a 16-year-old native Guatemalan and a senior at Katella High School in Anaheim, agreed.

“I want to be like them, a ‘somebody,’ ” Westerheidy said. “School is sometimes hard. But when you know there are so many others there like you, it is easier.”