Inspiring the Children of Migrant Workers : Education: Teachers’ assistants with the Mini Corps program rely on their experience in the fields to help others excel academically.

Veronica Magana remembers picking the last strawberries of spring as a child, working next to her parents in an Oxnard field. It was hard work but fun, she says, mostly because she got to spend so much time with her mother.

But the Cal Lutheran student’s memories of a childhood in the migrant farm worker culture are not all so sweet.

As an eighth-grader already eagerly planning for college, she struggled constantly to prove to school counselors that she could handle classes taught only in English. Just let me try it, she told them. What have I got to lose?

At 22, Magana still has the same sense of determination, but now she is using it to persuade other children of migrant workers that they, too, can go to college and become teachers, lawyers or whatever they want.

Having graduated from Cal Lutheran University in May, Magana is beginning a summer job Monday as a teacher’s assistant with the state and federally funded Mini Corps program. The program is designed to present role models to the children of migrant field workers while giving teaching experience to young people such as Magana.

“If you’re up there, hey, you’ve got to reach down and help the next person coming up the ladder,” Magana said.

About 20 students from Cal Lutheran, Cal State Northridge and Oxnard College are participating in the Mini Corps program this summer. All are bilingual, and all have had firsthand experience with migrant education.

Gil Villasensor, Ventura County coordinator of Mini Corps, said 2,000 to 2,500 children of migrant workers in the county will attend Mini Corps summer sessions this year in Moorpark, Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Santa Paula.

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The teaching assistants receive $6 to $7 an hour, he said.

“Mini Corps student teachers serve as role models at school sites,” Villasensor said. “They provide motivation to seek higher education and they are often better received than other instructional aides because they themselves were migrant children.”

The Mini Corps program is about 15 years old and has been operating in Ventura for 10 years, Villasensor said.

Magana is intent on becoming a teacher; she even has the school picked out, her former elementary school in Oxnard, Cesar Chavez School. But the Mini Corps program is not limited to those who wish to become educators.

Mirella Escamilla, 20, who will be a senior at Cal Lutheran in the fall, hopes eventually to go into public relations or broadcast journalism. But like Magana, she will spend her summer at El Rio Elementary School in Oxnard, helping children with lessons in English, math, history, science and on getting ahead.

“I know from personal experience how important it is to have a role model,” Escamilla said. “That person can be a mentor. Through them you see the possibility of your dream coming true.”

Escamilla looked up to her aunt and uncle as a child. They were the first members of her family to go to college. Her father--formerly a celery picker, now a foreman for Gold Coast Harvesting in Oxnard--encouraged her to do well in school.

Still, college seemed out of reach and too expensive. “I think my father would have been happy if I just graduated from high school and didn’t join a gang,” Escamilla said. Her high school counselors suggested Cal Lutheran, which gives financial aid to about 80% of its student body.

Rosa Moreno, Cal Lutheran’s director of multicultural services and campus coordinator for the Mini Corps program, said she tells the student teachers to share their experiences with the children.

“What I try to focus on with all the students is that it is important to give something back,” Moreno said. “I want them to share their life experiences, the struggles they have all had. The past affects the present, the present affects the future. It’s important to come full circle.”

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For Magana, that means picking up a book and reading to the children in flawless Spanish, then in equally flawless English. For Escamilla that means empathizing with children who lose newly gained friends when they move on with their parents to a new crop in a new town. She remembers how sad that feeling was.

Rosa Perez, a 33-year-old mother of two who will graduate from Cal Lutheran next May, has a unique perspective to share as a Mini Corps teaching assistant this summer. She remembers being in school and listening to role models tell her she had options other than working in the fields next to her father and her seven siblings.

“I never believed them,” Perez said. “I remember thinking, ‘This person is just saying this because they could go to college, because they have a good job.’ ”

She said she disregarded the speeches about opportunities. But when she started picking strawberries at age 14, she began to reconsider and decided she had to find other options.

“Working in the fields is what convinced me,” Perez said. “I’m never going back there again because I know what it was like.”