THE SUNDAY PROFILE : The Guiding Light : Young Latinos who believe that college is beyond their reach just haven’t met Martin Ortiz. He’s helped thousands see graduation day.

Martin Ortiz, a man of many firsts, attempts another: crossing a plaza packed with well-wishers without being sidelined for a quick hello, handshake or hug.

Buena suerte.

Not even Ortiz, a revered Whittier College elder known as El Jefe (the boss), can control the pandemonium his presence is causing.

For 26 years, Ortiz, director of the college’s Center of Mexican American Affairs and its only Latino graduate in 1948, has guided thousands of students, finding scholarships, arranging tutors, securing jobs and sharing words of wisdom that many hold dear long after graduation.

His crusade, or movimiento as he prefers to call it, is inspired by a past that taught him, “Don’t just cry, qualify”--an Ortiz original.

As a boy, a teacher degraded him because he didn’t speak English. As a young man, restaurateurs, barbers, hoteliers and landlords turned him away because of his Mexican heritage. And while walking to class on his first day at Whittier, he was stopped cold and asked, “And where do you think you’re going?”

A soft-spoken Ortiz replied: “To get an education.”

Today, Ortiz, long considered by educators the nation’s father of minority student programs, is the college’s first Latino namesake of a multimillion-dollar scholarship endowment for Latinos.

But it’s his personal touch, his chivalrous and charismatic way with people, that has lured 700 Latino students and parents on a fall day to the hilltop mansion of Whittier College President James Ash for a tardeada , or afternoon reception .

An 11-piece mariachi orchestra plays “Cielito Lindo” on the vihuela , guitarra de golpe and guitarron , high-gloss guitars of various sizes and sounds. Nin n os , perched on their fathers’ shoulders, reach for helium-filled balloons. Streamers in patriotic red, green and white flutter like kite tails above the throng.

Ortiz, in a receiving line, manages to break away.

He takes three steps before a former student hits him with a kiss and asks if the man she considers her surrogate father might give her away at her July wedding.

Another student approaches to vigorously pump the hand of the man he respectfully calls “Dad”--the man who provides the encouragement to stick with college, especially when the student’s own father, an alcoholic, abuses his mother until the violence becomes unbearable.

Then a proud Mexican woman whose son is the first in the family to attend college bashfully asks Ortiz to pose with her for a photo. Wearing a gorgeous braid and fringed shawl, she wraps her arms around his waist, snuggles her head against his chest and smiles, revealing several gold-capped teeth. “One day I will show my grandchildren his picture,” she says later in Spanish, “and I will tell them, ‘ El Jefe is the reason for my son’s success.”’ But Ortiz, a painfully shy man, flatly refuses to take the credit.

The praise, he says, should be showered on the parents and their kids. Thanks should go to Ash and his predecessors--except the one who tried to put the center out of business in its early years. And, he says, the center’s Hispanic Students Assn., the Hispanic Parents Advisory Council and the Hispanic alumni group should also be commended.

In 1970, two years after returning to Whittier to teach Chicano studies, Ortiz, then 49, became the center’s founding director. The college’s enrollment was 5.5% Latino. Five years later, it reached 16%. This year, 27% of the 1,260 students are Latino--the highest percentage among the 73-member Assn. of Independent California Colleges and Universities.

Says Jonathan Brown, the association’s president: “Carefully and cautiously, Martin has followed a social mission to deeply enmesh Whittier into the Latino community. He is the foot soldier who has made it work.”

No matter what their heritage, students pop into his small office, four flights up from the president’s suite, to ask for advice and letters of recommendation, or to just say hello to “Mr. Whittier College,” another of Ortiz’s monikers.

The annual tardeada , held since 1970, is one of the many ways Richard Nixon’s alma mater embraces its diversity.

And every year Ortiz revels in introducing parents to professors and students to administrators, then slips into the background because the spotlight, he says, “belongs on our students.”

But not this year.

After everyone settles into their chairs with plates of carne asada tacos, rice and refried beans, after the band brilliantly performs its last classical song, after the announcement “to hold onto your beer cups because we’re all out” comes the real reason for the celebration.

Says Ash, simply, eloquently: “We are here today to celebrate the gentleman whose work is the glorious fulfillment of his hopes and dreams.”

Clearly, El Jefe , surrounded by cheering and applauding students, is moved.

“I’m in heaven,” he whispers.

*

A few days later, Ortiz is strolling across the velvety green grounds of Whittier College, founded by the Quakers 107 years ago.

In the distance, a trio of students strikes out of their path to say hello, filling him in on their schedules, assignments and grades, and regaling him with stories about their families, from little brothers and sisters to grandparents Ortiz has befriended. He never forgets a name or a face.

Destiny must have brought Ortiz to a place where he could touch many lives, where he could help tear down the barriers that keep many Latinos from going to college.

Through the decades, in his low-key but persuasive style, he tells parents who never finished high school, who never considered higher education, to change history by giving their kids a shot at the American Dream. He reassures Latinos that attending college, instead of working full time to help their families, is the right thing to do. And he manages to alleviate fears about fitting in at Whittier, where wealthier white students are in the majority.

He speaks from his own experience.

His father never encouraged education because he never went to school.

“Not even for one day,” Ortiz says. Tirso Ortiz rode with Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution and later immigrated to the United States, settling in Wichita, Kan. His wife died when Martin was 4. He later remarried, but Martin never bonded with his stepmother. There were too many children. The oldest of 12, he worked whenever he could to help.

Born in a Wichita barrio called El Huarache, he grew up in poverty. Even though he couldn’t speak English, he understood enough of the language to love school--until the eighth grade. As long as he lives he’ll never forget his teacher that year. It was Mrs. Mitchell, a tall, skinny woman “with a strange hairdo” who chastised him every time he spoke Spanish.

“I remember just asking if I could go to the bathroom because I didn’t know how to say it in English. One day Mrs. Mitchell sat me in the corner of the classroom by myself. She emptied all the desks around me and pinned a sign on my shirt.”

For an entire semester, the pinning became a ritual.

Every morning, his classmates would dance around him, laughing, pointing to the placard that proclaimed: “I am retarded.”

“I didn’t know what the sign meant then,” Ortiz says. “But I know that I didn’t cry.” That ordeal fired a resolve “to never let that happen to anyone again” and to dedicate his career--with help from his assistant, Rose Hernandez--to creating opportunities for Latinos.

*

If he’s not on the telephone pitching the college to high school counselors, corporations and contributors, he’s showing the campus to a prospective student and parents, catching up on scholarship fund-raising letters or typing speeches with index fingers on his 20-year-old Remington.

Says Ash: “Mr. Ortiz has generated enormous respect both at Whittier College and across the country for his work. He is an amazing man--very modest, but a real giant in the education field.”

Adan Ortega, a 1984 Whittier graduate and one of three Latinos on the college’s board of trustees, was a high school sophomore and an aspiring U.S. Senate page when he met Ortiz, who served on the selection panel that year.

“Martin is a cultivator,” says Ortega, the first college graduate in his family. He recalls riding his bike to the campus that summer. Ortiz would treat him to lunch, “always stressing college.”

Later, after Ortega’s father lost his job, Ortiz helped him get financial aid. While taking a slate of classes, Ortega worked full time as a movie theater manager.

“The beauty in what Martin has done through the center is not give students a handout,” Ortega says. “He has created a network that empowers students.”

And he has also forged lifelong friendships.

“Martin has given me windows into the different stages of life,” Ortega says, explaining that his friend has advised him on everything from his career to a painful divorce. “He’s the patron saint of Whittier College.”

*

Olivia Cervantes doesn’t need convincing.

As chairwoman of the Hispanic Parents Advisory Council, a support group that meets at the center, she sees Ortiz work his magic on parents as well, arranging financial-aid workshops and other programs. He translates at meetings, visits parents at home and invites them to campus for walks and lunch.

Cervantes’ oldest daughter, Jacquelyn, graduated in 1987 thanks to Ortiz’s scholarship assistance. Today, her youngest daughter, Judi, a sophomore, is in the same good hands.

Guatemalan-born Joseph Solorzano, a 21-year-old senior and Hispanic Student Assn. member, credits Ortiz with keeping him in school.

“I had some family problems at home this summer and when I got back to school, I talked to Mr. Ortiz about that,” Solorzano says. “He shared his personal life with me and made it obvious that returning to school was the best thing for me.”

Ortiz told the student of his own brief escape from school.

At 13, toward the Depression’s end, Ortiz was frustrated, pressured by discrimination in school and alienation at home. He and two friends went to the local railroad yard and caught the first freight train headed for Kansas City.

“We became hobos for 3 1/2 years,” Ortiz says. He remembers jumping aboard boxcars filled with two or three families, riding atop and underneath cars, and getting locked inside one for days at a time. His nickname was “Wichita.”

“I was on the move. But I didn’t beg or steal,” he says. He worked on a sugar beet farm. He gathered potatoes. Picked cotton. Harvested apples. He slept in railroad jungles, heated food in tin cans over campfires, and learned to speak English. “I went wherever the tracks took me with no destination in mind.”

At 16, tired of his directionless lifestyle, he returned home and enrolled in high school, one of three Latinos. In his senior year, he became the school’s first Latino student council president.

*

Ortiz never planned to attend college. He had to work and was content sacking groceries at the neighborhood Safeway. But one morning a friend rousted him out of bed and took him to Friends University, a Quaker-run school, on registration day.

“My friend had a paper bag with him. We went into the men’s room in the basement, and he pulled out a shirt. ‘Put this on. You’re going to college,’ ” Ortiz recalls his friend saying.

“My friend did this because he felt that I was college material. He had faith in me.” So did three other Anglo friends who dipped into their pockets to pay Ortiz’s $200 tuition, and later tutored him.

Three years ago, Ortiz was the guest speaker at his high school reunion in the very hotel where he had been barred as a youth because of his brown skin. In the back of the ballroom sat his four buddies, wiping away tears as he spoke.

“What you fellows did for me is what I have been doing all these years at Whittier College,” Ortiz recalls saying. “Nurturing the minds of young people with potential.”

Ortiz put in one semester at Friends, then signed up with the Marines in 1942, serving in the South Pacific as an aerologist and language specialist. After World War II, he enrolled at Whittier because it offered a YMCA management program.

His skin color, his last name, his sack lunches of tacos--who knows why, he says--kept him from feeling accepted by other students. “I just kept to my own and in my own place because it was more comfortable to do that.”

In town, no barber would touch his head, no restaurant would give him a table, no landlord would rent an apartment to Ortiz and his young Cuban-born bride. So they lived in veterans housing near City Hall and persevered.

After he earned a sociology degree, the couple moved to Chicago, where Ortiz got his master’s degree in sociology from George Williams College. He also founded the city’s Mexican American Council and taught Spanish at a YMCA.

Then his wife, Maria, was found to have a brain tumor. After two operations she lapsed into a coma that would last 4 1/2 years. Eventually, Ortiz returned her to Cuba--her body stretched across six plane seats--where the press dubbed her “La Cubana Dormida,” the sleeping Cuban woman. She died at 26.

Ortiz remarried in 1980. He and his wife, Linda, a bilingual kindergarten teacher, share a home in La Habra with Peluso, a floppy-eared rabbit; Valentine, a turtle; Perlita and Emi, two cats; Iggy, the iguana, and Foxy, a mutt Ortiz found beaten and left for dead 11 years ago.

“The other night I went home and the dog bit me,” Ortiz says. “He hadn’t seen me for a few days because I’d been so busy, coming home late from meetings. Finally, he said, ‘I’ll get your attention.’ ”

When Ortiz isn’t caring for his menagerie, he’s working in his rose garden, reading one of five newspapers or reliving his hobo years at National Hobo Assn. meetings in Century City. And when he isn’t deep into work at the center, he’s serving on commissions, committees and boards across Southern California, and planning for his return to school to finish his doctorate.

But his kids always come first.

“When people ask me if I have any children, I say, ‘Well, this year I have 340.’ ”

*

Marissa Gallegos is one.

The 21-year-old senior psychology major says Ortiz has given her ganas . Determination.

“Before I started college I thought of myself as not having the potential to excel, not being able to get involved,” she says. “But Mr. Ortiz has made me feel like I am special and that I do have something special to offer.

“The only thing that scares me is what will happen whenever he leaves. I know the students will carry on all his traditions, but it’s scary thinking about him not being here. Nobody can ever take his place.”

Ortiz isn’t going anywhere.

He’s healthy. He gets around just fine in his 1989 Olds. He could have left Whittier long ago, he says, for jobs with quadruple the salary.

“I’d like to be associated with Whittier College as long as I can do this job mentally, academically and physically,” he says, adding that he has much to do, such as a movimiento to add Latino professors to the four on staff.

He’s looking to the future and the thousands of parents out there with children hungry for an education.

On his own college commencement day, Ortiz’s father was in the audience.

“I’ll never forget when I walked past him after I got my diploma,” Ortiz recalls. He stops. His eyes water. “My dad was crying. He was in tears because a member of his family had graduated from college.”

Martin Ortiz

Age: 73

Native?: Born in Wichita, Kan.; resides in La Habra.

Family: Married to Linda Ortiz. The couple have no children, but Ortiz calls the 340 Latinos at Whittier his kids.

Passions: “Monday Night Football,” historical documentaries, eating seafood, taking long walks with students.

On being 73: “I took a physical not too long ago and the doctors were surprised that I was 73. I told them that my definition of an old person is anybody who is 10 years older than I am.”

On his love for work: “I’m not ready to stop what I’m doing and just think about myself. I have my work, which I don’t see as a job. It’s a cause that I am committed to, that I am passionate about. Why would I want to retire when there is still so much work to be done?”

On his biggest secret: “People don’t know that I’m a magician. I can pull a coin out of an ear. I’m also a drummer. Friends used to call me ‘Drumsticks’ when I had my own pick-up band in Chicago. We played jazz at weddings, receptions and funerals. I used to carry drumsticks up my sleeve and play them on everything: books, trash cans, tabletops.”

On the importance of college: “I’ve had many students who have said, ‘Mr. Ortiz, my father doesn’t want me to go to college. He thinks I should be out working or get married and settle down.’ Sometimes Latino parents don’t understand the world of academia. They’re conditioned by the past. I tell parents that college is the future and their children belong in it.”