Latinas Urged to Pursue Professional Careers

With few mentors to tell her otherwise, Claudia Flores figured the best career she could aspire to was a secretary. But after listening for hours to successful Latinas recount their academic and career paths, Claudia, 16, reconsidered her career choice.

“A teacher. Maybe even a professor,” said the San Fernando High School sophomore. “I don’t know yet what I’d like to teach, but I think a teacher is a good way to reach people and to help people like they’re doing here for me today.”

Claudia was among more than 500 Latina teenagers who got a peek at career possibilities at the fifth annual “Adelante Mujer Latina” (Move Forward Latin Women) conference at Cal State Northridge.

The daylong conference, sponsored by the Valley chapter of Nacional Comision Femenil, a 25-year-old Latina leadership organization, was designed to inspire and motivate Latina high school students to strive for professional careers and college educations and to introduce them to role models.

“Latina women in L.A. have high teenage pregnancy and drop-out rates and we want to tackle these issues,” said Laura Casas-Frier, a member of Comision Femenil and an organizer of the event. “We want to light a fire underneath the girls for them to start thinking about careers and college early.”

Students from nine high schools around Los Angeles attended Saturday’s event, which featured a fair with representatives from two dozen businesses and organizations.

Maria Martin, 17, grabbed every brochure and flier she could find. Then she looked for women to quiz about their varied roads to success.

“I just wanted to make sure I had as much information as possible to make it easier to figure out what I want to do,” said Maria, a senior at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills. The Pacoima resident attended the conference last year, but returned for advice about what she should major in when she enrolls in Mission College in the fall.

Her enthusiasm and interest were precisely the kind of response Casas-Frier and other organizers were hoping for.

“What we strongly feel is that our Latina students need role models,” said Julia Vera, president of Comision Femenil. “None of the women who are here today came from wealthy backgrounds. They all had to struggle. And we want these girls to see them so they can look up at these women and say, ‘If she can do it, I can do it.’ ”

The Adelante Mujer Latina conferences began in Fresno in 1985 and have since been held in cities throughout California.

Casas-Frier and other members of the Valley chapter of Comision Femenil started the conferences here in 1989 to make them more accessible for teenagers living here. The events originally were held at Valley College and attracted about 250 students. But each time the numbers grew, and this year the turnout was large enough to force organizers to move to a larger locale.

With a $3,700 federal grant earmarked for the project, organizers put together 26 workshops on topics that included Latinas in psychology, government, medicine and law; how to survive college; achieving success and building self-esteem; and how to be a teenage parent and still work toward having a career.

“You young women have to take positions of leadership now,” Lydia Camarillo, the event’s keynote speaker, told the teens.

Camarillo, executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Texas, urged the girls to begin strengthening their leadership skills now by encouraging their parents and neighbors to vote, and to vote themselves once they are of age.

“You are our future,” she said in Spanish to a room full of teenagers. Then, switching to English, she added: “We are looking to you to carry us and our tradition to higher levels. It is within you all to do that.”