Immigrant Realizes Dreams of Success : Woman Says Hard Work Helped Her Overcome Homelessness to Excel at Stanford

To understand how far Maria Guadalupe Vasquez has come, you need to know where she started.

The daughter of migrant farm workers who drifted across the Southwest before bottoming out in an Oxnard homeless shelter nearly a decade ago, Vasquez spent her high school years dreaming of a life beyond the poverty that plagued her family.

So when it became apparent that there was little hope of escape if she stayed put, she decided to chase those dreams just as far as her straight-A grades would allow.

That is how she landed at Stanford University, the first in her family to attend high school or college and perhaps the first homeless person ever admitted to the prestigious private school.

“I think I really wanted to run away from my situation. I just wanted to escape any way I could,” said computer chip designer Vasquez, 24, who lives in the northern California town of Mountain View and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from California’s most expensive university.

“A lot of young people in my situation would probably take to the streets or go the wrong way,” she said. “I just had to leave. I had dreams and I worked hard to achieve them. I think I saw it as survival. I had the skills to survive and achieve something better.”

Hers is an American success story, an immigrant tale pointing up the value of education and hard work. It’s a story about the rise from a shelter to Stanford, and about the drive to overcome long odds.

When word of her struggle and her success got out during her senior year at Oxnard High School--where she graduated second in her class in 1989--she won widespread acclaim.

She was named ABC’s newsmaker of the week on a national broadcast. Actor Edward James Olmos put her under contract to do a movie about her life. She won accolades and awards from the city of Oxnard, the California Homeless Coalition and the Washington-based American Legion Auxiliary.

But most important, Vasquez assembled a collection of state, federal and university grants, scholarships and fellowships that paid the bulk of her nearly $30,000-a-year education.

“Lupe epitomizes the American dream,” said Noe Lozano, Stanford’s associate dean of student affairs. “She has a strong will to succeed and a desire to make things happen for herself. And there is no sense that any of this is an entitlement. She has worked really hard for what she has.”

Given the current political climate, Vasquez acknowledges that it could be harder today for youngsters in her situation to match her success. She came to the United States illegally when she was 2 and did not become a legal resident until 1988.

Although her family never received government aid, she said, it stands to reason that efforts to overhaul the federal welfare system and state measures aimed at cutting off public assistance to illegal immigrants could make it more difficult--although not impossible--for students like her to get ahead.

After seven years at Stanford, what Vasquez has is a lot more than a couple of higher education diplomas.

She has studied in Paris and has seen a world far different than the hand-to-mouth existence she knew in Oxnard. She has a well-paying job in the Silicon Valley working with a team of engineers who design microprocessors, the chips at the heart of every computer.

She also has two children, the first born weeks before she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1994 and the second born earlier this year, months before she got her master’s. She and her husband, Alexander Ukanwa, are expecting their third child in January. They are already putting money away for college.

“I want them to have a lot of the things I didn’t have,” Vasquez said. “I didn’t have much support at home, no role models to look up to. It was an environment where nobody was trying to make a better life for themselves, where people just didn’t care. It was depressing. Very depressing.”

Vasquez’s entire childhood was dominated by such scenes. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, she was 2 when her parents divorced. Her mother, an itinerant onion picker, moved the family in and out of a series of cramped apartments in small towns near Phoenix before remarrying and settling in Oxnard.

At first, the family of seven squeezed into a boarding room no bigger than a large bathroom. But when they couldn’t pay the rent, they landed at the Zoe Christian Center, a homeless shelter in Oxnard. She had never had it so good. There was always enough to eat. And for the first time in years, her family had a reliable roof over its head.

Meanwhile, Vasquez excelled in school. She had always been at the top of her class, but at Oxnard High she was earning straight As, taking honors courses and setting her sights on college.

To her, education was the great equalizer, a way of proving that she was as good as her classmates who could afford trendy clothes and personal computers. She applied to six colleges and was accepted by all of them. During senior awards night, she racked up so many scholarships and honors that the principal dubbed it “Lupe Vasquez Night.”

In the two-story apartment where her mother, stepfather and siblings now live, those mementos are carefully stashed in a plastic washtub.

A collection of awards, framed and protected by glass, are wrapped in towels to guard against damage. Dozens of newspaper clippings chronicling her achievements are kept in plastic sandwich bags to ward off decay.

“She was always very studious,” said her mother, Maria Leyva, who helped look after Vasquez’s children so that she could complete her studies. “I would tell her that it was important to make herself as strong as possible so that she could get ahead.”

But to get ahead, Vasquez knew she had to get out. She never told classmates where she lived. She was embarrassed to let anyone know she was homeless.

And it got worse once reporters began asking questions and exposing the most intimate details of her life.

“I didn’t want people to know those things,” she said. “It wasn’t very comfortable. I just wanted to go away and fit into the Stanford crowd as best I could.”

What she found at Stanford was anonymity and freedom. She was just another bright, hard-working kid going up against the best and the brightest from high schools across America.

And she had an edge. When other students complained about dorm rooms, she was thankful to have a place of her own. And when others lost their way in the free-wheeling universe of university life, Vasquez said she was able to stay on track because she had already been making independent decisions about what to do with her life.

Her hard work was rewarded in 1994 when she won the National Science Foundation Fellowship, which paid for two more years at Stanford to pursue a graduate degree.

Now focused on career and motherhood, Vasquez said she is proud of what she has achieved. She doesn’t know whether her life story will ever become a movie. Or how long she’ll continue to work in the fast-paced computer industry.

But she figures she has plenty of time to sort it all out.

“I just want to provide a good home for my kids to grow up in, something better than I had,” she said. “I guess I just want to try to live a normal life for a bit.”