Boy Scouting Is Badge of Honor for Latino Troop

A beefy man with a baseball cap walks into the hotel lobby and spots a teenager wearing a Boy Scout uniform. The youth is draped in merit badges, those patches of accomplishment that document the training completed by the proud bearer.

Citizenship. Astronomy. Horseback riding. First aid. Camping. Target shooting. And many more.

“Congratulations!” says the hotel guest in a booming voice. “That’s a lot of honors, my brother.”

To offer his praise, the visitor from Detroit unabashedly interrupted my interview with the Scout, Denovan Espinoza, an extraordinary 16-year-old from Westminster High School. Denovan and his troop, 1188, had been posted in the lobby to welcome local Scouting supporters to a fund-raising luncheon Thursday in Anaheim, part of an effort to recruit more Latino kids to the Boy Scouts in Orange County.

Our man from Detroit, James Albert III, just happened by, but he knows all about the importance of Scouting in minority communities. He grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in the 1960s, a time of urban riots and rampant street violence.

“They put us all in the Boy Scouts to stay out of trouble,” said Albert, now an ergonomics technician for General Motors. “It was a deterrent. And it works.”

Of course, it only works if you can convince kids to participate. That’s the goal of a recruiting effort called Scoutreach, a national drive to make Scouting more diverse. The Orange County Council of the Boy Scouts of America has been focusing its efforts on the Latino, Vietnamese and Korean communities in Santa Ana, Anaheim, Buena Park, Costa Mesa, Tustin, Garden Grove and Fullerton.

Marcos Nava, the council’s Scoutreach director, became a Scouting executive eight years ago. Back then, he said, he had to beat the bushes to find Latino Scouts to feature on a local cable news broadcast.

“I had a hard time looking for one troop that was Latino,” said Nava, whose family immigrated from Guadalajara when he was 9. “I mean, I really had to work hard to get eight boys together.”

Since 1995, the number of Latino Scouts in the county has jumped by 157%, from 3,500 to 9,000 boys, he said. A total of 94,000 youngsters participated in the Orange County council this year.

Setting an Example

Thursday’s $75-per-plate luncheon raised $40,000 for Scoutreach, with a big boost from corporate donors. The event featured a tribute to Frank Quevedo, vice president for equal opportunity at Southern California Edison.

Part of the money goes to pay program aides to get Scout troops started in minority neighborhoods. That’s not the normal way to organize a new troop, usually run by parent volunteers. But in places where language and cultural barriers make adults reluctant to take part, bilingual staffers can help set the stage until parents gain the confidence to take over.

Confidence seems to run in Denovan’s family. His little brother, Cub Scout Josue, 9, impressed the crowd of political, corporate and community leaders with a memorized address on what Scouting means to him.

“I want to follow in my brother’s steps,” said the pint-sized Scout, speaking at the podium in a forceful voice. “My brother is an Eagle Scout.”

Well, almost. Denovan has just one project to complete before attaining Scouting’s top rank. Five of his fellow Scouts are also on their way to becoming Eagles, which requires 21 of those merit badges. Another four of the troop’s 31 members, all Latinos, are one rank away from the honor.

That’s a remarkably high percentage of Eagle candidates for this one troop, based at a Mormon church in Westminster. Nationally, officials say, less than 2% of Scouts complete all the Eagle requirements, which include classroom study, extended camping trips and long, demanding hikes.

Denovan said he sets an example to motivate other Scouts. As senior patrol leader, the high school sophomore knows other boys look at who he is and how he acts.

And what do they see?

“People see a mature young man,” said Denovan, describing himself, “a youth who already has set his goals of what he wants to be, who will stand out in society and someday, perhaps, even be president of the republic. That’s what people see.”

Denovan--who should have been Donovan except for an error on his birth records--plans to attend Utah’s Brigham Young University to pursue a double career in paleontology and veterinary medicine. A big vision for a teen who’s barely old enough to drive.

I watched the young man prepare his troop for presentation of the colors before lunch. He lined up his fellow Scouts and told them how to hold the flags and which foot to start on, all with a firm but friendly expression.

“He knows how to command,” said Luis Sarmiento, 17, a Scout who sat at my table. “He doesn’t have to keep cracking the whip.”

Luis, a junior at Westminster High, also gives credit to the troop’s Scoutmaster, Manuel Lino, Denovan’s stepfather. When Lino took charge three years ago, the troop was almost defunct. Lino, a school bus driver and former Boy Scout in his native El Salvador, nurtured the troop back to life like a big bang.

“He started to teach us more and more, and it became like a little chain reaction,” said Luis, who has no father at home. “He’s never going to ask us to do something he’s not willing to do.”

I believe that. I had already met Lino the day before and glimpsed a man who takes his commitments seriously. Lino, who turns 41 on Christmas Eve, is a father of five children ranging in age from 5 to 20.

And he’s a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors the troop. Lino took a hard road to religion. The atrocities he witnessed during the civil war in his native country had shaken his faith in a Supreme Being.

In San Salvador, he was an Olympic swimmer and studied civil engineering at Universidad Centroamericana, the Catholic campus where Jesuit priests were massacred. As a Red Cross volunteer, Lino said, he witnessed gruesome scenes of decapitated and dismembered cadavers, and much worse.

“So confused was I that I became something of an atheist,” Lino told me in Spanish. “All the atrocities I saw. All the injustice. All the dirty things you see in our countries, the Third World countries.”

Both the guerrillas and the Army pressured young men to join sides. Students like him were especially vulnerable. It was enlist or be killed.

Twenty years ago, Lino came north instead.

Lino told me the chilling story as we sat alone together in his yellow school bus, parked at a Costa Mesa high school while he waited for his passengers to finish a soccer match. He also told me of his religious conversion after two Mormon missionaries showed up on bicycles at his Westminster home.

The young Americans told him they weren’t there to give him answers. He said he found those himself in the Bible.

As a father, Lino is strict about certain things. He demands good manners. And he doesn’t allow baggy clothes or tight skirts.

He’s also demanding of his Scouts, some of whom just arrived in this country and don’t speak English. Part of his secret is to participate with them, said Lino, who showed up at the lunch in his Scoutmaster uniform. He said he also takes time off with no pay to join the boys on camping trips.

“But the most important thing of all,” said Lino, as he rested on the big steering wheel in the empty bus, “if you make them a promise, keep it.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.