Raising Their Sights

Lupe Del Rio and her daughter, Michelle, a high school student, have made their way from their home in East Los Angeles through the USC campus to an office of burgundy and gold, the colors of the prestigious school.

The prestige is nothing Raul Vargas has to emphasize as he sits with the Del Rios at a small wooden table. As director of USC’s Mexican American Programs, he has made it his mission to convey the message he has repeated to countless Latino parents and students over the years: USC may be expensive, but, with financial aid, it is not out of reach.

Vargas often tells of scholarships from USC’s Mexican American Alumni Assn., which he helped start and still oversees.

The association, a pioneer organization among universities in California, began when Vargas gathered a few friends for a fund-raising dinner in 1974. The groupnow 1,600 members strong--will celebrate its silver anniversary Feb. 19.

In the last 25 years, the association has awarded 4,000 scholarships, a total of $6 million.

Vargas is a former English, Spanish and math teacher who came to the university reluctantly, on a temporary contract as a liaison with the Latino community. But once the association’s scholarships were established, he decided to stay on to administer them. He thinks his mission is more urgent now than ever.

“I will no longer accept ‘You can’t go to USC, you can’t go to Harvard,’ ” Vargas, 59, says passionately. “If we can’t help our Latino students go to school wherever they want to go, then we haven’t moved at all.”

Judging from its robust membership, the Mexican American Alumni Assn. has, indeed, helped open doors for Latinos. The group includes Newport Beach psychotherapist Margarita Avila and her family, which owns Orange County’s El Ranchito restaurants, attorney Rubin A. Smith, whose Irvine law firm has bought a table at the upcoming dinner, and elected officials (such as L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and state Sen. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte).

Orthopedic surgeon Pablo P. Prietto of Orange and his family, which has three generations of USC alums among them, have established perpetual scholarships to honor their late parents--Consuelo, and Pablo Sr., who received his dentistry degree from the Los Angeles university.

“Without those scholarships, I don’t think many of us would have accomplished our dreams of graduating from USC,” says Armando Islas, a surgeon from Covina. After graduating from Garfield High School in 1976, Islas received one of the association’s first scholarships.

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Vargas speaks enthusiastically of alumni like Islas--and of the upcoming anniversary gala, a black-tie affair at the DC3 restaurant and Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, where Vargas expects to raise three-quarters of a million dollars.

Proudly, he notes that even before he sent out letters, the 89 tables--each worth up to $5,000--were grabbed by corporations where the association’s alumni are now in influential positions.

“For me, the best part of the dinner is when they [announce] the scholarship recipients,” says Richard Zapanta, 53, an orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. “It’s very touching to see how many students come from very humble families.”

Richard and his brother, Edward Zapanta, 59--also a doctor and one of two Latinos on the USC board of trustees--were with Vargas when he started the association.

Their cousin, Al Zapanta--now the president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.--was the first to start kicking around the idea of dinner fund-raisers, Vargas says.

But all agree that Vargas’ devotion is what has led the Mexican American Alumni Assn. to success.

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Where did he get his drive to help young Latinos?

The only explanation Vargas can offer is his fond memories of growing up in tightly knit Mexican American communities, such as Lordsburg, N.M., the copper mining town where he was born.

After his father died in a mining accident while Vargas was still a young boy, his family found a new home in another mining community, Miami, Ariz. Vargas and the other Mexican American kids attended one of three elementary schools in town and took pride in their athletic prowess.

What he perceived as his first negative racial experience did not occur until the late 1950s, when he was 19. A close friend at Arizona State University declined to take him to a fraternity party, telling him he probably would not be let into the house.

Vargas looked back on his childhood and remembered the three schools in Miami: one for Mexican Americans, one for blacks and one for whites.

“That’s when I saw,” he says, “there was something wrong with that system.”

In the 1960s, he moved to Colton in San Bernardino County to teach junior high school. As his awareness of civil rights continued to develop, he came to admire Cesar Chavez, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy.

In fact, to honor all three of his heroes, he wanted to name his second-born Juan Martin Cesar Vargas. But Marcia, his wife, not wanting to saddle her newborn son with such a lengthy name, settled on just Cesar.

In 1972, Vargas was hired at USC to do outreach work in the Latino community.

Quickly, he realized most Latinos could never afford USC’s expensive tuition. So he learned all he could about financial aid, reaching out to a handful of Latino alumni for help.

Eventually, he and eight of the alumni marched into then-USC President John Hubbard’s office and presented their idea for an alumni association and scholarship fund.

Hubbard listened, then announced that the university would contribute $2 for every $1 raised by the Latino alumni, an arrangement that continues today.

“I asked, ‘Mr. Hubbard, what is the limit?’ ” Vargas recalls. “He told me: ‘Your ability.’ ”

Their first dinner brought in $48,000. Last year, scholarships were awarded to 173 undergraduate, 34 graduate, seven law school and four medical school students.

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In addition to the annual dinners, the association sponsors an annual golf tournament that raises about $60,000, and it oversees a $1.3-million endowment fund.

The scholarships for undergrad and graduate students range from $1,000 to $9,000 yearly for four years. The medical school scholarships are for full rides. Administered by the group, they were established by National Medical Enterprises, which built University Hospital in East Los Angeles in the early 1980s. The law school scholarships were kicked off a few years ago when the Hispanic Lawyers Assn. began contributing to the Mexican American Alumni Assn.’s endowment fund.

Behind these numbers are the faces of students who have passed through Vargas’ office looking for help.

“Walking on that campus was an incredible experience for me,” recalls Raul Rodriguez, now a 27-year-old account executive with KMEX-TV, who says his gardener father and housemaid mother never could have afforded any kind of schooling for him, let alone USC.

While attending College of the Desert, a community college in Palm Desert, Rodriguez believed baseball would be his ticket to a major university. But then his back gave out.

Fortunately, a school counselor had told him about Vargas.