Skid Row’s El Estudiante Is Now a Scholar

It’s just over two miles from skid row to USC. It took Daniel Rodriguez a decade to complete the journey.

An odyssey that began in a skid row mission has ended, for now, at a USC graduation ceremony, where the 43-year-old Rodriguez, a high school dropout and former penniless street fighter, received a bachelor’s degree in history with honors.

Next will come a master’s degree--he has been accepted to graduate school at USC--and then a law degree. He promises.

But no achievement is likely to mean as much as this one.

Wearing a cap and gown Thursday marked the fulfillment of a goal Rodriguez has pursued with the intensity of a man obsessed.

It took nerve, talent and monk-like austerity to make this climb that led from the public library to Los Angeles Trade Tech to USC. That, and many helping hands along the way.

“The miracle,” is what he calls his nine-year quest for an education. “God has been so good to me.”

In the two years he has been at USC, Rodriguez has earned a 3.5 grade-point average. He won scholarships to pay for his education, and he has landed two other awards for service and scholarship.

Even as Rodriguez collected accolades, he let few people know of his past, not even his senior thesis advisor, history professor and State Librarian Kevin Starr. Few knew he had been homeless, that he was still living on skid row when he started at USC.

There is nothing in Rodriguez’s appearance today to suggest his years on the margins. He is slight and extremely youthful-looking. He has an amiable, intelligent air, and wins friends easily. At Los Angeles Trade Tech, the community college he attended while on skid row, he was elected student body president.

But at USC, he is distinguished by a kind of separateness, and an all-consuming commitment to his studies.

An Intense, Scholarly Life

USC is no longer as white as it once was. One in six students today is Latino. But Rodriguez feels ill at ease among younger, whiter, richer students--hordes of them hanging out in Bermuda shorts and bikinis, blasting stereos on fraternity lawns near his home.

He beams intensity from every pore. Always in a hurry, and completely overloaded, it is as if he needs to remain in constant motion to sustain his trajectory.

“I don’t have a social life,” he said with particular emphasis, implying that it’s not just a byproduct of his schedule; it’s a principle.

His small, furnished room near the campus is nearly bare except for books. In a closet are his notebooks from all his years of college and university--eight total, six of them at Trade Tech.

Those early notebooks from his Trade Tech classes are yellowed now. Their content seems almost fantastically low-level: There are pages full of simple arithmetic, past and present perfect verb tenses: “Mike saw the bus. Mike has seen the bus.”

On top of these is a recent USC paper on the Byzantine Empire in the 12th century. It is written crisply, academically, the prose of an advanced history student at a top university.

It seems impossible that the same person could have done both it and the notebooks. “Looking at them, sometimes I want to cry,” he said.

The apartment also contains photos of his graduations and one of his adult daughter, from a relationship long ago, and a 5-year-old grandson.

Rodriguez admits that his daughter grew up without him. “But she has forgiven me,” he said.

There is a faded photo of his grandmother in the Dominican Republic. She is sitting on the grass, perhaps at a picnic, gazing unsmilingly into the camera. Rodriguez contemplates it with affection: “That’s what you call tough love,” he said.

There is one more photo: It’s of him as a young child at his first Communion in the Dominican Republic. In it, he stands ramrod straight in a white shirt. Something in it recalls the man today, not the one in those many grim years in between. “This is me,” he said. The skid row years “were not me.”

In the Dominican Republic, Rodriguez had excelled in Catholic school. After immigrating with his family at the age of 15 to New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, he excelled in fighting.

“We went to school to fight,” he said. “We didn’t go there to learn.”

After dropping out in the 11th grade, he earned a high school equivalency diploma and went to work in a series of dead-end jobs. He picked up trash. He washed dishes. He came to Los Angeles and groomed horses at Hollywood Park. He drifted.

He had big dreams of fancy cars and nice clothes. What he got instead was skid row. He landed there in desperation in 1989. He would remain eight years.

In 1990, his world changed. His grandmother died.

Unschooled, yet literate and devoted to her grandson’s education, Mela Castillo had been possessed of an iron will and a keen moral sense. She had been convinced that he would shine someday.

“It all came back,” he said. “All those years. My parents. That’s why they came here, to make me someone important.” He had to make it right. He had to go to college.

He began his new journey from an old-fashioned launch point: the public library.

For the next few months, Rodriguez was a daily visitor to the downtown library, studying and taking refuge from the chaos of skid row.

In 1991, he went back to school.

Los Angeles Trade Tech was established in the 1920s. It has only a few charms: beautiful trees and a central plaza. But mostly it is the realm of the practical. Nursing and automotive repair are among the trades taught here.

It has never been known as an academic transfer institution in the way that other community colleges are. The year Rodriguez transferred to USC, only four of Trade Tech’s 10,000 students went to USC.

Rodriguez was 35 when he started at Trade Tech. He had visions of being a businessman--of money, cars and clothes.

His skills were too low for college-level classes, especially in English, so he enrolled in remedial courses, feeling tentative and unsure. He earned his first B, then an A, and began to settle in.

Trade Tech was a home away from home. He stayed there every night as late as he could, seeking to reduce his time on skid row to just the hours he slept.

During successive county budget crises, his general relief check went through various permutations, from $364 per month to $212. Rodriguez remembers each amount, and every denomination in between. When you live on that little, you don’t forget.

It took him three years to get his two-year degree in business. But when he finished, he found the dream of the fancy car had somehow faded.

It had been replaced with an appetite for academics--for literature and philosophy. It was then that he also became aware of a new idea in the back of his mind: He could use his education to help people.

He went back to Trade Tech.

This time, he landed in the classroom of David Morse, a young assistant professor from USC’s graduate school of English.

Morse was the kind of teacher who wanted students to be challenged. He didn’t assign journals or personal essays. He stuck to rigorous compositions and pushed students to make arguments and give critiques.

Rodriguez is unrestrained in his gratitude toward all those who have helped him, and in interviews, took pains to list each one, from street people to Starr.

But Morse is in a category all his own. “My angel,” Rodriguez calls him.

“I was constantly bothering him,” he said.

Morse let him. The first time he talked to Rodriguez in his office hours, the teacher was struck by how eager Rodriguez was for criticism. “He was enthusiastic about the fact I was correcting him,” Morse said.

In Rodriguez’s last years at Trade Tech, other people noticed him too: teachers, advisors and the college president. David Esparza, transfer center director, helped him map out a university track, and reached into his own pocket when Rodriguez ran out of money for fees.

Rodriguez heard that one of the best universities was USC. But he’d also heard “it’s for rich people,” he said.

It was like a dare. Rodriguez was so poor he relied on food banks. He resolved to go to USC, where tuition and fees are $21,374.

Rodriguez was accepted there in the fall of 1997. He had earned a 3.8 grade-point average from Trade Tech, and spoke at commencement.

Meanwhile, on skid row, Rodriguez said, he “became an idol.”

The claim seems farfetched. But on a visit to his old haunts, nearly all the acquaintances he met went out of their way to identify him proudly as el estudiante, the student, the one who made good.

‘He Always Had His, You Know, Books’

At the St. Francis Mission on Flower Street, where Rodriguez once stopped daily for lunch, Josefina Perez came forward from the table where she was bagging groceries to greet him. “He always had his, you know, books,” she said in Spanish, imitating a student lugging books. “He is a very good man.”

Elsewhere, Rodriguez pointed out the sights: “Homicide Alley,” the place where dealers sell crack, the place where raiteros stop--people who give rides from the border.

Among his old skid row associates, Rodriguez fell easily back into the rough, slangy Spanish and petty quarrels of the streets.

When a loud, lumbering man on the sidewalk caught sight of him and began shouting, Rodriguez rolled down the window to yell back. Oye, dime! The two commenced an argument that was half-hostile, half-kidding over whether Rodriguez owed the man money. Rodriguez rolled the window back up, laughing.

“It’s this Cuban guy I’ve known for years,” he said. “I bought a suit from him. That’s what people do here, they buy a suit for $20 and sell it.” After a pause, he added: “I’m not going to give him any more money.”

A last stop is the Panama Hotel, where Rodriguez lived for $65 a week until his USC advisors helped him move to student housing in his first year there.

Resident manager Rickey Austin recognized Rodriguez right away. A large, gaptoothed man in black T-shirt and gold chains, Austin was behind the desk in what serves as the hotel’s lobby and security checkpoint, handing out keys to residents.

Revisiting His Past at the Panama Hotel

“Now he is a success,” Austin said, gesturing toward Rodriguez. “Usually, the people who leave with promises here, they come back in five months. They say they are getting off the drugs. Then they show up . . . and they don’t even have bus fare.” He emitted a throaty laugh. “I hear stories every day.”

Rodriguez made a point of thanking Austin, yet another on his lengthy list of helpers. When he was short of rent money, Rodriguez said, Austin “would hold my room a few days.”

Austin shrugged. “I do it for most people who are sincere,” he said. “I can tell who is and who isn’t.”

These days, places like the Panama Hotel are where Rodriguez sees his future.

At USC, he read Kierkegaard, and developed an idea of the moral life. He found he no longer cared so much about money. He wants, of all things, to go back to skid row--to work.

He had always planned on a law career. But in his senior year, with a decision on graduate school looming, he made up his mind. He is going to USC’s school of social work. Law school will come, but it will have to wait.

“If you are rich in mind, your soul is rich,” he said. “The life of the mind has taught me that.”