A Familiar Challenge

Bounded by Mexico to the southwest and New Mexico on the north, this part of Texas sprawls eastward onto dirt roads lined with ramshackle houses, many without plumbing or electricity. Recent arrivals have built their homes on sandy plots with their own hands from husks of abandoned trailers, discarded car hoods and corrugated aluminum panels.

Adriana Barrera remembers driving along the highway past one of the largest colonias, or border settlements, six years ago and thinking, “We should have a campus here.”

Now, El Paso Community College’s Mission Del Paso campus serves nearly 3,000 students, many among Texas’ most-disadvantaged new immigrants. The project is one reason why the soft-spoken, polite Barrera was selected to serve as the next president of Mission College in Sylmar.

Like El Paso Community College, Mission College has more demand than space and serves mostly low-income, Latino students. Most agree that the 7,000-student Mission College must expand, but unsuccessful efforts led to the resignation one year ago of Barrera’s predecessor, William E. Norlund.

The job, which she starts this week, will be Barrera’s first outside of Texas, where she was born and raised. Her love of education came early, as a child in Benavides, Texas, a community 150 miles west of Corpus Christi, where the public school system and the Catholic Church are the only institutions of note.

Benavides is slowly dying. It was never large--the population was about 2,500 when Barrera was young and has 1,978 people now. Residents say they have always prized education, perhaps because it was all they had.

Addresses, street names and paved roads have come to Benavides in just the last few years. On a railroad that runs through the center of town, tomatoes, Volkswagens and other goods are shuttled to and from Mexico, but no train has stopped in Benavides since the oil boom.

Before most of the wells dried up in the 1950s, they provided Benavides’ families with a good standard of living. So did the uranium ore mines and ranches and farms. There were two movie theaters and a lively little downtown with a handsome bank building, a general store and a depot station. There are still a couple of little shops left, a Mexican restaurant made out of plywood, a barbershop. But most of the old buildings are in ruins.

Except for the schools. One elementary, one middle and one high school are still the thriving places of Barrera’s childhood. Many of Benavides’ sons and daughters are surgeons, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, engineers and college and university presidents.

“All of my teachers were Hispanics,” she says. “We never felt inferior. We were not people of means, but we were hard-working. My parents taught us that we had to speak English and had to go to school. And in a small town, everybody knew if you skipped class.”

By all accounts, Barrera excelled as a student. She was involved in student government and became a drum majorette, a big deal in a town that recently named a street in honor of one of their champion baton twirlers.

Barrera’s parents never finished elementary school, but they encouraged their children to go to college. All but one of their six children did.

“They were humble and poor,” said family friend Gilberto Uresti, 65, a former Benavides judge. “But they believed in getting an education and working hard.”

Barrera’s mother, Juanita, was a homemaker. Her father, Polo, hauled lumber and equipment for oil companies in the 1950s. It was grueling work, says Barrera’s brother, Arturo de la Cruz.

“He was on call 24 hours a day,” he says.

De la Cruz, 58, still lives in Benavides, only a block away from where Barrera was born. Their father carried lumber from cleared oil fields and hauled steel and equipment for the massive oil drills that dotted the landscape. After many years, De la Cruz says, the long hours took their toll.

“He tipped his truck three times in one year,” he says. “He was costing the company money.”

The family bought a Mobil gas station for $300 and ascended into Benavides’ middle class. De la Cruz said his sister was a girl of “hyperactive” energy who usually had her face in a book and always ended up “the first- or second-best student in school.”

The decision by Barrera’s oldest brother, Albino, to go away to college affected her profoundly, she says.

“He influenced my thinking in terms of going to college,” she says. “He’s why I really believe very strongly in having role models in the community. Kids need to see that they can succeed.”

When she was a high school junior, Barrera moved from Texas to Ogden, Utah, to live with her brother and finish school. Ogden was a big city compared to Benavides, and for the first time Barrera felt out of place in her nearly all-white Mormon high school. In most of her college preparatory classes, Barrera also found that she was the only girl.

“That was extreme culture shock,” she recalls. “I was scared stiff. I was an outsider. In my junior year I hardly had any friends. I was a Catholic too. It was religion, it was ethnicity, it was gender.

“Initially, I didn’t know if I could be as smart as the other kids.”

Eventually, she discovered she could compete, earning straight A’s and the respect of her classmates.

“But at the same time, I wasn’t invited to their socials or [to be] part of any clique or group,” she says.

Barrera returned to her home state to attend Texas A&M; University and Texas Technical University. It was there that a college professor inspired her to pursue a career in academia.

“He said, ‘You’re a good student, why not go for the doctorate?’ ” she recalls. “I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t have the self-confidence, but he did have that confidence in me and stayed with me every step of the way.

“It was that personal touch that made me think I could do this. I could help others and particularly other Latinos, because at the time there were very few in grad school.”

She was inspired a second time as a doctoral student in 1982, when she began working part time at Austin Community College. It was her first contact with a junior college.

“The students I was working with saw the community college as a lifeline,” she says. “And I became engrossed in that atmosphere.”

After completing her PhD in education, Barrera stayed with Austin Community College for 10 years, organizing adult education and English as a second language courses and writing grant proposals.

In 1992, she became executive assistant to the president of El Paso Community College, then a predominately Latino, four-campus system with about 16,000 students.

When the president left amid accusations of mismanagement, Barrera became interim president in 1994. At the time, the Southern Assn. of Colleges and Schools had threatened to strip El Paso Community College of its accreditation, citing an autocratic administrative structure and an absence of master plans for campus expansion and curriculum development.

Under Barrera’s interim presidency, the accreditation agency removed El Paso’s “warning” status, and the board of trustees hired her as permanent president. She is credited with creating a more democratic decision-making process, bringing a swelling budget under control and helping faculty members win grants.

Biology professor Maria Alvarez said El Paso has one of the best community college research laboratories in the region thanks to a federal grant and matching funds provided by Barrera’s administration.

Although Barrera created standard hiring policies, critics of El Paso Community College board members said she was pressured to hire cronies and to leave unproductive but well-connected staff and faculty members in place.

“The employment process was short-circuited” by the board, said Robert Starke, a counselor who has worked at the college for 29 years. “She had faculty support.”

But she did not have board support. After several months of rumors and quiet power plays, Barrera’s contract came up for renewal in 1998, and the board voted 3 to 2 to dismiss her.

“It took every ounce of toughness in me not to fight back,” Barrera says. “I tried to go about doing my job. During board elections, there was a lot of mudslinging and I became a target of that, but I refused to give any credit to the people making accusations about me. I went about my business.”

Trustee Innocente Quintanilla said the tactic may have done Barrera more harm than good.

“She didn’t lobby the community,” he said. “She was very professional. That could be viewed as a shortcoming--that she did not fight for the position.”

The episode hindered her attempts to land positions at other colleges and nearly destroyed her career. When she applied for the Mission College job, she was working from home as a freelance administrative consultant.

Barrera arrived in Los Angeles last week and has been getting acquainted with her team at Mission college. Monday is her official starting date.

Barrera has said that campus expansion, a job she has some experience with, is among her first priorities. She also will review the campus master plan, which has been under development for several months.