Back to the Barrio

On those days when her students are struggling with their schoolwork, days when the influences of violent streets and broken homes threaten to swallow them whole, fifth-grade teacher Maria Ramos taps her secret weapon.

She reminds the youngsters at Cesar Chavez School that she was once like them, poor and growing up against the odds in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio. She tells them that she spoke little English, flunked fifth grade and worked in the fields alongside her mother, a single parent who picked celery and strawberries to support her four children.

And she tells them that if she was able to rise above the problems that plague so many families in this working-class, mostly Latino enclave, they can too.

“There are no excuses in my classroom,” said Ramos, 36, who lived with her family in La Colonia’s public housing projects from the time she was in junior high until she moved away to college.

“I’m able to relate to my students, to tell them I lived in the projects and I was able to go to college and become a teacher,” she said. “I let them know there’s a world of possibilities out there, and I think it has more meaning coming from someone who grew up just like them.”

Perhaps at no other Ventura County school can so many teachers drive home the same powerful message.

Nearly one-third of the 36 teachers at Cesar Chavez School grew up in La Colonia and have come back to their old neighborhood to teach these sons and daughters of immigrants, mirror images of themselves a generation ago.

They are educators driven by an unspoken sense of responsibility to give back to their community. They are dedicated to helping youngsters squeeze the most out of their elementary school exploration while shielding them from the influences of gangs and drugs that often run deep in barrio neighborhoods.

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To be sure, it is not unusual for teachers to return to schools they attended or practice their profession in the communities where they were raised.

But Stan Mantooth, assistant superintendent for business and personnel at the Ventura County schools office, said he can’t think of a local campus where more teachers have made that their mission.

“It’s just phenomenal,” Mantooth said. “You can see how that might happen in a small town or some isolated community. But to have it happen here, I think it says the best thing you can say about educators.”

There has been no effort to recruit the teachers to Cesar Chavez, no campaign to stock the classrooms with former Colonia residents.

In fact, few of the educators raised in the community of about 8,000 have even given the issue much thought.

Truth is, teachers like Ramos--who is in her fifth year at the Colonia school--decided on their own to return to their roots, knowing that there is plenty of work to be done.

Cesar Chavez is ranked the county’s poorest-performing school, according to the state’s index of academic achievement released last week.

About 80% of the nearly 900 students struggle to speak English while more than 90% come from families so poor that they qualify for free lunches. One out of every six students receives welfare, while nearly a third of the school’s parents did not graduate from high school.

It is against this backdrop that the Cahue sisters, raised in or near La Colonia most of their lives, decided to settle in at the barrio school.

Now using their married names, Beatriz Viveros, 37, Eustolia Cahue-Martinez, 32, and Rosalinda Cahue-Rodarte, 27, lived in a one-room house on nearby Garfield Avenue before their parents moved to the adjacent community of Rose Park, where they remain today.

Viveros, who was a student at the campus when it was called Juanita School, was the first to return. She worked as a teacher’s aide at the school for about a decade after graduating from Channel Islands High School, a period during which she got married, had two children and pursued a college degree.

When she graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1996, she jumped at an offer to teach at the campus.

“I really enjoy this school,” said Viveros, who teaches a first-second grade combination. “It’s like a family here. I’ve been to other schools, and you just don’t get the same feeling.”

Cahue-Martinez was quick to follow. It didn’t take her nearly as long as her older sister to graduate from CSUN; in fact, the sisters went through graduation ceremonies together, their parents looking on proudly from the audience. Cahue-Martinez spent a year teaching in the Hueneme School District before coming to Cesar Chavez to teach first grade, taking a $6,000-a-year pay cut for the opportunity.

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The youngest, Cahue-Rodarte, was the last to arrive. She also attended CSUN, graduating in 1997. And she was immediately hired at Cesar Chavez, having been inspired by her sisters and hopeful that she would be able to make a difference.

“My dream was to come back to Chavez and help my community,” said Cahue-Rodarte, who teaches a combination of second- and third-graders.

“Who better to teach the children of this community?” she said. “We know this community, we lived here. And we do our best to teach children there is something more than gangs, something more than drugs and something more than working in the fields that surround us.”

Of course, such sentiment is not restricted to the teachers in La Colonia.

At Sheridan Way School in Ventura’s Avenue neighborhood, about half a dozen educators who grew up in the area teach at the campus. And in the Rio School District north of Oxnard, about 20 of the 160 teachers are local products.

The same phenomenon is reported at campuses in Santa Paula, Fillmore and Moorpark, where first-grade teacher Juan Magdaleno oversees a bilingual classroom at Peach Hill Elementary School.

“There are several teachers in this district who were raised in this community and who came back because they want to show kids they can go on to college, that it’s not something that is unattainable,” said Magdaleno, a Moorpark native who attended local schools and graduated from Cal Lutheran University in Thousands Oaks in 1997.

Cesar Chavez Principal Julia Villalpando, a former teacher who once had the two younger Cahue sisters in her classroom, said many of the teachers at her school share a common struggle to escape the grip of poverty and low expectations. And she said many share the desire to reach back into the community and lift up those coming behind.

“I think it’s the community itself that calls them back,” Villalpando said. “They come back to their roots. They feel like it’s home and they want to stay. I’m lucky, very lucky.”

For some teachers, those roots go deep.

Third-grade teacher Javier Herrera, 32, was more or less raised in La Colonia. By the time he was in seventh grade, he was working in his father’s grocery store, long a fixture in the community and a short walk from the elementary school.

His father, Ben Herrera, spent the first 12 years of his life in La Colonia and established Ben’s Market decades ago. And although the younger Herrera didn’t live in the community until much later--he spent four years there after graduating from CSUN in 1995--he attended the local elementary school and it was the only place he wanted to teach after earning his degree.

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“I figure, me being Latino, the kids need a good role model and somebody who can teach them a lot of English,” said Herrera, who, despite being in his fourth year at Cesar Chavez, only stopped working at the grocery store last year.

“I remind them all the time that I was brought up in the community and tell them that they can go to college and become successful,” he said. “They’re only in third grade, but hopefully you can instill something that is going to stay with them.”

That, too, is the hope of Maria Ramos.

She knows the odds are long, the test scores lousy. But she also knows that such a narrow view ignores a much bigger picture, one in which teachers are scrambling to help students trade in immediate problems of illiteracy and poverty for a lifetime of achievement and success.

And she knows that they can’t do it alone, that they need good role models--Ramos was blessed with a mother who was heavily involved and teachers and counselors who cared--if they are to have any chance of beating the odds.

“What’s important is whether we are teaching them to be lifelong learners, whether they can solve problems and will be able to get into the work force,” said Ramos, a 1988 graduate of Cal State Bakersfield who once thought of becoming a lawyer but now can’t imagine professional life outside the classroom at Cesar Chavez.

“I share my own experiences with kids so they can see the bigger possibilities,” she said, “so they can see that despite being poor and not knowing English they can go to college, get an education and do anything they want to do.”