3 Who Made It Haven’t Forgotten

Now a Ventura County prosecutor, Gilbert Romero still remembers being stopped as a teenager by police in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio and ordered to lift his shirt so they could check for gang tattoos.

Oscar Cobian runs a program to boost the prospects of low-income students, but he still feels the sting of racial slurs hurled at him as a kid growing up in Camarillo’s Barry Street neighborhood.

And legal aid attorney Hector Martinez remembers how much it hurt to be overlooked by teachers and counselors as he struggled to rise off the streets of Ventura’s Cabrillo Village and make it to college.

Even though today they are considered role models and success stories, all three can attest to problems that have long plagued youngsters in barrio communities.

Those problems are a ready byproduct of being born brown and in the barrio. And many believe they are getting more difficult to overcome because of a widening divide between economic classes that is shackling a growing number of barrio kids with long odds and low expectations.

Romero, Cobian and Martinez believe that was the case when they were growing up.

Despite being written off by some as troublemakers and underachievers, all three were able to make it out of the barrio because someone told them that they could, and believed in them more than they believed in themselves.

Now they are trying to return the favor for a new generation of barrio youth.

Gilbert Romero could be a poster child for the most severe problems that plague the barrio underclass.

He was 6 months old when his father left home. His mother, who got hooked on drugs shortly after he was born, was in and out of jail.

He lived with various relatives, fell behind in school and by his early teens began drifting toward an uncertain future.

The 28-year-old prosecutor remembers it well. He also remembers the two moments that turned his life around.

One came during his junior year at Rio Mesa High School, when he was riding in an ambulance that was rushing his mother to the hospital. She had overdosed on drugs. He promised himself then, with the red lights flashing and the siren screaming, that his life would turn out differently.

The other came a year earlier, when he was living with his uncle during one of his mother’s binges. On a day he was feeling particularly low, Romero said the man pulled him aside and told him something he had never heard.

“He said, ‘I want to tell you that I know you have the potential to do something great with your life,’ ” said Romero, who joined the Ventura County district attorney’s office in 1998 after graduating from Hastings Law School in San Francisco.

“He said, ‘Everything you need to succeed in life is already inside you,’ ” Romero continued. “ ‘All you have to do is reach down and pull it out.’ ”

By the time Romero decided to start reaching down and making changes, he was leagues behind everyone else.

He had slightly lower than a C average going into his senior year at Rio Mesa, despite being enrolled in Upward Bound, a federally funded program targeting low-income students who have the potential to be the first in their families to earn a college degree.

“Realistically, the way the system is set up now, I don’t think kids like us can expect too much from school,” Romero said. “The structure really has to come from the family, from the home or someone else who believes in you.”

Lagging behind on his course work, he doubled up on classes and managed to get into Cal State Northridge, where he earned a degree in 1995 in psychology and economics.

He landed a job with the district attorney’s office right out of law school, under a program that recruits and trains young prosecutors.

Now a Ventura resident and years removed from barrio life, Romero has found that the old neighborhood has a funny way of following him around.

An extensive background check was done on him when he was hired by the district attorney’s office, largely because of where he lived and how he grew up.

And even now, from his vantage point behind a prosecutor’s table, it is not unusual to spot old friends dressed in jail blues as they wait behind glass partitions for their criminal cases to be called.

In some ways, he says he’s lucky not to have ended up like them. But on the other hand, he’s a big believer in making his own luck.

“I don’t think enough people look to themselves and say, ‘What can I do to make my life better?’ ” said Romero, who spends his spare time volunteering with programs--including Upward Bound--aimed at keeping at-risk kids out of trouble.

In fact, he is scheduled later this month to receive Upward Bound’s annual achievement award, handed out to alumni who have beaten the odds and are giving back to the community.

“I’m not anything special. I’m not any smarter than they are,” he says of those who took a different path.

“It’s been an uphill battle for me from the very start. But I’ve always believed, even though you can’t change what you were born into, you can definitely change where you end up.”

Some Called It ‘Little Tijuana’

In size and reputation, Camarillo’s Barry Street doesn’t rival the county’s better-known barrio communities.

But don’t be fooled.

More than 90% of the area’s residents are Latino, compared with a 12% Latino population citywide. Residents there also are decidedly less affluent than those elsewhere in the city.

And like its barrio counterparts, the neighborhood is viewed by many in the surrounding community as the city’s poor relation, best forgotten and frequently misunderstood.

Oscar Cobian, 31, remembers the names people had for his old neighborhood. They would call it “Little Tijuana.” And they’d call him a “wetback” as he walked home from school.

“It does wear on you after a while,” said Cobian, who is director of the Upward Bound program at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

“You feel like you’ve grown up missing something, like you’ve got something to prove,” he said. “You feel like you’re not like everyone else.”

That feeling bled into every part of his life as a kid, the Camarillo resident said.

It seemed as though teachers and police officers kept a closer eye on the Barry Street crowd, he said, as though one wrong step could land him or his friends in continuation school or juvenile hall.

When there were fights at school, he said it seemed as though the Latino students were punished more swiftly and more severely.

“There was a zero-tolerance policy, but it seemed like it was zero tolerance mostly for the Latino students, especially those who were perceived as being gangbangers,” Cobian said,

“I did have some good teachers who were caring,” he said. “But reflecting back, I didn’t have that one teacher who really took notice of me, that one who really saved me.”

What ultimately “saved” Cobian was an ultimatum from his father.

Although he didn’t offer much guidance about education, the elder Cobian taught his son the value of hard work. Cobian said he spent his summers alongside his father in a Newbury Park broom factory.

And when it came time to make decisions about his future, Cobian said his father made him choose between going to college or returning to blue-collar toil.

Cobian chose Ventura College, where he found teachers who encouraged him to succeed and developed a circle of friends destined for bigger and better things.

He rode that wave of success to Cal State Northridge, where he graduated in 1994 with degrees in Spanish and Chicano studies. He has since earned a master’s in counseling and guidance from Cal Lutheran.

Now he’s trying to provide that same inspiration for a new generation.

On a recent day, Cobian was at Camarillo High School talking to youngsters enrolled in Upward Bound.

The program works with thousands of students nationwide. At Cal Lutheran, 100% of those enrolled have graduated from high school and about 70% have graduated from college.

Huddling with students one-by-one at the high school’s career center, he checked their schoolwork, asked about their college plans and made sure they knew what they needed to do to apply.

One youngster, sophomore Santiago Pena, 16, confessed that his grades had been slipping.

“If you want to go to college, right now is the time to apply yourself,” Cobian gently chastised. “You’re a smart kid; I know you can do it.”

‘Not the Scary Place’ People Think It Is

Hector Martinez doesn’t gloss over the problems that plague the barrio neighborhood where he grew up.

In fact, he knows them better than most.

It was on the streets of Cabrillo Village, a cooperative housing project founded 25 years ago by farm laborers seeking a slice of suburban life, that his older brother was shot to death while attending a baptism party.

Rolando Martinez, 20, and longtime friend Javier Ramirez, 19, were killed during a 1991 drive-by shooting in the east Ventura community, commonly known as “The Camp.”

The shooting apparently was meant to settle old scores against Cabrillo Village gang members.

However, neither Martinez nor Ramirez were involved with gangs. They were innocent victims of the kind of random violence that has come to choke barrio neighborhoods.

The 31-year-old legal aid attorney says he knows that outsiders say his old neighborhood is dangerous, a place riddled with crime and gangs. But he also says nothing could be further from the truth.

“It’s not the scary place that people make it out to be,” said Martinez, who became a staff attorney with an Oxnard-based farm worker advocacy program after graduating in 1998 from Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco.

“People have stereotypes, and they buy into them without ever getting to know the people or the community,” he said. “This is a place where people know each other and look out for each other.”

At the time of his death, Rolando Martinez was studying at Ventura College to become an accountant. He planned to transfer to UC Davis, where Hector Martinez was doing his undergraduate work.

Martinez said his brother always tried to steer clear of trouble and spent plenty of time telling others to do the same.

In that spirit, Martinez said he is now working with the housing cooperative’s board of directors to find money to launch a youth center at Cabrillo Village, featuring a computer lab, after-school tutoring and a mentoring program.

The cooperative recently submitted an application to Ventura officials for federal money to get the project off the ground.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done as far as raising expectations and hopes, and keeping kids on track toward college,” he said. “We’re not like certain other communities, where they have doctors and lawyers and professors as parents. Without those kind of role models, the idea of going on to college can seem so abstract.”

Martinez can relate.

His own parents, who still live in Cabrillo Village, taught him to work hard. But they didn’t know much about navigating the school system and even less about what it would take to go to college.

He got lucky. His wrestling coaches at Buena High School saw his potential and counseled him about college.

The second oldest of six brothers and sisters, he has made sure none of his other siblings will suffer from a lack of direction.

His youngest brother will graduate this year from CSUN, a younger sister attends UCLA and the youngest in the bunch is an eighth-grader in the gifted and talented program at Balboa Middle School.

Though he now lives in his own apartment across town in Ventura, he can be found most weekends back in the old neighborhood, counseling youngsters a lot like himself--kids with plenty to offer but in need of a nudge now and then in the right direction.

“There are a lot of bright kids in our community,” he said. “We just need to give them more opportunities to succeed.”

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TUESDAY: People who are trying to make a difference.

About This Series

“Confronting The Class Divide” is a three-day series on the stereotypes that plague youngsters from Ventura County’s barrio neighborhoods. The series focuses on the increasing isolation of youngsters who come from the county’s poorest and most troubled communities. Today’s installment looks at three people who made it out of the barrio and their efforts to help others do the same.