Barrio Crusaders Come Home for Good

In the war to help kids from the barrios of Ventura County, it often comes down to a house-by-house and child-by-child rescue operation.

While there are some formal programs aimed at mentoring these kids, much of the battle is being waged by ordinary people, working quietly on gritty streets well out of the public eye.

The battle is playing out in Ventura’s Cabrillo Village, where legal aid attorney Hector Martinez scrambles to scrape up money to establish an after-school center for youngsters in the poverty-wracked community.

“I just felt like not enough was being done,” said Martinez, who can be found most weekends counseling kids in the neighborhood where he grew up. “I felt like I had to take things upon myself.”

It’s taking place in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio, where UC Berkeley graduate Lizeth Barretto has returned to her old neighborhood to help push youngsters toward college and careers.

“I think in a lot of ways the Colonia is very sheltered from the outside world,” said Barretto, program manager for an Oxnard-based nonprofit agency. “I just don’t want anyone to be left behind.”

And it’s underway on the campus of Ventura College, where Chicano studies professor Mayo de la Rocha pulls aside as many barrio kids as he can, pumping them up with pep talks until they believe they can achieve as much as anyone else.

“If we can get these kids to have a good, powerful sense of themselves,” he said, “then nothing can stop them.”

Driven by dismal statistics that show barrio youngsters dropping out of school and landing in juvenile hall in greater numbers than their peers, all three are part of a small but growing campaign in Ventura County to bridge a widening class divide that isolates the county’s poorest and most troubled communities.

Not only is the effort aimed at closing the gap in educational and economic attainment, it focuses on changing larger societal attitudes that lump many of these kids together as troublemakers and underachievers.

“It’s a cycle that goes on and on, generation after generation,” said Gilbert Romero, a 28-year-old prosecutor with the Ventura County district attorney’s office who grew up in La Colonia.

“Unfortunately, not enough kids who grow up in the barrio have somebody who can tell them there is more to life than what they see in front of them,” he said.

In his own one-on-one way, Romero is trying to do his part. He volunteers with the Oxnard-based youth mentoring agency City Impact, speaking to youngsters about his experiences growing up in the ghetto and telling them if he can make it out, they can, too.

He also volunteers with Upward Bound at Cal Lutheran University, a federally funded program that targets students who have the potential to be the first in their families to earn a college degree.

“I personally believe each one of us has a civic duty to go back to help our communities, especially those of us who come from the barrios,” Romero said. “We have a certain sense of responsibility because we truly understand how hard it was to make it out.”

Of course, it’s not all one-on-one combat.

Some schools and community-based organizations across the county have also taken up the cause, digging in to battle a tide of long odds and low expectations that too often drowns barrio youngsters.

At the Ventura Police Department, Chief Mike Tracy says he has launched a range of programs aimed at breaking down barriers that often exist between low-income communities and law enforcement agencies.

Among the programs are a Citizens Academy to help Spanish speakers understand how the department operates. He said he also has assigned an officer to work full time with troubled kids and their families in some of the city’s most downtrodden neighborhoods.

“It’s not about just hammering these kids and labeling them all gang members,” said Tracy, who grew up in Ventura’s low-income Avenue community. “I do understand how important these contacts are. They can make a huge difference in how these kids view the world.”

Ventura Police Officer Jesus Quezada understands the importance of that world view better than many of his law enforcement colleagues.

He grew up in Cabrillo Village, and as the city’s youth intervention officer returns regularly to help steer kids out of trouble.

Through a $600,000 state grant, Quezada visits two dozen youngsters referred by school counselors and probation department officials.

These aren’t kids with rap sheets, but those with problems such as truancy and fights at school. They are kids who remind him of himself, young people in need of a nudge in the right direction.

“These kids have a lot of potential; they can really be somebody if they don’t get sucked in by the negative influences in their communities,” said the 28-year-old Ventura resident. “Our job is to teach these kids to find a way out.”

At El Centrito De La Colonia of Oxnard, Barretto is wrestling with the same issues.

As program manager for the nonprofit social services center, she works with barrio youngsters to prepare them for adult life in as many ways as possible.

While much of the focus is on college readiness, Barretto said she also prods youngsters to start thinking about careers and to become involved in issues that affect their barrio community.

Raised in that community herself from age 2, she attended Oxnard College after graduating in 1992 from Channel Islands High. She then was accepted into UC Berkeley, where she quickly discovered she was unprepared in many ways.

“I never really had a lot of guidance in high school,” said Barretto, who graduated from Berkeley in 1996 with a psychology degree. “It was like they were preparing me for Oxnard College, not the university.”

At El Centrito, her goal is to make sure no one suffers from the same lack of direction.

Although she oversees a range of programs, it is her youth leadership group where that lesson really hits home. More than a dozen youngsters meet weekly in a cramped computer lab in a recreation center next to Colonia Park.

Most are girls. And on a recent afternoon, Barretto passed out copies of a newspaper story on a study showing that Latinas are less likely to graduate from high school or college than females in any other ethnic group.

This is not news to these barrio youngsters. Many know all too well the barriers they face, including cultural expectations that they should stay close to home, get married and raise children.

And they say it doesn’t help that there also are larger societal attitudes to overcome, such as a perception that barrio kids are bound for trouble and failure.

“With the pressure that comes with being a poor kid from the barrio, of course you’re going to feel like you’re less than everybody else,” said 18-year-old Lupe Mendoza, a senior at Oxnard High who plans to go to UC Davis after Oxnard College.

“We all get thrown into the same category, because of the way we dress or the way we talk or the place we live,” she said. “But we have to learn to overcome those obstacles.”

Several barrio youngsters cite Ventura College as a particularly good place to learn how to smash those barriers.

Perhaps that is because so many of the professors and administrators there went through similar experiences themselves. De la Rocha grew up in the East Los Angeles barrio of Boyle Heights. Fellow Chicano studies teacher Jesus Rocha grew up in La Colonia.

Even Ventura College President Larry Calderon learned early about the chasm separating the classes, having grown up in Santa Paula.

Going back to the late 1960s when he was at Santa Paula High, he remembers telling his counselor he intended to go to college. The counselor laughed and said he’d be lucky to get into Ventura College.

“We don’t do a good job as a society of taking care of areas that suffer from the kind of neglect that leads to these problems,” said Calderon, who has earned a doctorate from USC in higher and post-secondary education and has served as the college’s president since 1996.

“Socioeconomics is the divider, and that gap is becoming wider and wider,” he said. “Our society is not creating a bridge between the haves and the have-nots, and we’ve got to realize that one day we’re going to pay for that.”

In many ways, barrio youngsters are already paying the price, as the school dropout rates and juvenile crime statistics make clear.

After more than a decade at Ventura Avenue-area elementary schools, Sheridan Way Principal Susan Eberhart knows all about the dismal statistics.

But she doesn’t sit around talking about them much. She’s too busy doing something about them.

At the west end campus, Eberhart oversees a range of programs aimed at putting barrio students on par with their peers.

It is a collaborative effort, one that taps state, county and school district resources to provide everything from a full-time social worker to classes for Sheridan Way parents who want to learn English or earn their high school diplomas.

Among the most recent efforts is a program to track Sheridan Way students in middle school and high school, to make sure they stay on course.

Referring to one of the city’s continuation high schools, she says: “We want our kids to know that Pacific High School is not their high school.”

Eberhart, who took over this year as principal of the poverty-plagued campus after six years of directing its social services programs, said a strong teacher corps is not enough.

“It’s a matter of looking at the whole picture, of understanding that getting parents invested in this campus has everything to do with kids doing well in school,” she added. “We are smart enough to recognize that in our community, because of the challenges students face, we need to do more.”

For youngsters in the barrio, those scrambling to stay on course, it often does come down to having someone in their corner, someone who can turn the stumbling blocks into steppingstones.

Buena High School senior Adrian Arteaga, a 17-year-old resident of Cabrillo Village, said he believes he has been largely overlooked by his teachers and counselors.

It’s a belief shared by many other Cabrillo Village kids. Like so many others in his neighborhood, Adrian said he’s been steered toward general education courses rather than college prep classes, without much discussion about his future after high school.

Luckily for him, his two older sisters both graduated from college. And they make sure he stays on the right path.

“There’s a lot of pressure on me from my family to do good in school,” said Adrian, who wears silver rings in one eyebrow and hair so short it leaves just a shadow of color on his head. “My sisters are there to support me for anything I need.”

On a basketball court in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio, 15-year-old Rio Mesa sophomore Carlos Villicana tells a similar story.

Although his older brother was not a great student, he stuck with it and now holds a full-time job while attending Oxnard College.

Carlos said his brother has always counseled him to study hard and get good grades--simple yet effective advice that pulled him out of an academic nose dive in elementary school.

Now he delivers that same message as often as possible to his 9-year-old brother, Raul, a fourth-grader at Rose Park School.

“I want him to see you can do good in school, that you can go on to college and get a job that you love,” Carlos said, shooting hoops after school with the youngster.

“I want him to see that you can succeed in life, even though you grow up here.”

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 has focused on the increasing isolation of youngsters who come from these poor and troubled communities. Today’s final installment looks at people who are battling the long odds and low expectations that often weigh down barrio youth.

FYI

Anyone interested in serving as a mentor for students who have the potential to become the first in their families to attend college can call the Upward Bound program at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, 493-3350.