Immigrant Dream Shines Brightly for Teenager

Aurelio Marquez, 18, remembers hearing it from the time he was a young boy. Hit the books, said his father the carpenter and his mother the homemaker, so you can get into a good college.

The community of South Gate does not send armies of students marching off to elite universities. But Aurelio’s older sister Blanca got into USC three years ago, and Aurelio had read something about the Ivy League when he was a pup of 8 or 9. That, he decided, was where he belonged.

“I pictured myself in my room at college, working on a paper and seeing the snow fall outside my window,” says Aurelio.

His parents, Aurelio and Blanca, came up from Mexico specifically to raise this kind of hope. They passed their own first names on to their children and sent them to Catholic schools all the way through. For Mr. Marquez, this meant working Saturdays to pay the tuition. For Mrs. Marquez, it meant piling up service hours at the schools and doing without certain things.

“The least I could do in return,” says Aurelio, “was to excel.”

And so he did.

“He’s unassuming,” says Monica Carreon, Aurelio’s counselor at Don Bosco Tech, a Salesian high school in Rosemead. “But I knew his potential through his grades and his SATs.”

One day Aurelio walked into Carreon’s office and told her he wanted to major in business, and according to his research, the best business school was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

An Ivy League school.

“You want to encourage students with that kind of ambition, but you want them to be realistic too,” Carreon says.

She told Aurelio that Penn was outrageously expensive, very tough to get into and a long, long way from home. “Do you even know what snow looks like?” she asked.

Go ahead and apply, Carreon told him, but try a few other colleges too. Just in case.

It was not necessary. Of the 19,000 high school students nationally who applied to Penn, 2,385 got in.

Aurelio Marquez was one of them, and he got a scholarship to cover most of the bill.

It’s just after 7 a.m. the day I arrive at Aurelio’s home to drive him to his last day of regular classes at Bosco.

The two Blancas answer, one as proud as the other. Aurelio’s mother tells me she is very pleased, but heartbroken too, in anticipation of her son’s departure in August.

I stand in their gracious home and think to myself, it’s this simple. In a country that suffers endlessly over the failures of education, the answers are here with the Marquez family of South Gate. Hard work, high hopes, sacrifice, parental involvement. With a big assist, in this case, from the Catholic schools.

And now Aurelio enters the room wearing a necktie, not because he has to, but because he is his parents’ son. He’s tall and thin, and there is both humility and confidence in brown eyes that sparkle with possibility. His mother hands him his lunch, and we’re on our way.

Once we get to school, Principal Guillermo Gutierrez will sing Aurelio’s praises.

Antonia Elenes, Aurelio’s Spanish teacher and mentor, will tell me about Aurelio coming by her office for lunch most days, the two of them talking about his Ivy League aspirations and Elenes telling him, “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.”

I’ll meet Aurelio’s buddy Osvaldo Ojeda, who’s going to Yale, and he’ll tell me the plan. If they get heartsick for a familiar face, they’ll each get on a train, Osvaldo heading south from Connecticut and Aurelio heading north from Pennsylvania, and meet in New York City.

Aurelio will show me the grassy quad in the center of his campus--the quad no one is allowed to walk across because, as students are instructed the first day of freshman year at Bosco, “There are no shortcuts in life.”

But it’s the drive to Bosco that I enjoy the most, maybe because I used to drive my two sons to high school each morning in Philadelphia, where Aurelio will soon live. He’s very excited, Aurelio tells me, but as the day of departure draws near, “I’m more nervous too.”

He asks if there are good Mexican restaurants in Philadelphia, and at the cost of breaking his heart, I cannot tell a lie. One or two, I tell him. “But it won’t taste like home.”

“I guess there’s nothing like your mother’s cooking,” he says.

But that’s part of the deal. Aurelio says he wanted an adventure, a new culture, the whole bit. And besides, his father has told him about having to leave home one year in Mexico because there was no secondary school in the rural area where he lived. “He said he learned a lot, and really matured the year he was gone.”

Aurelio says he’ll have to work like the devil the first year of college so he can then transfer into Wharton, Penn’s business school. “I need a 3.5 grade point average, but I think I can do it.”

I sit there thinking about what a great thing it is to be 18, to have worked for a moment like this and to be filled with wonder and nervous anticipation.

Aurelio says he hasn’t decided yet on a specific career, but if he really makes it one day and has money in his pockets, he knows what he’ll do.

“I’ll buy my parents a huge house,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here if not for them.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.