Oxnard College Project Leads Troubled Youth to a New Path

Lorena Siqueiros never experienced the rite of passage that is high school graduation.

At 20, the young mother’s short life has instead been defined by incarceration, depression and youthful indiscretions -- behavior, she says, that she deeply regrets.

But this week, Siqueiros will finally get her chance. It won’t be the typical mortarboard, pomp-and-circumstance affair, but for Siqueiros, it’s just as good.

She and 24 other students will graduate Friday from the Oxnard College Youth Project, a program begun by two community activists last year.

“I always wanted to go to college and now I’m actually going,” said Siqueiros, who will go on to attend Oxnard College at night while she cares for her 6-month-old daughter, Isabel, during the day.

The program, a mixture of job training and career counseling, peppered with lectures on community activism, art and politics, is the brainchild of educators Armando Vazquez and Deborah DeVries, who own the Cafe on A in downtown Oxnard.

The idea was to take kids with not-so-squeaky-clean backgrounds and give them the skills, professional contacts and motivation to steer their lives in a positive direction, DeVries said.

Most of the students have been through the criminal courts system or been identified as being in danger of ending up in it, DeVries said. They received a weekly $50 stipend and college credit for courses taken during the 15-week program, funded through Ventura County.

The students -- some of whom have been through similar programs -- say there’s something about this one that holds their attention and inspires them.

“I hope that they’ll learn to see themselves as activists, as powerful,” DeVries said. “I hope they learn that they can be leaders for their families, friends and community.”

For Siqueiros, it’s just nice to have some people in her corner. A flip comment from a public defender still stings four years later. While awaiting trial on a carjacking charge, Siqueiros wrote the judge a two-page letter, which her lawyer never bothered to hand over, she said.

“The attorney didn’t believe I wrote the letter because he said it was college-material writing and someone like me couldn’t have written it,” Siqueiros said.

“He actually told me I wouldn’t amount to anything. After a while, you start to believe certain things, and I was always scared that I wasn’t good enough. It doesn’t sound like much, but here they knew my name and kept their promises to me.”

At Cafe on A, a downtown coffee shop known more for its neon walls and political forums than its java, the students meet three times a week to hear guest speakers discuss jobs ranging from field work to the film industry. Nearby, Vazquez and a volunteer look after some of the students’ young children.

The object of the lectures is to expose the students to a network of locals making a living in varied occupations. But the program’s emphasis on careers in the arts sets it apart from others and convinces many students that their pastime can actually become their lifelong profession.

“We’re just trying to bring different types of artists to show them you can be working class and be successful,” said Tomas Carrasco, a Chicano studies and sociology teacher at Oxnard College who’s also part of a Los Angeles-based comedy group. “We want to show them how people from their neighborhoods have utilized the resources available to them.”

Before attending the program, Hector Torres, 18, who has drawn and taken pictures since he was a child, was convinced that the only way he could reach a certain level of success was to join the military.

“Here I learned that anyone can go to college and that anybody can afford it,” said Torres, whose prior drug use had gotten him in trouble with the law. “I had never heard that before and was all set to drop out and join the Navy.”

Potential students can apply through the Oxnard College Economic Development office at 986-5888.