Out of garage and on a roll

I didn’t know all the details of Yecenia Olmos’ story when I went to see her Tuesday morning in Westwood. I only knew that she grew up in South Los Angeles, briefly fell in with a gang, and at 22, was about to graduate from UCLA and receive a humanitarian award for community service she performed while earning a double-major degree.

Olmos, who has bashful eyes and a personality to match, met me outside the bookstore and led me up to an office where she works as a director of Project Literacy. The student-run volunteer program tutors students from Watts to Mar Vista.

I wanted to talk to her because I was impressed with what she’d accomplished and curious to know if there was something in her experience that could be bottled and passed around. The city finally seems to be getting serious about tackling its gang problem, and sometimes youngsters are much wiser than adults in helping us understand both problems and solutions.

Before we got too far, Olmos downplayed her fleeting stint as a gang member. It was more like a club of middle-school girls who wanted to belong to something, she said.

She was about 13, felt a little lost and unsure of herself, and reluctantly gave into peer pressure, which meant fighting with a gang member as a rite of initiation.

But she said she didn’t take part in petty theft or tagging and quickly “jumped out,” as they say in gang lingo, meaning that the cost of her exit was another fistfight.

“I wasn’t a very good fighter,” Olmos told me with a smile.

She also knew it would break her parents’ hearts if they learned about her brief flirtation. The more we spoke, the clearer it became that a big reason for her success is her respect for her parents, their high expectations for her and her desire for a better life.

“We lived in a one-room garage for 13 years,” she told me, saying the family finally moved into a small apartment last year.

There were six of them altogether in that garage, including her parents and three siblings. Her parents are legal residents who were born in Mexico, but not U.S. citizens. They’ve lived here 30 years but never learned English, which Olmos is trying to correct, very much aware that it has kept her parents from digging out of their economic hole. Olmos’ father has worked minimum wage jobs that entire time, and her mother baby-sat for pay while tending to her own family.

“My motivation, my first year of high school, was that I did not want to be in the same position as my parents when I grew up, unable to improve my economic situation.”

But first she had some catching up to do. In a reading evaluation at Jefferson High, Olmos discovered to her horror that she was three years behind grade level. She started working harder, doing her homework, including an assignment to read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” The book offered even more motivation.

The protagonist, she said, was “badly judged by society,” and Olmos related as a person of low self-esteem living in a part of Los Angeles that is “negatively portrayed by the media.”

Olmos set high standards for herself and her younger siblings, as well, telling them they would live in the one-room garage forever if they didn’t turn off the television and video games and hit the books.

“They thought I was too strict at times,” she said.

But she set a pretty good example, graduating as class valedictorian and going to UCLA on a Gates Millennium scholarship.

“My parents were very proud,” said Olmos, who didn’t exactly coast after getting into college.

She worked as a baby sitter and as a law firm file clerk to help pay the family’s rent on that garage, and she did it all while carrying a full load at UCLA and volunteering with both Project Literacy and UCLA’s Community Service Commission.

“She is a most remarkable woman,” said Paule Cruz Takash, the UCLA professor who nominated Olmos for the Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award, named after the former chancellor for his commitment to community service. “She’s sort of a quiet young woman and the quietness belies her fortitude and tenacity, I would say.”

But tenacity alone doesn’t make it easy to overcome the circumstances Olmos was born into, Takash said, telling me she doesn’t see her success as a simple formula for “pulling yourself up from the bootstraps.” The Olmos family’s togetherness and support were key, Takash said, and so was the availability of scholarship money that many students miss out on despite their best efforts.

“No one, not Yecenia or scores of other students, should have to go through the hurdles she has had to face,” said Takash, who said that in her study of Los Angeles families she sees too many examples in which parents and their children struggle just to achieve “a modicum of material well-being and psychic well-being.”

“No, it wasn’t easy at all,” Olmos told me, and that’s why she has committed herself to tutoring children growing up with disadvantages she knows all too well.

She especially likes working with youngsters who are the same age she was when she began slipping. That’s when you’ve got to shake them up, she said, and lay out their options. If she were ever put in charge of public policy, she said, she would send a stream of role models into classrooms to ask children a few questions, such as these:

“Where do you see yourself five, 10, 15 and 20 years from now? Do you want to work 18 hours a day at minimum wage jobs and still be in debt, with no money to buy your own house and no money for travel?”

Olmos’ 18-year-old brother has been paying attention. He’ll graduate from high school this year as class valedictorian and follow his big sister to UCLA.

Yecenia Olmos, who works full time as a file clerk at a law firm now that she has completed her studies, will graduate in June and go on to law school.

She said that down the road, when she gets a job and saves a few bucks, she plans to move her family into a nicer home.

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steve.lopez@latimes.com