PHOTO BY JOHN BAUGUESS

¿Podemos?
Can we attract the coming boom of college-age Latino students to higher education in Oregon—and are we ready for them?
By Alice Tallmadge

One Friday this past March, more than 1,400 Latino high school students from throughout the mid-Willamette Valley converged at Western Oregon University for a day of workshops targeted to dispelling the myth and statistics that suggest Latinos and higher education are an unlikely fit.

If hope has a color, that day it was the color of the lime green T-shirt each participant in the César Chávez Latino Student Leadership Conference wore, with a graphic of the farm worker activist and the words Si, se puede (“Yes, we can”) on the back.

And if hope has a sound, it was the thunderous applause that erupted from the gymnasium’s packed bleachers when the Woodburn High School mariachi band struck up its first lively chords. And when guest speaker Carlos Ojeda Jr., whose downbeat slacker youth in Puerto Rico was transformed by a mentor’s belief that he could succeed in college, told the sons and daughters of nursery workers, construction workers, and small business owners that the door of opportunity is wide open for them—if they choose to walk through it.

“This is your time, your life, your future,” Ojeda proclaimed to the swath of brilliant green before him. A deafening roar answered him back.

The students Ojeda addressed are the face of a changing Oregon. In recent years, Latinos have been the fastest growing demographic population in the state. Their numbers doubled between 1990 and 2000, and the growth continues. Today, Latinos make up 10 percent of Oregon’s population.

Latinos have settled in communities throughout the state. According to 2007 figures, they make up more than 25 percent of the population in Morrow, Malheur, and Hood River counties. Percentages are less but the numbers are much greater in the Willamette Valley closer to Portland. Latinos constitute 14.7 percent (77,000) of Washington County, 10.5 percent (73,390) of Multnomah County, and 22 percent (68,230) of Marion County.

Nowhere in the state is this demographic shift more visible than in the state’s school system. The proportion of Latino students enrolled in K–12 classes statewide rose from under 5 percent in 1990 to 15.1 percent in 2005. Experts project those numbers to keep growing. The high school class of 2007 was 12 percent Latino, says Bob Kieran, assistant vice chancellor with the Oregon University System. Today’s third graders—the class of 2018—are 20 percent, and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education estimates that by 2017, 29 percent of the state’s high school seniors will be Latino.

Although the state has made substantial efforts throughout the K–12 system to accommodate the growing numbers of Latino students, many educators say too many obstacles remain between these students and a college education. The percentage of Latino high school graduates continues to be the lowest of any ethnic group in the state. And proportionate to their numbers in the population, far too few are enrolled in the state’s public universities and community colleges.

The price of not fully addressing these conditions is steep, educators warn. Oregon’s growing “knowledge economy” requires understanding complex manufacturing and high tech systems, says Dalton Miller-Jones, psychology professor at Portland State University and chair of the Oregon University System’s Student Participation and Completion Committee. In 2008, Miller-Jones’s committee hosted a symposium on educating the state’s underserved communities, of which Latinos are the largest group. Participants concluded that “Oregon’s economy cannot be sustained at a healthy level if we continue on the current trajectory without any change in the educational capital of our citizens.”

According to Miller-Jones, the committee is particularly concerned by what he says is an “apparent lack of urgency” in addressing the educational needs of this burgeoning population.

“An intelligent social system does not wait for a catastrophe to strike,” he says, “but seizes the opportunity to plan and implement actions that address this growing population in our K–12 schools.”

One of the state’s most pressing needs, he says, is teachers and administrators who are bicultural, bilingual, or who are trained to be culturally inclusive. Latino students need to have teachers who look like they do, speak their language, and understand their culture, Miller-Jones says. And if that isn’t possible, they need teachers who are trained to teach students learning English as a second language in a variety of subject areas and who are sensitive to the needs and concerns of these students.

The state’s college and university training programs, he says, haven’t shown enough initiative in filling this need.

“There’s a predictable tsunami coming at us here and we need to be much more responsive to it,” he says. “People don’t seem to understand that we’re going to have a real problem if we are not effective at educating this community.”

The University of Oregon’s College of Education is paying attention. The college’s teacher training program is revamping its curriculum to prepare future teachers for multicultural environments.

Beginning this fall, all teacher candidates will be required to earn an English as a Second Language endorsement, says Edward Olivos, assistant professor in the College of Education. Prospective teachers will learn how to make abstract subject matter more tangible and meaningful to students whose native language is not English. Courses in the social context of education will help future teachers identify their own biases, interact with different ethnic groups, and challenge the expectations they may have for certain groups of students, such as Latinos.

Prospective teachers “will learn how to be an advocate for students and their community, culture, and family,” says Olivos. This, in turn, will help minimize the frustration that many Latino students experience. “It will help them feel more a part of their school,” he says.

Needs to Succeed

To get a sense of the difference having a strong multicultural administrator—and a determined district—can make, take a look at recent changes at Springfield High School.

The Springfield School District has the highest number of Latinos in Lane County; the high school is 18 percent Latino. Several years ago, racial incidents and fights erupted frequently at the school. Latino parents rarely showed up at school meetings. Administrators had no clear strategy to incorporate Latino students into the social fabric of the campus.
Today, enrolled Latinos have a high attendance rate. The number of racial clashes at the school has plummeted. Latino assistants help out in the office, messages are announced over the PA system in both English and Spanish, the school hosts a GED program for Latino parents with free childcare, there’s an after-school graffiti art program, and the school boasts a celebrated mariachi band.

“Fights are down, interracial dating is nothing out of the ordinary. The kids really like each other,” says vice principal Carmen Gelman, M.Ed. ’04.

What made the difference? A targeted outreach effort throughout the district helped to identify what Latino students need to succeed. At the high school, the hiring of Gelman, a Latina parole officer turned school administrator, made a significant difference.

Once on site, Gelman quickly became a crucial link between Latino students, their parents, and the school administration. She advocated for Latino students and raised their profile at the school, recruiting them to run for student office and assuring them that if they went out for sports, “it was OK to still be Latino.” She broached thorny equity issues at administrative meetings and started a campaign to discourage the use of racial and other disparaging terms in the school’s hallways.
“When kids come to me, I listen to them,” says Gelman. “Kids know when they count, and kids here know they have a voice. And if they see that they matter, they’ll stay in school longer.”

During the district’s outreach effort, says Springfield School Superintendent Nancy Golden, M.S. ’74, Ph.D. ’87, the district held Latino-only gatherings where food was served and parents who were shy about their English skills felt comfortable speaking up.

“We asked them, ‘What would it take to feel like these schools are your schools?’” Golden says. Latino parents said that they wanted to be involved in school events, and that they and their children needed to feel the school embraced their culture. They said schools needed to have liaisons who spoke their child’s language and understood the challenges of being Latino in a mostly Anglo school environment.

Today, the district has three multicultural liaisons on staff. Announcements sent home with students are written in English and Spanish. The district provides classes for teachers who want to learn conversational Spanish. Cultural proficiency is now a requirement for new hires. A group of staff members, administrators, and teachers meets regularly to discuss issues of equity. Schools put on multicultural assemblies, and teachers and administrators are often invited to family celebrations.

The change hasn’t come without trials, Golden says. Some district employees were of the opinion that “if you come here, you learn our language, our culture, as opposed to seeing the beauty in terms of what different cultures have to offer,” she says. People found themselves engaging in tough conversations about racism, cultural insensitivity, and white privilege. For a while, it was messy. People got hurt.

“It would not be honest to say we didn’t go through things like that,” says Golden, who now speaks in halting, but well-intentioned Spanish when she addresses Latino parents. “But we have gotten substantially better. And what has been exciting is how willing the community has been to galvanize around this once the vision was out there.”

High schools in the Portland area have found success linking Latino students to their school via a multicultural soccer league for boys and girls, which includes forty-two schools from six area districts. To belong, players need to do well in school. “The stronger students teach the beginners,” says Saideh Haghighi, who oversees Hispanic outreach at Hillsboro High School. “They wear school colors, their uniforms have the school name. They have school pride.”

Hillsboro High School students have also gained from the school’s link with MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, a national Latino student organization that promotes higher education. “Their premise is, ‘not if, but when’ the students go to college,” Haghighi says. The school’s chapter brings in university representatives to talk about the advantages college can provide, scholarships, and other opportunities. Members also take on leadership roles—the bilingual MEChA students, for example, are in charge of phone banks used to communicate quickly with parents of the district’s elementary and middle school students.

“It’s done wonderful things for our kids,” Haghighi says. “We are realizing we have to start these chapters sooner—in elementary and middle school.”

Rural high schools have additional challenges in meeting the challenges of the expanding Latino population. The Ontario School District, which is 50 percent Latino, was caught by surprise in 2006–7 when the dropout rate at Ontario High School spiked to 8.8 percent, according to the annual report card the school receives from the state’s Department of Education.

“It was a blip we didn’t see coming,” says Bret Uptmor, principal of Ontario High School. Dropout rates at the school had been below 5 percent for several years, falling to 2.8 percent in 2005–6. For each of those years, Latinos made up slightly more than half the dropouts.

Uptmor believes last year’s dropout rate was an anomaly. The school for years has made a point to be welcoming to Latino students, he says, and many bridges have been built between the Anglo and Hispanic populations. “We’re a multicultural school,” he says.

But Melissa Williams, director of school improvement, admits that the rural district, located at the eastern edge of the state, has a tough time recruiting bilingual, bicultural staff members. Of the school’s seventy-five staff members, seven speak Spanish. The area also lacks a pool of adult Latino mentors that can help students understand important concepts, Uptmor says, such as the perplexing high school credit system and the importance of graduating. In general, he says, the idea of finishing high school and going on to college “is very much a part of American culture that doesn’t line up with the Latino point of view.”

A Path to College

The Latino community is not homogenous in attitudes about higher education, says Miller-Jones, chair of the OUS participation committee. But many students come from families where, although education is valued, the idea of college remains nebulous.

“There are very few community members who have had the experience, who talk about it around the dinner table, or at family gatherings,” he says. “It’s important to help the community understand how critical staying in school and getting a college degree is.”

Latino students, he says, must be given the message—early and often—that higher education is a worthy, achievable goal that will enrich their lives, their families, and their communities. Waiting until high school to introduce or encourage the concept is simply too late.

“We need to turn our attention to them earlier in the pipeline,” says Charles Martinez, University of Oregon vice provost for institutional equity and diversity. “We need to work with younger students and their families so they see themselves as having a natural path to college.”

Priscilla Vasquez, a fifth-year digital arts major at the University of Oregon, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Vasquez says she never struggled with the idea of going to college. “I always knew I wanted to do it. I just didn’t know how.”
Vasquez got the help she needed from a counselor in middle school, which is when she thinks most students make up their mind about going to college. “You find yourself when you’re in middle school,” she says. “If you have support, it helps make up your mind.”

Vasquez participated in a program in which college students visited her Portland-area middle school and mentored Latino students. Today, she returns the service, this time as a mentor at a Eugene middle school through a program called Ganas.

Ganas is run by Latino students who are members of the UO chapter of MEChA. The Mechistas in the Ganas program tutor middle school students, put on dinners and talent shows for students and their families, and take students on tours of the UO and Lane Community College campuses. Most importantly, they are visible examples that, when it comes to going to college, “Si, se puede” is not an empty slogan.

“They see someone who looks like them who is in higher education, so it helps students see that they can do it, too,” Vasquez says.

The UO Mechistas also organize an annual youth conference for hundreds of local Latino high school students, with assistance from the UO Admissions Office and the Eugene 4-J School District. The conference workshop offerings run the gamut from Chicano folklore to filling out the dreaded federal student financial aid form.

As energetic as the one-day conference is, Martinez says it is only one step among many that need to be taken to ramp up Latino enrollment. Like most of the state’s public universities, Latino enrollment at the UO has hovered at about 3 to 4 percent over the past decade.

“We have yet to catch the curve, as an institution, of the changes that exist in the state,” he says. “When the state is changing this dramatically, but higher ed isn’t, it means that there are access barriers.”

Efforts to encourage Latino enrollment and retention at the UO range from having every college and university unit implement a diversity plan—and provide an annual progress report—to having key information translated into Spanish on University web pages to building stronger relationships with elders in the local community. “This is a huge shift for our campus,” Martinez says. “The entire campus is taking ownership of this.”

The University is also realizing it needs to involve Latino families more intimately in the admissions process. Parents of Anglo students are typically considered somewhat peripheral to the student, Martinez says. But in the Latino culture, “parents and the community are allies and collaborators in encouraging academic success for students.” Latino parents are invited to attend admission information nights held at high schools. Discussions with prospective students include looking at how higher education can help them give back to their families and their community.

“It would be misleading to say the University is suddenly seen as accessible and welcoming for all students of color,” Martinez says. “You don’t make that kind of impact in the short term.” But, he notes, people are talking, and the University is listening. “There are early kernels of forming different kinds of relationships with our local communities.”

Proof that targeted efforts to make a university more welcoming to Latino students succeed can be seen further north at Western Oregon University in Monmouth, which has bumped up its Latino enrollment by “doing a better job of taking the university to the students,” says associate provost Dave McDonald.

During the school year, the university holds events for students and their families where university representatives explain financial assistance such as opportunity grants and debunk common myths many Latino parents hold about higher education—that it’s too expensive, that universities aren’t safe for their children, that once a child goes to college he or she is lost to the family. Once a year, the university brings an admissions team to area high schools with high percentages of Latino students. Seniors can hand in their application in the morning and get a reply by the afternoon.

The result of these efforts? The number of Latino undergraduates at the school has increased by 50 percent in the last four years, from 248 in 2004 to 371 in 2008, accounting for 7 percent of the school’s population, the highest percentage of Latinos in any public university in the state.

Latino students at the UO are hopeful their stories and efforts will help attract larger numbers of younger Latino students to the tree-studded campus. Diego Hernandez, a fifth-year UO student, is among them (inset photo on page 34). A political science, ethnic studies, and sociology major, he has also found time to be an active Mechista, organizing the group’s third Raza conference two years ago.

Raised by a single mom who cleaned houses for a living, he attended seven elementary schools and three middle schools in Oregon and California. Although he escaped being stereotyped because of his race, he knew Latino classmates whose future was sealed by middle school.

“You don’t speak like everyone else. The majority of people don’t look like you. Your family has financial problems. You get behind in school. And then you get the message you’re stupid,” he says. “And if you’re told by tests results that you’re dumb, you start to believe that you don’t have a future, educationally speaking.”

Thanks to a mentor he found at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Hernandez thrived in high school and received a Diversity Building Scholarship to attend the UO. He plans on a career in law, possibly in civil rights or labor law, but he doesn’t plan on keeping his story, or what he’s learned in his struggle, quiet.

“The only reason I’m here, why a lot of us are here, are the people who built the ladders for us to climb with,” he says. “Nothing was given to us. We had to build and fight for justice, and everybody’s been sacrificing in order to
give equal access to everybody else. I’m just trying to make sure I do my part in using the privileges I’ve earned to help
others.”

Alice Tallmadge, M.A. ’87, is an adjunct instructor at the UO School of Journalism and Communication and a freelance writer. She lives in Springfield. Her last feature for Oregon Quarterly was “Last Rites” (Spring 2008).