Rosa Ortiz hopes Wednesday’s trip down from Salem for the Raza Unida Youth Conference at the University will not be the last time she sets foot on a college campus
this year.
The conference’s organizers, from the University’s Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, hope so, too. MEChA organized the event, held in the EMU, to convince the South Salem High School senior and more than 400 other Latino students who also attended from across the state that they can come to college.
“We want to show them they belong here,” MEChA outreach coordinator Jairo Castaneda said.
It’s a difficult job. Statistics suggest that nearly half of Latino high school students do not graduate and that the majority of them do not go on to higher education. And even among those who do, at least at Oregon public colleges, almost two thirds do not graduate. The conference itself might not be enough to change that, said North Salem High School migrant specialist Cipriano Manon-Munoz.
“One visit is not going to make them see the light,” Manon-Munoz said, adding, “University was not in their mind. Survival is in their mind.”
Nevertheless, conferences like Raza Unida across the state hope to help and reverse the trend. And they are growing.
More students than ever before attended Wednesday’s conference, the sixth MEChA has hosted. Six years ago, Castaneda said, there were no more than 12 students. The hundreds who attended this year came from as far as the outskirts of Portland.
It was more than could fit in the EMU Ballroom, where breakfast, lunch and the dance that ended the day took place. During breakfast, students filled up all 30 of the tables set out in the room, some sitting in others’ laps, others merely lining the walls. By lunch, worried EMU staff moved some classes to rooms across the hallway.
MEChA is aiming to move the event to McArthur Court next year. “We need bigger space,” conference organizer Diego Hernandez said.
Liza Rodriguez, who does community outreach at South Salem High School, said, “It’s really powerful when you get students in a room with 500 other kids who look like them.”
One of Manon-Munoz’s students, Flora Maciel, who hopes to study nursing or business, said Raza Unida helped. While she was at the conference, she got counseling on financial aid and admissions at schools. “I got to check if I was doing the right thing,” she said. “I’m not applying for colleges yet, but next year it will be different.”
Ortiz, one of Rodriguez’s students, said there are still challenges ahead for her in applying to Western Oregon University. Neither her father, a construction worker, nor her mother, who works in a cannery, attended college.
“It’s more difficult for us because our parents don’t have the history,” she said. “So we’re learning at the same pace as they are.”
But, she said, “That pushes me to go further than they did. For them.”
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