College filled her mind and heart

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES / The Oregonian

Teresa Alonso was grown before she learned the story of how she entered the world on an earthen floor in a house with no plumbing.

How beautiful, Alonso remembers thinking. Being born of the dirt shows how far she's come.

In February, the 32-year-old became the first director of the College Assistance Migrant Program at Portland Community College. The school was one of just eight in the United States last year to receive the grant aimed at helping migrant children who are U.S. citizens or legal residents go to college.

Alonso knows something about the challenges facing children whose parents follow work that pays little. The woman with the cascading brown hair and dark eyes was one herself. "I feel like I have come full circle," Alonso says. "This was one of those jobs that was just calling me."

Even as a child, Alonso's fiery will plowed aside the obstacles tossed in the way of poor immigrant children. She's driven to show other Latino children how to do the same.

"Once she's got this goal in her head," says Paul Weill, former coordinator of the Lane County migrant-education program, "Teresa's not going to stop until she gets it. She's so successful because she never said what she couldn't do or complained that she was dealt a hand that was unfair."

When she was 4, Alonso left the indigenous Mexican village of Purepecha in the state of Michoacan to join her parents in Oregon. The cramped mobile home that her family shared with another couple offered few comforts like the clay stove in her grandmother's warm abode.

Alonso started school at 5. And, she got introduced to working in the berry fields. The family moved from town to town as the harvest changed. Sometimes, they lived in the same poverty they tried to escape in Mexico. No running water. No indoor plumbing.

Her parents worked multiple jobs to scrape by and were seldom home before bedtime. By age 10 she was preparing entire meals. In the mornings, Alonso woke her brothers and sisters and got them ready for school because her parents had already gone to the fields and nurseries.

"I ended up being the surrogate mom," Alonso says, tucking her legs underneath her as she sits on the couch in her Southeast Portland living room. "A lot of the responsibilities that shouldn't have been, ended up being mine."

As she struggled to learn English, Alonso's teachers held her back a grade. But school became a refuge. There, she got attention from the teachers who recognized a bright child. There, she didn't have to take care of anyone but herself. She excelled.

But when her parents couldn't find a baby sitter, they pulled Alonso from school. And when sports sparked her interest, she had to cut a deal to maintain all of her duties if they let her play. During school vacations, she picked berries.

Bent over in the heat with her mom and dad, the oldest child decided she would do more than this with her life. Her mother hadn't made it past the third grade, and her father never went to school. But Alonso's teachers and told her about college. And she told her parents.

"I remember crying," Alonso says. "Because my mom said, 'Teresa, that's not for you.' " Alonso confided in her mentor from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and the two of them prodded her mom to attend college information sessions in Spanish. When Alonso's mother learned that college in the United States wasn't just for the elite, and there was help to pay for it, she became her daughter's biggest supporter.

Her dad was a different matter. He figured she'd had enough schooling when she finished eighth grade, and that it was time for her to get a job and help support the family. In Mexico high school is costly, and mostly the affluent attend. Still, Alonso says, she was taken aback.

"It came out of nowhere," she says, shaking her head. "I said, 'No, Dad. I have to go to high school, and I'm going to college.' He just got mad at me and stopped the conversation. I was so upset I couldn't even talk."

Alonso spent the summer with a pit in her stomach. Her teachers had seen the potential in her, she thought, but why didn't her father? She kept pushing her parents, refusing to give up. Then before summer ended, her mother told Alonso that there would be books -- not plants -- in her hands that fall.

"She's always had more drive than any other child, I think," says her younger sister Erica Alonso. "It's internal."

After two years in high school, Teresa Alonso was accepted into a University of Oregon program for migrant students. She earned her high school equivalency and started at community college before transferring to Western Oregon University. Working several jobs to pay her way through school, it took nearly six years for Alonso to graduate.

When she finally walked across the stage to accept her diploma, her father was there, his chest puffed out like a rooster's.

Having paved the way, she pushed her siblings to go to college, too. "Sometimes she wanted to still be the bossy big sister," Erica says. "She's still doing that role-model thing." Even so, Erica says, she looks up to her sister. She and two of her siblings have gone to college; the other graduated from high school.

Helping her own family wasn't enough. Alonso took every opportunity to help kids like her. She worked with several migrant programs, then took a job with the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement, working to help Latino youths stay in school. She was quickly promoted to manager.

"I speak their language; I've been where they are," she says. "I want to support them like people supported me."

Shirley Orcaz met Alonso two years ago. The high school junior was going through a tough spot. Like Alonso, she is the oldest child and had to take on many responsibilities for running the home while her parents worked. She was worn out and close to giving up. A counselor asked Alonso to speak with her.

But Orcaz wasn't impressed. The snappily dressed and sophisticated-looking Latina must be stuck up, Orcaz mused. "I was like, 'What does this lady know?' " Orcaz recalls. " 'She can't relate to my life. She's successful, what does she know about what I'm going through?' "

But Alonso was persistent. And as she shared parts of her life, Orcaz realized that they actually came from much the same place. Alonso introduced Orcaz to a world where Latinos aren't just laborers. And when it was time for Orcaz to apply to college, Alonso talked to Orcaz's mother and, to Orcaz's surprise, her mother listened. Now Orcaz is in her second year at PCC. While she was sure Alonso would move on once the teen finished high school, Alonso is still looking out for her.

"She inspires me to be better than what I expect myself to be," Orcaz says.

Some who know Alonso say her drive may have stymied her social life. Juan Serratos worked for Alonso at the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement and says she always felt she needed to be doing something more to help her community. "I would see how many hours she worked and tell her she should take a rest and just leave and not answer the phone," Serratos says. "She would say, 'Yeah, I think I'll do that.' But she wouldn't."

Even Alonso's passion -- salsa -- gave way to her work. A former amateur salsa champion, Alonso says she had to stop dancing because she couldn't devote the time to practice.

Last week, as Alonso stood with a small group of students at a celebration of the College Assistance Migrant Program's first class of students, she knew it was worth it.

Families arrived late, many of them fresh from working in the fields. But they sat there beaming at the first of their children to enter college doors.