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Evelyn Ramirez, from fields to Ivy League
By Doug Hoagland / The Fresno Bee
The Bee is telling the stories of three people who didn't let growing up
poor hold them back. They were driven to achieve in a Valley sometimes
known as the Appalachia of the West.
Rural poverty blankets the region, and Fresno suffers with one of the
highest concentrations of urban poverty in the nation.
The three people — a young woman, a young man and a grandfather — have
never met, but their stories have common threads.
Ambition burned in them. Others helped them in crucial times. They made
the most of opportunities that came from hard work.
They are the students that teachers never forget.
Fresno County Superintendent of Schools Larry Powell has seen people
like them — and been amazed by them — in nearly four decades as an
educator.
“They refuse to be denied,” he said. “They sense what they can become
before they get there. It’s fantastic to see kids who have everything
against them, and they make it — and make it big.”
• • •
Fresno teenager Evelyn Ramirez soon will start a new life, far from the
fields where she dripped with sweat pushing wheelbarrows heavy with
purple eggplant.
She will leave this fall to study mathematics at Brown University in
Providence, R.I. — a school older than the American republic.
Ramirez hated picking crops. She detested the sweat and that she was
missing high school activities.
Her farmworker mother forced her to toil in the fields, and there were
times when Ramirez thought she hated her mother.
“But I didn’t say anything,” Ramirez said. “I kept it inside.”
Ramirez is getting scholarship aid to cover the $50,000 it costs to
attend Brown yearly. She also will use several thousand dollars she
saved picking eggplant, bitter melon and other vegetables.
Born in the United States, Ramirez, now 18, grew up lonely. She never
met her father and twice was separated from her mother, Julia Ramirez.
The two have never been close.
But along the way, Evelyn Ramirez met adults who helped her discover an
inner desire to succeed.
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