Two Routes, Same Destination: Sisters Karina and Elsa Mendoza are both Trojans. One got here through iron will, the other with a leg up from NAI.

Issue: Winter 2003

The Swallows of South Los Angeles

In a place where all too many children get left behind, USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative has helped hundreds of inner-city youths take wing. Somehow they find their way home.

By Carl Marziali

Photographs by Philip Channing

It was never impossible to go to college from South Los Angeles, just as it was never impossible, in theory, for children raised in poverty to become presidents or chief executive officers.

For children growing up in the city, however, the span dividing “possible” and “realistic” can seem as wide as the basin between Pomona and Beverly Hills.

Karina Mendoza watched her older sister, Elsa, make the leap: She studied alone in a neighborhood where school seemed a dead end, got herself bused out to L.A. High, and learned the mysteries of college admissions from scratch. Today Elsa Mendoza ’96, MS ’99 is a doctoral student at the USC Rossier School of Education.

To Karina, then in middle school, Elsa became a larger-than-life figure who had made it to college through pure willpower. Karina resolved to follow in her footsteps.

Friends discouraged Jessica Peraza ’01 from majoring in male-dominated computer science. “If they [men] can do it, I can do it,” she resolved. And she did: Peraza is now an embedded software engineer with Lockheed Martin.

But while Elsa had beaten the odds by herself, Karina came of age in a different world. The fall of 1991 marked the start of the Neighborhood Academic Initiative, a rigorous college-preparation program for South L.A. kids from middle school and up. The reward for those who make the grade: a four-year scholarship to USC and a realistic chance at the kind of life that suburban kids consider a birthright.

Because NAI accepts students so young, the program is just now producing its first meaningful harvest: young men and women who have not only made it into college, but have graduated, worked and had time to develop into mature, insightful individuals. For the true test of NAI is not whether its students go to university, but whether they use the opportunity to honor themselves and their community.

They are NAI alumni like Karina Mendoza ’02, who taught at a local high school after graduation and now wants to get a Ph.D. in English literature; Jessica Peraza ’01, a software engineer with Lockheed Martin; Cornell-educated research biologist Idolina Delgado, who tutors NAI students in her spare time; and Jonathan Ruiz ’02, who can’t decide whether to pursue a doctorate in English or go for an MBA instead, having discovered a latent knack for business as manager of a charter school in South L.A.

There is more to making it in the world than getting good grades, NAI alumni agree. All of them have struggled to reconcile their stunning success with their modest origins. In different ways, they are all asking themselves, “Where do I belong now?”

Karina Mendoza, for example, was always known as a “schoolgirl.” That can be an insult in South L.A.

And she was even more of a schoolgirl from the seventh grade onward: Every day, she and her NAI classmates would take a bus to USC for two hours of enriched classes in English and mathematics before returning to their home schools for regular classes. Then as now, there was tutoring in the afternoons for those who needed it, and mandatory Saturday enrichment and SAT preparation. Even parents had to show up for their own Saturday class, designed to help them provide a study-friendly environment at home.

To make matters worse, the NAI teachers insisted on calling their students “scholars,” even in the home school. Mendoza might as well have worn a scarlet “S” on her pocket protector.

Instead, she says, a funny thing happened. She started to get respect from the most unlikely quarters.

“These tough little cholitos, the gangster kids, one female and one male, approached me at two different times, and they’re like: ‘If anybody tries to give you a hard time, just let me know.’

“Yes!” she exults, clenching her fist at the memory.

Other protectors came and went, passing Mendoza along like a baton in the sprint toward college. At NAI, she developed a special bond with Nita Moots Kincaid MA ’90, then the program’s associate director.

“Literally from the age of 12 she took me under her wing. Nita would have these conversations with me as if I were an adult,” Mendoza says.

“We were all pretty much on a mission. I wasn’t alone,” says Jonathan Ruiz ’02 of his NAI peers. He plans to sit for the GRE or MCAT and enter a graduate program next fall.

Later she got to know several professors at USC, in particular the English department’s Heather James, who turned Mendoza on to the literature of Shakespeare. When Mendoza confided to her mentor that she was contemplating a career as a Renaissance critic , James told her: “Well, it’s something that you have to dedicate your youth to.”

Mendoza punctuates the retelling with another gleeful: “Yes!”

She now plans to pursue a doctorate in English literature, at either the University of Wisconsin or the University of Michigan. It is a bold and previously unimaginable goal.

If it weren’t for NAI, Mendoza seriously doubts she would have had the courage or the open-mindedness to contemplate such a thing.

“They helped ingrain the fact that there’s a way to live life for the pleasure of learning,” she says.

None of these decisions was easy. Rising above expectations in any community – or family – is a political act fraught with tension. And never more so than when Mendoza dropped a minor in education to concentrate on her literature studies.

“My sister and my parents were highly disappointed. They were mad. They said, ‘What kind of jobs are you going to get?’ And sometimes I do think, ‘What am I doing?’ It’s a constant battle between where I want to be in a few years and where my parents want me to be.”

She fights another inner battle every day, between her desire to move on and her wish to champion her much-maligned neighborhood. The South L.A. she knows and the one depicted in the media intersected only once or twice in her childhood. There was the fatal shooting on her street one Halloween, after which her parents invited the police in for dessert. And there was occasional trouble at the corner, where two liquor stores have since given way to an elementary school.

“Underneath all the negativity and all the stereotypes or the images you get from the newspaper,” she says, “underneath all of that you have hard-working people trying to survive, trying to make a living.”
Mendoza is living at home now, helping her parents pay the rent before she leaves for graduate school in 2005. It is a deal she struck with her stay-at-home sister, Elsa, who still commutes to USC as she works toward her doctorate in education leadership.

Karina had moved out as a freshman, cementing her role as the rebel. “I was the first person in my family’s history to leave the house not pregnant and not married,” she says.

All of her ambition and rebellion were almost for naught. Just before graduation, Mendoza was in a serious car accident, one that might have killed her. She feels she was spared for a reason.

“The first thing that came to my mind was: ‘It’s not time,’” she recalls. “In the sense that too many people have invested in me, invested with their time, with their love, with their encouragement. There was something more powerful at play.”

Now she has to figure out just where that higher power is leading her.

Like Karina Mendoza, Jonathan Ruiz got a pass early in life from the crime in his neighborhood. Several of his cousins were in gangs. Some were killed, others went to jail. When Ruiz joined NAI in the seventh grade, that settled the gang question definitively. (Gang membership is grounds for immediate expulsion.)

“My cousins sort of just hinted at it [joining a gang] playfully, but they knew, especially once I got into the program, that my path was a different one,” he says.

Before, Ruiz had not seriously considered going to college. It was accomplishment enough just to be the first English speaker in his family. (He has two younger brothers, one now in NAI.)

What flipped the college switch was a sixth-grade teacher at John Adams Middle School. On the first day of class, Alan Hubbard told his students about NAI and made it a course requirement that they apply. He coached them on interviewing skills (all NAI applicants must pass a one-on-one interview, in addition to writing an entrance essay).

“I think the friends I have now will last me until I die,” says NAI scholar Spencer Street, shown at Foshay Learning Center with his dad, Daryl Street ’77.

And throughout the year, Hubbard continued to show a special concern for the quiet, hard-working kid who didn’t seem to have a plan.

Even as a 12-year-old, Ruiz could tell that NAI was a good thing. And it wasn’t just the promise of a scholarship.

“I think they were looking for good, willing people – people who, if they were to succeed, were not only going to succeed for themselves but were going to come back, help their community and start a cycle,” he says.

There was one thing that puzzled him, however. When it was founded by USC professor of social work Barbara Solomon DSW ’66 (then vice provost for faculty and minority affairs) and University of Illinois-Chicago chancellor Sylvia Manning (then USC vice provost for undergraduate studies), NAI billed itself as a program that recruits average kids and shows them that they too could be Trojans.

“When we came into the program,” says Ruiz, “I think everyone, at least the adults, had the perception that we were just C-average kids – kids that without help would amount to nothing. I think it sort of confused us a little bit.”

Several of Ruiz’s original classmates (he calls them “colleagues”) were in fact borderline cases facing many challenges at school and at home. But quite a few others were, like Ruiz, high achievers ripe for the challenge.

It’s true that Nai won’t turn away promising students. However, staffers say they “seek out” kids with average grades who might not otherwise consider applying for college. The program will take a chance on almost any kid who has the desire and the work ethic, according to NAI director Kim Thomas-Barrios ’84.

This is highly unusual.

“Schools tend to push their pre-college programs to the kids who are getting the A’s and B’s,” says Thomas-Barrios. “Our program wants those kids who may be highly motivated but have not realized their potential. They may be C-average [students], but their potential may be A’s and B’s.”

Inevitably, this philosophy leads to a high attrition rate. Last year 40 scholars graduated out of a starting cohort of about 70. Almost all the graduates went on to college. Not all went to USC, either because their GPA and SAT scores missed the cutoff (at least 3.3 and 1,100, respectively) or because they chose another university.

This year the program has 375 scholars across grades seven through 12, recruited in equal numbers from Manual Arts High School and Foshay Learning Center. Of the kids interviewed for this article, some had C and B averages. Others had straight A’s.

Deborah Jarrett, currently a pre-med biochemistry junior at USC, believes she would have gone to college with or without NAI. But she feels the rigor of NAI made a difference.

“I really do credit the program for a lot of the preparation we received,” she says.

Ruiz admits that even with the best of intentions, he might have fallen short if not for NAI’s concrete assistance.

“The program gave me a realistic way, a plan to get to college,” he says. “Just having study skills – those things that you don’t get at home when your parents haven’t been to college – made the difference for me.

“It’s having a structure, having partners. Because we were all pretty much on a mission. I wasn’t alone.”

NAI scholar Spencer Street, a 10th grader at Manual Arts, likens NAI to a family. “I think the friends I have now will last me until I die,” he says.

His dad, a systems analyst with the Los Angeles Times, could teach Spencer plenty about college preparation, but even he calls NAI “a godsend.”

As president of NAI’s Parent Leadership Board, Daryl Street ’77 thinks the program has made his son and the other scholars “acutely aware of what it’s going to take to get into college or university, as well as pinpointing a lot of the things they need to do for themselves.”

Jillana Pruitt, who has two daughters in NAI, looked everywhere for a college prep program after she was forced to take 17-year-old Jasmin and 16-year-old Janté out of private school. She found it right in her neighborhood, having heard about it from teachers at Foshay.

“The nuggets are right in your backyard,” she says. “You just don’t recognize them because they don’t look like nuggets.”

The visibility of NAI’s success stories plays an important role. Ruiz has come back from time to time to talk to new students and parents. To them, he is living proof of the program’s value. The irony is that NAI has given Ruiz too many options. With a bachelor’s in English, a minor in philosophy, and extensive hands-on experience as facilities manager and operations director at a South L.A. school, Ruiz is not quite sure what to do next. For now he lives with his parents while he tries to decide whether to continue his English studies or pursue an MBA.

Meanwhile, all around him, people in the community go on with their lives. Having so many choices, Ruiz says, “seems artificial when you’re living in a neighborhood where everybody else knows their place. They know that they’re supposed to go to work at 7 a.m., and they’re coming back at 5 or 7 p.m., and they go home and they watch TV, watch their soccer games.

“It’s simpler, and they seem to sometimes enjoy the moments that we take for granted a lot more,” he adds.

For Ruiz, time to stop and smell the flowers lies in the distant future. He plans to sit for the GRE or the MCAT and enter a graduate program next fall.

Any way you look at it, NAI is a program made for “underserved” kids in the neighborhoods surrounding USC. Never mind that they have to work hard for the opportunity, and that their SAT and GPA requirements are rising to keep pace with USC’s ever more stringent admission standards. Never mind, too, that the program aims not to give neighborhood students an unfair advantage, but to close the resource gap between overcrowded, underfunded inner-city schools and affluent suburban school districts, with their smaller classes, bigger salaries and higher numbers of college-educated parents. For NAI scholars, the knowledge that they were chosen because of their status as part of an underserved population is never far from the surface.

It took most of her freshman year at Cornell University for Idolina Delgado to feel she belonged. What finally did the trick was a particularly challenging genetics course required for her biology major.

“It was the most infamous class there,” she says. “A lot of my friends dropped the major because of genetics, but I didn’t. I decided to struggle through it. If it would have been just minority kids that were dropping the class, then that would have made me feel bad. But it wasn’t. That sort of gave me some hope.” Delgado finished her biology degree at Cornell, and is now back in South Los Angeles studying for her MCATs. In the afternoons she tutors NAI scholars.

Thomas-Barrios understands her scholars’ inferiority complex. The current NAI director graduated from USC in 1984 with a bachelor’s in psychology.

“I felt out of place here,” she confesses. A minority in every way, including financially, she remembers a project partner during her freshman year who would fly to Italy at the drop of a hat (or a shoe) to buy herself new designer footwear.

What helps NAI scholars, Thomas-Barrios believes, is seeing graduates of the program attending USC and being happy as clams.

Equally important is the practice of holding NAI workshops and enrichment classes on campus.

The scholars walk around USC as if they own the place, says Kate McFadden-Midby, a ninth-grade English teacher at Foshay who has taught NAI kids for eight years.

“The idea of going onto a college campus is very comfortable for them,” she says. “They see what the college students look like, they overhear the conversations. Spending time on campus doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I think it has immeasurable value in terms of soaking in what college life is like.”

“I enjoy going to the USC campus in the morning,” says Foshay 11th-grader Jasmin Pruitt. “It’s a chance to see the students and the whole environment.”

Of course nothing compares to actually being a university student. Yuri Guardado, now a junior in political science, remembers her first day as a freshman.

“I felt like a whole new person, even though I had been on campus many times,” he says. “It seemed like a bigger place. I was used to just going to certain buildings where I had my classes. Now all of a sudden I had classes all over campus. I felt like I had accomplished a lot, like I had reached my goal.”

If Jessica Peraza had listened to certain misguided counselors and friends, she might have missed out on the following: a USC bachelor’s degree in engineering; a prestigious position as embedded software engineer with Lockheed Martin; and the opportunity to earn an MBA with her employer picking up 100 percent of her tuition.

Peraza had been feeling frustrated. A straight-A student in high school, she was barely passing some USC classes with a C. Then in her sophomore year she earned her first A, in programming. That settled it: Her major would be computer science.

But when she announced this decision, some well-intentioned acquaintances tried to dissuade her. The field is male-dominated, they said. It’s too hard, they added.

She took the comments as a dare, and pushed ahead.

“It was challenging because I was one of the few girls,” she says, and recalls thinking: “Why can’t a girl do it? If they [men] can do it, I can do it.”

She graduated with her bachelor’s in computer science in December 2001. Walking the stage, she told herself over and over, “I did it. I did it.”

There was a sense of relief that she had gone through all these challenges, that it had finally paid off, that she had met all the expectations of her parents and the NAI staff. She can laugh about it now, but those expectations during her high-school years had made USC seem like a vacation. As the only girl in her family, Peraza had to help cook dinner, wash and fold laundry, do dishes and clean the house. “In a Hispanic family girls get to do all the chores while the boys just run around and play,” she says.

When the housework was done, she would be allowed to start her homework. “I would stay up until 2 o’clock in the morning. That wasn’t rare for me,” she says.

Today Jessica Peraza lives on her own in Palmdale, Calif., close to where she works. On weekends she drives home to South L.A. and helps around the house, just for old times’ sake.

Since that first class in 1991, NAI has graduated almost 300 scholars. More than three quarters have gone on to a four-year university, either USC, a campus in the UC or Cal State system, or another private college. All but a few of the university graduates have enrolled in some type of post-secondary education. USC has offered more than $4 million in scholarships and financial aid to NAI graduates, and continues to pay most of the program’s operating expenses.

As for the alumni themselves, all are still tantalizingly young. Someday one of them may become a district attorney or a renowned oncologist or the founder of a hi-tech startup – or maybe the best high school teacher South L.A. kids will ever be privileged to know.

Still blinking in the strong light of life outside college, today’s NAI alumni don’t know exactly where their educations will lead them, but they know the world is full of possibilities.

Jillana Pruitt worried about sending her daughters Jasmin and Janté to public school before finding NAI. “The nuggets are right in your back yard,” she says.