A Life of Service: This Couple Wants Every Latino to Achieve the American Dream

Seeing young people not get their fair shake day after day can have a lasting impact on someone.
That was certainly the case with Richard Farias, who began his career as an educational liaison in the Houston, Texas juvenile justice system and now most recently, founded the Houston-based nonprofit American Latino Center for Research, Education & Justice.
“I became much more empathetic,” Richard told Lindsay Peyton of the Houston Chronicle. “I saw my job as trying to help kids, instead of trying to catch them and lock them up. I have a lot more insights on how to help them with the day-to-day.”
Moving on from the justice system, he started one of the first charter schools in Texas in an effort to address the problems he saw. Later on, Richard became the executive director of an alternative high school that gave dropouts a second chance.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker awarded Richard a lifetime achievement award in 2011, but as the launch of his new nonprofit demonstrates, he’s not done helping people yet.
Now with the help of his wife Rita, Richard is seeking to transform Houston neighborhood by neighborhood to become a city that boosts its low-income Latino youth to success. While the Latino population in northwest Houston is growing, Richard told Peyton, “there’s minimal support services for Latinos and their children here.”
Using their knowledge and experience, the couple has already started helping families at a mobile home park in the area. Describing it, Rita said, “You wouldn’t even know it’s there, and the living conditions are terrible.” As they work to transform the neighborhood, they keep the goal of their nonprofit in mind: To enrich the lives of low-income communities through education, arts, justice, and economic opportunity.
While the Fariases are zeroing in on one neighborhood, their nonprofit is also focusing on the big picture — by organizing the Latino Education Summit at Rice University in August. “It will hopefully serve as a catalyst to affect changes at the state level,” Richard told Peyton.
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Young Women in Technology Band Together in Texas to Succeed

Latina women have a hard road sometimes when it comes to pioneering careers in the tech industry.
They comprise only 1 percent of college students enrolled in engineering nationally, according to the Dallas Morning News. They can be outnumbered two to one by men in classes for some disciplines.
Students at the Singley Academy in Irving, Texas, take care of their own by offering a much-needed peer support group, Girls for Technology, for young women trying to make their way through the lucrative but male-dominated career path.
The club is a model for how banding together could help girls break into the ranks of science and tech careers — and demonstrate the different, and valuable, viewpoints young women bring to the table.
Singley Academy’s Assistant Principal Kacy Barton, who helped start Girls of Technology, told Avi Selk of the Dallas Morning News, “Females think differently. The guys get wrapped up in the technical side. ‘How are we going to make this work?’ Girls tend to respond to things they see changing the world around them.”
Lesly Hernandez, a senior, wants to work for NASA someday. Hernandez spent part of her childhood in Mexico while her parents worked in the United States. She now lives with her single mother, a food court manager, and a 6-year-old brother she looks after while her mom works. She’s also her household’s repairwoman.
Another club member, Rubi Garcia, showed early signs of science prowess when she smashed her Barbie radio — and then repaired it.
Supporting each other has given the young women confidence as they prepare for college. Women are essential, Barton says, because they think differently.
A man might say, “‘Let’s …do something else.’ And one of the girls reaches over and says, ‘If we just do these two steps, we’ll get this accomplished.'”
Leave it to a young woman to figure out how to engineer something simply.
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How an Incredible Teacher Kept His Outlawed Ethnic Studies Classes Alive

This is America. Why should we study about Mexico?
Well, because it brings attention to a part of America’s history that’s usually glazed over. Because it helps Mexican-American students identify with their roots. And most significantly, it allows Latino students to achieve tremendous academic success.
As Yes! Magazine reports, the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in Tuscon, Arizona has bucked national trends since its founding in 1998. It brought about such positive change that by 2011, the high school dropout rate for MAS students in the city was a mere 2.5 percent (opposed to 56 percent for Latino students nationwide). Ninety-eight percent of these students did their homework and 66 percent went on to pursue higher education after high school.
But the political climate and tide of anti-immigration sentiment in Arizona did not favor these classes. Curtis Acosta, a leader in developing Tucson’s MAS program, saw the state legislature ban these studies in schools in 2010. The school district was forced to end the classes or lose $15 million in annual state aid.  As a New York Times editorial puts it, “It was a blunt-force victory for the Arizona school superintendent, John Huppenthal, who has spent years crusading against ethnic-studies programs he claims are ‘brainwashing’ children into thinking that Latinos have been victims of white oppression.”
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Not going down without a fight, Acosta, MAS students and other activists successfully restored the MAS program three years after the ban with a federal court order. (Sort of.) These classes are now known as “culturally relevant” classes that also include African American studies. This contentious battle was taken on in the 2011 documentary, Precious Knowledge. (Watch the trailer for this film below.)
Despite the victory, Acosta (who left his teaching position at Tucson High Magnet School to start the Acosta Latino Learning Partnership) says the fight and controversy is far from over — Arizona superintendent Huppenthal says the Tucson curriculum is still inappropriate.
“People need to understand this has been happening for years. This is what’s happening in Georgia, in Alabama, in Arizona. And it’s happening in a lot of other places,” Acosta told Yes! Magazine. “If we share knowledge, resources, and information, we can have a national response locally.”
“We’re right back to the civil rights movement, we’re right back to the Farm Workers’ movement for my people,” Acosta, who continues to advocate Latino-American studies through his organization, added. “We need to find new spaces to meet and organize as a community since our public institutions, such as schools, are limiting and banning us from their spaces….The students are the present-future.”
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