A New Story in the Rio Grande Valley

ELSA, Texas -- In a valley that isn’t a valley, perception not only trumps reality, it can alter it. For decades, the dominant perception of the pancake-flat southern tip of Texas--dubbed the Magic Valley of the Rio Grande by hype-happy land marketers--has been one of despair. Little income. Little opportunity. Little reason to hope. Reality followed suit. At the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development (llanogrande.org), however, area high school students are changing both. On a visit to the center, I began to see how.

“Most objective indicators,” says Francisco Guajardo, Llano Grande’s founder and director, “suggest that we are impoverished; but we cannot obey the pitiful indicators. We would waddle in misery if we did that. We choose to take a radically different approach, where kids gain so much power that the world is their laboratory…where kids believe that they can change the world.”

And they are. Some students created an informational campaign that swayed voters to pass a $21 million bond issue for new schools. Others helped convince the state legislature to allow undocumented students to pay in-state, rather than international, tuition rates at state universities. Others established a youth advisory council to champion local park improvements. Still others host candidate forums. The list goes on and on.

And so do the students. They go all over the country and the world on student exchanges and internships—part of what Guajardo calls breaking the “isolation that really controls a lot of rural places.” And they go to college. According to Juan Ozuna, a Llano Grande alum and one of its program directors, the percentage of local kids going to college has doubled, going from 30 to 60 percent. And they’re going not just to regional or even state schools; they’re going to the Ivy League—70 kids in the last 8 years. Ozuna himself graduated from Yale. And then, like so many others before and after him, Ozuna came back to the valley to help others.

All of this from kids in a region that year after year ranks among the poorest in the nation.

Yet Guajardo doesn’t see the students’ success as achievement in spite of their economic situation. Rather, he says their success is because of their situation. Economic need translates into the drive to achieve for one’s self and for others. Family, community and culture translate into strengths upon which to build.

“We’re really tired of people feeling sorry for themselves,” says Guajardo. “Just about every signal tells them that they’re not all that. Well, we beg to differ… Our approach is a distinctly assets-based approach. We work on identifying, building and celebrating the assets of people. We are revolting against the deficit paradigm.”

Edyael Casaperalta, who as a child came with her mother and younger sister from Mexico one night and is now a graduate student at Ohio University, puts it this way: “In our communities, too many times we’ve been told that we can’t. And we internalize that… We’re doing away with the stereotypes and the limits that have been put on our imaginations that have [held us down] and kept us colonized.”

And with a line that I heard again and again at Llano Grande, she sums it up: “We can write our own story.”

The way students of Llano Grande write their own story is somewhat complex, but then as Guajardo points out, “Communities are complex; people are complex.” The work involves everything from developing and delivering classroom curriculum (the center was born in the local high school) to cultivating leadership activities to helping train students from all across the country in such things as digital storytelling.

“People ask what we do. It’s hard to describe,” says Delia Perez, another program director and Llano Grande’s first Ivy Leaguer. “I can give them a list of services and that may satisfy them, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with it.”

Nor would 17-year-old Nadia Casaperalta, a self-described at-risk student who nevertheless was instrumental in the park efforts and the candidate forums and will soon head off to Kalamazoo College in Michigan. “I really can’t describe it. It’s really more than family…and I think that’s what makes our organization so powerful.”