Evelyn Ramirez, from fields to Ivy League

Posted at 12:05 AM on Sunday, Jun. 22, 2008

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.

Sunnyside High graduate Evelyn Ramirez, whose mother is a fieldworker, will attend Brown University in the fall. (video: Eric Paul Zamora / editing: Will Albritton)

When she was a baby, Ramirez spent one year with her grandparents in Mexico while her mother worked in the United States. And at 5, Ramirez spent several months in a Valley foster home after her mother and older half-sister had a fight and authorities got involved.

Ramirez said one good thing came from being in the foster home. It’s where she learned English.

As she grew older, she spent time with a neighbor, Loida Olivas, who had books and puzzles that the Ramirezes didn’t have. Ramirez would swim in her pool and try to play Olivas’ piano. Olivas made “Star” — Ramirez’s middle name — practice her multiplication tables.

“She made me want to learn,” Ramirez said.

Olivas, however, takes no credit for the girl’s accomplishments. “I really didn’t do anything spectacular,” she said.

Language intrigued Ramirez, and she read as many 99-cent books as she could buy through school, using spare change.

When she was about 8, she fell in love with the word “preposterous” because it sounded sophisticated and big. “That’s a preposterous state of mind,” she declared as a fourth-grader.

That same school year, a teacher suggested that Ramirez take the entrance exam for Manchester GATE, the Fresno Unified magnet school for academically “gifted” elementary students. She found “gifted” an odd word. “I think they could have chosen another, like ‘driven’ or ‘motivated,’ ” she said.

Julia Ramirez let her daughter take the test, but wasn’t enthusiastic.

“My mom didn’t really understand, but she didn’t say ‘No,’ either,” Evelyn Ramirez said.

She attended Manchester for fifth and sixth grade — entering a world she knew little about.

Some classmates got $20 from their parents for every A on their report cards.

Ramirez earned mostly A’s, too, but her mother said little.

As she grew older, she found comfort in getting good grades, because it brought her positive attention from teachers.

At Kings Canyon Middle School, her interest in math blossomed — or, as she put it: “That’s when my love of math was, ‘Wow!’ ”

Ramirez knows why she likes numbers.

“I feel I’m more a left-brained person,” she said, referring to that part of the brain that processes in the linear, sequential and logical manner associated with math. “I think I like math because there is one right answer, and you can prove the right answer.”

Her middle school algebra teacher, Charles Rogers, said Ramirez would come in before and after school to talk about assignments. “She had a tremendous work ethic that was rare to see,” Rogers said. “She always had a ton of enthusiasm. It was infectious.”

When she moved on to Sunnyside High School, Ramirez wanted to embrace the social life and extra-curricular activities. She had learned to love the water in her neighbor’s pool, and now she wanted to play water polo and join the swim team.

Instead, she worked in the fields during summers, on weekends and sometimes after school.

“You wake up early and you see the sun come up, and you know you have to try to beat the heat,” Ramirez said.

She had moments any adolescent girl would enjoy — such as being chosen a homecoming princess. Her strict mother refused to let her go, but Ramirez climbed out of a bedroom window.

“I wasn’t going to miss that,” she said.

Sunnyside counselor Diana Rodriquez tried to mediate the mother-daughter conflict — with only partial success. Ramirez still picked crops.

But Julia Ramirez agreed to let her daughter go with Rodriquez and other students on a tour of East Coast colleges two years ago. Evelyn Ramirez said her mother respected Rodriquez, who believed she could win admission to an Ivy League school.

She was earning mostly A’s, and she was taking the advanced classes that colleges look for. Many elite universities also want Hispanics and other students of color to help diversify their student bodies.

But she had to raise $1,200 for the trip.

Ramirez asked her middle school math teacher for help, and Rogers wrote her a check for $500. The trip would be a good opportunity for her, Rogers thought. “I never imagined it would lead to all of this,” he said. “It makes me feel proud to have helped her.”

When the group visited Brown, something stirred in Ramirez.

She liked the freedom Brown offers students. They can take many different classes and even can design their own major with faculty approval. She said she would finally have choices.

Ramirez expects that classes at Brown will be hard, and she knows some of her classmates will be rich and unfamiliar with people who work the fields. But she hopes a common goal will help people overcome their differences.

“We’re all there for an education,” Ramirez said.

Julia Ramirez, at first, didn’t want her daughter to go to Brown. “She just wants to do crazy stuff over there with me not around,” Julia Ramirez told a relative one day in Spanish, as her daughter eavesdropped.

Evelyn Ramirez didn’t respond when her mother said she was against Brown, but nothing her mother said changed her mind.

Her confidence increased as she matured.

Last winter, Ramirez signaled that the power in their relationship had shifted. She told her mother that she was going to swim on the Sunnyside team in her final semester because she was turning 18.

“She knew I was insinuating that I was going to do it whether she wanted me to or not,” Ramirez said.

Julia Ramirez was silent.

She knew her parental control was slipping away.

Julia Ramirez, 48 and the mother of three daughters, has led a turbulent life. Evelyn Ramirez believes that her mother endured trouble and pain from failed relationships with family members and men, and that her mother wanted to protect her from those mistakes. But Julia Ramirez conveyed her concern harshly. She sounded like she was always scolding, Evelyn Ramirez said.

“I would look at other moms and know that my mom was not like them.”

Julia Ramirez grew up in a Mexican village where houses were made from tree branches. The eldest of 10 children, she cried when there was no food and felt bad when she was sent to the river to wash diapers. She hated that she couldn’t get the stains out.

She collected welfare to help support her children, and she could get upset when they appeared to waste food. She once cried when she saw Evelyn Ramirez throw away a cold tortilla.

Julia Ramirez didn’t understand the culture of American high schools — she went as far as second grade in Mexico. But she knew that Evelyn Ramirez was angry because she was strict. Julia Ramirez, however, feared that daughter Evelyn would get pregnant — as Julia’s oldest daughter had done as a teenager.

So she sent Ramirez out to work.

“I wanted her to know what it is to suffer in the fields” so she would want something better, said Julia Ramirez, who has a green card. Her daughter is a U.S. citizen.

This spring, Evelyn Ramirez — a valedictorian at Sunnyside — was accepted by the University of California campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, and at Fresno State. But Brown, the school that offered her the greatest freedom of choice, was her choice.

Julia Ramirez had planned to move to Rhode Island with her daughter, but changed her mind. “I need to let her go,” she said, beginning to cry. “I have been working at accepting that.”

Evelyn Ramirez wonders how her mother will react when she leaves: “Sometimes I think she’s more dependent on me than I am on her.”

She will use about $3,500 she made in the fields to help pay for her Brown education.

“Whatever she earned is hers,” Julia Ramirez said.

In the last year, their relationship has improved. Both have come to understand important things about one another.

“I knew she was smart,” Julia Ramirez said. “But I never knew how high a position she could go to with this great intelligence of hers.”

Evelyn Ramirez has come to appreciate in her mother what also is a part of her.

“She doesn’t quit.”