CSULB mentor uses life story to inspire others

By Sonya Smith
Online Forty-Niner
Editor-in-Chief

On a day like any other, 15-year-old Gabriela Alonso remembers waking up at 4 a.m., still shivering from the lack of insulation in her house. She calmly and routinely would insert a needle into her mother's arm that was bruised with repetition and connects the numerous, complicated wires to the life-prolonging dialysis machine to clean her mother's blood. After leading her blind mother back to bed, she would grab her books and head off to school.

A child in a migrant farm family, her future was set out for before her, and education wasn't part of it. She struggled through classes and always had to worry about the approaching storm that might have meant mean no work for many days, and whether her family would have enough to eat at night.

Today Alonso sits inside her office cubicle at Cal State Long Beach where she works as a counselor to students coming from migrant farm families like herself. This part-time job for her in the College Assistant Migrant Program is how Alonso gives back to the program that aided her in making the transition to college.

Alonso was born in 1981 in Visalia, about one year after her mother's first child died prematurely after her father abused her mother. Early on Alonso and her mother lived in various women's domestic shelters in the San Joaquin Valley and had a restraining order against Alonso's father.

Her family moved to Los Angeles when Alonso was a little girl so that her mother could sell watermelons in the fresh fruit district downtown. In the late 1980s, Alonso's family moved back to the San Joaquin Valley, this time to Tulare.

After school she would help pick grapes, strawberries, tomatoes or cotton depending on the season. She would leave the fields with cut-up hands from picking fruit, a painful and blistering sunburn from the persistent sun rays, nagging back aches from bending over and various skin irritations, such as bad acne, from the pesticides used. Even sleep lacked comfort as she would lay shivering, bundled up in numerous layers of pre-owned clothes from thrift stores.

By the fourth grade Alonso had developed a stoop from picking in the fields and osteoporosis from a lack of calcium. But she ignored the pain because her mother was diagnosed with diabetes and partial blindness, giving her four to seven years to live. "I felt really bad that I was sick," Alonso said.

Her mother's health went from bad to worse when Alonso was 15 years old as her mother's diabetes sickened her entire body. Nurses taught Alonso how to deliver the Online dialysis treatment to her mother. When her mother became almost blind Alonso had to sign all her mother's papers for her. Alonso recalls, "It made me feel old…I had to become her guardian."

With a mother who was never really healthy, Alonso said she never rebelled or challenged the responsibilities given to her at such a young age simply out of respect for her mother. "I never felt like a teenager," Alonso said of her formative years.

On Feb. 8, 1998, a small glimmer of hope appeared to the Alonso family when a phone call from Saint Vincent's Hospital offered kidneys and a healthy pancreas for Alonso's mother. Her mother was rushed to the hospital that night, where she received life-sustaining organs. This small window of hope, however, closed shut soon after the transplant when a devastating infection developed.

When a blood vessel behind her mother's pancreas burst, another attempt at surgery did not stop the bleeding. Then, on March 28, Alonso was faced with the toughest decision yet.

She had to decide whether to take her mother off life support.

"I remember getting the phone call," she says, choking back tears. "I promised her that I would never leave her on a life-support machine."

Even though she was only carrying out her mother's wishes, it was still hard.'"I was feeling frustrated, because I knew when the machine was turned off we would have to bury her," Alonso said.

Alonso turned 18 years old on the day of her mother's viewing and she decided to save her 16-year-old sister from foster care by adopting her, and Alonso became eligible for welfare. In order to receive the aid she had to take classes, and only teen pregnancy classes were offered.

"I was so embarrassed and worried that people would think I had gotten pregnant," Alonso recalled.

Alonso's half-sister, Lupe Munoz, is still grateful for her sister,'"If I was worried about something she would always be there for me…she filled in as a mother."

Alonso managed to graduate from high school in 2000, but the people around her did not expect her to make anything of herself, she said.

"In their eyes I was supposed to stay home and take care of my family," Alonso said.

With people not supporting her ambitions, especially her stepfather, Alonso had three words for them ——"Oh hell no." She applied to CSULB, because her mother loved beaches, and she was accepted.

By the luck of the draw, Alonso's first year at CSULB was also the first year for the College Assistant Migrant Program. CAMP was designed to help children from migrant farm families adapt to college.

The program is one of nine such programs in California, along with 80 similar programs offered throughout the United States, said Vivian Barrera, director of the College Assistant Migrant Program.

CAMP first recruits students at the high school level and helps them through their freshmen year. Incentives include: financial grants of up to $400, leadership training and opportunities, assistance finding housing, academic advising, and classes offered through EOP and Student Services, Barrera said.

"The work is hard and the workers have no benefits or disability," Barrera said. "I admire the families that do this."

Fifty percent of migrant farm children do not even graduate from high school, Barrera said. These children have trouble obtaining an education because their families often relocate, and since families get paid by the amount collected; the children often work in the fields before the minimum age of 14.

A part-time job at the CSULB Financial Aid center, psychological counseling on campus and CAMP helped Gabriela to gain confidence, ease from depression and a plan for success in college.

She now will graduate in May with an interpersonal communications bachelor's degree and become a full-time college adviser/recruiter for CAMP on Dec. 20. Alonso says she hopes to go to Albany State College to get a master's in public education. She also wants to someday return to Tulare, where she would apply for grants to start her own after-school program.

"She demonstrated to me that she has a really strong spirit and a strong heart." Barrera said.

Salvador Barajas, a student who was mentored by Alonso, said she kept him in school and on track. He said that she went out of her way to make him feel special, for example on his birthday she made him a cake, bought him a present and took him to see a comedy show.

"Mentoring means my heart"— I really do my job from the heart – it reminds me of my mom, when I worked in the fields and of how hard it is to not have parents that are educated," Alonso says. "The worst can happen to the nicest people in the world, but in reality, it just makes you stronger."