Dedication Paying Off in Degrees

When Maria Elena Perez receives her bachelor’s degree today from USC, her Mexican immigrant parents -- neither of whom advanced past the sixth grade -- say they will be very proud.

But it’s far from the first time they have felt that way at a campus commencement ceremony. Maria Elena, 21, is the youngest of the Perez family’s 11 children, and she’s the 11th to earn a bachelor’s degree. She’s also the sixth in the family to graduate from USC.

How has a working-class family from a low-income neighborhood in Pacoima fared so well in higher education?

Members of the family cite the parents’ high expectations and deep involvement in their children’s lives. The siblings helped one another succeed in school too.

“Our family is very united,” said Maria Elena, an American studies major who focused on Chicano and Latino issues.

The children also said they were inspired by the sacrifices made by their father, Samuel Perez Sr., 69, who from the mid-1970s to the mid-’90s often held three jobs.

“We don’t have luxuries,” the 64-year-old mother, also named Maria Elena Perez, said softly in Spanish. “But we have much, much love for our children, and we don’t want them to have to work the way my husband did.”

The siblings add that their musical education has played a big role in their lives, giving them direction and keeping them out of trouble when they were younger. All 11 children play instruments, and five of those who attended USC were in the marching band. On weekends, three of the siblings earn extra money by playing in a mariachi band.

“I can’t say enough about those kids,” said Richard Gigger Jr., who in two decades as band director at San Fernando High School taught 10 of the Perez children.

“All of them were leaders in the band, drum majors, section leaders,” he said. “They have 100% discipline. Anything that I would teach them, they would listen.”

Close supervision was a mainstay of the close-knit Perez home, where the six unmarried children still live with their parents. The mother, who has never worked outside the house, was a volunteer at the children’s schools and an avid spectator at their ballgames.

“With 11 kids, that’s a lot of work,” Gigger said. But the parents, he said, “came to everything.... They ran from one place to another.”

When the now-retired father held three jobs, he would have dinner in the midafternoon with his children after a full day at a machine shop. He’d ask about their school day, then head off to his second job, on the assembly line at the old General Motors plant in Van Nuys. On weekends, he earned extra money as a gardener.

“I was just trying to do my job as a father,” said the senior Perez. “Nothing more.”

The eldest child, Agar Perez-Dogue, 35, was the family’s college pioneer, showing the others what they could accomplish and how to circumvent the obstacles. She learned the ins and outs of financial aid, said brother Isai Perez, 33, back when their father still “wasn’t sure what tuition was.”

Yet even as the family grew savvier in the ways of college finance, covering the costs was always tricky. The children qualified for Cal Grants as well as Pell Grants, federal aid for students from low-income families. Some earned USC scholarships. Most held jobs while they studied and took out loans to cover the remaining expenses.

The Perez children overcame challenges that have prevented many Latinos from getting a college education.

Estela Mara Bensimon, a USC expert on minorities in urban higher education, estimated that as few as 6% of Latinos who enter California elementary schools go on to earn a degree from a four-year university or college. By contrast, the rate is higher than 25% for non-Latino whites.

“These parents beat all the odds,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, after hearing the family’s story.

Suro, whose Washington-based research group is affiliated with USC, explained that “other families have tried and failed because of the financial barriers and problems in high school preparation, and the temptations of the labor market, where kids often will drop out after a couple of years of college to go to work.”

He said the Perez family also needed to overcome “cultural barriers in which many families are reluctant to send their teenage children, particularly young women, to live away from home.”

Eight of the 11 siblings lived on campus in their undergraduate years.

Bensimon noted that even among Latinos who graduate from four-year institutions, few head to graduate school. She attributed that partly to Latinos often getting lower grades in their undergraduate studies.

In the Perez family, three of the siblings have master’s degrees, and two more are working on theirs. One of the master’s holders, Judith Perez-Mendoza, 32, has begun work on a doctorate in education.

The dedication to education is easy to spot in the family’s snug home in the northeast San Fernando Valley. A dozen diplomas, along with many pictures of family, cover the walls of the small living room. Three of the children work as teachers, and another is a guidance counselor.

The siblings as well as the parents say they want their family to inspire other Latinos to get college educations. Sometimes, when he visits a college, Perez Sr. said, “I get sick” from seeing so few Latino students.

But the focus began at home. Isai, who now works in public relations, recalls his father giving him an important nudge in his teens, at a time when “I didn’t think I was college material.”

Isai was leaning toward joining the Marines.

“My dad was very supportive. He said, ‘If you want to do that, fine, but I’d like you to try college.’ ”

Older brother Samuel Jr., valedictorian of his graduating class at San Fernando High, provided a further push.

“He told me there’s enough of our people in the service, there’s too many of our people who are incarcerated, but there’s not enough of our people in college,” Isai recalled.

So Isai headed for Valley College. After completing his studies there, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Cal State Northridge.

Perez Sr. said he stressed the value of education to his children because, after coming to this country in the 1950s through the bracero labor program, he saw the success that was possible for people with college degrees.

As for the family’s love affair with USC -- a “Trojan Country” street sign hangs on the living room wall -- it dates to the parents’ early days together in Los Angeles in the 1960s. They would go to soccer games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, then stroll by the USC campus.

The senior Perez promised his wife that their children would attend the school one day. Today, he laughs about it, saying he didn’t realize how much the school cost when he made that pledge. (Tuition, books, room and board and other expenses for undergraduates this year totaled $40,318.)

Even with his youngest child receiving her degree today, the father is counting on more cap-and-gown undergraduate ceremonies in the future.

He pointed to a living room picture of the eldest of his six grandchildren, Ines.

“Maybe she’ll be next,” he said.