Q & A

In the fall, Vanguard University welcomed Jesse Miranda to its campus.

Miranda is in charge of the Center for Urban Studies and Ethnic

Leadership, a new program at the school that seeks to build relationships

between the school, churches and the community. He also is a leader of

the Christian Latino community in the country.

Miranda sat down with Pilot City Editor S.J. Cahn to talk about the

new center and how he hopes it will improve the Newport-Mesa community.

The following is the first of a two-part conversation.

What are the principal goals of the Center for Urban Studies and

Ethnic Leadership and how do you hope to achieve them?

The Center for Urban Studies and Ethic Leadership is to engage and

connect the campus, the church and the community -- kind of a triad

actually -- to place scholarship and faith and service for the church and

the community and community development together. To develop the church,

develop the community and actually assist the churches in ministering to

its surrounding communities and empower communities through its own

people with training and development. In other words, develop the

community from the inside out; we are not the experts. We come in as

partners. We feel that it’s not a service that we’re just offering but an

engagement. We want it to be relational -- especially being at Vanguard

University, where it’s in the community of Costa Mesa. Our goals would be

to empower the community here and reach out to the churches in Newport

and partner with them -- with their assets, with their gifts, with their

skills that they have. It’s a tremendous asset to a community here. And I

would hope to discover the assets of the community as well. A lot of

times, the focus is on the needs and not on the assets. Having come from

an underdeveloped community, I know that there are people with gifts and

skills if we’re able to round them up, identify them and mobilize them.

To achieve that, I would guess that we do it by training in community

engagement through means of a seamless method of education -- starting

from a half-day seminar, to a one-day seminar, to an ongoing certificate

program, a B.A. degree, a master’s in Christian leadership. So it goes

all the way up to a master’s degree, depending on where the people are.

They can be people from outside Costa Mesa, as well as people from within

the community. Also, by having events such as a monthly lectureship on

God in the city, for instance, and an annual report -- kind of a state of

the city or state of the community forum -- to inform the community what

we have found out during the year. Our students have gone out, our

community partners have shared with us, so those would be some of the

things that we’d look at.

We also want to have a roster of experienced community workers to come

in and train -- so faculty from here and faculty from the community will

round out. We’ll do research, demographics. Applied research of questions

and issues that come up are the focus of our research. We hope to, with

time and years, have resources here -- books to read, studies that have

been made, people’s stories and successful models -- that this would be a

center of information. Our primary goal would be first the Hispanic

community because of the large percentage in Santa Ana and Costa Mesa of

Hispanics, but we eventually want to go maybe with other ethnic groups

that are in the area that we see necessary to engage, and we would be

open to that. As a result, there’s a national study that is being

conducted now by an organization that I’m president of that’s national.

AMEN -- The National Alliance of Hispanic Ministries. And we’re

conducting a national, three-year research on the Hispanic churches in

the public life of America. The findings of that . . . now others in

other parts of the country are doing African American, Jews and others.

So all of that is going to be housed here in our center. So it’s a

historical type of thing that will be available to us here. So that’s how

we will achieve our goals.

What in your background prepared you for this work?

It’s really my childhood that taught me the value of the church in a

community. Growing up in a poverty area, I saw the beginnings of gangs

and some drugs. In those days, they weren’t the heavy drugs that you have

here now, but that was the beginning. And my friends, a lot them died of

overdoses and others are in prison even to this day. I don’t think I’m

any more privileged; only that my family accepted the invitation of a

church in the area. And so that became the focal point of our life. And I

think that’s why, definitely, I turned out different than the rest of my

friends in my community. Also, the long journey of education has been a

means and not an end. To me, education has been to apply to the

community. I’ve learned, not for self-purpose, but for service to the

community and to the church. My career has been primarily -- all these

years, 44 years -- with disenfranchised communities. Poor, and yet I’ve

seen them very functional with a lot of talent and skills that the church

has been able to develop -- that they would not have been -- like myself.

We would be different people had it not been for the church in our life.

It gave us meaning and purpose.

An experience that I can relate: In April of 1992, I was in Stanford

University lecturing on Latino religion. From San Francisco, I flew into

L.A., and through the clouds of smoke of the riots. All of the sudden, I

said: “Here I am, teaching religion in a beautiful Gothic chapel in this

ivory tower of education, Stanford University. And look at the

community?” Just a real disconnect. It really pricked my conscience as

what are we doing. So that’s the birth of that triad -- the church, the

community and the campus -- and bringing them all together. I think

they’ve been too separated and have brought some of the social problems

that we experience. Costa Mesa’s a long way from an L.A.; maybe even a

long way from Santa Ana. But now’s the time to really address some of the

issues, because you have a first generation of immigrants and you don’t

have ongoing generations of poverty and cycles of habits. I think right

now’s the time to really engage it and deal with it and to keep a

beautiful community. It behooves us to do that.

There have been calls and discussion recently in Costa Mesa to limit

charitable services and support for noncitizens. What is your reaction to

that?

It’s and old debate and, like anything, a lot of misunderstandings.

When it comes to racial prejudice and discrimination, it’s such an

emotional issue that a lot of times you wonder how much people have said,

how they said it and what context. So I don’t think it’s the issue, but

sometimes the emotion of the person, the emotion of those that listen. So

I think a community has to be aware of those things, especially if it’s

beginning to happen and doesn’t have a long history of it. But I come

from Los Angeles, and there’s a long history there. We’ve learned

sometimes that communities overreact by some expressions that point in

that direction, but we’re not sure that’s what it is.