When her youngest son announced that he was dropping out of high school eight years ago, Catalina Mendoza Manini felt despair and anger.
“I was yelling I was so mad. I know how difficult life can be if you don’t have that piece of paper,” Manini said. “He told me: `You think it’s so easy, but you are not there. You don’t know how it is.’ “
The irate mother issued a challenge: Though she spoke almost no English, she would demonstrate to her son the importance of education by earning a high-school equivalency diploma for herself.
“I knew it would not be easy. But I told him: `I am going to show you that I can do it.’ “
As promised, she earned her high-school equivalency in 1989. But she found she couldn’t stop there. She continued on, struggling to master English while earning a two-year associate’s degree in microcomputer technology from the Dona Ana Branch Community College in Las Cruces.
“I spent almost the whole day there, because I needed to read and read and read the lessons,” Manini said. “I kept translating, because my English was not so good. Can you imagine my first semester? Sometimes, I was crying.”
Manini said she never could have anticipated how much of a barrier language could be.
“I remember asking myself: `Catalina, what are you doing here? You are not understanding anything of these classes.’ I didn’t want to take the risk to fail because I didn’t understand some word. If you misunderstand just one word in one exam, you fail the question.”
Manini was unsatisfied with any grade less than perfect. She was crushed if her papers ever received a mark that was less than 100 percent.
Manini’s determination caught the attention of Dona Ana County’s adult basic education program director, Sylvia Duran Nickerson. Nickerson later hired Manini to teach adult basic education classes part-time, to help inspire other adult students, particularly those not proficient in English.
In 1990, Manini was named New Mexico’s student of the year among the more than 35,000 enrolled in adult basic education classes at community colleges throughout the state.
Nickerson said Manini, who was in her late 40s when she started pursuing her education, spoke almost no English when she started attending classes.
“I was so impressed that in such a short period of time she accomplished achieving her high-school diploma in English and then learned enough English to go to college and succeed,” Nickerson said. “That’s a special determination that the average person, no matter how well educated or under-educated, does not have.”
Manini then enrolled in a four-year college, New Mexico State University, where last year she earned degrees in linguistics and sociology.
As she pursued her education, Manini underwent a divorce, which, she said, added to her determination to improve her circumstances. Manini said her son never did finish high school, but by this time her efforts were for herself.
“When I started my GED program, it was for him,” Manini said. “But since I got my GED, and I was working to receive my diploma, I knew that I wanted more. I knew that this was not enough for me.”
Only a few years earlier, Manini had spent her days in hiding in Las Cruces because she and her family had entered the United States illegally before taking advantage of an amnesty program granting residency.
In 1981, she and her husband had been forced to sell their printing business in Juarez, Mexico, because of the Mexican economy.
“We tried to stay there,” Manini said. “We tried to keep our business working and alive, but we couldn’t. We never would have come to the United States, had it not been for this.”
In desperation, Manini and her husband crossed the U.S. border and settled with their four sons in Las Cruces. Later, they moved to nearby El Paso, Texas. Until achieving amnesty, they family lived with the dread of being deported because of their illegal status. Language barriers increased their fears.
Manini described the isolation and persecution she sometimes felt living in a foreign country where anti-immigrant sentiments were growing stronger.
“The people who leave their country, it is not because they want to,” Manini said. “It is because they must. It is very sad to live far away from your country, especially when you have encounters with the kinds of people who can’t deal with immigrants.”
Manini said she endured discrimination on several fronts, even as she attempted to earn her college degrees.
She described one teacher, no longer at the community college, who she said ignored Hispanic students and once declared aloud: “I hate these Chicanos.”
Manini had worked as a secretary in Mexico and said she knew she was an excellent typist. She frequently assisted other students in the classroom. But her typing teacher consistently gave her low grades.
“She claimed I had not turned in my homework, when I had turned it in,” Manini said.
Manini said these incidents were occurring, even as she was earning A’s in her other classes.
“That’s when I realized how impotent you can feel, and how frustrated,” Manini said.
On another occasion, at New Mexico State, Manini said a teacher apparently unimpressed with her English-speaking skills unsuccessfully attempted to deny her entry into an upper level English class, despite her good scholastic record. Ultimately, the grade on Manini’s final in that class was an A.
“I gained her respect,” Manini said. “That has happened with almost all my teachers, because they saw in me what a big interest I had.”
Manini said she now is privileged to pursue a career that she chose, not one that was chosen for her. When she was a child growing up in Chihuahua, Mexico, she said, her father ordered her to study bookkeeping and accounting when she was older, even though she had no real affinity for those subjects.
“I grew up in a time when you tell your father `yes,’ ” Manini said.
She still has not achieved her goals, because she wants to accumulate enough money to pay off her student loans, complete her master’s degree and ultimately work in her chosen field of sociology. In the meantime, she enjoys teaching.
“To the people (reading this), I want to say something,” Manini said. “To people who have similar situations that I had, for example, with prejudice. Remember, I returned to school with three major reasons to be discriminated against: age, woman and Latina — an old Latin woman.”
Manini has now taken steps toward her next educational goal by completing several graduate courses. She is modest about calling herself a role model. But students in the citizenship and adult-education classes Manini now teaches in Las Cruces say she refuses to allow them to balk at learning. Manini insists that her students will succeed, just as she did.
She never slows down during a class, hurling rapid questions at her students, cajoling them into speaking English and gently correcting mistakes.
“That’s why I am teaching this class,” Manini said. “Remembering my necessities and remembering my fears and my insecurities, I’m very, very sure they need someone who they can trust. Someone who shows an interest in them and who cares for them.”
