From Mexico to East LA, On to Harvard to Realize a Dream

By EFE News Service

Nine years after coming to the U.S. without documents, Mexican native Juan Hernandez-Campos is the first student from the Los Angeles based “After School All Stars” program to win a scholarship to go to Harvard, it was announced on Monday.

Born in Guadalajara 18 years ago, Hernandez-Campos crossed the border when he was nine-years-old to reunite with his father in Los Angeles. And now he, like other members of his family, is waiting for President Barack Obama to act on immigration reform so he can obtain permanent residency.

“Since I was small I would say: I want to work in what my dad works when I grow up; but my dad is a construction worker,” said Hernandez-Campos, who is a freshman at the applied sciences and engineering school at Harvard. “But he told me ‘no, I want you to study something so you can be boss, like the work that engineers do, because this work is hard,’” recalled Hernandez-Campos.

In addition to his father’s advice, Hernandez-Campos credits the after school program “After School All Stars,” for changing his life.

“While in the program, from sixth to eighth grade I signed up to learn how to use computers,” he said. “The teachers guided me and when I was ready to go to high school, I enrolled at Theodore Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles because they have a science and technology magnet school,” he explained. Hernandez-Campos recounts that as a senior in high school he realized that —despite his excellent grades—because of his lack of legal status he would not be able to access the many scholarship and grant programs available to his U.S. born friends.

Juan Hernandez-Campos

“But I figured out what universities and private foundations give out scholarships without caring about immigration status,” he said.

In his research on universities, he found that at Harvard, undocumented and low-income student, after competing with other high-achieving aspirants, could get a scholarship to make their dreams come true as an international student.

The engineering school scholarship at Harvard included tuition, housing, meals, books and is worth more than $50,000 a year.

Hernandez-Campos said he was accepted to 15 universities, and seven offered him full rides, but he chose Harvard. “A professor at Roosevelt told me that since the school was founded in 1923, only eight students have been accepted at Harvard,” he said.

Carlos Santini, associate director of “After School All Stars,” said the program that influenced the life of Hernandez-Campos, was founded in Los Angeles in 2002 by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It aims to keep students busy after school, by involving them in a variety of activities.