Doña Julia’S Children: The Life and Legacy of Educational Reformer Vahac Mardirosian

By Luis Torres

This is a biography of Baptist minister-turned educational reformer Vahac Mardirosian, a remarkable man who has accomplished a great deal over a long, fascinating career. Now in his late eighties and long since retired, he looks back on a long and eventful life. The arc of his personal narrative is a window into captivating chapters of history in the twentieth century.
He is the child of survivors of the Turkish genocide perpetrated on Armenians. He grew up in post-revolutionary Mexico and came to the United States during World War II. He served as a Baptist minister until he became a political activist and educational reformer during the turbulent days of the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s. He capped his career by creating a nonprofit organization that helps immigrant parents become partners with the public schools in order to improve educational opportunities for their children. This is the remarkable story of an Armenian-Mexican-American.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483676227

Luis Torres

A product of East Los Angeles, Luís Torres is a veteran journalist, writer and filmmaker. He recently retired after nearly thirty years as a reporter for KNX Radio, the CBS station in Los Angeles. He has received a number of awards for excellence in broadcast journalism, including the prestigious Peabody Award, the duPont-Columbia Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award. He holds a master of science degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City and a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in Pasadena, California. This is his first book.

Book preview

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Turning point: The 1968 East

Los Angeles high school walkouts

CHAPTER TWO

Parents, students and community

CHAPTER THREE

A Rosa Parks moment

CHAPTER FOUR

An Armenian-Mexican

CHAPTER FIVE

Mardirosian and the seminary

CHAPTER SIX

The ministry: "I devoted myself

to that pastorate"

CHAPTER SEVEN

The system can respond to a challenge

CHAPTER EIGHT

School desegregation and busing

CHAPTER NINE

Starting over, laying the foundation for the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE)

CHAPTER TEN

PIQE and the separation of church and state

DEDICATION

For Sandra

INTRODUCTION

Vahac Mardirosian, an Armenian who was raised in Mexico and accomplished a great many things in the United States, recalls the kindness and compassion of a Mexican woman who gave him a bit of food and a bit of hope during desperate times. Her name was Doña Julia, Vahac recalls. This was in the late 1920s. Vahac was a little boy growing up with his little sister in Tijuana. His parents were survivors of the Armenian Genocide. They made their way to the Americas with infant Vahac in tow. They landed in Mexico City and then moved to Tijuana.

The family had been visited by tragedy not long after settling in Tijuana. His family had made its way from Turkey to Syria after the 1915 Armenian Genocide, then on to Mexico City and eventually settling in Tijuana in 1927. Vahac’s mother, Maritza Teboyan Mardirosian, died at a young age in 1931. At that time, poverty and sadness had the family by the throat. But a neighbor, Doña Julia, showed remarkable kindness to little Vahac and his sister Shinorig. Here is this humble woman, recalls Vahac. She had eight children and a husband—why would she feed a neighbor’s children? She feels a compassion, so she opens her heart to feeding them. The love of that woman for children made me feel that I was something worthy. How am I going to repay Doña Julia? By finding a lot of Doña Julia’s and telling them, ‘Your children are headed for trouble unless you go to their school and watch them.’ So then Doña Julia becomes the model for the poor Mexican woman that slaves for her children’s future, and that was my inspiration for what became the Parent Institute. Over a 60-year professional career as a minister and later as an educational reformer, he has helped many Doña Julia’s.

The Parent Institute for Quality Education is perhaps Vahac Mardirosian’s crowning achievement in a lifetime of significant accomplishments. The Parent Institute, now thriving in California and in many other states, helps parents become partners in the education of their children. Begun in San Diego in 1987, it capped a long career of educational reform and activism on Mardirosian’s part. The turbulent struggles for educational reform that began in the Chicano communities of Los Angeles in the late 1960s transformed Mardirosian from a Baptist minister committed to serving the needs of his pastoral flock into a determined social activist and astute educational reformer.

This is his story.

It is a story of devotion to God, commitment to social justice, a belief in a common-sense approach to education and the enduring love of a woman, his wife Eunice. He was born in Syria after his parents fled the Turkish government’s systematic annihilation of a million Armenians. He came to the Americas as an infant with his parents, surviving a long and dangerous sea voyage. He grew up in post-revolutionary Mexico and was touched by the ideals of that movement. As a teenager in Tijuana, he came under the tutelage of a Baptist minister who opened up a new world of faith and service to him. Mardirosian eventually attended a seminary in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s and began his work as a pastor in the American Midwest.

His work as a Baptist minister took him and his family to Los Angeles in the 1950s where he became a stalwart member of the broader Baptist family. He was satisfied to be the best Baptist minister he could be, until something unexpected happened. In 1968 Mexican American high school students (they had started calling themselves Chicanos) staged massive strikes, walking out of class. The student strikes became known as the walkouts or blowouts. The students were demanding a decent education. Mardirosian joined their cause, eventually becoming a prominent and successful educational reformer. Our children have to be treated with dignity by the school system, he said at the time. The work he did in Los Angeles helped build the pedagogical foundation for the Parent Institute for Quality Education, which he established in the 1980s in San Diego. It is what I’m proudest of, he says. This from a man who has a great many things to be proud of.

PROLOGUE

Now in his late 80s and long since retired, Baptist minister-turned-educational reformer Vahac Mardirosian dotes on his large family of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and much of his time is taken up with family dinners and birthday and holiday celebrations. But he is not content to just relax and take it easy. He’s occasionally asked to speak before groups of educators and parents. It is something he still enjoys doing. It’s like a Hall of Fame baseball player being called out of retirement to pitch one last game, each time he speaks to a group. Each one just might be the last one.

On October 11, 2011 Vahac Mardirosian drove from his home in Carlsbad, California over the hills and down into a valley to the town of Escondido. (The name means hidden in Spanish, and the little town off the beaten path merits the name.) He was on his way to Mission Middle School. In the car on the way to the school he talked excitedly about the evening ahead. You could sense the anticipation in him. He had been invited to speak to a group of parents about how they can help their children do better in school.

When he pulled into the parking lot, Mardirosian practically jumped out of the car, eager to make his way to the little auditorium where he would make his presentation. As the crowd filed in, he spoke with the school principal at the back of the auditorium and enthusiastically shook hands with the many parents he was introduced to. The little auditorium is what is often referred to as a multi-purpose room these days. It doubles as a cafeteria during lunch periods. It was a Spartan but efficiently appointed room.

The event was scheduled to begin at seven o’clock. He was early. About 100 parents took their seats. The school is smack in the middle of a working class neighborhood. Most of the parents were Mexican or Mexican American. The principal explained to me later that many of the students in his school are children of recent immigrants. Mardirosian was seated in the front row with the look on his face of a pitcher who has already warmed up sufficiently and is eager to run to the mound and wind up for his first pitch of the game. After being introduced he jumps to the front of the room and grabs the microphone.

Life is a gift, he tells the parents right away. He smiles broadly as he scans the audience quite deliberately, like a motion picture camera panning all the way from left to right. He writes two words on the big whiteboard that’s been provided: Disciplina and Comunicación. Those two words would be the foundation of his talk for the next 45 minutes…

CHAPTER ONE

Turning point: The 1968 East

Los Angeles high school walkouts

It began with a phone call. It was a phone call that would eventually transform Vahac Mardirosian’s life. And it would begin a chain of events that would ultimately affect the lives of hundreds, then thousands, of students and parents in East Los Angeles and beyond.

The phone call came on March 4, 1968, an uncharacteristically cloudy day in usually sun-drenched Los Angeles. Mardirosian, a Baptist preacher by training who had grown up as an Armenian-Mexican in the border city of Tijuana, was having breakfast with fellow ministers in East Los Angeles. It was a Monday, a day off for ministers. A group of them regularly gathered for breakfast and conversation at La Placita Methodist Center on Indiana Street in East Los Angeles.

It began as a normal, quiet affair like many gatherings that had been held there before. Then someone in the kitchen answered the phone and expressed alarm. I think it was one of the wives of the ministers, recalls Mardirosian more than forty years later. She rushed into the dining area where the ministers were and blurted out what she had been told on the phone. Someone from Garfield High School, a school smack in the middle of blue-collar Mexican American East Los Angeles, had phoned the center.

The person who telephoned said, ‘The police are beating up the students at Garfield,’ recalls Mardirosian. And I immediately said to the other ministers, we should go down there right now and see if we can help.

Mardirosian and a few other ministers, including Baptist minister Horacio Quiñones, hopped into a car and rushed to Garfield High. It was just a few blocks away and they were there in minutes. Some five-hundred or more students had staged a protest, defiantly walking out of school. It was a startling development. By all accounts the students were peaceful as they marched in protest, some carrying picket signs. But Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies and officers of the Los Angeles Police Department swarmed the area outside the school. Several witnesses described acts of unnecessary shoving and even clubbing of students on the sidewalk.

Harry Gamboa, Jr. was a student at Garfield at the time. Years later Gamboa became an artist and writer of some renown. He was a junior at Garfield on that day in 1968. He recalls, Police were beating students just a few feet from where I was, I’ll never forget it. A few students were being handcuffed and shoved into police cars. Some of the police were just plain brutal, recalls Gamboa.

Up until that day Mardirosian had not been anything like a community activist. He was simply a Baptist minister tending to his flock and working as an administrator for the Baptist bureaucracy. But he was deeply affected by what he encountered on that pivotal day. He and other ministers went to the principal’s office to find out what was going on and to see what they could do to help the students. They met nothing but resistance and a cold shoulder from the principal. It turned out that he was a retired army colonel who ran his school like a military encampment.

In speaking to Mardirosian and the other ministers who gathered in his office, the principal shrugged off any suggestion that the students might be justified in staging the protest. The students were trying to call attention to the fact that Garfield and other eastside schools were rundown and run by teachers who didn’t seem to care about their students, most of whom were Mexican American.

That day was part of what became known as the East L.A. Walkouts or blowouts as they were later called. They were massive students strikes over several days during which high school students walked out of school en masse. As it happened, that day at Garfield was a day that catapulted Mardirosian to the role of a forceful, charismatic leader in the Mexican American community.

It was the catalyst for what would be his life’s work as an innovative, resourceful educational reformer. He would play an important role in bringing about positive social change in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Moreover, that experience many years hence would prepare him to develop an innovative, widely applied program for parent empowerment known as the Parent Institute for Quality Education. But on that day, Mardirosian was focused on the immediate well-being of the students who were being hassled by the police.

In 1968 a momentous series of events began with student strikes at Garfield High School and three other public high schools on Los Angeles’ eastside. The walkouts would transform Chicano communities and help usher in a movement of dynamic political activism. Students, at great risk of being disciplined with suspension and other consequences, walked out of class and shut down the schools to demonstrate their desire for a better education. They were taking a stand and, in essence, demanding dignity from a system that had traditionally relegated them to a kind of second-class citizenship.

All of those schools—James A. Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln High—were schools whose students were predominantly Mexican American. They were beginning to call themselves Chicanos. The schools—and the students who attended them—were clearly getting the short end of the stick when it came to quality education. The physical plants were rundown and clearly inferior to schools on Los Angeles’s predominantly Anglo westside. Student achievement at eastside schools was demonstrably low.

The high school dropout rate was stratospheric. More than half the students never graduated. And it wasn’t because Mexican American students were somehow universally dumb or lazy. Students were eager to learn and willing to work hard, but the teachers, counselors and administrators were not devoted to the students and their potential success, as events would demonstrate. Mexican American, or Chicano, students had long suffered from neglect on the part of teachers and administrators. Compounding all of this was the reality of both subtle and overt racism on the part of some teachers who dealt directly with the students.

Expectations were low and academic results matched those low expectations. And there was a general attitude of ignorance and insensitivity when it came to the culture, history and perspective of Mexican American students. In 1968 students knew things were bad and they knew they deserved better. With the support of an activist Mexican American teacher at Lincoln High School named Sal Castro the students tried to do something about it. Vahac Mardirosian did not organize the student walkouts. In fact, he was taken aback by them, as was the public at large in Los Angeles. But the walkouts became a call to action for the once quiet, plodding Baptist minister. He was transformed into an influential community leader by the walkouts and their immediate aftermath.

Paula Crisostomo: A representative student of the times

When they occurred, the walkouts shocked the city of Los Angeles and the ripple effects stunned and surprised the rest of the country. The first day of the walkouts was followed by successive days of student strikes and demonstrations by Chicano students during that turbulent week of March 1968. Paula Crisostomo, now an administrator at Occidental College in Los Angeles, was a student at Lincoln High School during those heady days. She was among the students who helped organize the student protests.

She was among the students who metaphorically fired the starting pistol, urging the rest of the three-thousand students at Lincoln to slam their books shut and march out of the classroom, down the hall and into the streets.

I distinctly remember being very nervous about standing up, looking around and walking through the door and hoping people were walking behind me, she recalls. Luckily, they were. She remembers being almost jittery from the uncertainty of what would happen. She, like other students feared the possibility of being expelled for such civil disobedience. And I remember being in the hallway and then hearing some of our college student partners saying, ‘Walk out’—and that’s what gave me more strength and encouragement and confidence.

Sitting in her office at Occidental College in Los Angeles more than forty years later, she says, I don’t remember what teacher I had that morning, but I remember it crossing my mind that the teacher could call me back, and then what would I do. What would I do? If I were called on it, what would I do?

It took courage for Crisostomo and the other students to walk out of school, in defiance of warnings from teachers and the principal. There was the threat of being expelled. Some Chicano students had already been accepted to college and were expecting to attend in the fall. Most such students would be the first in their families to attend college. A lot was at risk.

Would this jeopardize that? Would students forfeit that chance to go to college? It was a very real concern. Yet, many students felt compelled to voice their complaints about the school system and the insensitive manner in which they were often treated by teachers. Many students believed teachers didn’t seem to care about genuinely educating students. There were, of course, teachers who cared about students, but the perception was that the vast majority of teachers had an almost colonial attitude toward Mexican American students. There was plenty of evidence that students on the eastside, for the most part, were receiving an inferior education.

It was these types of concerns that Vahac Mardirosian would soon learn a great deal about. He would set about, with other like-minded activists, to improve the educational system for Mexican American kids.

Unlike most of the students at Lincoln and the other schools, Crisostomo had the support of her mother. Many parents were simply unaware of what the organizers were planning. Rumors about the possibility of a mass student strike had been rumbling through eastside communities. Many parents were opposed to the idea of their kids engaging in anything resembling civil disobedience. They figured the schools knew best and that students should just do what they were told. Crisostomo’s parents were among the