Hispanic law students help others up

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Sept. 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Siria Gutierrez remembers opening the door to her honors English class in her first year of junior college and thinking, “Whoa — where are all the brown people?”

Not there. And there weren’t many when she got to UNLV’s Boyd School of Law last year, either, just three of 60 in her class. That’s why she became president of La Voz, the school’s association for Hispanic law students. The group helps Hispanic and other minority Las Vegas Valley high school students graduate and go to college.

The Hispanic National Bar Association, a 38,000-member nonprofit group, just named La Voz student organization of the year, lofty recognition of its work.

But beyond the deserved praise, a look at La Voz — and Gutierrez’s own life — offers insight into today’s polarized political climate regarding immigration.

Gutierrez, 24, has been in the country illegally and legally. Her Nicaraguan father and Guatemalan mother brought her to San Jose, Calif., when she was a year old. Her father became a legal resident relatively quickly, but she and her mother were illegal immigrants for about eight years. Now they’re in the country legally.

Gutierrez’s father delivered pizzas when she was growing up and her mother, uncharacteristically, worked in construction. More surprising, her mother became a general contractor. Gutierrez grew up with the idea that she and her little brother would go on to college.

Not doing so “wasn’t even an option,” she recalls.

She graduated from UCLA in 2005, the first in her family with a U.S. college degree. Now she and others in La Voz hope to reach as many Hispanic students in the Clark County School District as they can. They have a large pool to choose from — 120,000 students, about 40 percent of the district. The group teams the high school students with Hispanic law school students — about 10 percent of the school — and Hispanic attorneys. They explain college admissions and financial aid to families. Just as important, La Voz members give students and their parents role models they wouldn’t have otherwise.

“I want them to have someone to look at like themselves ... things we didn’t have,” Gutierrez says. She has seen results: Last year the mother of a girl she met with assumed they could never pay for college. “I told them they could do it,” Gutierrez says. The girl is now a UNLV student.

What drives Gutierrez and La Voz?

“Something in the forefront of our minds is the larger context,” she says. “Of the 45 million Latinos (in the U.S.), we’re not all people having anchor babies who want to bleed the beast. Given the opportunity, we can show them — we can speak English well, we can be professionals ... even if you are the only brown person in the class.”

She also wishes the political arena would be less polarized, more nuanced, when it comes to immigration.

By the standards of one side of that debate, the 24-year-old student shouldn’t even be in the United States, much less on the road to becoming only the second person named Gutierrez licensed to practice law in Nevada. (She met the first one, Joseph, this summer.)

“There’s a lot of potential being missed,” Gutierrez says.

It remains to be seen whether either presidential candidate will see that potential and rescue the issue of immigration from the dust bin in which it’s been tossed in recent months.