Leadership Profiles
Jaasiel Quero LLaven (Center Coordinator)
When Jaasiel assumed the role of Learning Center Coordinator in 2007, he brought with him experience in educational counseling, a university diploma in accounting and a Masters Degree in Education. Along with all that, he had teaching experience that ranged all the way from the secondary level in the remote mountains to the university level in the city. He was no stranger to the Center, having worked with Gary for many years before and having been associated with the Center since its founding.
At times, Jaasiel has wondered whether his diverse educational background served a purpose, but now he knows it does. He finds himself drawing daily on the business skills, organizational skills and administrative know-how his education has given him. He was, for instance, principally responsible for writing the successful grant application to the Ministry of Social Development that enabled the Center to fund its satellite operation in Las Lomas de San Jacinto.
Of special concern to Jaasiel is the steady improvement of the Center’s services, in particular making the tutoring it provides as focused and useful as possible. That priority goes hand in hand with his personal commitment to bring more students into the program. “The two hardest populations for us to reach are girl students and indigenous students coming into the city from distant villages. Neither group is used to having free services targeted for them. The challenge is to reach out to them and bring them in.”
Jaasiel recently won a three-year appointment as the Academic Coordinator of the Mathematics Department at the State teacher’s college located in a suburb of the city. It’s a new, prestigious and demanding responsibility, but one Jaasiel confidently balances with his role at the Center. He sees it as yet another way to hone the skills he needs in coordinating the Center’s continuing growth.
Gary Titus, founder, The Oaxaca Learning Center
Many people take much of a lifetime to discover where their passions and abilities converge. For Gary Titus, it was self-evident from early adolescence. Organizing people into effective groups pursuing socially constructive purposes.
He was born in Long Beach, California, in 1934. His parents, originally farming people from Iowa, had moved to Long Beach in 1930 looking for work. Nothing in the family history foreshadowed the birth of a child with a gift for social organization, but by the time Gary was 14, he was hard at it, organizing youth groups at school, the YMCA, wherever.
“It came naturally and I loved it,” Gary remembers. “I’d organize anything from camping outings to fire drills and church groups.
His energy and determined focus attracted attention. A professor at the University of Redlands saw Gary at work and became for him the kind of mentor that Gary would later become for others. He encouraged Gary to attend the university and promised to backstop him with any extra help he might need on his way through to a degree. Four years later, Gary had his BA.
It wasn’t a welcoming world. There was military engagement in Korea and a compulsory draft. The violence of combat, however, ran contrary to Gary’s convictions about human conduct, and he opted for the status of conscientious objector. He was assigned to two years of alternate service with Goodwill Industries, working for a dollar an hour. He was happy there. Organizing.
Six years later, Gary had a Masters Degree in Social Work from the University of California at Berkley. He spent the next four years organizing in the Bay Area, working with (among others) The War on Poverty, which brought him, for the first time, into close daily contact with Latin American immigrants. His first visit to Mexico came on a vacation in 1967, indulging his love for body surfing in Puerto Escondido. He returned to Puerto many times after that, stopping for a few days in the city of Oaxaca each visit.
All this time, he was continuing his work in the Bay Area, organizing a church-related collective, cooperative food stores, day care for working mothers, support groups for young families, and mental health services and AIDS.
In 1992, approaching the age of 57, he retired from his work in the Bay Area, came to Oaxaca supposedly for four months, and never left. For the next ten years, Gary lived in the barrio of Xochimilco. His time in Oaxaca had brought him face-to-face with the need of Mexican students for extra tutoring as they struggled to get ahead through education. In Xochimilco, he turned his front room into a study area, sheltered and mentored two live-in students, and began to talk more systematically with students.
In 2002, he found himself the beneficiary of a small inheritance from an aunt.
“That was the missing ingredient,” Gary says. “I could now look for larger quarters and organize an actual Centro de Aprendizaje, a Learning Center that could take in more young people, offer them, free, the extra tutoring they needed to get through their studies and also provide good jobs for college students.
In 2005, the Centro opened on Murguia, incorporating a Bed & Breakfast into its operation to help pay the bills. Almost two hundred students have now moved through the Center, achieving educational goals that, without the Center’s help, would most likely have remained beyond their reach.
Sonia Bautista Leon, Coordinator, Las Lomas de Jacinto
Sonia was born in a small village way up in the northern Sierra. There, as in most mountain villages, education for women was considered a waste of time. Starting at the marriageable age of 15, women were expected to start raising a family. Sonia, now 19 and single, had other ideas. Fortunately, her mother encouraged her as, for years, she made the two-and-a-half-hour, round-trip trek on foot to the nearest school.
Sonia’s transition to city life was difficult. Luckily, she found a mentor, who helped her cope with city ways and even get a university scholarship. Still, Sonia felt overwhelmed and dropped out of university life. Last September, however, she felt herself ready to drop in again. Her studies are going well now.
With help from the Centro de Aprendizaje, she learned typing and computer skills. Along the way, she found new satisfaction teaching others what she had learned. In addition to keeping up with her own studies, she has spent four hours a day at the Center’s satellite in Las Lomas de San Jacinto, a poor community up on a hill above the city, helping girls 12 to 15 learn Math and basic Computer Literacy. More recently, Sonia accepted the position of Coordinator at Las Lomas.
Sonia’s mother is especially proud of her advancement. Her father is somewhat more skeptical. “But why aren’t you married yet?” he asks.
When something needs doing at the Center, Andres does it. Whether it’s any kind of building maintenance, caring for the multitude of plants or doing the extensive shopping the Center requires, that’s his job—and one he thoroughly enjoys. What’s more, he is the Center’s cheerful and indefatigable cook, providing meals for uncertain numbers of people at unpredictable hours.
“Andres is my right hand,” says Gary, who has known and worked with him for 11 years—ever since Andres was 18.
Andres is clearly happy doing all that he does. He grew up in the city, the fifth of nine kids, and received only minimal formal education. Fifth grade was as far as he got. “I liked the streets better than the schoolroom,” he confesses with a laugh. But he’s educated himself plenty along the way, picking up the essentials here and there, and now on his way to becoming proficient in English. As for the cooking, that he learned from his mother and his wife, as well as watching how Gary’s previous cook went about it.
“Andres always has a kind word for everybody,” Gary says. “He’s always offering encouragement to students who are struggling. He’s more than my right hand,” he adds. “He’s the heart of the house.”
