Author: silviag@uoregon.edu

PROFILE: JAIME MALDONADO
A black van sits outside the EMU, patiently waiting for people to arrive so that Jaime Maldonado can drive them to their destination: the GANAS program’s graduation night. Maldonado is quiet, but a bit restless. Many people had accepted his invitation to the middle schooler’s graduation, but only three had shown up. If he didn’t leave soon, he would be late. He waits five minutes longer than he had planned, but eventually drives off.
For the past school year, Maldonado has given up his afternoon’s on Mondays and Wednesdays to drive himself and other volunteers to Kelly Middle School to participate in a mentoring and tutoring program called GANAS. The program was founded in 1996, and continues on today with the help of with MEChA de UO (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). Maldonado is the student coordinator of the GANAS program, a position he attributes to his growth as a leader for people of color and the Latino community.
The GANAS program, helps the middle school students become confident in their abilities to break the barriers towards higher education that Latino’s encounter. Maldonado confesses that growing up, he didn’t think he would be able to attend a college and receive higher education. A native of Tigard, Ore., Maldonado was an only child for a large part of his life, and was raised by a single mom. His mother worked in the Tigard-Tualitin school district as a teacher for elementary, middle and high schools.
“Having that influence in my life, my mom and grandma as teachers, influenced me to give back to the community, give back to my people… give back to the Eugene community, although I wasn’t raised here. I can always do something to on my part to help out,” he says about why he has chosen to participate in the GANAS program.
During his middle school years, Maldonado participated in an afterschool program similar to the one he now volunteers his time to. Although the program from his middle school, T.O.G.A (Tigard Organized Great Activities), didn’t have opportunities for him to grow in positions of leadership or get involved in the community, his mother encouraged him to be a positive role model for his peers. The T.O.G.A. program was instead a way to keep students that were deemed “at risk” off the streets and have a safe space for them to simply finish homework and exercise in the gym. The majority of the programs’ members were of Latino descent. Maldonado reflects about his time in the program and wishes that there would have been a component to the program that would have allowed the students to give back to the small but growing Latino community that was present in Tigard during Maldonado’s youth.
The graduation is held in Kelly Middle School’s cafeteria, and while special decorations and lights have been put up, there is no denying that it is just a small, middle school cafeteria. The area is decently filled with the students and their families, and there is a potluck with enough food to easily feed twice as many people.
Maldonado is a large man, taller than even most of the rest of the parents, and his dominating presence in the room sets off a chorus of the excited students announcing that he has arrived. The skin around his deep set eyes with drooping eyelids are a peculiarly a darker color than the rest of his skin, which give the appearance of him always being tired and sleepy, but they light up and crinkle as he smiles back to the students.
The night goes on smoothly. The students receive their certificates of completion, makes a small speech and even participates in a dance game that the middle school students put on. Throughout the night Maldonado is happy and always smiling, proud of the students that he has spent the past year getting to know and mentoring. He is the last to leave for the night, staying late to help clean up the festivities. He always gives 100 percent of his effort to make sure things go right, a trait that is admired by his friends as well.
Leah Barrera, a friend of Jaime and former coordinator, is impressed with the amount that Maldonado was able to accomplish during his time as coordinator. “I think he did well, especially since he’s taken on the role himself…When I was coordinator I had a co-coordinator with me, so I admire that he’s taken on the responsibilities himself.”
Maldonado considers himself lucky: he is a college educated Latino male, raised in town without Latino role models and with a single mother. Statistically he recognizes that the odds were against him, but it never hindered his drive towards becoming a university graduate. He studied journalism with a focus on advertising, but following in the footsteps of his mother and becoming a teacher is not out of the picture for Maldonado. The past year of mentoring the GANAS students has also inspired in him further to possibly seek a future in education or other positions which would enable to interact with the Latino community.
His friends also see a future in education for Maldonado. Veronica Alvarado, who met Maldonado at the beginning of her sophomore year sees changes in Maldonado that came as a result of his involvement with MEChA and the GANAS program. When she first met Maldonado, she describes him as a tough looking kind of character, and was intimidated by him, because he was a large figure who talked little. Later she learned that it came from his shyness. “I feel like he has gotten more outgoing. I think that he will keep going to GANAS because the kids love him there and I know he enjoys it,” she says, “I see him being a middle school principal or a super involved teacher. I also see him expanding after school program for Hispanic middle school students.”
Being involved in the Latino community and making an impact is also an important aspect of Maldonado’s future. Last year he and another MEChA student put together a workshop on the importance of eliminating stereotypes, something that as a Latino student, Maldonado has had to face before. However, growing up, Maldonado remembers few insignificant moments when he was racially profiled or discriminated against. It wasn’t until he began attending college that the prevalence of stereotypes became a part of his life.
Since those experiences, Maldonado hopes to eliminate negative sterotypes, and does so by educating the younger portion of his community, and his younger sisters, one of which is entering middle school. His time this past year with the GANAS students has opened his eyes to the amount of change he can inspire to the younger generation and hopes to pass it on within his own family. It is the type of change in the Latino community that he hopes to always inspire

My eyes quickly roam the large lecture hall and spot her in a second. She is easily recognizable as her large, bright orange backpack shines like a beacon guiding me towards her. The backpack is so stuffed she has difficulty putting it down between the cramped seats. I wonder sometimes how she can even manage the weight of her pack, as it is monstrous compared to her petite stature. She is short, but strong. Today she wears a polka-dotted blue skirt with a muted burgundy tee. She is the type of girl who ever wears pants, because “they’re annoying” and will wear skirts in the middle of winter paired with thick, cozy sweaters. At her old job, the dress code forbid dresses and skirts, so she went out to buy her first pair of jeans in years. They were a light wash, cuffed, loose pair of ‘boyfriend’ jeans, but that’s just a trendy word to disguise what they really looked like – mom jeans. When she quit her job, the pants were banished to the corner of her closet and haven’t been seen since.

We settle into the seats we have claimed as our own, and have a few minutes to chat before class begins. She shows me the bracelet she bought at a flea market, her voice excited and eyes lit up, eager to show me her new treasure. It’s a bracelet made of little ceramic painted skulls, with a stretchy band instead of a clasp so she can roll the bracelet on her arm. It’s identical to one she had lost. While I try the bracelet on, she tries to push aside the hair in her eyes. She has thick, curly, soft black hair. She always has her bangs pulled away from her face with several bobby pins crisscrossed in the mass of her hair.

When she talks to you, she gives you her whole attention. She positions her body so that it faces me, and I glance at her face for a second before I respond. She wears no makeup except for a smudged thin line of eyeliner that looks like she hurriedly applied before having to leave. Her brown skin is clear, something I’ve always been envious of, and her dark brown eyes stare unblinking at me until I respond. It unnerves me when she stares because her eyes are so big that they make a person a little uncomfortable. It’s like she’s trying to read my mind or something. I say the bracelet is cool and she smiles, a big smile that crinkles up her eyes and makes them look smaller.

The class, Economics, is boring the hell out of her. I can tell because she fidgets in her seat, changing her posture every couple of minutes. She checks her phone constantly, her long nails clacking against the screen as she types out messages or checks her cats in a game. When class ends, she grunts as she picks up her backpack and hobbles out the room.

With long messy blond hair, glasses and a chill demeanor, Ian Mullin is the epitome of a college student ready to engage in the unique discourse of student life. The conversation we have has many philosophical points of interest, which seem to spark genuine, enthusiastic responses from Mullin. He discusses the importance of compassion, and the word quickly becomes a keyword in the rest of our conversation. He paints for himself the portrait of a compassionate young man, though recognizes that he wasn’t always this way.

In his younger years, particularly during his final years in high school, Mullin describes himself as grumpier, less patient and more easily set off version of himself. In his senior year of high school, he was in a relationship with a girl two grade levels below him, and he that her friends would constantly annoy him. They were young, immature girls in his eyes, and he would get tired of hearing his girlfriend talk about them excessively. Mullin laughs as he retells the story of how he asked his girlfriend to his senior prom. In a romantic gesture, Mullin wrote a poem for her, but sneakily included an acronym that spelled out “I HATE YOUR FRIEND”.  He did it as a joke, letting out his frustrations about his petty feuds with the friends, and never meant to hurt anyone’s feelings.

As he entered college, however, Mullin experienced moments of maturation where he began to realize that he had begun to grow as a person, and become a more compassionate version of himself. He learned about the term sonder, which is typically described as the realization that random passerby has complex lives outside of one’s own awareness. The term has had an impact in his life and how he interacts with the people around him. He recalls feeling alone, as he was now removed from his family and friends from where he spent the majority of his life in Moscow, Idaho. The circumstances of arriving to college and starting a fresh chapter of his life made it possible for Mullin to have his moments of growing maturity, and become more caring and compassionate. “Once sonder became part of my psyche and I was able to apply it to other people and be like ‘oh, they’re probably feeling similar things’… it just makes general sense to be kind of nice,” he says.

But perhaps the biggest moment in Mullin’s development towards maturity is the accident he suffered the summer after his first year at college. A skateboarder, Mullin didn’t think too much about safety, and rarely wore a helmet. A week after school was out for the summer, Mullin and a couple of his friends went up a particularly tall hill in the attempt to skate down at full speed. One moment Mullin was cruising down, and the next he was on the pavement, his head bleeding profusely, a sickening pool of red forming on the concrete. Mullin can’t remember much of what else happened that day. At the hospital, the doctors told him he had fractured the right part of his skull, and that it was lucky he bled out instead of having internal cranial bleeding, which would have been fatal. This near death experience shook up Mullin’s mindset. He reflected on how reckless and immature he used to be and makes a conscience effort now to stray away from that. He even harasses his friends to wear helmets while they skateboard, as he doesn’t want his friends to experience the same terrible accident he endured.

Mullin believes he will continue to mature, but recognizes that he still holds on to some of his old reckless behavior. He sets out goals, but will have impulses to stray from his goals. He, like many other students, are unsure of what the future holds for them, but Mullin’s positive attitude will likely take him far.

With long messy blond hair, glasses, and a chill demeanor, Ian Mullin is the epitome of a college student ready to engage in the unique discourse of student life. The conversation we have has many philosophical points of interest, which seem to spark genuine, enthusiastic responses from Mullin. He discusses the importance of compassion, and the word quickly becomes a keyword in the rest of our conversation. He paints for himself the portrait of a compassionate young man, though recognizes that he wasn’t always this way.

In his younger years, particularly during his final years in high school, Mullin describes himself as grumpier, less patient and more easily set off. As he entered college, Mullin experienced moments of maturation where he began to realize that he had begun to grow as a person, and become a more compassionate version of himself. He learned about the term sonder, which is typically described as the realization that random passerby has complex lives outside of one’s own awareness. Though the word is not included into official dictionaries or considered a real word, the term has had an impact in his life and how he interacts with the people around him. He recalls feeling alone, as he was now removed from his family and friends from where he spent the majority of his life in Moscow, Idaho. The circumstances of arriving to college and starting a fresh chapter of his life made it possible for Mullin to have his moments of growing maturity, and become more caring and compassionate. “Once sonder became part of my psyche and I was able to apply it to other people and be like ‘oh, they’re probably feeling similar things’… it just makes general sense to be kind of nice,” he says. His maturation during his first year of college allowed him to reflect on his past attitudes with an apologetic view. Like most college students, going home to family after the first tastes of independence can confirm the depth of maturation one has made. Mullin’s visit back to Idaho during winter break of his freshman year solidified his thoughts on how he was independently growing up away from the familiarity of his old life.

Mullin has lived the majority of his life in Moscow, Idaho, but lived in several other places as a child. Mullin’s dream career would be to travel the world and write articles as a freelancer.

Tizon’s Atlantic piece, In the Land of Missing Persons weaves the story of two families and the fates of one of their lost family members who were lost years ago in the wilderness of Alaska. Rick Hill and Richard Bennett’s disappearance are a mystery to the families, because both Richards are natives to Alaska, and were familiar with the woods. To those not from Alaska, it seems like something that would happen regularly, however. Alaska is a giant state, with cities and towns few and far between, the majority of the state stereotyped into a dangerous, frosty wilderness, characterized by bears around every tree, and temperatures low enough to freeze water during the day.
The setting Tizon captures in his writing is “the middle of the middle of nowhere”, and puts emphasize on the Funny River (an ironic name considering the seriousness of the issue for the families). Tizon follows a structure in his article that introduces us to both families separately before combining their stories for the reader to make the connection. The common factor in both families is their losses, and their contact with the Alaska State Troopers, who are the ones that link the families together when they reveal the investigation’s mistakes.
The whole story reads like an episode of CSI. There are coincidences between the two missing men that add to the mysteriousness, and the Alaskan State Troopers misidentification creates tension between the Richard Bennett’s family and the troopers, as they are forced to give up their closure on the subject, and begin their sorrow again. For the Hill’s the recovery of their family members remains, creates a closure that they had waited for for 10 years, coincidentally the amount of years a physic had once told them would the period they would have to wait to find out what happened to Rick Hill. All of these coincidences create a story filled with mysteriousness and intrigue.