 "Photo: GREG BLOBAUM/DN")
Burke High School 2004-2005 1,950 total students 71 percent white 16.4 percent black 8.7 percent Hispanic 2.4 percent Asian 1 percent American Indian 64 percent college-going rate to four-year schools 22 percent college-going rate to two-year schools
Pictures of smiling sisters on the beach, handwritten notecards and award ribbons decorate the space over her desk. Pinned neatly to brown corkboard, the mementos bring home a little closer for Cindy Barrera.
When she looks at them, she doesn't think about why she sometimes feels so different from the girls living in her residence hall or the students passing her on campus.
Each day, she climbs the lecture hall steps, scanning hundreds of faces.
The girl shadowed by a low-slung baseball cap? Nope. Not the guy shielded with an open newspaper either.
She's not really sure what she's looking for. But she knew she lost it after coming to Nebraska nearly eight years ago.
``I'm usually always the only Hispanic student in my classes,'' said Cindy, a freshman pre-physical therapy major.
``It's something I expect, so I see it as a fact and move on.''
full ride
More than a year ago, she peeled apart the acceptance letter from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, accompanied by an NU Paths scholarship, and a sharp pain seared through her stomach.
The scholarship - full-tuition with automatic admission to the University of Nebraska Medical Center - was too much money to pass up.
``I knew my parents were going to make me come here,'' she said, ``and I knew I was going to hate it.''
When she told her parents the news, they jumped up and down in the small kitchen of their Omaha home. They hugged each other then encircled their arms around their crying daughter.
``¿No es usted feliz, Cindy?''
``Aren't you happy, Cindy?'' her mother asked, tears spilling over her own brown eyes.
``No, Mama.''
Cindy never visited UNL's campus before applying. She hadn't made any college visits.
She traveled to Lincoln once during high school, a short field trip to the Capitol building. Out the school bus windows, her wide brown eyes searched for the rest of the city that paled in size to home.
She looked for the Hispanic markets and neighborhoods that had made her family feel more at home after moving to Omaha when she was 12. For the entire day, the only Hispanics she saw were her classmates.
Cindy wanted to go to Brigham Young University in Utah. Her family is Mormon and she thought she could relate more with the university's conservative student body.
But all she knew of BYU was what she read on the school's Web site. She never requested for the school to mail her any information and never actually applied there.
She also never told her parents. No way would they let her travel 900 miles for school. They didn't even allow her to stay overnight at a friend's house.
The only reason she applied to UNL was because her high school's guidance office had the applications on hand.
She knew her parents, both without college degrees, expected her to do what they never had the time or money to accomplish. Their dreams for their daughter, though, had limitations.
``Antes de que usted haga cualquier cosa consiga su grado.''
``Before you do anything, get your degree,'' her father once told her.
But telling her to work on homework, helping her with challenging math problems or quieting his children so his oldest daughter could study - he never did that much.
Yet, Cindy's high school grade point average never fell below 3.8. She graduated among the top students in a class of 1,950 at Burke High School.
``I wish I could have had a million students like Cindy,'' said her guidance counselor, Wayne Fowler. ``She never asked for help but always had everything under control.''
While many of her friends fell behind on homework and stayed out late each night, Cindy was home by 11 p.m. on weekends. She pleaded with her father for a later curfew, but he just waved his calloused hands. She would understand when she was older.
The day she mailed her intent letter to UNL, Cindy retreated to her room in a torrent of sobs and stomping feet. That evening, her mother crept in to stroke her daughter's dark hair - the gentle way she quieted Cindy to sleep on past nights in loud, overheated and cramped apartments.
``Deseo que haba ido a la escuela.''
``I wish I had gone to school,'' her mother whispered in her ear.
And as Cindy watched her father lumber out the door the next morning, off to spend another long day driving a school bus, she knew life would have been better if her parents had gone to college.
``They had to work so hard to support me and my sisters,'' Cindy said. ``I don't want it to have to be so hard for me.''
American dreams
Jobless and penniless, her parents came to California from Guatemala looking for a new life. Her mother, then 20, was newly married and pregnant with Cindy.
Her 22-year-old father was tired of losing jobs, knowing he wouldn't be able to provide for his future child.
After moving in with family in Lakewood, Calif., just southeast of Los Angeles, her father began working odd jobs, mostly in security or construction.
He eventually moved his growing family into their own small rental apartment. Cindy shared one bedroom with her sister, Leslie, and her parents took the other.
During summers and school breaks, the family returned to Coatepeque, their hometown in the impoverished southwestern corner of Guatemala. The small city had lush jungle and burbling brooks, where as Lakewood had busy streets and tiny yards.
Cindy walked to the sandy beaches and went horseback riding with sisters and cousins. In a small guestroom, the young girls giggled for hours listening to their parents laughing outside on those warm evenings.
Now, she only sees those beaches when she peers at the photos posted above her computer screen. Girls' laughter floats under her bedroom door in Harper Residence Hall. The pictures arranged near her desk sometimes hide the loneliness.
Her family moved to Nebraska in December 1998, and long, expensive plane rides to Coatepeque meant trips became less frequent.
Her parents moved Cindy, then 12, and her two sisters into a four-bedroom home in South Omaha. Her neighborhood - predominately Hispanic - smelled of simmering chili spices, and Cindy heard Spanish ballads drifting in through her bedroom window many nights.
Just before she started high school, they moved again, this time farther west. Their house was larger, and the distance between her and her neighbors even farther.
Children didn't play in the streets, and her mother - who knew little English - began speaking less outside their home.
At Burke High School, Cindy was one of a few Hispanics in most of her classes. And, like her mother, she masked her differences in her silence.
Eventually, with little help from her teachers or parents, she became one of her class's top students.
On the urging of teachers, she walked into the guidance office during her senior year. She told counselor Fowler she wanted to go to college, so they began filling out applications to in-state schools.
They started with community colleges - it was all Cindy's parents could afford - and, in the meantime, searched for scholarships and financial aid.
Thick piles of application materials sat for weeks in her room at home. She didn't talk about her progress on wading through Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms, scholarship essays and r©sum©s, and her parents didn't question her.
At school, when Fowler asked if she was having trouble getting through the materials or needed help, she would shake her head and find the quickest escape out of his office.
Eventually, though, she managed to mail all the applications by their deadlines. When she came home each day, she checked the mailbox for replies, sifting through the family's bills for a university's return address.
Fowler noticed Cindy seemed more on edge in the last months of her senior year. Her white friends, many having parents' help to send in their college applications early, were already hearing back from their top choices.But when the acceptance letter from UNL arrived, sandwiched between one of her mother's catalogues and some junk mail, her eventual decision to attend offered little relief.
``I didn't want to go to UNL,'' Cindy said, ``but my parents and guidance counselor did.''
Many of Cindy's Hispanic classmates never made it to Fowler's office.
One friend got pregnant and married, others figured they couldn't afford college and some planned to work before attending school.
Cindy felt like she was abandoning her childhood playmates by leaving home in the fall. But she didn't want to get married right away. She wanted to live in a big house and drive a big car someday.
After graduation, she attended UNL's Summer Institute for Promising Scholars (SIPS). The program, designed for minorities, allows incoming freshmen to attend classes, work and live on-campus and build relationships with other students.
That summer, Cameya Ramirez met Cindy as the girl with the soft voice who rarely looked anyone in the eyes.
But within the program's six weeks, Ramirez, a program coordinator for the Office of Academic Support and Intercultural Services (OASIS), also saw a girl a lot like herself a few years ago.
``She had so much potential,'' Ramirez said, ``but I could tell she really missed home. She felt like she was leaving her family by coming to Lincoln.''
When fall classes began, Cindy's summer schedule - structured around mandatory study times - began falling apart.
Like at home, no one told her to work on homework or wake up for class. In high school, listening to teachers' presentations and a few hours of cramming usually earned her an ``A.''
Now, she sometimes leaves class after a test with stomach pains, feeling unprepared despite days of studying.
``It's a lot harder than I thought,'' she said.
She joined several Hispanic student organizations - the Mexican American Student Association and the Students of Color Career Advisory Committee - but her meeting attendance sometimes wavered as schoolwork piled up. Most of her friends at UNL are white, and she sometimes feels they don't understand why she misses home so much.
As part of the SIPS program, Cindy learned where to find on-campus academic support services to help with her first-year challenges. Ramirez also checked up on her occasionally during the fall, making sure she was following a study regimen.
But just because Cindy knew OASIS was located in the Culture Center or the phone number for her adviser's office didn't mean she would reach out for these resources.
``The most important thing is to at least let students know where they can find help,'' Ramirez said. ``It's then up to them to get help, but if you don't have anyone that tells you where to go, then you will feel lost.''
finding home away from home
Cindy knows why she wants to succeed. She has her mother's overtime hours, her father's work-related backaches and her family's old, cramped apartments.
She goes back to Omaha most weekends. She likes UNL - it's more diverse than what she saw from the school bus window all those years ago - but she still doesn't feel home yet.
The smiling girls from the photos in her room, her two younger sisters, grill her about college life the minute she walks in the door. One wants to be a nurse, the other changes her mind every minute.
And like her parents showed her, in their own silent way, she tells them they won't be alone. They will have their family celebrating each triumph.
``I just knew I had to go to college. I knew I could do better for myself,'' Cindy said. ``A lot of people don't seem to stop and think college isn't just for white students.''
