Outdoors San Salvador Church in Colton, a guitar trio performed the bolero traditional “Sin Ti” (“With out You”), accented by horns and bells from passing trains.
As mourners entered, they wrote tributes to the person they referred to as “Dr. Tom” and caught them in a field, which rapidly overflowed.
Tom Rivera grew up two blocks away in a barrio on the south facet of the railroad tracks that bisect the town.
On a sweltering Friday afternoon final month, he was remembered within the low-slung church topped with 4 white crosses and Aztec geometric motifs.
Beside Rivera’s coffin, the place he lay in a UCLA gown and sash, was a portray of him holding a lily and a photograph of him within the wheelchair he had used for 4 a long time.
They have been attorneys, lecturers, docs, politicians. They have been there to recollect their mentor, who died of most cancers at 82. They have been additionally there to rejoice themselves.
In any case, lots of the a whole bunch of people that sat in San Salvador’s worn-out chairs have been his life’s work. That they had as soon as been Latino youngsters who wanted a dose of self-confidence and optimism to succeed.
Judith Segura-Mora, Future Leaders class of 1985, approached the lectern.
**
The son of an orange picker, Rivera grew up in a wood home constructed from the planks of outdated boxcars.
Within the Colton of his childhood, the Southern Pacific and citrus business have been kings but compelled their Mexican workforces to stay as second-class residents. College students obtained subpar training in segregated colleges. Mexicans couldn’t step within the white a part of city after sundown.
The inequities even performed out within the spiritual sphere. When Catholic leaders constructed a brand new church, they positioned the towering Immaculate Conception in north Colton, regardless that San Salvador’s parish group dated from the Nineties.
“That have molded him,” stated his daughter, Evelyn Rivera Molina. “He felt it was simply one thing incorrect with that. It created a bit of hearth inside him to make it proper.”
He did issues no Mexican child from South Colton was ever presupposed to do. He went to Colombia within the early Sixties as a Peace Corps volunteer. He earned a doctorate in training from UCLA, working afterward as a sixth-grade instructor, a group faculty counselor and a college administrator — no matter it took to raised the prospects of younger Latinos within the Inland Empire.
Along with his spouse, Lily, Rivera raised cash for school scholarships. In 1978, he received a seat on the Colton college board. In his spare time, the quick however robust Rivera grew to become a champion handball participant.
Then sooner or later in the summertime of 1981, he awakened unable to maneuver his legs and arms.
Guillain-Barré syndrome, docs stated — an autoimmune illness with no identified treatment.
Most sufferers get well sufficient to stroll once more, however Rivera, a father of three younger youngsters, was left a paraplegic.
“When is that this going to be over with?” the San Bernardino Solar quoted him as saying in 1982, a few months after he returned dwelling from a yearlong hospital keep.
However he finally regrouped — and redoubled his efforts to assist younger Latinos.
“He was impossibly optimistic,” Lily, his spouse of 56 years, stated just lately. “He couldn’t see clouds. He couldn’t see storms. Any drawback that got here up, for many of us, we’d say, ‘No, we are able to’t try this.’ He’d say, ‘Let’s discover out.’”
Rivera went again to his job at Cal State San Bernardino. In 1985, he and different educators created Inland Empire Future Leaders. Each summer season, a whole bunch of Latino eighth- and ninth-graders from Riverside and San Bernardino counties gathered for a weeklong camp within the piney woods of .
Rivera and different adults let the kids be teenagers — singalongs, outside actions, foolish icebreakers — whereas difficult them to not turn into a statistic. Go to varsity. Achieve life. Come again dwelling. Give again.
I first met Rivera greater than a decade in the past, when he invited me to discuss my job at a Future Leaders camp. I had by no means heard of him or his group, so I wasn’t certain what to anticipate as I made the winding trek from Orange County to the heights of the San Jacinto Mountains.
The wheelchair was the very first thing I seen, however I rapidly forgot about it as soon as I noticed his smile.
It was a broad, shiny grin that by no means dimmed, one which reworked each room he entered and fueled his often humorous, all the time inspiring speeches to youngsters and adults alike.
It’s what got here into my thoughts each time Rivera despatched an e mail to congratulate me at varied factors in my profession — a brand new e-book right here, a promotion there. I used to be certainly one of many native Latinos whose accomplishments he tracked and marked, exhibiting that he seen, and he cared.
In my a few years protecting Latinos in Southern California, I’ve by no means met somebody so quietly influential as Dr. Tom. He was the epitome of the outdated journalism adage “Present, don’t inform.” Each time I’d meet one other Latino mover and shaker from the Inland Empire, they’d inevitably be a Future Chief alum, and I’d ask how Dr. Tom was doing.
Planning for the following Future Leaders, they’d all the time say — and was I going to talk this 12 months?
**
“Even in dying, Dr. Tom Rivera did what he did greatest in life — introduced individuals collectively,” Segura-Mora advised the gang in San Salvador Church, about half of whom have been Future Leaders alums.
Though Rivera’s passing was unhappy, he wouldn’t have wished anybody to really feel dangerous this night, she stated. “He’d need us to ensure to take that vitamin S” — a smile.
And with that, the newest Future Leaders camp was underway.
“His quixotic optimism unifies us all,” stated Riverside County Deputy Dist. Atty. Carlos Monagas, class of ’85 and co-emcee of the memorial together with Segura-Mora. Within the crowd was Monagas’ niece, a graduate of final 12 months’s Future Leaders digital summit.
Rudy Monterrosa (1988), a lawyer in South Bend, Ind., and a former member of the varsity board there, led a unity clap — the normal activist applause that begins gradual and ends in a thunderous crescendo.
R.C. Heredia (1992), present Future Leaders board chair, Colton native and psychology professor at East Los Angeles School, thanked Rivera for educating him that “giving again to your group is among the best items you could possibly provide.”
There have been inside-baseball camp references to “cariño grams” and “familia” that drew realizing nods.
When one other speaker urged everybody to face up and interact in a favourite Rivera train — level your thumbs at your self and shout, “ I'm! Anyone!” — nobody rolled their eyes on the earnestness. That they had carried out it as youngsters, they usually have been very happy to do it once more as adults.
A recording of Dr. Tom performed over one slide present.
“I really feel that an individual wants to be ok with themselves,” he stated. “They should really feel that individuals will take heed to them. They should really feel that individuals will assist them. And I feel that’s the very first thing that individuals have to turn into empowered.”
In certainly one of Rivera’s most seen triumphs, two of the Inland Empire’s congressional districts are represented by Future Leaders alums — Pete Aguilar (1993), a fourth-generation resident of the realm, and Raul Ruiz (1989), the son of immigrant farmworkers and a graduate of Harvard Medical College.
The congressmen flew again dwelling from D.C. to attend the memorial, then received caught in Friday night time visitors. They despatched recorded messages to play to the gang — Aguilar lastly confirmed up close to the top.
Others spoke of Rivera’s affect exterior Future Leaders.
Dr. William Keh, board director for the Tzu Chi Medical Basis, advised the gang how the Buddhist group sought out Rivera within the early Nineties to assist set up free well being companies in San Bernardino as a result of they revered his sunny, do-the-hard-work strategy.
California Meeting Majority Chief Eloise Gomez Reyes (D-Grand Terrace) proudly joked that Rivera “all the time claimed” their hometown of Colton wherever he went.
Gomez Reyes, an lawyer, recalled that she requested Rivera to speak to certainly one of her shoppers, a 16-year-old named George who grew to become a quadriplegic after being shot.
Rivera was blunt with George about how society would view him — they’d simply discover the wheelchair.
“However in case you smile,” she recalled Rivera saying, “the very first thing they’re going to note is your smile.”
20 years after that assembly, “George nonetheless remembers what Tom advised him. And he smiles.”
The grand finale was a slide present Rivera created in anticipation of when his physique would fail.
With Whitney Houston’s “One Second in Time” as a soundtrack, flashes of a life well-lived handed by. Images of a contented childhood. School commencement portraits. Trip snapshots along with his household. The time he met President Clinton. Scenes from the hospital keep that modified all the pieces, and but nothing. Picture after picture of Future Leaders camps by means of the a long time.
Folks laughed. Folks sighed. Folks wept. After it ended, they stayed round and caught up.
Rivera can be buried the next day. One other reunion would occur.
Then, they might disperse throughout the area and the nation, again to their jobs educating, legislating, therapeutic, advocating — leaders, all.
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