Elma González grew up in a small ranching town in South Texas where youngsters typically tried to escape the local poverty by joining the military, finding some menial job or leaving altogether in the hope of a better life. González, instead, sought refuge in college, largely because of an almost sacred childhood memory: Her father, a cowboy who supplemented his meager income by picking crops in the summer, read to her regularly from two cherished books.
These weren’t the works of Cervantes or Shakespeare but tattered geography textbooks he had kept as the only mementos of his brief six months in school. In a charmless town without even a stoplight, let alone a bookstore or library, and where cows outnumbered people 20-to-1, the texts were González’s sole window to the outside world. “I wanted to see how the other half lived outside my small town,” she says. Her father’s “dreamy kind of marveling at people in distant lands” has been a theme throughout her life, she adds, inspiring her to travel to a dozen foreign countries she could only have fantasized or read about in her youth.
González, a professor of biology, has taught at UCLA for 30 years, and for nearly 10 of them she has been director of UCLA’s Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program. A federal plan funded by the National Institutes of Health, it provides financial support to 12 UCLA undergraduates annually. The idea is to help them prepare for graduate and doctoral studies — a journey that González herself undertook against enormous odds 40 years ago.
Her life’s story, from a backwater town to the distinguished halls of academia, is almost epic — a tale of courage, determination and optimism overcoming grave adversity.
Every summer, for eight years, González picked crops alongside her parents and three siblings, harvesting cucumbers, cherries, beans, tomatoes and cotton in states like Nebraska, Michigan and Wisconsin. The family slogged for three months, six days a week, up to 10 hours a day, spending the nights in cramped labor camps that every now and then filled with the cries of women being beaten by their husbands. By the end of the harvest, “we finally had enough money to buy books and clothes,” says González. Once, heavy rains in North Dakota destroyed the entire potato crop just as González and her family got there. “It was cold,” she recalls. “We used up all our savings and had to come home empty-handed.”
Despite all the hardships, González excelled at school, but even there the odds were stacked against her. In her English-speaking school, ethnic Mexican students like her were punished if they spoke Spanish. At her home in Hebbronville — the seat of Jim Hogg County, in the midst of the flat scrub and chaparral landscape of Texas’ Rio Grande Plain, 65 miles west of the Gulf Coast and 28 miles north of Mexico — no one spoke English. Because there wasn’t anyone to help her learn spelling, González had to memorize entire lists of words after carefully studying them in a textbook. Then she would put the book aside and call up the words from memory. The exercise did have the benefit of eventually making her a very good speller, and a stickler for grammar.
One alternative to her harsh life might have been to drop out of school and, with some luck, land a low-paying job at a local store. But González considered such work not only dull but a dangerous trap. “I did not want to fall into the pattern of marrying and working in a store all my life,” she says. “One’s leitmotif in life should be courage.”
Her father thought she wouldn’t make it past high school — he had himself stopped attending school at the age of 7. But González persevered, even though she knew that her parents couldn’t afford to send her to college and that there were no state scholarships or aid at that time to help her get a college education.
Oddly, even the counselors at her high school refrained from urging students to go to college, fearing that their expectations might not be met. “They believed that inspiring us to go for higher education would lead to trouble,” says González. Undeterred, she approached her high school principal, a straight-talking New Yorker. “People like you need to go to college,” he told her. “If you don’t, you become bitter old women.”
It wasn’t long before González applied to Texas Woman’s University, although she was far from sure if she would be accepted without aid or a scholarship. During the course of a long correspondence with the university, González learned about the National Defense Student Loan, a federal program for undergraduates started by the U.S. Congress at the onset of the Cold War to build the nation’s scientific talent.
González got the loan and was admitted into Texas Woman’s University, becoming the first member of her family to go to college. (Both her sisters followed and earned master’s degrees.) The loan covered 90 percent to 95 percent of the cost of her education, and González paid for the rest by watering plants in the university greenhouse, a job that paid 55 cents an hour. Her mother made all her clothes, “so that was a big help,” she recalls. “And she would send some cash for incidentals — $5 or so — every once in a while.”
Well before she earned a bachelor’s in science, with majors in biology and chemistry, González had a heart-to-heart talk with her father. She was 20 — much too grown up and educated to pick crops, she told him. Ever the supportive father, he agreed. But if she didn’t want to go to the fields anymore, he said, she must get a job. That posed a problem; the only way for González to make a living with an undergraduate science degree was to teach. And she was interested in research.
Instead, she looked into graduate schools. But that proved to be a sometimes-discouraging experience. She recalls that one professor at the University of Texas told her that she shouldn’t bother considering a Ph.D. “because I was female. Wasn’t I going to get married and have kids? What use was a Ph.D. going to be? This was the prevalent attitude — women and Mexicans weren’t expected to go anyplace.”
González entered a graduate program at Rutgers University in New Jersey, paying her way with teaching assistantships. In 1972, she received her Ph.D. in cell biology. Two years later, she joined the faculty at UCLA. She pursued biology, she says, because “I was intrigued by why things happen the way they do.” The issue is, of course, central to the circumstances and decisions that have shaped her own life. Which raises the question: Why has Elma, as her colleagues and students fondly call her, turned out to be a high-achiever, and why do so many others from backgrounds similar to hers never make it?
“People have asked me how I made it, and I have wondered about that, because I wasn’t special,” González says. “There were a lot of kids I left behind who were smarter than I was, and they didn’t make it. I’m a very ordinary person, but maybe a little bit stronger, a little more persistent. You have to be persistent.”
Much of the impetus comes from family, she says. She considers herself lucky because her parents had a solid, stable marriage, and they had aspirations for her and her siblings. “You come out of such an environment with a very good self-image, feeling confident despite poor schooling in poor neighborhoods.”
It is UCLA’s good fortune to have González on faculty. As director of MARC, she has played a critical role in providing the incentive and support for undergraduates to pursue higher studies, thereby preparing them for possible careers in academe. Her success is evident: Students who have been through the program have gone on to graduate study at such top universities as Harvard and Yale.
“There is a well-documented shortage throughout the United States of both women and underrepresented minorities in university faculties,” says Judith L. Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education, who works with González to further UCLA’s efforts to create greater diversity in its student body and faculty. “Elma embodies this mission — it is her passion.”
In recognition of her work, González recently received the Academic Senate’s 2005 Distinguished Teaching Award for mentoring undergraduates in research. She acknowledges that only high-achieving students benefit from MARC, and that a large number of students from underrepresented populations are thereby excluded. But to “bemoan those who aren’t here or those left behind [is to] focus on the negatives,” she says. “You have to celebrate those who, despite all the odds, make it in a mainstream environment like UCLA.”
One of those making it is Tara Gomez, a senior who is majoring in molecular, cellular and developmental biology. Every few weeks for the past two years, she has met with González, her MARC adviser, for guidance in research and to prepare for graduate school. Gomez wants to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom, partly because it takes less time to earn a Ph.D. there than it does in the United States. Though some people have suggested to Gomez that earning a doctorate in the U.K. is not as prestigious as receiving one from here, González has been encouraging, tailoring her counsel to fit the needs of the student. “She knows that is what I want to do and that I will be happiest in the U.K.,” Gomez says.
It’s the kind of advice a mother would give, and González is in fact known for her motherly counsel. And although she’s admirably accessible, she’s no pushover. “Those who are laggards, I kick,” she says. “Those who are good, I praise. What helps students succeed is that somebody cares and has high expectations for them.”
González knows that encouraging students to succeed is sometimes easier said than done, and that what’s important is to inspire them by identifying with them, especially if they happen to be female. “She herself faced some of the same struggles many of them face, so she understands the starting points,” says Smith. “And she sets high standards for them to achieve, the standards she set for herself.”
Sometimes, though, high standards are about less work, not more, as González advised Brianna Burden, a MARC scholar majoring in biochemistry. Burden is what González calls an “overachiever” — someone who takes on too many course units and wants to get through them in a hurry. “I told her it’s not how much you do that counts, but how much time you invest in a task and how well you do it,” says González. Burden took the advice and is much happier now with her course load and laboratory work.
González’s academic and professional success has not been without some personal cost. It has, at times, been a contentious issue within her family, particularly with her brother, who, unlike González’s sisters, chose not to pursue a college education. And her father, even though he has been supportive, had at times been mystified by her choices, particularly when she’s spent time during vacations doing research or writing papers. Academic life, she told him, “is a little like owning your own business — if you’re not there to move it forward, it won’t move.”
The issue of marriage has also dogged González. “I never had a compelling offer,” she says. “It’s tough. You have a career, you spend a lot of time on it and you become very independent.” There was certainly pressure for her to wed — her mother generally started conversations on the phone by remarking on how many children and grandchildren her neighbors had. “I was so fed up with my mother’s exhortations that I always thought marriage was a disease,” González says. After a pause, she adds: “I guess I immunized myself too well.”
González now looks forward to retiring in two years — she’ll be 63 in June — and spending time with her family, especially with her father, who is 90 years old and lives in a nursing home in Fort Worth, Texas. She also looks forward to traveling, visiting friends and working on an autobiography she has already begun, a project involving seven other women. “My big hobby is gardening,” she says, and she plans to build a house and create a garden from scratch on a 3-acre plot in Oklahoma, right next to where her brother lives.
It sounds like the perfect retirement plan. And if at some point in González’s private Eden, she were to be handed a magic wand with which she could change one thing in the world, she knows exactly what she’d do. “I would do away with poverty,” she says unhesitatingly. “People who are born poor don’t deserve to be poor. It’s the most unfair thing in the world.”
