Eleazar Gutierrez believes every young person should get to experience Washington, D.C.
It’s just a beautiful city, he says. The first time he saw the U.S. Capitol, it took his breath away.
The first time he met his congressman, and communicated his political views to him, he began to develop his voice as a constituent.
“Most importantly,” Gutierrez said, “I saw professionals working in D.C. that looked like me.”
And so Gutierrez, a 26-year-old CSUB sociology graduate, works to bring young Latinos from around the country to Washington for a week as associate manager of high school leadership programs for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
CHCI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that extends a variety of educational services to young emerging Latino leaders. It was created in 1978 by original members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
One day Gutierrez would like to create a nonprofit that specifically brings kids from Kern County, especially his beloved hometown of Arvin, to the nation’s capital.
“What keeps me going is seeing the transformative change that I’m having on the future leaders of this country. Participants in the program start off shy and kind of timid and leave the program as young, professional high school students that are ready to take on the world,” he said.
His own story
In a story so common among CSUB students and alumni, Gutierrez’s parents were immigrants from Mexico who grew up poor and sacrificed their own educational goals for their children.
“They always aspired to receive an education but due to financial constraints and family responsibilities they had in Mexico they were never able to complete one,” he said.
So when they immigrated to the United States and started a family, Gutierrez’s parents emphasized the importance of education to their three children. Gutierrez is the oldest.
“Education was always very fundamental to our lives,” he said. “It was the epicenter of our conversations and everything that happened.”