Voices in Our Heads
Jessica Quintana is Always Pushing Forward
Jessica Quintana, Executive Director of Centro CHA, reminds me of another community organizer I had the honor to work with during 1968-69. Evelina Lopez Antonetty was a civil rights activist who fought battles with the Education establishment on behalf of parents and children of the Bronx. Like Jessica Quintana, she was dogged in her determination to makes lives better for her community. She taught me about community organizing, politics, strategy, and most importantly, commitment and determination. Ms. Quintana shares those skills well. They also share one other important attribute, the desire to improve the community around them no matter what. Quintana, like Antonetty, is always pushing forward because stopping or going backward is not an option.
Jessica Quintana
Jessica Quintana, A Long Beach Childhood
Jessica Quintana’s childhood in west Long Beach is what you would expect for any child: growing up on 34th and Santa Fe Avenue, going to the Silverado Pool, playing baseball at Admiral Kidd Park, hanging out with friends at the parks, “…and going to Golden Star for hamburgers and just doing kid stuff on Santa Fe.”
“Our biggest thing was whether we were going to go the Pike on a Friday and go hang out.”
The daily life of childhood dreams and fun got a boost with summer jobs for teenagers.
“During that time, there was an investment in youth, in jobs, in summer jobs for youth.”
There were the summer jobs at Centro de la Raza on Anaheim Street which was administered by CSULB Professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos. There, mentors helped shape her and her friends.
“So being a youth, at 14 years old working summer jobs, we had the opportunity and experience to be under Latino mentors who were focused on academics and ensuring that we had a place and a place to learn as young people growing up.”
Those early seventies were a memorable time for a fourteen-year-old who was exposed to the Chicano movement and the United Farmworkers and Caesar Chavez. “We were learning about Cesar Chavez and the movement and better jobs.”
“So, we were boycotting the markets out on Anaheim Street and doing mural projects, learning about Cesar Chavez.”
At fifteen, she joined in when Chavez came to Long Beach as part of a long march from Delano to Los Angeles. It’s an experience that she’ll remember all the rest of her life.
There were other lessons for Jessica Quintana
There was a teen center on the Westside organized by a community legend, John Northmore. Quintana credits the late community organizer for becoming the person she is today. Her community education continued under John Northmore who was active in Long Beach and the Harbor Gateway area. He advocated for those Teen Centers, especially in low-income areas. They were recreation centers for youth and places where teens could connect and see the world beyond their neighborhood.
“I went to my first Fair with John. He would take us to the Hollywood parade. We went on many, many excursions with John. Our group of kids, inner city kids back then.”
This was an important lesson in best practices: get the kids out of their neighborhood so they could experience other places. The Teen Centers were pivotal back then to create a hub for youth. According to Quintana, John Northmore would fight for the youth, keeping them out of jails, instilling some sense of discipline in their lives.
“He got me my first job ever. I got my first job at nineteen working in Wilmington for the clinica.”
Jessica Quintana was surrounded by activists and mentors. Supported by her family then and now, Quintana’s activism continued and grew right into the challenge that Centro CHA presented and she accepted. Over the years, Quintana would work to impact the lives for low- income Hispanic/Latino communities in Long Beach. Her areas of concern range from health to employment, immigration to anti-violence efforts and social justice. Through the Summer Night Lights (SNL) Violence Reduction Initiative launched in 2010, Centro CHA worked, in collaboration with many community partners, to focus on reducing crime during the summer months typically known as the peak time for violence. They gathered public and private investment to, “…support more than 100 jobs for youth, and including gang prevention, and intervention programs and services coupled with recreational, and sports programs offered at eight park locations in Long Beach.”
A task that Centro CHA and Jessica Quintana embrace
One area of particular interest of Centro CHA is reentry for ex-offenders. Every week, California state prisons and county jails release felons and those who served their sentences for misdemeanors. They arrive in communities, sometimes homeless, no prospect of work, separated from their families, and with no support systems. It’s a task that Centro CHA and Jessica Quintana embrace. She knows it’s a system that’s broken.
“The system is not set up to help a lot of folks through our environment, through our schools, through our government, and in our homes.”
Quintana explains that it’s easy for young people to get lost in the cracks when the system breaks down and is not working.
“So, what we have to do as a community, as a government, as an education system, our parents, our homes, is to look at our systems. You know, how are they working?
Jessica Quintana views the issue holistically. It’s a pipeline that stretches from education to jobs for the parents to housing, the environment, and the question of whether all neighborhoods are equal when it comes to resources.
“We can no longer dance around, ‘They got an abundance of resources over there but we don’t have the resources here’. No community should look different.”
Quintana states the solution clearly. “It’s going to have to come down to equity. We have to have equity in every space.” She’s emphatic that the likelihood of your life’s direction shouldn’t depend just on where you live. She was lucky to have been exposed to summer jobs, mentors, and opportunities. But, it could have been different in a time when heroin was prevalent and gangs were ubiquitous. Time has shrunk the resources to address these present problems.
“What we’ve seen is more and more less and less of resources.”
The change can only come when everyone who has a role to play sits at the table and works together. Everyone with a resource and a solution has to come to bear on a comprehensive plan that addresses both the systematic challenges and the individual’s needs.
Save the Date
On a lighter but equally important note is the upcoming Nuestra Imagen Awards. Centro CHA is celebrating the awards’ twentieth year anniversary on September 29th at 5:30 PM in the Pacific Ballroom at the Long Beach Convention Center.
“These awards were started to really recognize the leadership in our community. We noticed that we had a real lack of leadership, folks out there that were really looking at how do we give back, how do we change our Latino communities.”
The recipients of the awards are recognized for their community service, the public service of elected officials, and from education and the business world. The awardees have given back to the community and the Nuestra Imagen Awards are, according to Jessica Quintana, to recognize them as champions. “It’s very important to highlight those folks.”
For sponsorship and advertisement opportunities or to RSVP for tickets, contact: Susan Gonzalez, Reservation Chair, 562-612-1424 or email her at susan@centrocha.org.
