Impoverished childhood couldn't shatter dreams

Any oddsmakers trying to predict life's winners and losers likely would have counted Chriss Chavez out from the start. She grew up poor in a 100-year-old adobe without running water and only the smallest fraction of hope in a remote part of northern New Mexico.

Yet Chavez succeeded because she knew numbers well enough to defy the odds.

A lifelong love of math and learning saved her from poverty. Chavez now has been honored nationally because she uses her hard-earned talents to help others growing up like she did.

"Sometimes you get to save that one or two where the light bulb goes on," Chavez recalled. "They are the gateway for their families."

A logistics and materials planner for the Automotive Components Holdings glass plant in Tulsa, Chavez has dedicated much of her free time to inspiring other Hispanics to embrace education and better their lot in life.

Her efforts earned Chavez the national Jamie Oaxaca Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

The award noted Chavez's volunteer efforts in establishing SHPE chapters in Tulsa and Nashville, Tenn., as well as helping Hispanic secondary students seek math-related careers. She will be honored during a ceremony next month in Philadelphia.

Chavez shrugged when first complimented on her award.

"You're not doing it for the recognition," she said. "I didn't set out to do what I've been doing so I could get an award."

And yet her life story begs for some sort of Hollywood hero treatment. Her maternal grandmother, retired teacher Juliana Lujan Chavez, raised four grandchildren in the small adobe on a $600 monthly pension.

Young "Christella" and her siblings had to shower at school, but they also learned to read by 3 or 4 years old and gained mechanical skills early on when it came to toys.

"I was so curious, taking stuff apart and putting things back together," Chavez recalled. "We had only one bike, so if it broke we fixed it."

Good teachers early on recognized Chavez's precocious intellect and pushed her to learn even more. By her teenage years at Pecos High School, she had gained internships and trips to such programs as Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico State University and a mining school.

Chavez was trying hard to break free of cultural barriers that limited Hispanic females in her community.

"We expected women to get married young and not go to college," she said.

How ironic, then, that she plotted her escape by learning to sew and cook extremely well. Chavez became a officer in the Future Homemakers of America and even gained a trip to Atlanta her senior year in high school.

A student council officer and cheerleader, her extracurricular activities caught the attention of a recruiter for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She was accepted and used her early life's experiences to prepare her for the West Point challenges.

"It was hell," she admitted. "A lot of people quit, but they had no idea what I'd been through."

Chavez graduated and spent several years on active duty as a military police officer. Her love, however, was always math and engineering, so she eventually resigned to work in the private sector and got involved in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

By 1998, she came to work at the Visteon Glass division of Ford Motor Co. in Tulsa, now Automotive Components Holdings. She helped establish Oklahoma's first SHPE chapter two years later and was its founding president.

The group launched student chapters at Oral Roberts University, Tulsa Community College and the University of Tulsa. Chavez also got involved in mentoring Spanish-speaking elementary school children and volunteered to help engineering competitions at middle and high schools.

"Education is No. 1," she said. "It really hurts to see how many kids, regardless of economic and ethnic backgrounds, don't finish school."

The older generations hold some responsibility for reversing that trend, Chavez pointed out. She believes that adults should put their money where their complaints are.

"People fight about taxes that they pay," she said. "The bottom line is that those children will provide your infrastructure as you age."

Her old Pecos School District was Chavez's spring board despite a lack of funding. Chavez knows she worked hard but also was lucky because of her grandmother's grand desires and the extra effort of various teachers through the years.

"Where would I have ended up if I didn't have those people?" she asked. "All those pieces got put together."

Chavez recently moved back to Tulsa after spending four years working at the ACH facility in Nashville. She also volunteered untold hours in that community but is glad to return to Tulsa.

She's excited about the area's growing Hispanic community and hopes that recent immigration battles don't scare away those individuals. Chavez said the ACH plant, which is being sold by Ford to a local investor, plans to adopt a learning center in the Kendall-Whittier neighborhood.

"I'm so glad to be back," she said. "This is a community I know I can make a difference in."

Chavez also believes that Tulsa is a great place to raise her two teenage sons. She just hopes to do half the job that her grandmother did in inspiring four Hispanic grandchildren to beat the odds.

"She really was something else," Chavez said.

Rod Walton 581-8457
rod.walton@tulsaworld.com