WSU News Service

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Washington State University Online student Sylvia Guzman used to be a homeless migrant worker. Now she helps parents raise their young children.

Guzman started picking produce in central California at age 13 to help her parents, immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico. At 18, Guzman married Cornelio, a fellow Oaxacan she met in the fields. They became migrant workers, following the harvest up through Oregon and Washington, where their two children were born.

The family lived in labor camps, in a cargo van, and in a livestock barn where they boiled water to shower in a plywood-covered feeding pen. One boss let them sleep in a corner of his rat-infested warehouse.

In 2001, Guzman, her husband and their two young children were sharing a two-bedroom house with about 20 people in Burlington. Fed up with fieldwork, she walked across the street to a child-care center.

“I asked for a job,” she said. “I told the woman that I’d come here every day for a week and work for free.”

She got the job – her first job in child care.

After graduation from Skagit Valley College with an associate degree, she chose a human development online degree program so that she could study while spending time with her family. In fall of 2008, she was accepted into WSU Online program.

At her job in Early Head Start in Mount Vernon, Guzman teaches special needs and mainstream children, using Spanish, English and sign language.

She also makes home visits to teach parenting skills – simple things, she said, such as how to obtain a driver’s license or use food banks. She was recently selected to go to the national Head Start conference in Washington, D.C., where she gave two presentations, one about bilingual education and one about her life.

The first to graduate with a college degree in her family, Guzman plans to earn a master’s degree in bilingual education.

“I get paid to play all day,” she said. “I never want to go back to the fields. And I’m not. Never.”