“The benefits of having a mentor [are so valuable]… asking questions, not feeling shy about asking questions,” Torres-Baez said to more than 20 local middle school, high school, and college-age students on Jan 30. “Even at this age in my life, I struggle sometimes with asking those questions to figure out what I need to do next.”

Today, Torres-Baez is a diversity programs coordinator in Weill Cornell Medicine’s division of general internal medicine. But in the early 2000s, Torres-Baez was a program administrator with Mentoring Latinas/Club Amigas—a 16-year-old program that cultivates close relationships between teenage and college Latinas in the Bronx. It brings adolescent Latinas, who are typically the daughters of immigrant parents, onto the Rose Hill campus for tutoring and down-to-earth dialogue with Fordham Latina students every week. Over the past decade, the program has received $500,000 in grants from AT&T.

At the Wednesday afternoon event, Torres-Baez showed the club’s newest members the power of Latina women with a familiar story—her own.

The daughter of Peruvian immigrants, Torres-Baez graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a concentration in Latino studies. During her college years, she and her classmates supported undocumented students who lacked access to higher education in the U.S. and conducted workshops to explain their cause. Now she is applying to Ph.D. programs, with the goal of researching educational equity and inclusion of undocumented students in medical school, she said.

At Weill Cornell, Torres-Baez is working on a grant to increase underrepresented students at the medical college. Recently, she said, she also helped initiate a mentoring program for minority medical students, faculty, and residents.

“Last night, there was a room of 77 doctors of color: black, Latinx, Asian,” Torres-Baez recalled to the room of young women—including one who said she wanted to become a doctor. “And you don’t see that often.”

The most moving part of Wednesday’s mentoring session was when the young mentees and mentors revealed their dream careers in a round-robin fashion, said Sandra Turner, Ph.D., director of the Mentoring Latinas program and associate professor in the Graduate School of Social Service. The jobs were as eclectic as they were ambitious: a professional soccer player, a neonatal nurse, a marine biologist.

In spite of a sudden snow squall that afternoon, the event at Dealy Hall had served its purpose: to unite Latina women from different generations. As the event reached its end, Torres-Baez recalled the year she left Mentoring Latinas—and in particular, the girls in the program from many years ago.

“I think most of those students … just graduated from college, or they’re in their senior year of college. That will be all of you in a couple of years,” Torres-Baez said, looking at the young Latinas in the room. “I hope we all keep in touch.”

Stories of triumph, hope, and perseverance filled the room at a Feb. 28 event at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, celebrating the 15^th anniversary of the University’s Club Amigas/Mentoring Latinas.

“This is inspirational because there are people out there who tell Latinas ‘don’t apply to this job or school because you are not good enough,’” said mentor Briana Alejandro, a student at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

For 15 years, the program has helped Bronx Latinas overcome obstacles and excel in high school and college while maintaining their cultural identity.  AT&T, which has provided $450,000 to the Mentoring Latinas over the past nine years, was recognized as the program’s largest funder. 

“We firmly believe that the influence of mentor can significantly improve young person’s potential for success,” said Ed Bergstraesser, director of external affairs at AT&T. “The event is a celebration of the 350 young women who have come through this program, and [whom]we believe are stronger [because]of it,” he said.

Empowerment Through Mentorship

Mentoring Latinas was founded in 2003 as part of the GSS’s Institute for Women and Girls. The program pairs a Latina college student from Fordham with middle and high school Latinas from local schools in the Bronx— the New York City borough with the largest population of Hispanics.

Despite their challenges, Sandy Turner, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Women and Girls, said the mentees had high hopes for their future. During the ceremony, she shared that many of them wanted to be doctors, teachers, architects, and social workers when they grow up. A video made by Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior Roberta Munoz, the head mentor for the high school division of the program, served as a testament to Mentoring Latinas’ impact.

“It has empowered young Latinas to believe in themselves and achieve goals that they wouldn’t have tried otherwise,” she said. “It teaches them that Latinas are more than what the media portrays them as.”

Personal Stories of Achievement

Eileen Torres, executive director of BronxWorks, and Marlene Cintron, GSE ’77, president of The Bronx Overall Economic Development Council, were among the distinguished local leaders who shared personal stories about their struggles as adolescents and how they went on to prove naysayers wrong.

“Their roles are usually not dominated by people of color,” said mentee Mariely Gomez, a sophomore at Belmont Preparatory High School. “Now I can see my future a little bit brighter.”

Torres recalled her Puerto Rican parents working hard “to make ends meet.” She had to fill out college enrollment forms on her own since no one in her family graduated from college, she said.

She encouraged the mentees to lean on their mentors during tough times. “Once you accomplish a goal, come back, reach out, and give someone who might be in similar circumstances a chance,” she said.

Cintron, the ceremony’s second speaker, described what it was like to grow up in the South Bronx to immigrant parents who stressed the importance of education. Though she went on to hold prominent positions in finance, including serving as a financial analyst at Merrill Lynch and Citibank, as a teen, she wrestled with self-doubt and a high school counselor who didn’t think she’d amount to anything.

Today, she fosters economic development in the Bronx for the Office of the Bronx Borough President.

Advice From the Heart

She advised the young Latinas, whom she described as as “shining, beautiful promising faces [of]our future,” to recognize that they have the power to make their dreams a reality.

“The future is in your hands, and I can’t wait to see what you are going to do with it,” she said.

Belmont Preparatory High School student Belinda Reyes, who dreams of becoming a chef or a fashion designer, said she felt motivated to work harder after the celebration.

“I felt excited because I always thought the things I wanted to do were impossible,” she said.

The speakers’ words of encouragement also resonated with mentor Alondria Agurcia, a senior studying finance at the Gabelli School of Business.

“I could see the girls tearing up when I looked around,” she said. “Even though I’m graduating this year, this reminds me to keep pushing forward.”

As the group was making its way back to the Rose Hill campus across the street for a mentoring session, Turner noticed that one of the girls who was walking alongside her had a temporary tattoo with the word “Pink” on her cheek.

“I said, “Hey, what’s that about?” Turner recalled. “She was very shy and hesitant at first and then she told me that it was in memory of her grandmother, who had recently died and loved the color pink.”

The young Latina would go on to share some of her personal worries—from the absence of her father who was incarcerated to a younger sister living in another country who she longed to see.

“She just kept talking,” said Turner. “All of these things had been bottled up inside of her. It made be realize how much young people need someone to show interest in their lives, whether it’s someone my age or a mentor who is closer in age to them.”

Founded in 2003 by Ellen S. Silber, Ph.D., Mentoring Latinas provides support and mentorship to Latinas in middle school and high school at the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, the New York City borough with the largest Hispanic majority.

The program was created to address the educational challenges that young Latinas face. Graduation rates for Latinas have decreased over the last decade, and Latinas hold 7.4 percent of the degrees earned by women—even though they constituted 16 percent of the female population in 2012, according to the Center for American Progress.

Over the years, Mentoring Latinas has attracted generous support from corporate and private foundations and the state and federal government, including the Colgate-Palmolive Inner-City Fund, AT&T, Walmart Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.

With the help of AT&T, which has contributed over $350,000 to-date to the program, Mentoring Latinas is positioning Bronx adolescents for success inside and outside of the classroom. To boost educational achievement and social growth among high school Latinas, the program pairs each student from local schools in the community with a Latina college student from Fordham University. The goal is to build relationships, promote a healthy bicultural identity in mentees, and prepare them for high school and college, said Miriam Quilan, ACSW, who took over as director after Silber retired in 2015.

Most recently, the Mentoring Latinas program was chosen to participate in a state-of-the-art survey with AT&T, Travelers and several leading practitioner organizations to create the College and Career Readiness Genome, an evidence base of research literature to identify best practices in programming that can increase high school graduation rates, college and career access and readiness, along with college persistence and completion.

According to Quilan, Latina adolescents face many barriers to education. She noted that many of the mentees are daughters of non-English-speaking immigrants who often struggle to navigate the American educational system. It’s something that rings true for Mexican-born mentor Roberta Munoz, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) junior.

“I have an older sister who graduated with a master’s in engineering from an Ivy League school,” said Munoz. “No one helped her with the college application process but she helped me so much. She inspired me to do the same for another Latina.”

For Graduate School of Social Service student Marisol Chaparro, Mentoring Latinas allows her to share the mistakes she made as a teenager and the lessons she learned along the way.

“When I was young, I didn’t have someone to mentor me,” said Chaparro, who dropped out of high school but went back to school and received her bachelor’s in sociology before enrolling in Fordham’s graduate program for social work. “I took different routes that weren’t the best and eventually had to find my own path.”

“The more I worked with Hispanic families in the field of education, the more I realized my community needed support. So I looked into more ways of getting involved, ” said Davila.

Mentors said that, like their mentees, they’re gaining knowledge and developing a sense of belonging through the program, which has served more than 400 adolescent Latinas since it was established.

“It may sound cliché, but it’s really a sisterhood,” said Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Kathryn Madigan, a Guatemalan who hails from Wisconsin, where she said her interactions with Latinas were limited. “We’re empowering students in a way I wish I [had been]. ‘If they can do it, I can too’— that’s the kind of community we’re building and the results are amazing.”

Madigan said that two years ago, one of her mentees was struggling in global history and was nervous about an upcoming test, but her anxieties subsided once Madigan gave her a pep talk.

“I think just having me there helped,” said Madigan. “I told her to get a good night’s sleep and eat breakfast the next morning. I also told her about my love of history. I said, ‘sometimes when you’re studying history, you have to think of it as stories and not just facts.’ She embraced this mindset and she actually did really well on her test.”

One of the things that makes the program a success is that the mentors recognize the importance of leading by example.

“I always emphasize that education is a priority in my own life, and I encourage them to do the same,” said FCLC senior Magdalena Valenti, who mentors middle school students in the program. “I think when they see a person who is older than them succeeding at a school that is close by and reputable, it breaks the ice. They say, ‘well if my mentors come to Fordham, there is obviously a place for me there.’”

At a holiday party in December, the mentees seemed right at home. In one room, middle school mentees and their mentors each spoke about special talents they possess.

One mentee, described by mentors as shy and quiet, unveiled a plaque she had just received for being the best debater on the school team. Another girl read a statement about how she used to be bullied in school but has learned to stand up for herself with help from her mentor.

Two rooms away, a group of high school mentees and their mentors sat in a circle and took turns sharing what they were thankful for as they prepared for a new year.

When it was one mentee’s turn to express gratitude, she looked around the room and paused.

“I’m thankful for everybody in this room at this time,” she said. “You guys have all taught me something in your own way, whether you know it or not.”

(Mary Awad contributed to this article.)