Roots in Columbia: Santiago Vallejo points to a photo of family who remained in South America. MARIA YOUNG / TIMES PHOTOS
Santiago “Santi” Vallejo’s personal story is largely about immigration, but it’s not the kind of tale that often makes headlines.
Vallejo, 18, graduated from Father Judge High School with a 3.8 grade point average, good enough for 36th among 202 in his senior class. Before that, he was an honor student at St. Martin of Tours in Oxford Circle. And before that, he and his parents had fled their native Colombia, a nation crippled by political, paramilitary and narcotics-related violence for most of the last half-century. A family that had once lived in the relative comfort of the Colombian upper-middle class found themselves in a foreign land with little but the clothes on their backs and the will to succeed.
In the coming weeks, Vallejo will be starting classes at Eastern Connecticut State University with his long-term ambitions keenly focused on earning a four-year degree and building a career as an architect. Financial support from the Children’s Scholarship Fund of Philadelphia has helped him get this far.
Vallejo was recently chosen to speak on behalf of thousands of young CSFP award recipients during the fund’s annual Student Awards Ceremony at The Kimmel Center. In the last five years, CSFP has awarded grade school scholarships to 10,000 students from low-income families throughout the city. The organization’s Campaign for 10,000 Children has raised more than $50 million to fund the cause.
Vallejo is one of the program’s success stories. His personal message about coping with sacrifice and change while overcoming daunting challenges transcends generations and national origins.
“I use that as extra motivation. I’ve always gotten high grades,” Vallejo said in an interview from his Lower Mayfair home.
Translating for his Spanish-speaking mom, Patricia, Vallejo said, “She’s real proud of how responsible and diligent I’ve been. Even though I’ve faced hardships in life, I’ve kept my faith and pushed on to accomplish goals I’ve set for myself.”
Vallejo’s family didn’t leave Colombia to escape poverty. On the contrary, they made great financial sacrifices to do so. Santiago’s father, Jorge, was an executive for a coffee company and his mother a banker. They lived in Manizales, a city of about 340,000 people in the Andean, roughly equidistant from the nation’s three largest cities, Bogota, Medellin and Cali. Surrounded by some of the highest mountain peaks in the Andes, Manizales is in the heart of Colombia’s coffee-growing region and is also considered an important hub of higher education.
“There are a lot of hills and valleys and a lot of universities,” Vallejo said.
Life was good for Jorge and Patricia, despite the spectre of poverty that loomed over the country. With more than 47 million residents, Colombia is South America’s third-most populous nation. At the turn of the 21st century, its poverty level hovered close to 50 percent, though the official figure has declined to less than 30 percent in recent years.
Predictably, personal security had long been another issue there when Jorge departed Manizales on a business trip one day in the late 1990s.
“He was on a business trip to another city. They knew where he was going to be and they jumped him and his buddies and stole his money,” Vallejo said, again translating for him mom. “He was not really injured, but he definitely went through a lot of shock because my mom was pregnant (with me) at the time.”
The assailants were no run-of-the-mill street thugs. They weren’t drug traffickers or political paramilitaries, either. They were working for a rival in the coffee industry.
Jorge didn’t tell Patricia about the robbery right away. He didn’t want to frighten her. But ultimately he knew he had to tell. When he finally cleared the air, they immediately agreed that Colombia was not the place to sustain a career or to raise a family.
Vallejo was born in Colombia, but has no memories of it because his family left so soon. He can only imagine what he might have become there, if his parents’ resources might have given him a head start on his dreams. Patricia still holds the place and its people close to her heart.
When asked what she misses most, she replied, “todos,” Spanish for “all of it.”
“There’s a sense of community there. It has a small-town feel,” Vallejo explained on behalf of his mother. “She misses the large family and the traditions that she’s used to.”
Conversely, being in the United States, Patricia likes “the sense of security here. You don’t have to worry about certain things. You don’t feel like your life is on the line. And there’s more opportunity here, not just for our family but for others,” Vallejo said.
In the U.S., Vallejo’s parents had another child, Tomas, who is following in his brother’s footsteps as an honor student at St. Martin’s. But it’s been tough to get ahead financially. His father now works in construction.
“Over there, they had good jobs. But over here, you’ve got to do whatever you can do to start,” Vallejo said.
Optimism seems to be one key to long-term success. Vallejo doesn’t always know when his opportunities will come, but he has to be ready to capitalize when they do. It’s like when he won a CSFP scholarship to attend St. Martin’s starting in sixth grade. Or how he’s been able to expand his network through charitable volunteerism.
For the last several years, he’s worked at Inn Dwelling, a Germantown nonprofit that provides transitional housing, tutoring and mentoring to at-risk teens and their families. He learned about the program from a cousin who was involved. In his freshman year at Judge, a nun recommended that he work there for his Christian charity obligation.
“I enjoy it. It’s not just tutoring. Sometimes you do Christmas parties for the elderly. It’s fun seeing them enjoy the holidays like everyone should. Sometimes we wrap Christmas presents for little kids,” he said.
Vallejo also enjoys pickup sports with his friends and was a member of his high school’s art club. His interest in drawing and painting dovetails with his architectural aspirations. He says he wants to design structures for open public spaces like parks.
He’s not yet sure how he’ll make it financially, but uncertainty has never stopped him before.
“Everyone has different challenges. No one’s story is exactly the same,” Vallejo said. “Certain people deal with different challenges in different ways. But where there’s a will, there’s a way basically.” ••
Head of the class: Santiago Vallejo, a native of Colombia, graduated from Father Judge High School with a 3.8 grade point average and was ranked 36th among 202 in his senior class. MARIA YOUNG / TIMES PHOTO
With honors: Santiago Vallejo, a native of Colombia, discusses his family’s journey to America from his Lower Mayfair home. A graduate of Father Judge High School, he was recently chosen to speak on behalf of thousands of Children’s Scholarship Fund of Philadelphia award recipients during the fund’s annual Student Awards Ceremony. MARIA YOUNG / TIMES PHOTO
