It was in eighth grade when Andy Salvatierra finally broke down.
His Guatemala-born father had been deported a few years earlier, then was fatally shot trying to cross the border and get back to his family in LA.
That day, his mother put an arm around him as he sat in his room sobbing. Six years later, as Salvatierra, 18, prepares to head to Yale University, he recalled how that gesture from his mother taught him to lean on the people around him.
“I needed that support so much,” he said. “It’s OK. I can have somebody else look out for me.”
Salvatierra graduated Thursday and, along with a handful of classmates, left an indelible mark at Alliance Judy Ivie Burton Technology Academy High School by shifting the way the campus talks about mental health, substance abuse and grief.
It was a trip to the East Coast last year that challenged him to make a difference in his community. The weeks-long leadership training program, called Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA) brought Salvatierra all the way to Princeton and Yale as just one of 100 students LEDA says are selected each year for the program.
Program staff challenged the cohort to find a way to help their neighborhoods when they returned home. Salvatierra immediately thought of mental health.
As the only boy of three siblings, he became the man of the house after his father died. His childhood taught him that men and boys in his neighborhood are often discouraged from talking about their interior lives, but he wanted to change that for his peers.
“They don’t get those opportunities to speak up about themselves,” he said. “It’s so heavily looked down upon in our communities.”
To meet the challenge from the LEDA program, Salvatierra landed on the idea for a mental health club and presented it to school staff, who were conveniently looking for someone to launch a Peer Health Advocate team. The county program equips students to guide classmates through conversations about everything from substance abuse to grief.
“He uplifts his peers,” Rogelio Sanchez, principal at Alliance Burton Tech, said of Salvatierra. “The toughness he has, the resilience. He has high standards for himself and his friends.”
Changing the conversation around mental health isn’t the only challenge Salvatierra is tackling for his community.
This fall he’s heading to New Haven, Connecticut, to study nuclear science at Yale University. He dreams of shielding the world and under-resourced communities like his from the ills of climate change.
Salvatierra’s mom, Nayeli Rojas, knew little about Yale. She was, for a moment, surprised he preferred it to nearby USC until a relative told her about the international reputation of the Ivy League, which U.S. News and World Report ranks the fourth-best university in the nation, tied with Stanford University.
“Oh my god, he’s doing big things,” Rojas realized.
There are many unknowns for Salvatierra ahead at Yale — he’s never lived in a place with winter or so far away from his family — but still, he’s excited.
Rojas, like any mother, said she is worried about the little problems her son could face so far away, like hard-to-reach doctors or poor quality food. But she knows he’s made the right decision.
“I’m really proud,” she said. “He’s like a bright star to the world and his friends. He’s a good example to all the community.”
