Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Cinthia Rodriguez Veronica Luna, recipient of the 2008 William Randolph Hearst/California State University Trustees' Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Before that fateful day when her daughter asked her about attending West Valley College together, Veronica Luna had never imagined college to be a part of her life.

"Growing up as a child," Luna said, "I thought the only people who went to college were white, rich and smart people."

Now 48 and a first-generation college student, Luna is SJSU's recipient of this year's William Randolph Hearst/California State University Trustees' Award for Outstanding Achievement.

She is a graduate student in social work with a career goal of becoming a prison chaplain, who provides counseling and instruction in moral and spiritual development for prisoners.

Luna is a single mother with five children, and two of them are also low-income single mothers. She is a CalWorks recipient and receives no financial or physical help from the absent parents.

"Although financially stable, my life was filled with chaos and turmoil," Luna said.

As a little girl of a Hispanic middle-class family, Luna learned to cover for her alcoholic mother when her elementary school friends visited.

"When you think your family is the only one having that problem, it's like a secret you don't want people to know," Luna said. "It's like a lie you have to live with."

After getting pregnant at the age of 15, having siblings who became drug addicts, and being abandoned by her father, Luna spent her adult years living in two abusive relationships, one after another, with the fathers of her five children.

Luna said the first abuser would physically attack her and the second one would call her at work with threats and intimidation.

For years, she presented herself in front of other people as if nothing was wrong until one day in 1993, she said, when she was six months pregnant with her fifth child, she told the police through tears: "I wish I was dead."

She was taken for a psychiatric evaluation, hospitalized and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"After that I just knew, enough is enough," Luna said.

With help from Next Door, a domestic violence service agency in San Jose, Luna started going to church, volunteering in the community and attending college.

Continued...

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