Pueblo educator Terri Martinez didn’t have to look far for a role model. The person who inspired her to make education a career, she said, was someone she saw everyday. At home.
“My Dad was an educator and principal,” said Pueblo native Martinez, CEO of the National Center for School Engagement. Indeed, her father, LeRoy Martinez, spent his career in Pueblo School District 60. As role models go, Martinez said of her father, you can’t do much better.
Martinez, who has divided her career between the classroom and school administration, said her formative years taught her the strength of family.
While her parents were nurturing and involved with their own biological family, Martinez said, there were always non-biological kids around the house.
“I never knew what it was like being from just a biological family,” she said. There were always foster kids in her home. “I am so thankful I grew up that way. It prepared me for life.” Martinez own grandparents, she said, also took in foster children as she was growing up.
One straight line through her career is kids, she said. From early home life to classroom to her current chief executive position, young people have been omni-present.
As a teacher she worked with kids with “social and severe emotional needs,” Martinez said. As time went on, her job took her from the classroom to what she euphemistically called, ‘community engagement work.’ She became a truant officer. Yes! They still exist.
“I would drive around town and find a lot of my kids,” often times playing basketball. “I actually learned how to play basketball to gain their trust,” she recalled. It created a connection. If you don’t have one, Martinez stressed, “we’d lose them.”
While Martinez admits there will never be the resources to solve all of the challenges kids face today, you just can’t give up. Martinez was instrumental in winning a nearly $700,000 grant from the Department of Education to address some of the day-to-day challenges of her work. “We were able to hire eight community advocates” who worked in the highest needs schools. Each was trained in cultural competency in order to help build relationships. “We wanted to make sure they had all the tools in their tool boxes,” in order to keep more kids from getting caught in the judicial whirlpool. Her program and its new approach to reducing the truancy problem was “one of the first in the nation.”
In her job as CEO of National Center for School Engagement, Martinez has visited schools across the country, each dealing with the historic and challenging job of keeping kids engaged—keeping them from dropping out. Her trips have taken her to the Rosebud Reservation, once called the most poverty challenged zip code in the country, to every time zone in the country.
And while the job may seem endless and, too often, thankless, Martinez said it won’t change anything for her. Kids are a forever passion and responsibility. Martinez is also ‘mom’ to one of the kids her family once fostered.
“I adopted one of our (her family’s) foster children. He was my ‘brother,’ but he became my son,” Martinez said. Part of her promise in the adoption was to ensure “he followed the ‘Red Road,” that is, stay true to his Native American roots.
Twenty years passed between that adoption and Martinez getting married. The marriage produced a “second son” who is now a teacher and coach living in Nashville, Tennessee.
In Pueblo, there are few people who have celebrated as many births, weddings, graduations and anniversaries as often as Cindy Reyes. Reyes is the owner of one of her city’s ‘go-to’ catering companies, Cinfully Delicious Catering.
It was when she was living in Los Angeles “back in the 70’s” helping her brother open a restaurant, Reyes said, that she found she had a talent for cooking. Learning the business came a little later when she worked for a caterer who had jobs all across Los Angeles. That’s when she took her dream and ran with it. “I’m just going to go home,” she told herself, “and start my own business.”
But, beyond making delicious savory meals or ‘to die for’ desserts, Reyes has another connection to her community.
Long before Latinos were invited on to radio, television or politics, her father, Henry Reyes, was a well know media and political force all across Pueblo and the Arkansas Valley.
Her father, she said, worked his way up from doing field work—planting and picking crops—across the agricultural breadbasket of southern Colorado to sitting behind a microphone as ‘the voice’ of radio station KAPI, the first Spanish language radio station in that part of the state.
He later went on to become a city councilman and its first Latino ceremonial Mayor. (In Pueblo, the president of the city council, also performed the ceremonial duties of mayor.) Still, she said, he always made time to lend a hand, even washing dishes at one of her events when there was no one else around. “He even helped make tamales.”
It is from him, she said, that she not only inherited an indefatigable work ethic but the knowledge of building relationships with people, many of whom may have been going through the hardest moments in their lives at memorial dinners.
As a caterer, Reyes has cooked for more post-funeral gatherings than she can remember. But food, she says, is often the perfect connection in these moments. It can, if only for a moment, take someone’s grief and meld it into a conversation of joy and remembrance.
Even though Reyes has, over the years, become an astute businesswoman, she isn’t above diving into the nuts and bolts of a job and joining her crew in making sure that her customers get exactly what they pay for. She tells one story about how, in a single week, she did everything her team did—including spending a lot of long hours—making “750 dozen tamales.”
Most of her employees are long term, said Reyes. Two of her daughters have also worked for her, though one recently stepped away to raise her family. Another, a man named Eric, said Reyes, “does everything.” When the business was going through a growth spurt several years ago, the Pueblo native said, “I finally had to teach someone all my recipes because I can’t always do it.” It was a move that has paid off, especially now. “I recently had surgery on my arm,” she said. “But I’m healing.”
Reyes has spread her joy of cooking into countless corners of her city. She’s taught tamale classes at Pueblo Community College and hired on young people who’ve taken her recipes to every compass point.
She modestly eschews calling herself a culinary artist, but does admit that “food is an art.” “Everybody loves to eat,” she said, no matter if the sun is shining or not. “Food brings people together.”
