Helping Hispanic students

CITIZEN JOURNALISM:

He could be pocketing a cool million bucks annually even in today’s commercial real estate market, J. Fernando Barrueta says, but he chooses to raise eight times that much helping Hispanic high school students acquire a better future.

As the chief executive officer of the Hispanic College Fund (HFC) for almost 15 years, Mr. Barrueta, 66, of McLean, couldn’t be happier testifying in Congress on behalf of immigrant students or convincing a timid Latino teen of a higher pursuit.

“I don’t do this for money. Even in real estate, I wasn’t money-motivated,” says the buoyant Mr. Barrueta, known to most as Fern.

Maybe not for himself, but certainly he works to earn enough cash to put his four children through college and to shake the money trees for countless parents whose children would not get a shot at higher education without his commitment.

“Now I sell a product that actually benefits individuals, that benefits the national economy and benefits a community that needs to expand from a professional point of view,” he says. “It is a net plus for everybody, especially the student and the student’s family.”

Mr. Barrueta is so motivated because he understands from his own experience how hard it is for Hispanic students, who often are the first in their families even to grasp the concept of going to college. Most don’t know that financial aid is available, let alone the rigors of matriculating through four years of academia.

“It’s astounding how many students come to our summer youth summit who do not know about [the Free Application for Federal Student Aid]. They have no guidance and no legacy,” he says.

“Their parents are not hanging around a country club talking about whose son or daughter went to Harvard or Yale,” Mr. Barrueta says. “These are the children of migrant workers and people working in office buildings. They are working for a living very, very hard.”

Most high schools do not have enough guidance counselors to go around, Mr. Barrueta points out, and a lot of Hispanic students “are too shy to force themselves into the mix, so they walk out [of school] and their lives are in jeopardy.”

One of Mr. Barrueta’s happiest moments was helping a soccer player - soccer is another of his passions - secure the resources to send the man’s daughter to college. Hispanic parents “have no idea to how to help their kids because they think, ‘Who would help my kids?’ - but there is help,” he says.

To look at the prosperous man he is today, you’d never know that this son of Mexican immigrants arrived in the nation’s capital from El Paso, Texas, in 1961 with just $300 and a scholarship to Georgetown University. Mr. Barrueta lost the funding his first semester because of poor grades, in part because he had been placed in advanced courses.

“Even though I was the valedictorian of my high school, I was unprepared for a place like Georgetown; I was lost,” Mr. Barrueta says.

Yet he persevered and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Georgetown in 1965. He did so, however, by working more than 30 hours a week at the Georgetown Coffee House to repay tuition loans advanced by owner Leonard Wnukowski.

By the time he entered medical school, Mr. Barrueta was a husband and father, and it did not go well. He returned to retail sales, selling office machines and “really good coffee and tea” before entering the commercial real estate business. By the time he sold his company, Barrueta and Associates, in 1996, it had earned the distinction of being the largest Hispanic firm of its kind in the country, with 40 brokers working in office, retail and industrial leasing; investment sales; commercial mortgage financing; and management.

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