Posse's Got Your Back

A college dropout came to Deborah Bial in the 1980s and told her that he wouldn't have dropped out if he'd had his posse. Thus goes the creation story of Bial's Posse Foundation, which creates “posses” of ten to 12 high school students from a common geographical area and sends them to one of 37 liberal arts schools that are a part of the program. There, the posse acts as a support group for its members and a springboard for greater cross-cultural communication for the school community. The posse comes in together and they leave together, in four years time, with a college degree. Why then, in the fall of 2009, was Evelyn Rosero on the verge of leaving Kalamazoo College?

As a Los Angeles native who'd spent her life moving between the ethnic and multicultural neighborhoods of that cosmopolis, Evelyn was able to avoid drowning in the college's sea of whiteness. It is just another culture to her, and she moves between cultures effortlessly.

“I'm all about diversity,” she says, and indeed her everyday life is an ongoing collision between cultures of every stripe. She is a member of the Black Student Organization and performed in the organization's annual Cultural Awareness Troupe. Her boyfriend is white, and she's made friends with people from Africa, the Caribbean, and all corners of the States. A Catholic Jesus hangs crucified on the wall of an institution with Baptist origins, indicative of an intermingling of two religions whose historical animosity has sparked full-scale war as recently as the 1970s. Any bland cultural homogeneity that Evelyn encountered at college was not daunting in the least, but instead something to be changed and made more interesting bit by bit. It's part of what the Posse Foundation set out to do.

After months of intensive bonding with her posse, Evelyn came to Kalamazoo. She was a vanguard, the first Kalamazoo College posse. She watched her friends make other friends, integrate themselves, and she felt her posse coming apart. She wondered to herself whether she could go to them for support. Her father left for Los Angeles, to look after her mother's swelling belly—a baby brother whose birth Evelyn would miss. At a couple thousand miles out, the safe harbor of family is shrouded in fog. Evelyn felt her father's pillar of support shrink in the distance, and homesickness set in. Doubt crept in with the first October chill.

“Why am I here?”

“Am I good enough to be here?”

“I don't know if I can do this.”

“I don't care.”

“I want to give up.”

Was Evelyn going to be the remainder of the Posse Foundaton's touted 90% graduation rate? Every posse has an on-campus advisor that works with the posse for a minimum of two years and meets one-on-one with students biweekly. Evelyn went to hers, Amelia Katanski. “I cried the entire hour,” she said. “I could barely talk.” But Katanski gave her direction: talk to her friends directly, independently, and see how they felt.

Evelyn found that she was not alone in her homesickness. But while she could find support in her posse, solutions would have to come from somewhere within herself. She often wondered how, at the same age, her mother had managed not just to arrive in America from Mexico, but find a suitably comfortable space and start a family. Her mother came from a childhood of selling candy on the streets and skimming off the top to buy a sandwich, at seven years of age, because her own father—Evelyn's grandfather—spent the family's money on drugs and women. Her father attended college in Ecuador for two years before being forced to leave the country “for political reasons.” She had come to respect her parents' experiences, but how was Evelyn's experience supposed to compare? Was she faltering because she was did not have her parents' fierce tenacity, who had risen from destitution and endured unrelenting hardship to give Evelyn a shot at a college education that she was now not even sure she deserved?

Evelyn's mother told her the experience was not less, but the same. “The difference is that we're here for you. You have a stable place. As long as you have food each day, you'll be fine.” A total change of scene is absolute no matter whether moving within a country or between countries. Whereas her parents did not have a preceding point they could return to, Evelyn did. That familiar pillar of support would always be there as a safe place. And she had her posse.

After a pause, Evelyn concedes that her crisis of faith “was the biggest moment of my life.” It is the meaningful hesitation any of us places before such a statement, to ensure for ourselves and our listener that we truly mean what we say. Everyone: her posse, her friends, Amelia Katanski, her family, knew that “if I gave up I'd be pissed off at myself.” Her personal Statement of Faith hangs above her desk as a testament to her words:

Be it known that at the start of this great journey, The Posse Foundation has every confidence in Evelyn Rosero. We have no doubt that should Evelyn maintain focus and have the courage to follow her dreams, she will graduate on the Quad in the spring of 2013 with the entire posse at her side. She will leave Kalamazoo College with four solid years of learning, adventure, and accomplishment, and Kalamazoo College will be a better place for having had her.

She reads it everyday. “I trusted the process and, oh my God, it's working, it's working,” she says. “No matter what, we're still a posse together. We're a family. I love my family. I love my posse.”