Marissa Ocampo

When 17-year-old Marissa Ocampo thinks back on her childhood and education in Salinas, she remembers one of her earliest teachers telling her class there were a lot of people who were already stereotyping them.

After all, Salinas is a city with the highest youth homicide rate in the state and a history of gang violence. Many of its public schools have a high poverty rate among students.

“I took my teacher’s words as a challenge,” Ocampo says. And despite the negative narratives she continues to hear circulating today about her hometown, she is coming out of the Salinas public school system motivated.

She gets good grades as a senior at Everett Alvarez High School. She’s part of her school’s debate team and the Gay Straight Alliance. She volunteers regularly in her community, like serving with the pedestrian-traffic project Ciclovía. She serves as student body president. She’s graduating in May and plans to head off to college this fall to study political science.

All of her achievements suggest she’ll be off to bigger and better things in the world at large. But as she explains, the bigger and better things she’s after are in her hometown. After college and law school, she wants to come back to improve life in Salinas as a civil rights lawyer, possibly working in the areas of education, health or immigration.

Weekly: If you could trade in your childhood and your life right now, for an entirely new one in a different city with different privileges, would you?

Ocampo: To be very honest, I wouldn’t. Knowing how people are struggling now makes me want to better my city.

If I grew up in a nicer city, I’d probably be ignorant to a lot of things like poverty and gang violence. I would be ignorant to who was picking my food!

For all the bad things Salinas is known for, it has also given me a unique perspective.

How does that make you different from, let’s say a white, upper-middle-class girl who went to a good college and decides to study history, politics or feminist theory, then becomes an activist in a high-poverty or high-crime city?

The biggest difference is I’ve seen it all my life and I’ve lived it all my life. Sure, by reading history books you can learn about how bad it was, or you can read about the lives of other people, but it’s my personal experience and connection with [the Salinas community] that is pushing me to make it better. It’s the emotions and the feelings that I have associated with my city that makes it not just an education, but an experience.

Has your community ever been unsupportive of your activism?

They have been mostly supportive. There have been a couple times where they haven’t. My school wouldn’t allow a school-wide Gay Straight Alliance event. They only allowed us to pass out fliers, buttons and small stuff. There was another year when teenage drinking was a big problem and some students wanted to have an assembly about it, but my school said no, because they thought we would end up promoting teenage drinking instead. They didn’t see it as an educational opportunity.

The community hasn’t always had the best relationship with law enforcement. You recently helped moderate a panel discussion with the new chief, Adele Fresé. What are your feelings on the new chief?

I always want to be optimistic. But if we’re being realistic, you can’t take back all the deaths of minors and teens, who were innocent and who were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Those things are out of our control. Yet people are still angry about it.

I like how [Fresé] said she would work on trust and communication between authority figures and the community. That’s important, because I think Salinas has a hard time trusting the people who are supposed to be protecting them.

Why plan on coming back to Salinas?

I have this theory, if you want to see global change, you have to start small. It doesn’t matter how small, if you make an impact, it’ll change the world.

So why not Salinas? It’s made me the person I am today and I think it’s so important to go back and invest in that community that gave me so much from so little.

Going away to a big city that’s already developed and successful is the easy way out. If you want to change the world, you have to embrace where you come from and not run from it.