Three months after being appointed as a non-voting member of the Española City Council, Española Valley High School graduate Maurissa Maestas is finding the nerve to speak publicly.
Mayor Javier Sanchez created the new position on the city council shortly after he was elected, and appointed Maestas to the post, March 27 during a regular city council meeting.
“This is a way for the city council to bridge the gap between the youth in our Valley, and it’s a very simple way to bring that excitement, energy and that communication between the high school and the city council we have here,” Sanchez said.
Growing up in Sombrillo, Maurissa Maestas would often ride her bicycle outside with her three similarly-aged cousins near her grandmother’s house.
“We used to use chalks and make little roads on the cement, pretend we were driving around,” she said. “We’d play an ultimate game of hide and seek where we’d hide in the cars and no one could find us.”
Nowadays she and her cousins go shopping and scroll through Facebook together.
She has a younger brother named Lawrence, a student at McCurdy Charter School hoping to go to Española Valley High School.
She wants to become a pediatric nurse.
Finding her voice
Having her position on the city council has helped her raise awareness about what it’s like to grow up in Española.
“Being that we’re the future, how can we try to make things better without looking into what has already happened?” she said. “Being there now will help me later on in the future, if I decide, maybe I don’t want to be a nurse, maybe I want to go into that kind of role.”
Maestas and her mother, Janelle Maestas, first met Sanchez at Dandy Burger earlier this year, when he was campaigning for mayor.
“I asked him what he would do to help our public schools,” Maurissa Maestas said. “Because there are problems with our public schools. It happened from there.”
She recalled that he said some of the problems lie with parents who aren’t involved in their children’s lives.
“I was lucky enough to have parents that support me,” she said. “Some people don’t have that. Without the right support, some kids feel like they can’t do it.”
She brought up the issue because she had observed low graduation rates at Española Valley High School.
She said at the beginning of the year there were about 260 students in her 2018 graduating class. During the graduation ceremony, there were 212 graduates present.
“I don’t even know how many principals we went through in these past four years,” she said. “There’s a lot of switching principals, a lot of movement going on.”
She estimated four or five principals during her time at the high school.
Janelle Maestas felt excited but scared when she saw her daughter graduate in May, because Maurissa is her first child to finish school.
“Just knowing that she is growing up, or she has grown up,” Janelle Maestas said. “Hopefully we’ve given her guidance. She says we’re strict, but I think had we not been strict, I think there could have been opportunities for her to go a different direction. She has made some very wise choices in life.”
Reserved
After Sanchez won the race for mayor, he got in touch with Janelle Maestas and passed along a message that he wanted Maurissa Maestas to attend the meeting on March 27.
“I went, and I didn’t know he was going to appoint me,” she said. “It kind of just happened. I wasn’t given very much detail.
When her name came up in the meeting she was excited but did not know what was going on.
Maestas has always been an introverted person.
In the meeting, she recalls feeling like she should have stepped up to the city council’s seats to shake their hands. Yet, because she is so quiet, she just thanked them for the position.
She describes herself as a homebody. In an interview, when asked why she is that way, she looked at her mother and said with a smile, “Because somebody doesn’t let me out of the house.”
In her free time, she watches Netflix and goes shopping with her friends.
Eleven weeks into her time observing city council meetings, Maestas spoke up on June 12 during a presentation by Española Project RACE Director Ashley Montoya.
“How do students get involved in this, how can students get connected?” Maestas asked. “Is there maybe a way we can get this back into the high school? So kids can get involved while they’re in school?”
Montoya said anyone aged 15 and older can apply to participate in the program, and she already teaches life skills at Española Middle School through the program.
In an interview, Mayor Javier Sanchez said it was awesome to see Maestas speak up during the meeting.
“It really brought to light the very reason that we had that position that we had created for her,” Sanchez said.
He had asked her to do the invocation and prayer at the beginning of a meeting, but she was too shy.
“She’s just been a passive member, up until now,” he said. “I don’t know what it was that brought it out in her, but it was her time. We each have something to say, and we just have to wait for our time.”
Now 18, Maestas said she still feels a responsibility to respect and listen to her mother. She would probably move out if she had the money, she said. That won’t change until she pays off her car.
“I’m Hispanic, Hispanics are one of those, ‘You’re 18, but you still live under my roof, so you still have to follow my rules,” she said.