Antonio Esquibel’s life changed while he was cleaning a bathroom.
The year was 1964 and Metro State’s newest Board of Trustee member
and former migrant farm worker was working as a janitor at Adams State
College in Alamosa, Colo. “I heard a bunch of students outside the
bathroom talking and I thought, ‘These guys are dumber than I am.’ So I
got off my knees and said to my boss, ‘I’d like to go to college.’”
Working one-and-a-half jobs and taking overloads, Esquibel graduated cum laude
in 33 months with a Spanish major, a Latin minor and a teaching
certificate and over the next 40 years, this veteran educator, would
distinguish himself as both a maverick and savvy administrator.
Teaching at his alma mater, Englewood High School, Esquibel and his
students organized Denver’s first Cinco de Mayo celebration, which the
school board tried to quash. He antagonized the school board again when
he joined other activists in a hunger strike supporting farm worker’s
rights.
Impressed with Esquibel’s initiative, the University of Southern
Colorado hired him as an assistant professor, where he taught
everything from social psychology and mental hygiene to Introduction to
Chicano Studies. In Pueblo he launched another Cinco de Mayo
celebration and spearheaded a progressive training program for
elementary school teachers, for which he received the Award for
Distinguished Achievement from the American Association of Colleges of
Teacher Education.
He would earn his master’s in educational administration/bilingual
education from New Mexico Highlands University and his Ph.D. in
administration and supervision from the University of New Mexico, where
he wrote his dissertation on Chicano administrators in higher education.
By the time he came to Metro State as vice president of Student
Affairs, Esquibel had amassed a vast array of experiences from teaching
high school and training elementary school teachers to teaching college
students and recruiting minority students to conducting research and,
for a short stint, producing a Spanish-language TV show.
For 11 years, Esquibel served as Metro State’s student affairs V.P.,
but eventually he returned to the classroom as a tenured professor
of Spanish (he’s now professor emeritus). But it was after he retired
that he encountered his toughest job: As director of the Rocky Mountain
SER Denver Head Start, a job that meant dealing with nutrition,
transportation, facilities, education, personnel and pre-schoolers.
With experience spanning pre-school through post-doc, Esquibel, who
serves on the board’s finance and academic and student affairs
sub-committees, hopes to influence a number of areas at Metro State
They include fundraising, campus infrastructure, retention, teacher
training and the College’s goal of becoming an Hispanic Serving
Institution.
“I have a wide variety of experience to bring to the board. I can
relate to the migrant kids and I can relate to the faculty and their
concerns about pay-for-performance. (And, as a former administrator) I
can read budgets.
“For a guy who started out as a farm worker,” he says, “I’m blessed to be here.”
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