[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 21]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 31224-31226]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                       TRIBUTE TO MANUEL MONTOYA

                                 ______
                                 

                             HON. TOM UDALL

                             of new mexico

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, November 18, 1999

  Mr. UDALL of New Mexico. Mr. Speaker, it makes me very proud to rise 
before the House of Representatives to recognize Manuel Montoya from 
Mora, NM. Just a few weeks ago Manuel began his studies at Oxford, 
England as a Rhodes Scholar. Manuel is a graduate of the University of 
New Mexico and is one of only 32 students nationwide to earn the much 
coveted scholarship named in honor of philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. And 
just last year Manuel also earned the distinguished Truman Scholarship. 
I want to recognize Manuel for bringing honor to his family, his 
community and to New Mexico.
  Manuel was born and raised in Rainsville, in the County of Mora. He 
lost his father at an early age. Through his faith and his gifts, he 
has turned tragedy into inspiration and misfortune into strength, both 
for himself and for those around him. The County of Mora is one of the 
most economically disadvantaged counties in our country. The county 
confronts all of the challenges that affect rural America today. 
Although stricken by poverty, Mora is one of the wealthiest counties in 
spirit in our country, rich in culture and history with its Hispanic 
Heritage, rich in beauty with its mountains, valleys and rivers, rich 
in people that place the highest value on family, honor and respect. 
And Mora is rich in faith and rich in hope. The best of Mora is 
personified in Manuel Montoya and he has made our State and his 
community very proud.
  On behalf of all New Mexicans I want him to know that he is in our 
thoughts and we look forward to his many successes. Manuel, La Gente de 
Mora y de Nuevo Mexico estan Contigo.
  Thank you Mr. Speaker, I ask that a copy of the newspaper article 
recognizing Manuel's accomplishments also be placed in the Record.

             [From the Santa Fe New Mexican, Dec. 8, 1999]

                  Mora Native Wins Rhodes Scholarship

                             (By Kim Baca)

       As a boy, Manuel-Julian Rudolfo Montoya of Mora wrote 
     stories about his father--his favorite hero next to Batman.
       In his stories, his father helped him and the family. 
     Montoya was 7 when his father died, but the child never 
     forgot the things his father taught him--especially things 
     about trust, honor and leadership.
       It may be those things that helped the 21-year-old 
     University of New Mexico senior become one of 32 American 
     students named a Rhodes scholar Saturday.
       ``I am not proud of the accomplishment, but what it means 
     to all those people that helped me get there,'' Montoya said. 
     ``This is by no means my scholarship; it belongs to a lot of 
     people--to my family, to my friends, my community. It belongs 
     to UNM and everybody has the right to celebrate that.''
       The prestigious scholarship program was created in 1902 by 
     British philanthropist and colonial pioneer Cecil J. Rhodes 
     to help students from English colonies and the United States 
     attend Oxford University in England for two or three years.

[[Page 31225]]

       The scholarship, which pays all college and university 
     fees, is one of the oldest international study awards 
     available to students.
       Montoya, a 1995 Mora High School graduate, has a long list 
     of achievements. After graduating as valedictorian, he was 
     awarded the Regents Scholarship, a four-year grant given to 
     New Mexico's highest achievers. While in college, the English 
     and economics double major helped establish a rural honors 
     program for high school students in honor of his father.
       Earlier this year, he was named a Truman Scholar--a 
     national scholarship project named after President Harry S. 
     Truman and given to college juniors who have extensive 
     records of public service and outstanding leadership 
     potential.
       After he was awarded the Truman scholarship, his advisers 
     in the honors program at UNM encouraged him to apply for the 
     Rhodes program.
       Rebecca Vigil, Montoya's English teacher at Mora High 
     School, said news of the scholarship comes as no surprise to 
     her.
       ``He has always been dedicated and committed. I always 
     thought he would succeed.'' she said. ``It's great that he 
     has received this honor, not just for him but the entire 
     community.''
       Mary Lou Sanchez, a guidance counselor for Mora schools, 
     also remembers Montoya as an exceptional student.
       ``His written and verbal communication was always 
     outstanding,'' she said. ``He has always been a leader.''
       In addition to playing pool, guitar and writing poetry, 
     Montoya is also helping build a museum in Mora. The museum 
     will contain the history and genealogy of Mora residents.
       Montoya's mother Mary Louise Montoya, said her son has 
     always been a quick learner. His first language was Spanish, 
     but he learned English immediately.
       ``He was a lector at our church at the age of 7,'' she 
     said. ``He taught a confirmation class when he was still in 
     high school.''
       Montoya is one of a dozen Rhodes scholars residing in New 
     Mexico. The last person to receive a Rhodes scholarship at 
     UNM was in the 1970s.
       In September, Montoya will leave for England and study law. 
     After his term at Oxford, Montoya plans to go to Stanford 
     University law school.
       ``It's my dream to become a litigator and provide legal 
     services for the underprivileged,'' he said. Montoya would 
     also like to create a think tank to study public policy.

                                  ____
                                  

                    [From the Santa Fe New Mexican]

                       The Best and the Brightest

                            (By Monica Soto)

       Mora--The Mora River rises in the Rincon Range, east of the 
     Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and flows to the west and to the 
     south until it fuses with the Canadian River north of 
     Sabinoso.
       Generations of families have lived and died near the river. 
     This is where Manuel-Julian Rudolpho Montoya, the Rhodes 
     Scholar, was born.
       His story, his journey, is simple really. It begins and it 
     ends in Mora, a place too beautiful for words, where the most 
     brilliant flowers bloom in the muddiest of waters.
       Montoya, 22, stands in a field and stares at his birth 
     home. The gray A-frame house is empty; it has been for a long 
     time.
       The wind rushes past him, and he sees images of his father, 
     Rudy William Montoya, washing the family's 1972 Plymouth 
     Duster and of his mother, Mary Louise, cooking dinner. He 
     sees the forbidden cookie jar atop the highest kitchen shelf. 
     He closes his eyes and smiles.
       ``I've come realize this as the turning point in my life 
     because it meant a harder life for me,'' he says, then 
     pauses. ``Why live life if it's not hard? I seek the 
     virtues.''
       Montoya, who graduated last month from The University of 
     New Mexico with degrees in English and economics, leaves 
     Sept. 25 for Oxford University, the first UNM student to be 
     named a Rhodes Scholar since 1978. Montoya last year was 
     named a Truman Scholar, a distinction bestowed upon college 
     juniors who have extensive records of public service and 
     outstanding leadership potential.
       If Montoya represents the future of New Mexico, then he 
     wants his home-town of Mora to be celebrated for this gift. 
     It is the place where he experienced unconditional love, 
     punctuated by deep pain, where he gained the wisdom to know 
     that his experiences, both good and bad, have shaped him into 
     a worthy man.
       Montoya was born Dec. 9, 1976, but his story begins a 
     generation before that.
       Mary Louise Martinez was born Feb. 12, 1953, to Francisco 
     and Dolores Martinez in Mora. Rudy William Montoya was born 
     Oct. 2, 1953, to Ambrosio and Celena Montoya in Rainsville, 
     10 minutes away.
       For the first 15 years of their lives, the two never 
     crossed paths. Then on a spring day, halfway through 
     adolescence, Rudy William Montoya and Mary Louise Martinez 
     attended the same eighth-grade picnic in the Tres Ritos area, 
     near the river.
       Mary Louise didn't know how to swim. And she knew what 
     happened at these types of functions. Someone always got 
     flung in the river. This time it was her.
       Her classmates must have thought she was joking when she 
     started to scream for help. She panicked and went under 
     water. Rudy William jumped in the river. He saved her life.
       Both were freezing when they emerged from the frigid 
     waters. Mary Louise had brought a beach towel to the picnic. 
     They wrapped themselves in it and sat on a log, beneath a 
     tree.
       ``Really shyly, he got my hand and he held it,'' she 
     remembers. ``That was the start.''
       Mary Louise and Rudy William went to every basketball game, 
     every dance together from their freshman through senior 
     years. They graduated from Mora High School in 1972. They 
     were married the following August.
       Manuel was the first born. Francisco followed four years 
     later on April 12, 1981. Rudy William Louis, the baby, was 
     born Dec. 22, 1984.
       The elder Rudy William was a hard-working man with a gentle 
     soul, a man who had grand dreams for his family. The heavy-
     equipment operator planned to build a split-level house in 
     Rainsville on property he and Mary Louise inherited from the 
     Montoya family.
       Rudy William already had begun digging the trenches to lay 
     the foundation of the house when on April 17, 1984, he 
     responded to a call for help and was shot. He died a day 
     later.
       Mary Louise says the events surrounding her husband's death 
     are things that are still too painful to discuss, only to say 
     that he was ``an innocent victim to a violent crime. He had 
     no idea what he was walking into.''
       She can still remember how Montoya, just this little boy, 
     walked around the house and prayed fervently in every room 
     the day his father died. And the moment at which Montoya 
     became a man.
       The family held the funeral in Rainsville. When the casket 
     opened, when Montoya first laid eyes upon his father, he 
     didn't cry. Rather he clasped his hands together and incanted 
     The Lord's Prayer, very clearly, very loudly.
       After her husband's death, Mary Louise says she did 
     everything she could so Montoya didn't have to feel like he 
     was the man of the house, but that ``he took on a lot of 
     responsibility within himself.''
       Montoya's patriarchal role was, in ways, inevitable. 
     Montoya's younger brothers went to him for guidance and 
     advice. He fixed their problems the way he imagined his 
     father would.
       Montoya had numerous uncles to draw guidance from. He was 
     nevertheless painfully aware that his own father was, in his 
     words, ``a guardian angel now.''
       He spoke of his struggles once to a group of peers at a 
     student government conference. He modeled his speech after 
     the words of Martin Luther King Jr. ``I speak of the trials 
     in my life not to gain your sympathy, but to gain your 
     understanding.''
       Montoya says his father's death and the struggles he went 
     through as a result pushed him to excel in ways that he felt 
     would honor his father's memory.
       ``I love his memory more than anything in this world,'' he 
     says. ``It compels me every day.''
       As a single parent, Mary Louise doesn't describe her life 
     with her three sons as one in which she played dual roles as 
     mother and father. They leaned a lot on both the Martinez and 
     Montoya families--people whom she refers to as ``very 
     special.''
       The dynamics of her own family was such that every son--
     Montoya, Francisco, and Rudy William--played an integral role 
     in keeping the family together.
       Mary Louise says all four of them made decisions on the 
     finances and even discussed emotional issues. When she 
     decided to return to school to receive an associate's degree, 
     all four of the family members studied together.
       ``It took the four of us to do what we've done,'' she says. 
     ``It took the four of us to pull together.''
       It's been 15 years now. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.
       ``I remember somebody asked me one time how I felt,'' she 
     says. ``I always wondered, how are you supposed to answer 
     that? But I did real truthfully saying, `I feel like I'm cut 
     in half. I'm missing half of me. And it's not crosswise, it's 
     lengthwise.'
       ``We truly were one, and that's how it's always going to 
     be.''


                           A promising youth

       Montoya always had shown promise. He learned both English 
     and Spanish at an early age but preferred to speak Spanish 
     before he began school. Neighbors would traipse into his 
     grandmother's house to watch him stand on the coffee table, 
     with his little guitar, and sing Spanish church hymns.
       ``I can remember he was a voracious reader,'' says 
     Quirinita Martinez, his third-grade teacher. ``He could read 
     and read and read.''
       By the time Montoya was in high school, he understood 
     clearly the educational opportunities he missed growing up in 
     a rural community. His high school did not offer calculus or 
     an honors English program because of the lack of demand. His 
     school library did not carry Machiavelli's The Prince or 
     Aristotle's Ethicos as standard texts.
       The more people held Montoya up as an anomaly, the more he 
     believed that he was no different than his peers.
       ``I saw them struggling through a system where they said, 
     `If you don't do this or that,

[[Page 31226]]

     you're a loser,' '' he says. ``That's unacceptable to me.''
       In college, Montoya spent a summer writing a proposal to 
     the Mora School Board that would implement a general honors 
     program at the high school. The program would set up 
     independent studies for students who had exhausted the school 
     district's traditional options.
       Montoya wrote in his proposal that an instructor would 
     craft semester-long lesson plans for each student. A student 
     who enrolled in a class on contemporary, moral and ethical 
     issues, for instance, would read books such as Mary Shelley's 
     Frankenstein to gain insight into such issues as 
     ``euthanasia, genetic cloning, chemical testing on animals 
     and humans, freedom-of-speech issues and hate crime.'' He 
     included a 40-page economic analysis.
       The school board signed the proposal in August 1997. The 
     board later rescinded the program because it could not fund 
     an instructor to oversee it, Montoya says.
       Montoya says he was disappointed by the outcome, but that 
     he has not given up on his project.
       ``Next time I'm going to have everything ready to go,'' he 
     says. ``No questions, no doubts.''
       Montoya also has worked diligently on another long-term 
     project--to build an archive and museum that would house the 
     town's family and cultural histories. He envisions a Plaza 
     where the community could gather; Mora no longer has one.
       Montoya, who has been accepted to Stanford Law School, says 
     he also dreams of the day when each person is appreciated for 
     his or her potential, when his brothers are held up for their 
     talents, just as he has been celebrated for his.
       ``One time, my grandfather made a china cabinet with no 
     nails, structurally sound,'' he says. ``My brother 
     (Francisco) can do that. It's something that I envy in him. 
     The time hasn't come where they say that this is just as 
     beautiful as being a Rhodes Scholar, and that bothers me.''
       Toby Duran, director for the Center for Regional Studies 
     and the Center for Southwest Research at UNM, worked with 
     Montoya on the museum proposal. Duran says that one of the 
     first things they discussed was Montoya's dream of becoming a 
     United States Supreme Court Justice.
       ``I was impressed by his boldness,'' says Duran, who gave 
     Montoya a fellowship that enabled him to spend time preparing 
     his Rhodes Scholar application. ``He has a way of feeling for 
     things and for people, but in addition to that, he uses 
     reason. He's able to balance that very well.''
       Friends and family, those who have influenced Montoya, say 
     that despite his rigorous intellect, he is stripped of 
     pretension. Montoya's dream is to return to Mora and practice 
     law with his closest confidant, Cyrus Martinez, also a Mora 
     High School graduate.
       The Rev. Tim Martinez, who was once a pastor in Mora, 
     explains it this way:
       ``For a lot of people that grow up in rural communities, 
     they have to leave before they realize the value of their 
     upbringing,'' he says. ``He realized the value long before he 
     left his community. He carries that with him, always.''


                       A date at the White House

       Montoya will participate in a White House ceremony before 
     he leaves to study jurisprudence philosophy in England. He 
     will meet President Clinton and members of the U.S. Supreme 
     Court.
       Even then, Montoya says he will be ``the farm boy from Mora 
     making messes in my mother's kitchen.'' And for that, he is 
     immensely proud.
       `I don't learn things without them being fixed in human 
     experience,'' he says. ``The facts can exist without human 
     experience, but the truth cannot.''
       The truth, Montoya says, is that he is a culmination of 
     many lives and many lessons, the embodiment of a town. He is 
     his uncle, the Vietnam veteran and his Godmother, a shy and 
     humble woman; he is his father, hardworking and unapologetic, 
     and the viejo who plants a tree at the chapel each year.
       He is also a man, now--one who has made it his life's 
     mission not to allow his people to lose hope.
       ``If you don't surrender to your community, you will never 
     unify what you have inside of you,'' he says. ``It's 
     indescribable. It's a healing that I have yet to 
     comprehend.''

                                  ____
                                  

                        Addressing A Generation

       Manuel-Julian Rudolpho Montoya's speech for The University 
     of New Mexico's general commencement ceremony in May:
       What then, I ask myself, shall we do this fine morning? How 
     will we give praise to our education and our light?
       I say we shout.
       Shout in honor of the gathering. Give praise to your 
     talents and those who lay hands on that talent. Form a song, 
     without words and without beat save the rhythm of the many 
     standing alongside you. Hear the rhyme of one language in 
     unison as we shout in shades of Black, Yellow, Brown, White 
     and Red. Shout in colors, shout in creeds. Shout in praise of 
     the legacies that brought you here. Shout difference! Shout 
     unity! And remember that they do not betray each other, they 
     simply approach your soul from one end to the other.
       Dance.
       Dance in honor of your celebration. Give substances to the 
     presence of our smiles and our laughter. In our dancing, let 
     us love the greatness of this day, for it is a day that we 
     recognize the trials of wisdom and knowledge brought to bear 
     upon our very souls.
       Cry.
       Cry in honor of your suffering. Give it a voice so that it 
     may surrender to the echoes of healing among our communities. 
     Give it to the ignorant, so they may have heard that pain of 
     their brothers and sisters.
       Fight.
       Fight with your minds. Gather your faculties in honor of 
     the shouting, the dancing and the crying. Give them reason 
     for existing. Validate them. Look to your minds and recognize 
     the great unifier within you. Reconcile your pain with the 
     promise of a better day because you fought with your mind. 
     Know that you have learned all you can so that one day 
     learning can take its place in the symphony of change.
       Fight with your heart. Fight with kindness and do not 
     relent when the wits of the many sway against the singular 
     revolt of your heart. Cherish your passion and let it bleed 
     for your neighbor. In this lies the hand that picks up our 
     enemies and cares for them.
       Let us now be called forth and have our names announced to 
     the community. Call my name, for in it you evoke the legacy 
     of my grandmothers and grandfathers. My beloved father and 
     mother. My brothers. My friends. My family. My happiness and 
     strength. Let it be called because our name shall ring the 
     truth of my veneration for my community. Mora, New Mexico. Mi 
     tierra y my vida.
       Let us call the names of our graduates. Let their names 
     ring forever in the past. So today, as we call names and hand 
     diplomas, let us celebrate the world that lives alive and 
     well within us.
       Bless you all.

       

                          ____________________