The youngest of five children, Keren Rivas was accustomed to being in school with one of her siblings and spending a lot of time with her family.

“We are very close-knit — that’s very normal in Latin America,” Rivas said. “We’re used to always being together.”

But now, Rivas hasn’t seen one of her sisters or been home in 11 years. The entire family has not been together for Christmas since 1997.

Born and raised in Peru, Rivas was a teenager when her father, a Protestant minister, felt his ministry was needed elsewhere. He had opportunities in Brazil, Chile and the United States. When an opportunity opened in Miami, Rivas applied for visas with her parents and sister and they received their green cards and were on their way to their new home within a year.

The two youngest of the five sisters were able to travel with their parents to the United States, as they were under 21. But the older ones could not. In 1997, the family split apart.

Rivas attended Elon University, worked hard as a student and teacher’s assistant, graduated in 2003 and eventually found her way back to her alma mater for a full-time job. She now works in the Elon University Office of Communications as the assistant director for alumni communications.

Miami heat to Burlington bliss

For Rivas, life in the United States was very different than in Peru. But moving to Miami made it a little easier. According to Statistic Atlas, around 65 percent of Miami’s population is Hispanic. Rivas was able to continue speaking Spanish and eating typical Peruvian meals as she transitioned to life in the United States.

Rivas’ family spent two years in Miami, but soon realized that there was not much need for new Spanish-speaking churches in Miami. Her father started looking for an area with a higher need for Latino ministers. Around the same time, there was a significant increase in the Hispanic population in North Carolina. Between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina’s Hispanic population grew by 302,237 people, a growth rate of nearly 400 percent.

After visiting friends in the state, her parents settled in Burlington in June 1999. They started a church while Rivas stayed in Florida for another year, finishing up her job as a secretary at a nonprofit orgranization. She wanted to go to school and study, and Burlington was the perfect setting to slow down, work and earn a degree. It also didn’t hurt that the Rivas family had fallen in love with the changing leaves in North Carolina.

“It reminded my mother of her years growing up in Chile,” Rivas said. “It made North Carolina feel more like home.”

Life at Elon

Despite the familiarity of the landscape, Burlington wasn’t as easy to adjust to as Miami.

“At first I couldn’t understand people because the accent is so thick,” Rivas said. “It’s a very different English, it took me a while to adjust.”

Rivas looked at then Elon College and Alamance Community College (ACC) as possible places to go to school. Coming from Peru, she wasn’t “prepared” for college in the same ways others were. She hadn’t saved up money for college and she had never taken the SAT.

Though she never heard back from ACC, Elon was receptive and worked with her as an international student. She started taking two classes in the spring of 2000 and charged them to a credit card.

“Elon really took a chance on me."

Keren Rivas

Assistant Director for Alumni Communications

“Elon really took a chance on me,” Rivas said. “But I told them I can do this.” She sat in the front row and told her professors to be critical of her work.

She also worked as an English as a Second Language teacher’s assistant for the Alamance-Burlington School System during her four years at Elon.

“The school system was desperate,” Rivas said. “The demographics were changing and they didn’t know how to adjust.” She took all of her classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays so she could work full time at Andrews Elementary School in North Burlington on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

At Elon, Rivas also spent a lot of time with other international students at El Centro. “El Centro wasn’t so much a place for me to continue learning English, but rather to help me acclimate culturally,” Rivas said. Though she learned English in high school, it was still hard being completely immersed in college life in a different culture.

In Rivas’ senior year at Elon, she worked as an intern for Norma Thompson, a school counselor at Graham Middle School. They worked on the CARE Project, which aimed to bring diversity training for the growing Hispanic community in the Alamance County schools. Rivas helped Thompson create a training video for all personnel in the school system.

Thompson is also an immigrant, born and raised in Mexico, and the two formed an immediate friendship. “We both experienced a lot of ignorance,” Thompson said. “People didn’t understand that being Hispanic isn’t a race, it’s an ethnic group.”

Rivas set the bar very high for all future interns.“I was always expecting other interns to be like Keren, and I was always disappointed,” Thompson said. “They didn’t have the same commitment, the same ‘Yes, I can do it’ attitude.”

Being Hispanic in the U.S.

After her graduation, Rivas continued working full time for the Alamance school system until June 2010 when she was referred to a job at the Burlington Times-News by one of her professors. She told them that though she was interested, she couldn’t start until the summer. They agreed to keep the job open for her for two months.

Rivas said she only took three days off between the two jobs.

At first, Rivas worked in general government reporting, covering general interest stories and getting to know the people in Gibsonville and Elon. After a year or two, she was assigned the court beat, which she reported on until 2010. She spent a lot of time in the courthouse checking files and lawsuits, asking questions and befriending the clerks.

She spent most of her time in superior court covering civil and criminal trials.

“It was a good way to learn the system here, an interesting look into the judicial system in America,” Rivas said. “It was very fascinating to me.”

But, her experiences with law enforcement were not always positive. Rivas still remembers one night when she was leaving her boyfriend’s house in Gibsonville and a police car stopped her. “He was clearly stopping me because of who I am,” Rivas said.

Sure enough, the police was still following her and he pulled her over minutes later. She asked him why he was stopping her and he mumbled something about an issue with the license of the person listed on the tags. The car was in her father’s name and his driver’s license was in order. So was hers. Eventually, the officer let her go.

The following day, she called the Gibsonville police chief and asked him, “What is the reason for somebody to be stopped if there is no apparent reason for it? Because if you’re not profiling then what is it?”

She also called around to other departments asking about their motivations for deciding who to stop. It all came down to what an officer considers to be a “reasonable suspicion.” Rivas was infuriated in that moment ­— she knew she had been profiled.

But Rivas has gained resilience from her hardships.

“I think that by being a minority, Keren was very aware of how misinformed people are about Hispanics,” Thompson said.

Returning to Elon

In 2010, Rivas started working in the Elon University Office of Communications as the assistant director for academic communications. She transitioned to her current role in fall 2012. Her job ranges from coordinating print and digital communications for alumni events, to populating the homecoming website, to serving as editor for the quarterly Magazine of Elon, which has an average circulation more than 30,000.

“The magazine illustrates the importance of giving back to the school,” Rivas said. “It’s a way to show the impact giving has and a way to listen to the stories of students and alumni and what Elon means to them.”

Persist and inspire

Rivas has persevered through the hardships that immigrants face in the United States. “Her experiences give her a better sense of the things that actually matter; she doesn’t sweat the small stuff,” said Katie DeGraff, her colleague in the communications office. But she has enjoyed the greater freedom she has as a woman.

The way Rivas describes it, the working culture in Peru is much different than the United States. For women, older than 30 years old finding or keeping a job is more difficult. Employers are always looking for someone younger, more driven by a “macho” culture.

Rivas is the proudest of being able to do what she wants to do, without the pressures of being a wife, having kids or being able to cook. “In Peru, women are still in the 18th century,” Rivas said.

“They’re expected to stay home and cook. But I don’t cook; I often say I don’t do it as a way to rebel against the expectations of my gender.”

But Rivas does not want simply to persist or rebel, she wants to lead and inspire. If Rivas ever decides to go back home, she said she, “will focus on empowering women in my country.”