Bonilla’s drive to help others began with family
They arrived in North Carolina in 2000, Jakelin Bonilla remembers. She was 10 years old. Perhaps the worst part of the cross-country journey was showing up on the first day of school unable to speak a word of English.
Nearly a century after the railroad arrived in Siler City in the 1880s, the town remained a sleepy Southern burg of a few thousand souls. Roughly half the town was white, the other half black.
But in the 1990s, outsiders began trickling into Siler City, people who knew little about the town except that it was a destination point for work – either in the chicken slaughterhouse or the aging textile mills.
Soon, the trickle turned into a tide.
Some came from Mexico. Others from Central America. Still others, like the Bonilla family, traveled across the country from East Los Angeles. The parents and their seven children crowded into the taco truck that had been, and remained, the family’s means of income.
They arrived in North Carolina in 2000, Jakelin Bonilla remembers. She was 10 years old. Perhaps the worst part of the cross-country journey was showing up on the first day of school unable to speak a word of English.
None of her brothers or sisters could, either, Bonilla said, “and nobody at the school seemed to know what to do with us.”
Carolina reaches out
Mary Williams met Bonilla four years later at Jordan-Matthews High School during Bonilla’s sophomore year when Williams was a Truman Scholar just starting her sophomore year at Carolina.
They met as part of Carolina’s Scholars’ Latino Initiative, created to offer promising sophomores like Bonilla three years of one-on-one mentoring and enrichment opportunities. By the time Bonilla entered high school, nearly a third of the student population was Hispanic.
Williams served first as a mentor, and eventually as a trusted friend.
“Jakelin was both exactly like other students at Jordan-Matthews – and yet totally unique,” Williams said. “Like many of her classmates, she came from a large, close-knit family. She had many friends and a drive to do well.”
But two qualities set her apart: her maturity and her curiosity. Whereas most students her age were thinking about their next class, Bonilla was mapping out the next stage of her life, Williams said.
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