News Cut: November 7, 2011 Archive

You should meet: Mitch Roldan

Posted at 1:22 PM on November 7, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: You Should Meet...

When you talk to Mitch Roldan, it's tempting to divide his story in two, the part in which he was a gang member and the part in which he wasn't. "I'm very much the same person," he said, a testament to the complexities of his life and his role spanning his past and his present.

Reader Joseph Mitchell suggested the Minneapolis man for News Cut's The People You Should Know series. "His story is incredible and still ongoing," he wrote. He was right.

Roldan is the gang prevention coordinator for Centro Cultural Chicano. He acknowledges he was in a gang at one time, but doesn't want to dwell on it. "People will do anything to put food on the table," he said.

When his best friend was killed in a car accident, his uncle vowed to "help you make the right decisions." He got a job working with young people at Centro, but when his boss found out about his gang past, he was fired and moved to Houston. But the kids wouldn't let him stay. "I don't know what you did to these kids," his former boss said to him in a phone call, "but I've got a petition here from 100 of them demanding you come back, and these kids have never liked anybody." He came back.

What he did to the kids, from what I could tell, is understand them. "You take 180,000 Latino males," he said, citing national statistics, "and only 28,000 will graduate from high school. Only about 1 percent will go to college. Sixty-five to 70,000 will end up in prison. People think the difference between 12th grade in high school and college is like going from the 12th to the 13th or 14th grade," he said. "We find that it's more like going from the 12th to the 20th."

When we talked last week, he was scheduled to visit with a young man at an area school. "He doesn't want to leave the gang, and I'm not going to tell him to," he said. Instead he planned to listen and offer some ideas. The chances are good that the kid already knows who Mitch Roldan is, and he already knows "I don't snitch," he added.

Gangs, he says, give kids an identity. "When someone says to you, 'you're a Latin King,' it's often the first time they've been recognized for an achievement."

He says he doesn't do as much work with gangs as he once did. It's dangerous work and he's looking for ways to change a system. He can't do that, he says, without "credentials." He seems frustrated that for as much work as he does with Centro, and Minneapolis schools, and anti-tobacco programs he runs on Saturdays, and research work he does at the University of Minnesota, and his position on Minneapolis' Latino Advisory Committee, until he gets a college degree, he won't be able to do much more to change a system that needs changing. He's taking classes at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and hopes to transfer into the University of Minnesota.

"There's a lack of honesty in this system," he said. "I want to bring the honesty back."

He has a music career he's trying to develop, too, although he says he keeps it and his work with young people separate. Some of his work is dark and incompatible with the inspiration he's trying to give to young people.

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Do you know of someone we all should meet? Who's the most interesting person you know? Submit their name and tell me why.

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