kids these days

Throughout May, commencement speakers everywhere beseech young graduates to embrace opportunity as they step into a bright future. Each graduate has a story about his or her journey to this day. Some have traversed dark and challenging terrain ...

For those, the light is especially brilliant.

If the School of Hard Knocks were a real place, Woodrow senior RogelIo MaRtInez could write the textbook. nothing about the 20-year-old’s upbringing was easy, but as a sophomore in high school, Martinez found something at Woodrow that changed everything for him — lisa Moya King’s dance class.

Martinez and his siblings lived with his grandparents in East Dallas for the first half of his life. His mom skipped out on them when Martinez was a baby, and his alcoholic father was deported to Mexico when Martinez was about 7, he says. The year his dad was deported was the first year Martinez failed a grade, but it wasn’t the last.

When he was about 12 or 13, his grandparents moved to Mexico, and he and his twin brother and older sister moved in with their oldest sister and her family. His sister’s husband was anything but welcoming. Martinez says his brother-in-law abused him verbally and physically and threatened to hurt his family if he told anyone about it. That year Martinez failed another grade.

At that point his mom began reaching out to him and his siblings. One day she showed up at the door and took him and his brother away to a small ranch in North Texas outside of Paris, he recalls, but because of her ever-present drinking problem, things weren’t much better.

“I was over there because of what happened, but I never wanted to be there. I just wanted to be here because my whole family was here,” he says. “We were there because we were stuck there.”

When his oldest sister visited them and saw how they were living, she brought Martinez back to Dallas, he says. That year Martinez started going to Woodrow as a freshman.

“The situation when I was living with her was the same, but I didn’t care. I was like, as long as I’m back I don’t care,” he explains. “I always kept an eye on my brother-in-law. I just tried to avoid him.”

The next year, during his sophomore year, Martinez discovered Lisa Moya King’s dance class at Woodrow.

“I started staying after school to practice, and I liked it a lot because I wasn’t at home. I was away from home, I was here doing something that caught my attention, I would forget about everything,” he explains.

Not only did he enjoy it, he excelled at it. Dance opened up a new world to him, and before long he was doing things he never knew were possible.

“I danced everything, and I was a really fast learner. I put all my mind into it,” he says. “People always see me as a quiet person, and when I would dance I would be different. I just love performing, just the way it feels. It’s like freedom, you know?”

But when his brother-in-law found out he was dancing, Martinez says things became worse. He says there were days he couldn’t dance because he was hurt too badly, but he refused to give it up.

Over the years, King became a huge part of his life, he says.

“I saw her as a mom, because I never really had one,” he says. “She took care of me and stuff. A lot of my life I felt like a bother, because of my brother-in-law and because of how other people treated me, but when I was with her, she would talk to me about ‘how’s this and that?’ and she would be after me with my classes, you know, basically like a mom.”

Martinez’ feelings about dance are not uncommon, King says. In her eyes, her dancers are one giant family, and she’s the second mom to them all. “They just take care of each other and keep each other accountable,” she says.

In the four years that King has taught at Woodrow, the Woodrow dance program has grown to be the largest in DISD, and it has been a life-changer for many kids, King says.

“What happens with the students is they come to dance at Woodrow with a very narrow definition of what dance is,” she says. “The transformation happens when they realize that dance is about expression; it’s about individuality.

“So what it does, is it starts this process of self-discovery. They start confronting their fears, they start trying new things, and I think what happens is that transformation carries onto trying anything in life, getting that self-confidence of, ‘You know what, I can do this. I wonder what else I can do in life?’

So it just broadened their horizons, and before you know it they’re going, ‘You know what, I can go to college. I am capable. I can do something with my life.’ And not only that, but it’s through dance that they start developing really strong work ethic. They know that they have to work hard if they want to do well, and then they start doing well in the rest of their classes.”

For Martinez, dance was the reason to go to school, he says. One day his sister told him she was going to take him to live with his mom, but Martinez didn’t want to leave Woodrow. He called King to tell her goodbye, and she and her husband convinced him that, because he was old enough to live on his own, he had a choice. “That same night, I took a backpack, and I just left,” he said.

Now Martinez is 20 years old and a senior. He still dances whatever he can whenever he can, he says. Dance gave him the motivation to go to school and the confidence to do well at it. Now he’s counting down the days until high school graduation. After that, he plans to go on to either college or the Army.

“Because of my family,” he explains. “I saw them and learned from their mistakes, and because I want to do something. I want to prove my brother-in-law wrong, that I am able to do something.”