Elisa Velasco ’23, a 2023 Napier Award for Creative Leadership recipient as well as a Projects for Peace awardee, designed and implemented a nine-week program called Sin Límites (Without Limits) last summer for 21 Latina/o high school students in her hometown of Norman, Oklahoma. The program emphasized community engagement, Latina/o history and college access, and provided transportation and meals. Nine students earned small college scholarships through the program.

In addition to creative activities, students in the Oklahoma program created by Elisa Velasco’23 went on field trips, connected with community organizations and met Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina astronaut to travel to space.

The Napier Award provides $20,000 to carry out a social change project, while Projects for Peace grants $10,000 to “pursue innovative, community-centered and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues.”

The Napier Initiative is a partnership between the Pilgrim Place community in Claremont and the five undergraduate Claremont Colleges to encourage leadership for social change. Members of the Napier Initiative council with ties to Pomona include Paula Martin Hui ’67 P’01 P’07, Richard “Dick” Johnson ’66 P’96, Emerita Professor of Sociology Jill Grigsby, Draper Center Assistant Director Rita Shaw and honorary member David Menefee-Libey, the William A. Johnson Professor of Government and professor of politics.

Amanda Eric ’25 has been awarded the 2023 Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service, which provides students with up to $50,000 in financial aid, travel experiences and a network of mentors and leaders to support them.

Velasco, at middle front in black top, designed and led a nine-week program for 21 teenagers in her hometown of Norman, Oklahoma. She is pictured here with students and other young assistants.

A cognitive science major from Delaware, Eric plans to focus on helping to transform front-line communities facing challenges from global climate change. “I aim to utilize cognitive justice to advance climate resiliency in communities with limited resources, capacity, safety nets and bureaucratic power,” she says.

Angie Zhou ’25 Claims National Singles Tennis Title

A year after reaching the title match as a first-year player, Pomona-Pitzer’s Angie Zhou ’25 claimed the 2023 NCAA Division III singles championship in women’s tennis with a 6-2, 6-2 victory over Olivia Soffer of Babson College on May 22 at the USTA National Campus in Orlando, Florida.

Zhou became the fourth Sagehen to be crowned singles champion since the NCAA began holding a women’s competition in 1982, joining Shelley Keeler ’92 (1992), Claire Turchi ’97 (1994) and Siobhan Finicane ’10 (2008).

Zhou, a two-time Intercollegiate Tennis Association first-team All-American and the 2023 SCIAC Athlete of the Year in women’s tennis, also was selected the 2023 D-III Honda Athlete of the Year for Tennis, one of 11 finalists for Honda’s D-III Athlete of the Year.

A computer science major from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Zhou arrived at Pomona as a National Merit Scholarship recipient and National AP Scholar.

Cesar Meza ‘16 is completing doctoral studies in mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis.

As a freshman at Fontana High School, Cesar Meza ’16 was suspicious of the offer to join the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS), a college access program that aims to increase the pool of area students prepared to enter highly selective colleges and universities.

Go to a town called “Claremont”—an unfamiliar place even though it was less than 20 miles from home—move into a Pomona College residence hall for four weeks every summer, take rigorous classes to become more competitive for college, eat in the dining hall every day—and not pay a dime? “Too good to be true,” thought Meza, who planned to bolt the first time he was asked for money.

Three years later—not having paid a single penny for his three summers in the PAYS program—Meza moved into a college dorm again. This time it was as an enrolled first-year student at Pomona.

This past summer, Meza—now a doctoral student in mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis—returned to Pomona to again teach math in the PAYS program during its 21st summer. Aiming for a career as a professor, Meza says his goal is to make math come alive in the classroom, just as PAYS professors did for him a decade ago.

“Some students start out saying, ‘I’m not a math person,’” he says. “Or they say, ‘I didn’t think I’d be able to do these types of problems when the course started but by the end, I feel comfortable enough to try harder things next time.’ That’s one of the things that brings me joy.

“I have an opportunity to teach at PAYS and to give back to the program and help other students realize what an opportunity it is,” Meza says. And he knows from personal experience: “This is a life-changing thing.”

The PAYS program, founded in 2003, is highly selective. This year, there were 214 applicants for 30 available spots in the incoming cohort. Participants come from low-income or underrepresented groups in a five-county area of Southern California. The goal is to help them prepare for enrollment and success in college. Selected students commit to a three-year program that begins after their first year in high school and includes an annual four-week residential summer program, plus connections with Pomona College faculty and staff during each school year.

The summer program is challenging—nearly three hours of intensive math or critical inquiry reading in the morning, with elective classes and study sessions in the afternoon. Rising seniors conduct hands-on research with faculty—a group of 2022 PAYS students undertook a project using the revolutionary CRISPR gene-editing technology, a method co-discovered by 2020 Nobel Prize laureate Jennifer Doudna ’85.

At the annual closing ceremony on the Pomona campus, PAYS alumni who have just graduated from high school return to announce where they will be attending college. Six hundred students have completed the program since its inception, and every one of them has been accepted to a four-year college or university. Some have chosen Pomona or other members of The Claremont Colleges, while others selected UCs, CSUs or Stanford. Others have gone to Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Princeton or Yale.

Being part of a cohort for three years helps the students form a sense of community. As one PAYS scholar says, there is “academic rigor, but we are together.”

The Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections’ citrus industry archives include the Oglesby Citrus Label Collection donated by the late Emeritus Professor of Biology Larry C. Oglesby and his wife, Alice. Special Collections also houses the David Boulé California Orange Collection, the Matt Garcia Papers on citrus and farm laborers, and the California Citrus Industry Collection, collected and gifted by Claremont Heritage.

The heyday of Claremont’s citrus industry in the first half of the 20th century is long past, but vibrant examples of crate labels featuring local scenes endure. The 1908 Carnegie Building, depicted below, served as the library of both Pomona College and the city of Claremont until 1914. Today, it houses classrooms and offices for politics, international relations, public policy analysis and economics.

Mason Hall, (presented below), was completed in 1923 as a state-of-the-art chemistry facility, is 100 years old this year, as is Crookshank Hall, originally a zoology building.

Today, Mason is home to classrooms and offices for history and languages, and Crookshank houses the English Department and media studies. In this view from what is now Stanley Academic Quad, Mason is at center and the building at left is Harwood Hall for Botany, built in 1915 and demolished in 1968. The displayed labels are from the Oglesby Citrus Label Collection. The late Professor of Biology Larry C. Oglesby, also known as “Doc O” to some, taught at Pomona for 30 years and was a mentor to several of the alumni featured in this issue, including Doug Bush’94, Cathy Corison ’75 and Kim Selkoe ’97.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, celebrating its centennial this year, hosted its first varsity college football game on October 6, 1923, with the USC Trojans playing none other than the Sagehens of Pomona College. (See story) The citrus label commemorates the 1932 Olympic Games, with the Coliseum’s famous peristyle incorporated below.

As commercial art, labels weren’t signed by the artists and lacked descriptions, though some might not have represented actual scenes. The image below at first suggests Bridges Auditorium, built in 1931, but Bridges has five double-height arches on each side, among other differences.

The idealized vision of the citrus industry and life in a college town depicted on crate labels was not the experience of everyone in Claremont and surrounding areas. The Matt Garcia Papers in The Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections include research materials such as photos, oral histories and newspaper clippings related to Garcia’s book A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970. This image of citrus pickers in San Dimas around 1930 from the Pomona Public Library collection is included in Garcia’s book and used as its cover image.

Photo courtesy of Frashers Fotos Collection/HJG