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Rebecca Ramirez discovered at the age of 8 that she was a Latina, a revelation that contradicted everything she had learned while growing up. She was raised speaking English, her mother spoke the English language perfectly, and her father had a slight Spanish accent when he talked, but nothing that ever sparked Ramirez’s curiosity.

On top of that, Ramirez lived in a middle-class suburb and attended middle-class suburban schools. Sure, her mother liked to make tortillas from scratch, and Ramirez recalls eating a lot of beans, but she never put two and two together until her family moved south. It was in Star County, Texas – the poorest county in the state – that Ramirez learned that she was a Latina, the same place where she had to teach herself the Spanish language in order to communicate with her relatives.

This was her turning point.

It was this childhood discovery and a subsequent sequence of life-changing events that transformed Ramirez’s outlook on life and ultimately her culture. From this moment on, Ramirez internalized her culture, embodied the Latino heritage and advocated equal rights and protection in movements across the nation.

Her passion, her dedication and most of all, her love of the Latino culture can be seen every day in her work at The Xochipilli Children’s Center, an early-childhood education center that teaches children between the ages of 2 and 5 how to speak Spanish and English as well as how to embrace different cultures.

Currently, 94 students are enrolled at the center, most of whom are receiving subsidies through the Iowa Department of Human Services, which Ramirez said is the center’s main financial supporter.

“It’s not just A-B-C, 1-2-3,” Ramirez said. “Getting kindergarten-ready is not just the basics anymore. We have a lot of children here who are brought up in different cultures, so it’s a lot of education and that is why I am so passionate about it, because nobody is doing anything that we are doing here.”

The child-care center, which also serves as a preschool, has teachers who speak only English, including volunteers from Des Moines Independent Community School District, as well as teachers who speak only Spanish, two of whom have bachelor’s and master’s degrees from schools in their countries of origin. However, the majority of the 11 teachers are bilingual.

This bilingual environment infiltrates the curriculum and creates an environment that is unique to the center, Ramirez said, one that encourages using and respecting both languages.

“The first four years of a child’s life are the most important; your brain is like a sponge,” she said. “Why would we want to wait until they are in junior high or high school for them to learn another language?”

Ramirez said most of the students who graduate from the center fluently speak both languages and enter kindergarten at a first-grade reading level.

“I think our main focus when we started the program was the large dropout rate in high school,” she said. “So you’re looking at this foundation here. You know that if you give the child a good early start and you get the parents involved, it’s going to help that child succeed.”

But at Xochipilli, success is measured by more than just the formal education; it’s also measured by the amount of pride young children feel about their culture and their heritage, Ramirez said.

“It’s very important to educate, but we also want to empower them,” she said. “And so we also give them the pride. We bring them the importance of culture and their heritage and how important it is to keep it. We don’t care what culture they have; we just want them to keep it, and that is very important.”

Ramirez recalled one moment when an 8-year-old boy came into the center ashamed of and embarrassed by his heritage.

“I saw this child and he said he wished he wasn’t Mexican, and that he wished he was American, and he didn’t want to speak Spanish,” she recalled. “And it hurt. He wasn’t proud of who he was. But then again, how can you be proud if you see your mom and dad being humiliated because of their language and their culture? It’s so hard. We want them to be proud of who they are, no matter what culture it is. We talk about pride of your family, and that is the first thing we talk about, pride.”

For Ramirez, pride extends beyond the classrooms of Xochipilli and into the preservation of the building. Ramirez said the school, which is sometimes given negative connotations solely based on its location at 828 S.E. Scott Ave., is a landmark for the Latino community in Des Moines and will continue to reside “in the bottoms.”

“A lot of people are scared of the environment and the location,” she said, “because people think of it as being very negative, poor, and the bottoms are like the worst place to be at. Sure, our building looks like it’s falling apart from the outside, but on the inside, it’s like, boom. So we just say it’s our little diamond in the coal mine.”

Though the school has received offers to move out to West Des Moines or Urbandale into bigger, newer and grander facilities, Ramirez has rejected them”We have to (stay here),” she said. “This has history in it. This is who we are, this is where we started from, and this is our hub. This is our home, and people can relate to it.”