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Editor’s note: This story is first in a KVPR/Merced FOCUS series called “Landing a Dream,” which looks at efforts by students at a Merced high school to pursue careers in the arts.
On a May night at Golden Valley High School, students were five minutes into the opening number of the final musical of the year: Legally Blonde Jr.
Jacqueline Ortega-Barajas was at the back of the stage, tucking herself behind the hand-constructed wooden set. She was waiting for the main character, Elle, to burst through for a fast-paced costume change.
The doors swung open. Within less than 10 seconds, Ortega-Barajas helped Elle pull on a sparkly hot pink skirt and glittery white cardigan.
“We got it!” she said, as the actor playing Elle strutted through the doors to the front of the stage.
As a “costumer,” this was one of five outfit changes Ortega-Barajas managed for the musical. Legally Blonde Jr. was her final production before she graduated in June.
She dreams of being a costume designer for movies, and her theater teacher thinks she’s talented enough.
But she is not so sure it can happen.
Ortega-Barajas says there are many aspects pulling her back from pursuing her dream.
“It’s the money, the going away,” she explained.
Not to mention the biggest obstacle: leaving her family.
Both her parents emigrated to the United States from Mexico for better economic opportunities . Ortega-Barajas is their only daughter and she would be the first in her family to go to college.
Now that she and her brothers have been raised in Merced, her parents want them all to reap the potential benefits, like graduating high school, going to college, and pursuing the careers of their dreams. Despite the fear of leaving her home behind, Ortega-Barajas wants to attend fashion school in Los Angeles.
“I feel like I would go homesick really quickly,” she said. “I feel like…going out there quickly would be kind of devastating.”
Family is just one of the factors that often holds students back from jumping into dream careers like the performing arts. Ortega-Barajas lives in Merced, a city in the San Joaquin Valley where one of the clearest career paths is agriculture.
Still, a good portion of students have increasingly become interested in the performing arts – a career path that would provide what some view as the American Dream. But for many of these students, their path is riddled with barriers.
Even though county and state funding help subsidize performing arts education for students like Ortega-Barajas, sometimes that isn’t enough to overcome personal challenges.
Interest in the arts grows
Merced is a city of around 90,000 people in the heart of one of the most abundant agricultural regions in the world. Poverty throughout the county is higher than the state average, and so is unemployment.
County data show high school graduation rates are consistently higher than the state’s, but only one in nine residents have a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
According to 2024 data from the state’s Employment Development Department, 15 of the county’s top 25 employers are categorized as either agriculture or healthcare. Indeed, at Merced Union High School District, where Ortega Barajas recently graduated, agriculture and natural resources holds the most student interest of any career pathway available for students.
Called career technical education pathways, they’re selected by students from grades nine through 12 in order to advance job skills in their areas of interest.
The arts, media and entertainment pathway, introduced in 2017, ranks second among student interest. Last school year, the pathway enrolled 3,408 students.
The arts in Merced are also being supported by recent local and state funding. Proposition 28, a statewide measure from the 2022 ballot that went into effect last school year, requires K-12 schools to allocate a proportion of their budgets to arts and music instruction.
On top of that, Golden Valley High School theater teacher Amber Kirby received around $4,000 from California’s Career Technical Education Incentive Grant, got teachers from the visual arts pathway to contribute another about $3,000 from the same grant and received a $3,250 grant from the Merced County Education Foundation to bring students on an intensive, week-long field trip to Los Angeles in March. She began offering the trips in 2021, and the county funding allowed her to expand the number of students who can attend.
Ortega-Barajas was one of 17 students in her school’s arts program selected to attend the field trip, of nearly 100 who applied. Once in Los Angeles, Kirby, the teacher, arranged tours, workshops, and even portfolio reviews and auditions at competitive arts colleges for students.
Kirby tells her students they should be a part of what they regularly see on their phones and even Netflix.
“Our whole lives are arts, media, and entertainment, and so I tell them, ‘I want you guys to be the producers of it,’” she said.
Students later expressed to her that the trip showed them what’s possible.
“They don’t just see it as, ‘I’m just doing this for high school,’” Kirby said. “They start seeing it as ‘I’m doing this for my portfolio. I’m doing this for my future.’”
Ortega-Barajas saw her future during the trip.
On their visit to the costume museum at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, a college in downtown Los Angeles, she entered the front door, and was immediately drawn to two mannequins decked out in pink cowgirl and cowboy suits from the movie “Barbie.”
Upon closer inspection, she saw she shared the same first name with the movie’s costume designer,Jacqueline Durran.
Ortega-Barajas broke down in tears.
“That could be my name right there,” she said.
Kirby agreed. She knows Ortega-Barajas has the passion and the skill.
There didn’t used to be a costumer at Golden Valley High School before Ortega-Barajas, her teacher, Kirby, said.
“She saw the need, I saw her talent,” Kirby said.
Despite dreams, reality sets in
After the field trip, Ortega-Barajas soon landed back in reality.
Family. Money. Leaving home. All of it came back to her mind.
She said her parents have been supportive of her dreams. During the last couple of years, her dad, a construction manager, helped her make elaborate props for her musicals – like a centaur for a production about popular young-adult fictional hero Percy Jackson. Her mom offered to sign her up for a sewing class.
But mom and dad have also admitted to their daughter the thought of leaving home scares them, too.
They would worry for her safety, and their own happiness. Ortega-Barajas says she’s the closest to her parents of her two siblings. She helps her parents stay active, accompanying them to her productions or family parties.
Sitting in their living room one afternoon, surrounded by displays of family pride – including family photos and her brother’s high school diploma — her mom, Angelica Ortega, told her in Spanish, “If you went, it would change our situation a lot. You are the light.”
Ortega-Barajas said she’s not ready to leave home yet, either. She doesn’t want to leave her friends behind, and a part of her isn’t even sure she’s skilled enough for the Fashion Institute in Los Angeles, she shares.
“Realistically, I don’t feel ready,” she said. “I don’t feel like I can make it out there.”
But despite casting doubt in herself, she’s thought through a plan she thinks can work. First, she said, she’ll graduate from Merced Community College. By then, she added, she’ll have more confidence and maturity, and only then she’ll apply to the Fashion Institute.
She said she’s not losing the dream, just deferring it.
“Slowly climbing my way up the ladder to the moon, if that can be possible,” she chuckled back at the costume museum while gazing at the cowboy suits. “One step at a time, like an astronaut.”
