It took five decades and National Hispanic Heritage month for Latino education pioneer Emma Violand-Sanchez to share some highly personal details of her immigration story.

The native of Cochabamba, Bolivia, who in 2008 became Arlington’s first Latino school board member, spoke Sept. 14 to the Arlington Historical Society about her pains and triumphs over the “culture shock” common to many who come to America.

Now 78 as a member of Arlington’s largest minority group, Violand-Sanchez continues to give back.

In 1961 in La Paz, Bolivia, her family of six sisters had to split—her father, political leader Adalberto Violand Alcazar, was exiled to Peru. “It was difficult for my mother, for economic and political reasons,” to support them, she said. “That decision reflects why it is difficult and painful to leave one’s family and culture.”

Emma at age 16 was sent to Fairfax County, where she enrolled—with only a bit of English—at Mount Vernon High School. “I’ve never forgotten driving from National Airport on the George Washington Parkway and exclaiming, This is beautiful,” she said.

She settled in Lorton. And though she did not understand American racial peculiarities at the then-segregated high school, she was light-skinned enough to qualify. A “terrifying” life with a language barrier left her “frustrated and lonely—which pushed me to work with immigrants,” she recalled. But eventually she ended up scoring the school’s first 800 on college board Spanish achievement test. That prompted her guidance counselor to “look at me in a different way, to look at the role of a first language” rather than underestimating her.

Violand-Sanchez also worked as a nanny for an American family that encouraged her to consider college. The Quaker family tutored her and wrote her “a wonderful letter of recommendation.”

After visits to the campuses of Georgetown University and Trinity College, she ended up with a scholarship to Radford, then a women’s college. There she met her first husband, Virginia Tech ROTC student Albert Giddings. Just months after their marriage in July 1967, he received his orders to ship off to Vietnam. It was in August of the tumultuous political year 1968 that she became a war widow.

A grief-stricken Emma Violand-Sanchez focused on earning her master’s at Radford in counseling. She returned to Bolivia, where she and friends organized to help isolated rural schools hire teachers. But she felt “frustrated by the glass ceiling” in her old country. Deciding to take advantage of her status as a U.S. citizen and war widow, she moved to Arlington and enrolled in George Washington University for a doctorate.

In 1976, she was hired by Arlington Public Schools as a bilingual resource teacher at Key and Patrick Henry elementary schools. The timing was right: Superintendent Larry Cuban was responding to national court decisions requiring schools to invest in English as a second language instruction, when she was made secondary school coordinator for a federal grant.

1976 also brought war refugees from Vietnam to Arlington. And in the 1980s, after a second wave of Spanish-speaking students made Wakefield High School crowded, she launched a second program at Washington-Lee (now Liberty). The 1980s brought refugees fleeing the violence in Central America, she noted, and the later student tongues would range from Urdu to Mongolian.

In 2010, Violand-Sanchez helped found the Dream Project, which continues to help immigrant students with scholarships, mentoring, family engagement and advocacy.

“Culture shock,” she says, can ease. “After you work hard, you can feel you belong here.”

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The Sycamore School, Arlington’s only nonreligious private school, celebrated its move from Ballston (behind the Holiday Inn) to Rosslyn at 1550 Wilson Blvd. The ribbon-cutting Sept. 14 was attended by members of the county board, the chamber of commerce and the Rosslyn BID. Attendees thanked Arlington Economic Development for help in the relocation.

Founded in 2017 by psychologist Karyn Ewart to provide a less-stressful alternative middle school, Sycamore’s student body of 6-8th graders has grown from 14 to 70.