Her path had many obstacles

LEWISTON – Mia Bautista’s love of the law came from those closest to her not abiding by it.

She’s now a deputy prosecutor for Nez Perce County and hasn’t allowed her difficult past to affect her.

On Oct. 10, she was awarded the Horatio Alger Alumnus of the Year Award in Williamsburg, Va. It’s a national honor for people who have succeeded despite difficult circumstances.

After being selected from 37 applicants, she found herself giving an acceptance speech after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I consider myself successful and hope to speak at schools and tell others my story,” says Bautista, a 28-year-old with a passion for the law and mentoring troubled youths

The Horatio Alger Association for Distinguished Americans was founded in 1947, named after poet and author Horatio Alger Jr., who wrote rags-to-riches stories. The association gives scholarships to high school students like Bautista each year and honors high-achieving individuals.

“She has taken her adversity head-on and helps her community and her profession,” says Anthony Hutcherson, communications specialist for the Horatio Alger Association.

Bautista’s story comes flowing out of her mouth freely, as she has told it before and will probably tell it many more times as encouragement for others who think they’re in hopeless situations.

She grew up in Chisholm, Minn., born to a 15-year-old single mother. Her parents married and then divorced. Her mother married a man Bautista refers to as the “wicked stepfather.”

He would often say racist things to the half-Filipino girl and physically abuse her. It didn’t help that Chisholm was a mostly white town.

“I remember sitting in the bath when I was younger and trying to scrub the color off my skin,” she says.

Eventually, the stepfather was arrested and sent to prison for molesting boys. Her mother turned to drugs and alcohol for support.

This rough life caught up with Bautista’s mother, and she was put in jail for selling drugs. By the age of 11, Bautista was taking care of her siblings, often while her mother was clinching a drug deal.

“I remember sitting in the back of a police car being taken away and being scared,” she says of the day the police came to take them to another home.

Not many foster homes were willing to take in her and four siblings.

Eventually, they were sent to a group home she says was like “kiddie prison.”

Consequently, she says, she and her brothers and sisters were forced to grow up fast. A foster home was found that would take in all of them, and with that came an important change in Bautista’s life.

She calls the 26-year-old woman with whom they were placed “my personal hero to this day.”

“That was the turning point in my life, and I made the decision that I wasn’t going to allow this to push me down.”

The siblings were shuttled back and forth between the foster home and her mother, who was out of jail.

She blames this on an out-of-touch court system, which led her to want to go into law and become a prosecutor. At 16, she made the decision to move in with her grandparents and focus on school.

“I decided to dive in, because I realized getting a scholarship was the only way to pay for college.”

The second turning point in her life was receiving a scholarship. She was one of two Minnesota high school seniors in 1994 to receive a Horatio Alger scholarship for college.

“I got to go to Washington (D.C.), and that just opened my eyes. I wasn’t the only one who had struggled. It was inspiring.”

Bautista took advantage of a program allowing her to take college courses during high school and graduated with her associate’s degree the day after getting her high school diploma.

Somewhere in there, she had time to make the first of two dreams she had as a little girl come true – being a beauty queen.

“I was Miss Teen Minnesota,” she says, with a slightly embarrassed smile.

From there, she went on to complete her second dream of becoming a lawyer. She got her bachelor’s degree in psychology at the age of 20 from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., and then went to law school at the University of Idaho, graduating in 2002.

Since working in the prosecutor’s office, she has worked on many cases involving domestic violence, as well as felonies.

“Domestic violence is just something I have no tolerance for. It’s kind of a soap-box topic for me.”

Her ultimate goal is to be a judge, she says. Her Alger Association award came with a $10,000 grant, which she hopes to use to pay off some student loans and also donate some to her high school in Minnesota.

After working with some troubled girls on juvenile probation, she recently started a pilot program for mentoring them.

For now she’s focusing on telling her story in the hope it will inspire others to make something of themselves.