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When Rosalia Alvarez announced her intention to pursue a career in drafting, family and friends swarmed to warn her away from the male-dominated vocation.
“You will never get a job,” they harped, “nobody will hire a female drafter, especially one who is Hispanic.”
Her father went so far as to insist that women have no place in higher education, not according to his own cultural roots, at least.
But Rosalia would not be deterred. The Palo Duro High School product not only earned an associate degree in drafting from Amarillo College, she used it to land a vital role as an associate mapping technician with Xcel Energy.
These days she heads the firm’s Mapping Distribution Design Department in Amarillo and uses geographic information systems to make sure every power line, transformer and switch in the Panhandle is mapped precisely to scale.
“My first rock in the road was my very conservative family,” Rosalia, 26, admits. “My dad especially was against my going to college. He wanted me to get married and have children like my three older sisters.
“Now, though, they are proud of where I am in my life, of my independence, and I think my sisters are even a little bit jealous.”
Plenty of other rocks popped up in Rosalia’s career path. She worked at multiple jobs and searched out every available scholarship to put herself through AC’s Drafting Program, seldom able to attend full time, while receiving minimal family support.
In 2008, during her last semester at AC, Rosalia’s final exams and capstone drafting project were complicated by cancellation of her matrimonial plans, the birth of her son, and by the difficult choice she made to leave a job she’d held for six years to accept an internship with Xcel Energy.
And even after she parlayed that internship into a full-time job, Rosalia still had to deal with being a woman in a field dominated by men.
“I was nervous about that,” she said. “I knew I had to work extra hard to gain their respect, and I think I did that. At first a lot guys thought I didn’t know what I was talking about. But you know, when they do realize you have a clue, they treat you the same as everybody else.
“Xcel Energy is a great company. They gave me a chance to prove myself in a very detailed job, and it didn’t matter whether I was a female or a male. I feel like I’ve been accepted and I don’t plan on going anywhere.”
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