Mother and daughter will take another walk at UNLV

Friday, May 13, 2005 | 9:55 a.m.

Mother-and-daughter team Norah and Chelsie Campbell could be twins save for the age gap between them.

They dress alike, finish each other's sentences and do almost everything together -- including college.

On Saturday morning, Norah, 54, and Chelsie, 25, will graduate from UNLV together for the second time.

Norah, who came to the United States on a "Freedom Flight" from Cuba as a political refugee in 1971, will receive her master's degree in foreign languages, and Chelsie will receive a law degree from the Boyd School of Law.

The duo first walked across the graduation stage together in 2001; Norah with her bachelor's degree in Spanish and Chelsie with a double bachelor's degree in Spanish and broadcast journalism.

The pair are two of the more unique graduates among 2,332 students earning their degrees from UNLV on Saturday, about 8.5 percent of whom are Hispanic. About 28 percent overall are from a minority group.

Both women are advocates for the Hispanic community on political, immigration and educational issues and use their own collegial success as a way of motivating other Hispanics to go to college.

They also helped found the Young Latino Democrats of Nevada in 2003, which pushes young people to vote.

Both are important to Norah because of her upbringing in Cuba, she said, and she engrained those values in her daughter at an early age.

Having had to flee the country under Castro's regime before attending college, Norah said she made a point of pushing college by taking Chelsie to visit UNLV as a kid and by never giving up on her own goal of earning a degree.

"That was my goal," Norah said, speaking in the Moyer Student Union Thursday morning after she and her daughter stayed up until 4 a.m. studying for finals together. "I wanted to teach Chelsie that she could do it. She could do it, we could do it and we all can do it."

Norah, however, had to do it "little by little," and Chelsie said she started joking with her mother at age 6 that she would someday catch up to her in college.

"I told her then that we would graduate together," said Chelsie, who took on extra classes each semester to make it happen. Chelsie is the managing editor for "Nevada Family" magazine and its Spanish equivalent, "La Familia."

Norah's progress was slowed down by her husband Alan's nine-year bout with Leukemia, which forced the family to move from Las Vegas to Los Angeles for several years. During that time Norah said she tried to balance the needs of her family with her work as a teaching assistant and her classes at a community college.

Alan, a casino manager, supported Norah's wish to earn a degree and told her to make sure both she and Chelsie finished college if he died.

"It was something I had to do," Norah said.

Norah's mother, Hilda Requeira, worked at the University of Havana when she was a child and helped the student protesters there hide from Fulgencio Batista Zaldmvar's soldiers prior to Fidel Castro's revolution, and she saved one student from execution. For that time and culture, her divorced mother was "muy valiente," Norah said.

"Courageous," Chelsie translated.

In those days, everyone liked Castro as an alternative to Batista, but Castro "lied to everyone," Norah said. Soon after he took power he began enforcing his Communist regime, Norah said, eroding freedom of speech and other civil liberties and forcing kids to work on farm camps in exchange for their education.

Her mother couldn't handle that, Norah said, especially after Castro starting telling people they couldn't believe in God or go to church. Her mother somehow got a visa out of the country, and then made arrangements for the rest of the family to follow her to the United States. Castro wouldn't allow members of one family to leave together.

"She did a lot to make sure we had a decent life," Norah said of her mother, now 81 and living in Los Angeles.

The pair entered UNLV together in 1997, and took several classes together. At first, Norah's mother tried to tell her not to "follow her daughter" so much but Chelsie ended up following Norah by adding the Spanish degree.

Although Norah inspired her daughter to go to college, Chelsie said she often had to convince her mother to actually go to class.

"Our roles are kind of reversed," said Chelsie, who described herself as the "more serious one" and her mother as "more relaxed."

"She'll be like, 'Chelsie, I don't want to go to class,' and I'll be 'Mom, we have to go to class.' "

But both decided their bachelor's degrees weren't quite enough. Already active in politics, Chelsie decided to pursue the law degree and now plans to open her own practice specializing in immigration, family and criminal law. Norah teaches English as a Second Language at the Community College of Southern Nevada and is considering a Ph.D.

Education "opens doors," Norah said, "Even if you are 54."