Most college students hurry across campus to head to their next class, worrying about deadlines but for 52-year-old Herica Paniagua, every step across the A-quad at Long Beach City College is a reminder of how far she has come and how close she once came to never returning at all.
After surviving the unimaginable loss of her teenage son, 15 years of addiction and more than a decade without stable housing, Paniagua is not only rebuilding her life, but will walk the stage this spring semester alongside her son Edrick Salgado, who never stopped believing in her.
Long before addiction ever entered her life, Paniagua was a single mother raising four children in West Long Beach. She worked, studied and pushed toward a better future, eventually earning a human services certificate in 2004 and becoming a certified drug and alcohol counselor.
“I was working, I was going to school, I was trying to be a mom,” she said. “I wanted to give my kids the best.”
But being the only parent, with teenagers and a newborn, came with constant pressure.
Years later, Paniagua would question whether chasing education and employment meant she missed warning signs happening inside her home.
On July 18, 2010, her 17-year-old son committed suicide. The trauma ripped open everything she had been holding together. And that moment would haunt her and her youngest son, Salgado, forever.
Just seven at the time, he was the one who found his brother.
A month later, Paniagua’s son-in-law died in a car accident, leaving her daughter with a newborn baby. Soon after, her cousin, who had just come home from prison, also died by suicide.
“In one month, everything fell apart,” she said. “I didn’t see hope.”
Her grief didn’t find counseling or healing, it found addiction.
For nearly 15 years, Paniagua was unhoused and addicted to hard drugs, moving from hotel to hotel with Salgado.
“My son never complained,” she said. “But he was the one being the parent. He was paying for hotels. He was trying to snap me out of what I was going through.”
Salgado recalled moments from his childhood when his mom would drop him off at school.
“I remember being seven or eight and crying when she dropped me off because I didn’t know if I would see her again,” he said.
Still, Paniagua couldn’t escape the cycle. “I didn’t know how to be part of society anymore. I didn’t want to be seen.”
One day in 2023, Paniagua and Salgado were walking when an LB Transit bus passed them. On the side were two words, ‘You Belong.’
“And I said to myself, I do belong. I need to go back and finish.” And that’s exactly what Paniagua did.
She returned to LBCC and so did Salgado, who was once enrolled at LBCC but took a break.
When his mother got sober and returned to school, he watched her come home excited, motivated and full of new energy.
That inspired him to register the following semester.
“I thought, if she can do it, after everything, then I can too,” Salgado said.
Walking across campus together still felt surreal for him.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Damn, I’m walking with my mom at school.’ People tell me they wish their mom could go to college with them. It makes me realize how lucky I am,” Salgado said.
Last June, Paniagua earned her Associate’s degree in Psychology. This past fall semester, she graduated again, this time with her Associate’s in Sociology, making her a double major.
Paniagua transferred to CSULB this spring semester, but plans to come back and walk the stage at LBCC, right beside Salgado, where he will also earn his Associate’s degree in Sociology and then transfer to CSULB following in his mothers footsteps.
Coming back to school for Paniagua after 15 years without having technology skills and without support would have felt impossible without the Justice Scholars Program at LBCC.
JSP supports formerly incarcerated students and system-impacted individuals integrate back into society.
Salgado isn’t part of JSP but entered school with LBCC Phoenix Scholars, a program designed to support gang-impacted youth and young adults.
Currently, the two programs are combined, attesting to Paniagua and her son on the impact the older generation has on the adolescent.
“We combined JSP and Phoenix Scholars to inspire the younger generation that if the older generation of system impacted students can go to school, so can the younger generation,” said Rosa Martinez, the outreach and recruitment specialist of the Justice Scholars Program.
Today, Paniagua has regained her family relationships. She is sober, involved and present for her grandchildren.
“If you graduate, they graduate,” she said. “That’s what motivates me.”
