Officer Juan Tejeda talks with Isabel Gallegos, vice queen of the 2018 Miss Hispanidad Virginia pageant, on Aug. 4 at the National Night Out kickoff event at Target on Forest Hill Avenue. (Photo by Parker Michels-Boyce)
Juan Tejeda is not a person who loves to be the center of attention. Overseeing the Miss Hispanidad pageant in May, he barely addressed the crowd from the microphone, preferring instead to record the event from behind a camera.
While playing a behind-the-scenes role, the 46-year-old police officer has a big impact. As president of the Hispanic American School for Advancement (HASA), Tejeda spends many evenings organizing events such as the pageant and the Hispanic Parade and Festival, kicking off today at 11 a.m.
Tejeda started HASA as a sports academy in 2011 to fill a recreation void. That same year, he started the parade, which leads to a festival at Broad Rock Park. Hundreds of spectators and participants turn out for the children’s rides, food vendors, music and dance performances featuring local residents from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Aided by a team of volunteer board members, Tejeda also runs a soccer league and a Christmastime celebratory holiday feast called Cenamos Juntos, or Eating Together, from the organization’s office in a South Richmond apartment complex.
“I saw the need for more things in the community,” he says.
HASA’s programs, he believes, benefit the Latino community by helping immigrants acclimate to the area, allowing them to show pride in their countries of origin and by cultivating new leaders.
Tejeda’s industriousness can be traced to his childhood in a village in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. When he was 7, a cyclone destroyed his father’s farm, but Tejeda was determined they would rebuild.
In a recent interview with radio host Oscar Contreras on WBTK-AM, a Spanish language station, Tejeda explained that he encouraged his father to replant beans on the farm even though they were both exhausted and overwhelmed. He told Contreras that seeing their crop flourish again was an early life lesson for him.
His journey out of the Dominican Republic only happened, he says, because the family discovered his Puerto Rican great-grandmother’s U.S. citizenship, which opened the door for her descendants to become citizens.
Tejeda moved with his family in 1989 to New York City, where they all worked in a brush factory. As a teenager, he sought to better himself by earning a GED and improving his English. He drove trucks and then operated a van service, taking Hispanic passengers between Pennsylvania and New York. While passing through Richmond as a truck driver, he decided it felt more peaceful than New York City, and he moved to the Virginia capital in 2000. Here, he worked in construction and as a mechanic, but he yearned to become a police officer. It took him years to pass the Richmond Police Department’s written entrance exam, but his difficulty mastering English motivated him to sign up for more classes.
After he joined the department in 2007, he used his bilingual skills to help the city's growing population of Spanish speakers. He also organized officers from the Second Precinct to participate in a Latino baseball league. In 2009, Tejeda became the first Hispanic officer to be named rookie of the year.
A float in the Hispanic Parade (Photo courtesy Juan Tejeda)
Two years later, when making a float for the first Hispanic Parade, he cut off the thumb on his right hand while using a table saw. It was a devastating loss that made him question his ability to continue his career. But he recovered after months of healing and therapy, and even made losing the digit a joke for children who were frightened of his disfigured hand. “Call me ‘Cuatro,’ ” Tejeda says he told kids on his beat, wiggling the four remaining fingers on his right hand and promising them a dollar every time they did so.
Later that year, Tejeda took on the role of Hispanic community liaison with the Richmond Police Department.
“I always wanted to be the kind of person the community could rely on,” he says. He acknowledges that his sense of mission takes some of the time he otherwise would spend with his wife, teenage son, adult son, adult daughter and granddaughter, though the family attends many of the events Tejeda manages.
Twice a year, he runs a Latino Citizens Police Academy.
“Juan’s Latino citizens’ academies are more family-oriented. You’ll see extended families and little kids who he includes in the activities,” says Donald Cook, a police department colleague.
Tejeda explains constitutional rights, driving under the influence, domestic violence issues, personal safety and traffic stop protocols. Participants also get to try a simulation of a traffic stop that turns violent.
He works to increase trust of officers in Spanish-speaking communities where people might be suspicious of authorities because of their immigration status or the history of corruption by officials in their native countries. The Spanish language tip line he monitors receives over a dozen calls a day. Key crime and policing issues for the Latino community here, Tejeda says, are robbery and domestic violence, as well as civil problems such as nonpayment for work.
But the Hispanic Parade and Festival allows him to put tough issues aside for a happy afternoon of music, dance and pageantry.
“Juan is a real stand-up guy. He’s very caring and understanding. He’s well-liked and respected,” says former HASA board member Michael LeBron, who is a co-host of a salsa radio show and an organizer of the Latin Jazz Festival at Dogwood Dell. “He takes servanthood to another level.”
For details about the Hispanic Parade and Festival, visit hasavirginia.org.
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