The furor over Lou Dobbs escalated, as CNN got closer to the Latino in America airdate. A small but vocal band of protestors marched in a circle outside a few of my screenings. At others they wore buttons begging CNN to “Drop Dobbs.” The funny thing was that they’d stop protesting to welcome all the CNN people when they’d arrive at events. They were almost embarrassed to be disrupting my party. They kept telling me how much they loved CNN. They asked me for autographs and pictures. This clearly wasn’t about me. They were upset because they didn’t expect a news organization like ours to tolerate an anchor whom they heard as a one-note song.
I rarely was able to watch Lou’s show during the peak of his immigration coverage. When I was an American Morning anchor, it was on at exactly the hour I got to spend with my four kids every night before going to bed. Then I was flying around reporting on ethnic and racial minorities. I knew what the show was about. I understood the uproar. But the thing that stuck with me most about the Drop Dobbs movement was not the impact of the show that went on every night. It was the frustration of people who felt voiceless. Lou Dobbs was the only person covering the impact of illegal immigration regularly. Whatever you thought of his views and how he expressed them, it was a platform on an issue of great importance to people of all races and ethnicities. If you had something to say about immigration, there was no other place to turn. The folks who agreed with him looked thrilled to have a stage. They were deeply angry over how illegal immigration had affected their lives. The people who disagreed with him could either subject themselves to confronting a master debater on live TV or have no voice at all. A full 40 percent of Latinos are foreign born; the immigration debate is a life-changing issue.
Latino in America was not just an opportunity to go after a TV anchor. It was a chance to get heard. That is what is so vital about preserving everybody’s avenue to express himself or herself in this country. Change only happens where there is open public debate. When we put our heads together, we find solutions. I have yet to hear anyone defend our current immigration system as intelligent, right-minded, or humane. We’re not getting anywhere by letting one side shout at the other. We’re just creating a nation of young people, like that kid at Hotchkiss, who can’t quite articulate what he is so angry about. This country has seen its share of nasty First Amendment battles, but this was not about free speech. We now have more ways to express ourselves than ever before with triple digit cable channels and the exponential growth of Web sites. The problem is not that people have no place to talk; it’s that no one is listening. The flow of information is overwhelming and the quality is underwhelming.
Lou is one of a handful of TV people who ensured it was impossible to ignore them. His style and delivery were magnetic; his rage and lopsided debates were provocative. The conversation wasn’t getting anywhere, but people were listening. At first his opponents just wanted in; ultimately they also demanded equal time. They wanted to be heard.
Latino in America, just like Black in America before it, was an opportunity to hear from everybody, to explore issues with nuance. That’s why people could picket Lou but say emphatically that people also had to watch Latino in America. They weren’t going to give up a chance for visibility and voice. Latinos had been some of the biggest fans of Black in America. They wanted their own program.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ONE CHANCE TO SUCCEED
I finished the main section of my book Latino in America with a fervent wish for one young woman I had met on my journeys for the documentary “For her but also for all of us,” I wrote, “I desperately want Cindy Garcia to graduate.” Cindy Garcia was a seventeen-year-old senior at Fremont High School in East Los Angeles when I met her and she was about four weeks from graduation. I liked Cindy a lot and she was saying the right things about staying in school. But I knew she could go either way Cindy was under tremendous pressure at home, working long hours to help out her sick single mom. Still, I was hopeful the support she was finding at school would get her over the finishing line.
Graduating high school is the minimum standard you must achieve to make it, the first predictor of future success below which the odds can be grimly stacked against you. In this economy, you need a diploma just to work in a fast-food restaurant. Over the course of a lifetime, high school graduates make on average $300-, $400-, $500,000 more than nongraduates, depending on which study you look at. (Of course, these figures escalate dramatically for college graduates and post-graduates.) In this country, you can’t slip up when it comes to education. It’s a deal breaker. The person who goes far without a good education is noteworthy, an exception, an asterisk in the American dream. Yet the Pew Hispanic Research Center reported in 2010 that 41 percent of Hispanic adults twenty and older have no high school diploma (versus 23 percent for black adults and 14 percent for whites).
The devil for a lot of Latinos in this country is that they often seem to get just one shot at success. If they trip, they fall. There is a large population of Latinos facing so many social ills that one mistake, one lost opportunity, one failure brings them down. It starts with the public schools. I travel to Los Angeles to take a firsthand look and arrive in time for an explosion of sunlight and violet flowers, the signs of oncoming spring in Southern California. I can’t walk through any urban corner of this state and not think back to my days in Oakland, when pushing past the images of urban blight promised glimmers of true beauty East L.A. bears itself in colorful walls of graffiti dedicated to Latino urban legends, growling serpents and bleeding hearts, thorny flowers and messages of hope. This is the town of Stand and Deliver, with its storybook promise that any lowrider can become the next math whiz. Yet Latinos have the highest dropout rate of any ethnic group, 22 percent versus six percent for whites. Some of the worst schools are graduating no more than 30 percent of the student body on time.
I visit Garfield High, where Jaime Escalante (who died in 2010) famously tutored students to pass the Calculus AP exam. The hall floors shine of floor wax and attendance is at 90 percent. The classrooms overflow with students but they are quiet and orderly. Garfield is one of the five largest schools in the United States. Garfield reflects all the overcrowding challenges facing L.A.’s schools. Portable classrooms have overtaken the parking lot. There are three daily shifts of class to accommodate everyone. The school year is short seventeen days even though classes are taught year-round to fit everyone in. They have neither found enough space nor enough money for all these kids. At the end of the year, no more than half these kids will graduate on time. California is number one in the country in funding prisons and dead last in funding schools.
I have come to East L.A. because Latino in America needed to shed light on what a huge number of Latino teenagers face in getting a good education. Their destiny is our national destiny. Half of all of the nation’s students will be Latino by 2050, 84 percent of them U.S. born. Since 69 percent of all U.S. Latinos are of Mexican descent, the kids in this massive California school system reflect our country’s future.
Latino kids, according to the Pew Hispanic Research Center, are most likely to attend schools with the country’s worst student-teacher ratios and highest overcrowding. More than half of all Latinos are attending the largest public high schools in the nation with the poorest students. In California, 40 percent of Latinos go to large high schools full of economically disadvantaged people. From bottom to top the signs are ominous. Latinos represent one in five preschoolers yet they are the least likely to be in Head Start. Later on, they are absent from math and science classes, missing from Gifted and Talented programs; nearly half spend time learning English even though most were born here.
Language and how we use it have always been a deal breaker in this country We are resistant to living a life in two tongues. The early immigrants came from so many places that foreign languages were reserved for ethnic ghettos or your kitchen table. English was less than a generation away Latinos changed all that. They preexist the border. There was always Spanish
being spoken in parts of the United States: the Southwest, South Florida, pockets of big cities and all of Puerto Rico. So the language took root when even more Spanish speakers came after the border was drawn and redrawn. Our shared border means that Spanish speakers will continue to revitalize the language even if the rising tide of immigration reverses course. A whopping 44 percent of all Latinos report being bilingual. The number of Spanish speakers concentrates in such huge areas that in many places it is easy to never speak a word of English. The language dominates the culture of places like Miami and L.A.
America prospers most often when it embraces changes rather than resists them. Yet it angers people of all backgrounds from coast to coast that so many Latinos have not learned to speak English. It doesn’t matter that studies by the Pew Hispanic Center say that most Latino children will speak English by the time they are adults, even if their parents speak only Spanish. But the sheer numbers of Latinos struggling with the language in the schools sap resources and exacerbate conflict. Nearly half of all Latino children in U.S. public schools are learning English for the first time. Seventy percent of all Latino schoolchildren are speaking Spanish at home. L.A. spends about $8,000 a student yet is still laying off teachers and increasing class sizes. There are English teachers facing classes of 43 challenging kids, PE classes with 70 students, and guidance counselors “guiding” 650 students. People can burn with anger that an entire community seems disassociated from our nation’s common language, but that won’t get better with numbers like that.
There is something about the halls at Garfield High School that makes it surprising that not enough learning is going on. The students seem so quiet and orderly, respectful and focused. I greet so many of them that day, my first of many visits to American high schools at risk of failing their students. There is nothing separating the Latino kids in this building from the white and black kids I meet in other places. They all need the building blocks to succeed.
Steven Perry, a Connecticut educator, built from the ground up a school that defied the odds. He did it with a racially mixed student body and faculty. I spent some time with him at Capital Preparatory Magnet School near Hartford. He walked the halls, pushing students to wear the school’s official sweatshirt and keep the noise level down. He told kids to go to another school if they didn’t see themselves as college bound. His is in one of the lowest-performing districts in the nation, yet he has a nearly zero dropout rate and sends everyone off to a four-year college. His key is setting high expectations for every student. No one is supposed to be at the bottom. No one is supposed to fail. He believes that the key to making it possible to succeed is making everyone in the educational process accountable for results—including the teachers and the students’ own families. That means not accepting that something as intangible as the “system” is responsible for all the ills facing kids in public education. There has to be a point where the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of individuals, not systems, if even to hold people accountable for not expecting and demanding more than they are getting.
What maybe makes some Latinos different is that they live in a culture that venerates the family. The family is our way out, our backbone, our strength, the driving force behind our education and subsequent success. So perhaps it is the family that holds the ticket to helping Latinos overcome the challenges our schools throw in their way. I see how families propel kids to success, how they fight to get their kids into the best schools, fight to improve bad schools, fight against bad educators and budget cuts. They also have the power to establish high expectations, or not. I had two parents who were teachers. It went without saying we would learn. They both came to this country for the opportunity to study That we studied hard is a logical by-product of that journey
But studies show that a second generation away from immigration, Latinos lose touch with that commitment to learning. I won’t allow my kids to do that, but I also have the luxury of sending them to excellent schools. These families fight not just the battle of teaching their kids the value of learning, but the fight to improve their schools. The world seems so out of their control. All they can provide is a basic family structure, the building blocks for perserverance and self-esteem, key ingredients to succeeding in school. But, as Perry might say, they have to at least do that. The moment family fails, or breaks under the pressure of the world around it, the kids almost certainly get lost.
I like Cindy Garcia the moment I meet her. She is seventeen and is friendly and enthusiastic. I meet her outside John C. Fremont High School, which is near Garfield. Her eyes are speckled and she is wearing typically Californian clothes that all seem to be made of T-shirts. A tiny ring pokes through her lip. Although she has about four weeks to go before she gets out of high school she is dangerously behind. Cindy forces smiles for me every time I ask a question, her optimism pushing through an obvious sadness. We are buffeted by the many urban stresses that haunt her life. Traffic chortles around us. Her school building explodes with the sound of too many students. Planes and helicopters thunder overhead. An occasional police car siren announces the pursuit of another crime.
Cindy notices that it’s a pretty day, even though she is separated from success by thirty credits of school. She studies twelve hours a day plus Saturdays trying to catch up. She is quick to admit that she first fell behind because she skipped school so much in the ninth grade. She looks at dropouts working minimum-wage jobs and has her regrets. Her own sister got pregnant as a teenager, but Cindy still has hope.
Our country is full of kids like Cindy who keep pushing ahead despite facing ridiculous obstacles. Cindy’s high school, Fremont, only graduates 29 percent of its students in four or five years. The school has three thousand students too many Outside school, the rates of drug use, gang membership, and teen pregnancy exacerbate poverty. Cindy has sidestepped all those problems so far and she’s still on track. What she can’t avoid is what is going on in her own home. Her mother, who is from Guatemala, has lupus. Her father is from Mexico, his whereabouts unknown, as they have been for years. Her stepfather is in detention for something to do with an illegal handgun. Between attending her mother’s doctor’s appointments and her stepfather’s court appearances, she practically works a part-time job as a translator. She also has to run the family store—a clothes and shoes store—when her mother cannot. She babysits for her sister’s child and a cousin’s three kids. All those things pull her from school on a regular basis.
Cindy’s family lives life on the brink. Her mother’s home, car and business are all being threatened by the banks. The whole day, Cindy races around like a fireball of energy, but she still misses her elective classes with regularity. When she gets home all she wants to do is sleep but there’s always some job she has to do.
Her best hope is her school counselor, Marquis Jones, who remains ever hopeful, finding ways for her to make it, letting Cindy work in his office between school sessions. His own job is threatened by budget cuts, but he keeps focusing on Cindy Just when Cindy needs a helpful voice like Jones’s, L.A. cuts the $10 million Diploma Project, laying off nine thousand employees and depriving thousands of at-risk teenagers of counselors like Marquis Jones. He is spared, but he is doing a lot more work.
Cindy’s route to opportunity lies through graduating high school but she is never in a position to put herself first. She doesn’t feel that she can tell her mom she needs to be in school because her help is needed by so many people so much of the time. She’s trying to blaze a trail but she has more resposibilities than any seventeen-year-old should have to bear. But what Cindy does next brings her efforts to a crashing halt—she gets pregnant. The father is her boyfriend, a twenty-five-year-old man with brown eyes and dark short hair and prominent black eyebrows. He is a nice guy. He helps in Cindy’s mother’s store. He watches the other kids. But this is the last thing Cindy needs. Her family has run out of money to pay for her stepfather’s lawyer. They eventually lose their car and their business and are so far behind
on their mortgage that they will soon lose their house. And Cindy misses making her graduation credits because she is home nursing her morning sickness. A few months later she has her baby and hits the books again. It is daunting. She still has not graduated.
Latino in America airs in October of 2009, shortly after I publish the companion book. The reaction is mostly positive; people want more. A few folks complain that the stories are too grim. They are stunned to hear some of the statistics behind them. More than half of all Latinas are pregnant before they are twenty. Three-quarters of the country’s illegal immigrants are from Latin America. The number of hate crime attacks on Latinos rose 35 percent in just three years. I have plenty of rosy stories about our sweet success, the promises of our family’s cultural heritage, and the resilience of our faith. I tell people I do no one a favor by ignoring the challenges we face.
One thing is certain: I have given ample voice to the complexity of the immigration debate. We visit a church where I ask parishioners how devout Catholics can feel so distant from new immigrants of faith. I follow a girl who came to the United States as a child, only to be arrested and deported twenty years later, away from her American daughter to a country she doesn’t remember. I tell the remarkable story of “Marta,” who came to the United States as a kid hoping to reunite with the mother that left her as a child. She crosses the searing desert and floats across the Rio Grande in an inner tube, only to later be captured by Border Patrol. I adore her. She is just a kid. She doesn’t know about borders or border issues. She just wants her mom.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 19
