I Tried, I Really Did or Thanks to Second Chances

            by Daniel Cano

                                                                     

Books and Music, A Life in Education

      It was the first week of classes at the local city college, Santa Monica, a place many of us from working-class families passed on our way to the beach or to downtown Santa Monica to stock up on school clothes at J.C. Penny or Sears. I don’t remember stepping foot on campus, except to go swimming in the college pool or attend a football game. Most of the students enrolled at the college lived in the wealthier enclaves, like the Palisades, Brentwood, or the tonier parts of West L.A. and Culver City.

     My dad told me he only knew of one person who attended the local college, his friend, Mario Vasquez, who attended in the early 1940s. Mario had been an outstanding football running back at University High School, in West L.A., and the SM J.C. football coach recruited Mario to play for the Corsairs. Later, Mario attended barber college and cut the town's hair at his shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.

     Even though I attended Catholic high school, the good brothers of St. Patrick didn’t encourage students, like me, to think about college. By the tenth grade, we knew which kids they were prepping for entry into the ivy walls. I guess the brothers assumed the rest of us would become manual laborers like our fathers. There’s the irony. Our parents sent us to parochial school so we wouldn’t have to work as hard they did, so we'd do something better.

     Truth be told, I only enrolled in college when I heard the Army was offering a three-month “early out” and a monthly stipend on the G.I. Bill. Oh, sure, my parents always talked about me going to college, but they never understood the process or what it took to get us there. I guess that’s why they paid the school and trusted the brothers would take care of it.

     Growing up, I only knew my family as workers, landscapers, gardeners, construction, etc. I never saw myself as college material. All I cared about were music and sports. When I showed no inclination to college, my mother decided to send me to barber college, where I received my California’s Barber License after high school, the youngest student in the class. My mother told me it was something to “fall back on.”

     Bored and itching for adventure, I put the barber’s license away and joined the Army. After nearly three years serving Uncle Sam, I matured, reached the rank of sergeant, and was discharged, figuring I’d give college a try. I hadn’t been a bad student in high school, just nothing to brag about, mainly, due to my own lack of initiative. Put a guitar in my hand, and I’d practice for hours, a book – not so much.

     Those first days on campus, I was swimming in a sea of strange faces, a lot of guys and girls with bleach blonde hair in 1969. In most of my classes, I was the only Mexican. I pretty much stayed to myself, until one day, I ran into a guy I knew, Frank Juarez, a Chicano from Santa Monica. We were both glad to see each other. Frank was also a veteran, discharged from the Marines, so we developed a bond, brothers in arms.

     Frank was much more extroverted than I, and he introduced me to his friends from the neighborhood attending classes, not the typical scholars, some rough around the edges, even a few “cholos” who traded in khakis, white t-shirts, and Pendletons for huaraches, jeans, guayaberas, and sarapes, mostly in college to avoid the draft, like a lot of male students back then.

     Frank and his friends rounded up all the Mexicans they could find on campus and invited them to a meeting. There were maybe twenty or twenty-five of us. We were the first generation of Mexican college students from the community on campus, non-traditional students, using today’s political jargon, and we referred to ourselves as “Chicanos and Chicanas.” It wasn’t a term I’d ever used. I’d heard my dad call someone a Chicano. Some Tejanos in the Army referred to each other as Chicanos, but it had a different ring to it, more slang, as in “dude.” It wasn’t a commonly used term and had no political connotation like it did later when college students adopted it.

     As kids, we were simply Mexicans, the White kids Americans, and the Japanese just Japanese. In West L.A., where I was raised, there was only one black kid, James Walker, and he was just James, no need for a collective moniker. Anyway, that’s how it was and had always been. I recalled times when the word “Mexican” was as much a racial slur as an identifier, depending on the tone when someone said it. Mexican American always sounded so clunky and was abstract. How can somebody be two things?

     The students in the meeting began referring to the group gathered there as members of MEChA. I had a vague idea of the acronym, something about Chicanos and Aztlan, the Aztecs mythical homeland. I guess, in my mind, I was still a soldier thinking soldierly things, trying to break free of the military’s psychic chains and transition into a college student, whatever that was. I really had no idea.

     At the MEChA meeting, wild-haired guys wearing round wire-rimmed glasses filled the desks and spoke in an awkward Chicano academese. Frank and I didn’t talk about the military or Vietnam, that I remember, shy, or ashamed, of revealing our place as veterans since college kids railed against the war and anyone who fought in it. I think all of us Chicano kids were “outliers,” using Malcolm Gladwell’s term. We didn't know it, but we were opening doors for others, hopefully, our younger siblings.

     I admit, it was hard fitting in, even among other Chicanos. I didn’t feel I belonged, and even though I wasn’t college bound in high school, I still took core academic classes and worked hard enough to maintain B and C grades, except for a D in geometry. The brothers had us reading, writing and discussing esoteric topics, like the existence of God and our place in the universe. Like all good Catholic school kids, we studied and analyzed bible stories and dabbled in Latin. When I graduated, I set a benchmark for my younger siblings. Doesn't sound like much, today, when so many have college degrees.

     My father, an avid reader, never finished school, dropping out of high school to work, the same with his four siblings. My mother graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1942 and had no doubt her children would all graduate high school, and hopefully attend college, or at least work at clean, well-paying jobs. I can still hear the excitement in her voice when I called her from Fort Bragg, NC, and told her the Army had given me an “Early Out,” to enroll at SMCC. The year I'd spent in Vietnam had taken a toll on her.

     I had no idea what to expect in the MEChA meeting, I mean like why I was there or what they were up to, so I sat back and listened. It started off like any other meeting, what they call “housekeeping,” updates about financial aid and visits to universities. I could sense something brewing. Some students took the lead and, in my opinion, monopolized the discussion. Others started tossing out topics, like ideas and projects, arguing passionately, as the rest watched. I could see, right off, a couple of the “talkers” liked hearing themselves talk and took themselves way too seriously.

      I’d just spent almost three years watching and listening to some of the best “talkers” from across the country, black guys from Chicago, New York, and Philly, Chicanos from East L.A., Albuquerque, and San Antonio, and white guys from Boston, Atlanta, and Birmingham, each guy who could hold our attention during the longest all-night gab sessions. Whether they were telling the truth or not, who knew? Entertainment and insight were much more important than truth.

     Two MEChA gallos nearly came to blows. One wanted to stage a mass protest and force the administration to put burritos into all the vending machines. Another wanted to raise funds to bring El Chicano to play a concert on campus. A few, the more serious students, said we should join the anti-war protests across the country, or maybe rile up high school students for another “Blowout.” Somebody else was worried about getting arrested and kicked out of school.  

     Well, I wasn’t about to get arrested, not over burritos, anti-war marches, or blowouts. Two years earlier, after the murder of MLK, I’d patrolled the area around Howard University as Washington D.C. burned. Through the smoke, I saw the capitol, a strange sight among the charred buildings, ashes, and madness.

    I tried that semester, and the next. I really did. My head wasn’t in it, none of it, especially the studying. I thought the lectures were boring. I mean, how long can one person listen to another talk? When I realized my heart wasn’t in it either, it was too late. Two semesters had passed, and I, maybe, passed two courses.

     I quit before they kicked me out. Besides, I was smart enough to realize, I didn’t want to hang around and use up all of my G.I. Bill. I might want to return, one day, who knows, take it all more seriously, which I did, two years later, earning all A grades in every class I’d failed. 

     Eventually I transferred to a state college, Dominguez Hills, perfect for a married, older student, with kids, and a world of experience behind him. I received a fellowship to study in Spain for a year, and beyond my wildest dreams, enter the profession I once considered the bane of my existence. Books became my constant companions. I taught community college classes for the next thirty or so years, loving every semester, hoping my students would learn from my past experiences.