My parents
always told me they wanted a better life for my sisters, brothers, and me, better education, better jobs, better income, and better social status.
Like one time, my father said he never wanted to see me doing the kind of
work he did, construction, too dirty and too hard. He wanted me to study and
make something of myself.
In the 50s, my
mother, like most mothers, stayed home, got her husband off to work by 6 AM,
the school-aged kids off to school, the toddlers fed, the house cleaned, the grocery shopping finished, and the bills paid, you get the picture. Sometimes when money was tight, Mom had to
pick-up a part-time job at one of the many electronic or manufacturing
companies near our home on L.A.’s west side, companies with names like
Magnavox, GE, Gilfillan, Sasha Brastoff, Wynmac, and many others, mind-numbing
work, welding tiny wires together, sanding, scraping, polishing, or packaging
merchandise to ship across the county. She wanted better for her kids.
If we claimed
sickness on a school day, the thermometer better be above 97 degrees. If it was
a cold, she’d better hear phlegm in that cough. She made sure we finished our
homework before we could go out to play. She didn’t want to see any grade lower
than a B on our report cards, but for me, like vanilla toffee, the happiness stretched
to a C. That may not sound strict at all, but we came from poor to working-class families, where
many of our relatives never finished school, dropping out to work.
Whenever she
tutored me in math, she realized, there might as well have been a metal plate between the numbers and my brain,
especially when it got to word problems, like traveling 123 miles on half tank
of gas, leaving home at seven at night, stopping to fill up in Gilroy, and
arriving in Frisco at three in the morning, how much gas would your tank have, how many miles did you travel, and what time did your companion wake up? Man,
I wasn’t even old enough to drive. Forget about it. I was “out.”
From the first
day of kindergarten, having to wake up at the ungodly hour of 6:30, it was clear, I would not
be a budding young scholar. As the years passed, to play
sports and keep my guitar, I had to earn a C, what the Ivy Leagues back then
called the Gentleman’s C, to avoid having to flunk the kids of the rich and
influential, of which I was neither, but a gentleman I tried to be. My teachers
liked me, and I kept them laughing. So, my C kept me on the athletic field and in
early rock ‘n roll bands with my friends.
There went my dad’s
big dreams of my graduation from West Point Military Academy and joining the
ranks of famous generals, which he’d always tell me after he’d had a few beers
too many.
I guess both my
parents realized I didn’t have it in me to become a doctor, lawyer, banker,
movie mogul, or even bigshot construction contractor, so they settled on barber
and shipped me off to the Hollywood Barber College on Cherokee Avenue, around
the corner from the world famous, and pretty rank, Hollywood boulevard, a few
block shy of Capital Records.
In the summer of
1965, for an 18 year-old kid fresh out of a Catholic high school, the barber
college introduced me to my fellow students, mostly thirty-somethings, shysters,
gangsters, wanna-be actors, failed musicians and poets, divorcees, college dropouts, prostitutes,
and the first gay woman, Shawn, I ever met. I’ll always remember a line from a
poem one guy wrote to her, “Shawn, who always stands up in the John.” I, being
the youngest, became their pet.
Long story short, I learned education was more than just math and science. It was about thinking creatively and imaginatively, as well. I earned a university degree, wrote novels and short stories, and after administrative
stints at UC Davis, UCLA, and Cal State Dominguez Hills, I ended up teaching
English at Santa Monica Community College, a mile or so from the ocean, a
couple of miles from where I was born, and next door to the town I called home.
Did I fulfill my
parents dream and do better than they had? In their minds, they had succeeded.
When I first
started teaching, Richard Rodriguez published his controversial blockbuster
memoir Hunger of Memory. Chicano scholars, students, and activists wouldn’t accept
it. Rodriguez was revealing to the world his Ph. D and education from Stanford,
Columbia, Cal, and Warburg Institute (London) had changed him, not only could
he not identify with his Mexican parents, or his Mexican self, but, admitted,
as a child in elementary school, he was embarrassed of his parents, the smells and
noises of their house, their attempts at speaking English. He came out strongly against bilingual education and affirmative action programs, as holding kids back rather than launching them forward.
Rodriguez lived
in 1950s Sacramento, surrounded by Anglos, many racist. Because of his dark
skin, Rodriguez couldn’t hide his Mexican-ness. He couldn’t pass for Anglo,
Spanish or Italian. Between the lines, he also revealed some deeply-seated psychological issues. Though I had lighter skin, I had an idea how he felt.
I was raised on
L.A.’s west side, surrounded by Westwood, Bel-Air, Brentwood, Play del Rey, Westchester,
and Santa Monica, home to some of the wealthiest, influential, and most physically beautiful (if one accepts the European version of beauty) Americans in the country, and at one high school in West Los Angeles, the children of the elite, the working class, and the poor
met--University High School, the school of Norma Jean Baker (Marilyn Monroe), Ryan O'Neil, David Crosby, Jan and Dean, and so many others. Some friends, as adults, confessed to me it
didn’t raise their self-esteem when their dads pulled up in gardening trucks to
pick them up after school for work. Often, they’d hide or pretend they didn’t
see their father.
I’m not sure if
the same adolescent identity angst holds true for Chicanos raised on the East Side, where most of
their neighbors were other Chicanos(as). If you attended Roosevelt,
Garfield, Wilson, or Lincoln High School, you were part of a community much like yourself, the
athletic stars, the cheerleaders, the homecoming king and queen, the
A-students, the F-students, band, the slackers, school government, newspaper staff, social clubs, and the kids
most likely to succeed, looked like you, Chicanos and Chicanas. On the west side,
except for the rare exceptions, the kids “most likely to succeed” did not at all look like us, especially not at the Catholic high school I attended. They were rich beyond one's wildest dreams. They lived in mansions and sprawling estates. Some had their drivers drop them off at school, and often, there they sat, in the desk next to you. Is "bettering" ourselves relative?
How do we “better”
ourselves? I remember hearing a story of
an African American girl coming home for summer break from a prestigious
university. As she lugged in her suitcases into the house, one of her siblings
said, “Now, don’t you come in here speaking White.”
Really? Is that
what it to means to broaden our world, to talk, dress, eat, act, and think “better?” It means acting "White?” Is
that what my parents wanted for my siblings, and me, to be more “white?” I don't believe so, and I don’t
see the connection between becoming better and taking on any one particular ethnicity except one's own. Neither did my parents.
For a lot of Chicanos
raised on L.A.’s 1950 and 60s west side, whiteness, in and of itself, isn’t a
big stretch. Since many of our friends were “White,” we began speaking like
them, acting like them, eating the food, and listening to the music they did, not to copy them, more out of exposure. Some of them reciprocated, acting like us, but that was more a social class than ethnicity. Many of us stopped speaking Spanish. Some of them absorbed Chicano diction. That didn’t make us better—or worse, just
different.
My friend Marco
Sanchez tells the story about him and his close friend Junior Parsley, a kid who moved
into the Chicano neighborhood from West Virginia. As neighbors, they grew
close, hung out, and did everything together. Marco said he’d go to Junior’s
house and his mom would feed him Southern food, fried chicken, chitlings, greens,
grits, fresh biscuits, and gravy. Marco's mom had died before he reached his teens, and the Parsleys treated him like one of the family.
Marco a guitar player as a kid, whose dad
was a musician and played on the radio in the 1930s with Pedro J. Gonzalez’
band, would listen to country music on the radio, at Junior’s and try to pick
up some of the riffs. Then Junior would visit Marco’s house and clean-up on
bean and cheese burritos, menudo, chile, fresh tortillas, Marco’s older brother
practicing guitar in the other room. “It was all pretty natural,” he told me.
One thing about
growing up among “White” kids is that we quickly learned no group had a
monopoly on intelligence, athletic skill, or ethnic superiority of any kind. In school, some of the
white kids were dumb as nails and not a lick of common sense. Others were
bright as light bulbs, but then so were many Chicanos and Japanese, the
dominant groups in town.
Forget about the
Asian stereotypes, math and science whizzes. We saw some of our Japanese friends do well and succeed.
Others became con men and were "down and out." Still others turned to drugs and
ended up in jail, Japanese, baby Yakuza.
Before the
Chicano street gang that the press seemed to love for a good news story there were the car clubs, Whites, Asians, and Chicanos,
the Dukes from Venice, the Buzzards from Santa Monica, and the Falcons from West
L.A. They could be as violent as any street gang, but since white kids participated, it wasn't such a great news story.
In the 60s, Chicanos made up
most of the street gangs, but they were the minority, not the majority of kids
in town. Of the entire park where we all hung out, they occupied a tiny corner of it and hardly anybody gave them a second thought.
The vast majority of kids played sports, attended school, had hobbies,
and went on with their lives, hoping to better themselves, as their parents
dreamed. Gangs are good for news, as we see the attorney general of the United States claiming war, not against ISIS, Russia, China, or Iran, but an American street gang composed mostly of Salvadoran immigrants, ruthless in their little world, but nowhere near the fire power of North Korea. What about the "white" motorcycle gangs who control the flow of drugs throughout the world and contribute to the creation of the American street gang, or the bankers who launder billions of dollars, why isn't the government splattering their mugs on television. What is the message to the world, "Beware of Latinos?"
So does bettering
ourselves mean moving farther and farther away from the difficult lives our
grandparents lived? Does bettering ourselves mean broadening our horizons and exposing ourselves to different cultures, languages, music, foods, friends, and
ways of life?
I have relatives who
lived hard lives, turned to drugs and crime, ended up in prison, and many are
now dead, never stepping out to “better” their lives, always staying in that little corner of the park. With each generation, like my parents, I hope our children and grandchildren aspire for something “better,” something broader than we had, however
they find it.
My father was
never impressed with big houses, fancy cars, or clothes, so, I know, for him,
“better” did not mean “more.” He always talked about “nice” or “good” people,
so did my mother, about respect and manners. She filled us with sayings, like, “Give advice only when you
are asked;” “If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all; and the
granddaddy of all sayings, el mero, mero, dicho, “Dime con quien andas y te
dire quien eres,” the same advice my grandmother, a woman with no formal
education, gave to my mother, a woman who always pushed her children to better themselves.
