I traveled 477 miles from New York City to Lawrence,
Massachusetts, and back, to revisit Northern Essex Community College (NECC)
last week. This time I was visiting the Bridge Program, a free primer for
entering students to help them acclimate to college. These students, all Latino
and mostly Dominicano, remind me of who I was over thirty years ago: a poor kid
from the U.S.-Mexico border with no clue at Harvard. Coincidentally, this was
the same week when my wife Laura and I dropped off our son Aaron at Yale, for
the start of his freshman year.
One of the issues that stuck in my mind at NECC was this: how
do we identify and help those poor kids who are driven to move up, who are
ready to sacrifice for themselves and their families, and who are pulling
themselves up by their boot straps, awkwardly, tentatively, but with an
undeniable hunger? Because that’s how I was.
In the United States, we spend so much effort militarizing
the border, throwing money at the border security industrial complex, and
giving air-time to fear-mongers only too eager to bash poor people and their
neighborhoods. Imagine if we spent the same billions of dollars on identifying
those children of undocumented workers with stellar school records, with the
right family values to succeed, with the framework to be the best of citizens.
Imagine if we helped these young people become productive college graduates and
taxpayers.
Imagine if we made the effort to know poor Mexicano
neighborhoods like Ysleta, where I grew up, to understand which families had
disciplined parents, which families refused food stamps, like my own family,
because the parents thought it was shameful. Instead of vilifying poor families
as the parasites of society, instead of attacking these convenient and awful
abstractions in pseudo ‘arguments,’ imagine making careful distinctions.
Imagine doing the hard work of practical thinking, and implementing this as
policy.
In class at NECC, we discussed my novel From This Wicked Patch of Dust,
and then I went to lunch with the students, administrators, and teachers of the
Bridge Program. I spoke to one young woman who made an impression on me. Kiara
was focused and intelligent, she wanted to be a radiologist, her father was a
taxi driver, and her sister had already graduated from the University of
Massachusetts at Lowell, after attending NECC. I had a long
conversation with Kiara, and I could tell she was going places.
I had made that leap too, from being poor to the middle
class, with loving but tough Mexicano parents who taught me to work beyond
exhaustion and avoid the drugs and gangs of our neighborhood. I went from being
marginalized in society, ignored, and even laughed at (sometimes by other
Mexicanos and Chicanos full of envidia,
jealousy), to self-education through cultural sacrifice, financial savings
through pain, and learning-on-the-fly through fear. I saw a younger version of
myself in Kiara. Will others take the time to see this potential in individuals
like Kiara? I always have that hope.
This same week I told my son Aaron, as we moved him into
Yale’s Old Campus, that if he saw a poor student looking shell-shocked, as if
Yale were a different planet from, say, the Chihuahuan Desert, to help that
person, to give him or her advice, to be friendly. “Aaron, I was that
freshman, I didn’t even know what the Ivy League was, I was too quiet in class,
I ate alone in the dining hall, at least at the beginning, I wasn’t sure I
belonged at Harvard. I thought they had made a mistake.”
Our son Aaron is a New York City kid, savvy beyond his
years. Before this week, he had visited Yale often, as the head of the Model United
Nations group at his high school. I would have been intimidated by a freshman
like Aaron. I would have marveled at the ease with which he navigated this
strange world of the Ivy League. I know Aaron will take my advice to heart and
seek out those who need help and who want to help themselves but may not know
how. For two years in New York, Aaron volunteered to tutor poor students who
could not afford to pay for expensive private tutors. We are proud of both
Aaron and Isaac, not only for their intellectual prowess, but also for the good
citizens they have become.
What Laura and I have always taught our kids is that we are
connected to each other. Even if we struggled and succeeded, that does not mean
we should only look after ourselves. We should help those coming up, who want
what we have achieved, who have that same drive and discipline to achieve it,
who deserve a chance. By helping los de abajo, you improve your entire community. By seeing and understanding those
different from you, you remember who you were, you sharpen your empathy, you
decide to find out for yourself (and not accept what you are told). By seeking
out that ‘other,’ whoever that other may be, you will learn from them too.
