Mexicans in U.S. : Education: It Knows No Boundary

Jorge Salman knew his children would pick up some English in this border city, where hot dogs are sold on the street and teen-agers listen to rock ‘n’ roll on American radio stations.

But Salman, who owns a garment factory that exports to the United States, did not want his four children to speak street English. He wanted them to be fluent and articulate. And he wanted them to understand American culture as well as the language.

“We planned our family; we thought it was important for the children to speak the schooled English that I would like to speak,” Salman said. “I consider it a great advantage to be bilingual and bicultural, to have two sources of information.”

So, like scores of well-to-do Mexican border families, the Salmans take their four children across the international boundary each Monday through Friday to Catholic schools in the United States.

And they bring them home to Mexico again each afternoon.

Car Pools to Schools

The Mexican students travel in car pools--for up to an hour and 20 minutes, if traffic is backed up at the border--to Sacred Heart School in Coronado, St. Augustine High School and Academy of Our Lady of Peace in San Diego, and other parochial schools.

Their journey is the first step on a road to success that some expect will lead to Ivy League universities and careers modeled after their parents’. Along the way, it also can lead to upsetting cultural clashes for the students, who sometimes feel like outsiders at school.

The students include the sons and daughters of some of Baja California’s leading business and political families, and although their names are not widely recognized north of the border, the rosters of Mexican students and alumni from these schools read like a Baja Who’s Who.

Noted Baja Alumnae

Our Lady of Peace girls’ school--with 20 students from Tijuana out of 550--counts among its alumnae a Baja California senator, the wife of the governor, and the wife and two daughters of the mayor of Tijuana.

Baja California Gov. Xicotencatl Leyva Mortera briefly attended St. Augustine. The 600-student boys’ school currently has 25 students from Tijuana, including the sons of the owners of the largest department store and food store chains in Baja California, and two former presidents of the Tijuana National Chamber of Commerce.

The students are links in an increasingly entwined border society, where business, commerce, family and language defy a barbed-wire fence that attempts to separate the two countries. Some were born in the United States to Mexican parents, making them dual citizens until they turn 18.

Sister Dolores Anchondo, principal of Our Lady of Peace, said the children from Tijuana belie the stereotype that some American students have of poor, uneducated Mexicans.

“They’re wealthier than three-fourths of the kids here,” Anchondo said. “It was the same where I went to school.”

At Anchondo’s alma mater, the Loretto Academy in El Paso, 80 girls from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, are among the 440 students enrolled. They not only enter another country when they head for school, but also change time zones.

For many of these Mexican border families, an American Catholic education has become a tradition.

“A good many of the kids from Tijuana are relatives of alumni,” said St. Augustine’s principal, Father John Pejza. “I think it’s a kind of status symbol for some of them. They want it for their brothers, nephews, children. . . . There is kind of an old boy’s network of alumni.”

Opportunity Stressed

The Mexican parents say it is opportunity, not prestige, that entices them to send their children across the border each day, paying tuition ranging from about $1,000 to $2,200 per year. They are equipping their sons and daughters for success with a bilingual education that combines religious training, rigorous academics and discipline.

The parents want their children to learn to cope in a new environment, to have the choice of studying at Mexican or American universities, to be able to conduct business on both sides of the border.

The students say they mix with their American peers at school and are influenced by American tastes in music and clothes. The principal of Sacred Heart, Sister Mary Hope, points out that Tijuana students excel at her school: Two of the last three student body presidents were from Tijuana, and twice in the last five years, Tijuana girls represented the school in the county spelling bee.

The Mexican students agree with their parents on the benefits of a cross-border education, but say that battling stereotypes can be painful. No matter how versed they become in English and American culture, some say, they still are treated as foreigners at school. They say their closest friends are Mexican.

‘It Still Hurts’

“Some of my (Mexican) friends don’t like Americans,” said Salim Salman, 17, a junior at St. Augustine. “They (the Americans) ask if I live in small huts in Mexico. If we are late because of the wait at the border, they say, ‘Oh, the Border Patrol got you.’ They’re just kidding, but it still hurts.”

His 14-year-old sister, Beyka, added that she resents the portrayal of Mexico in her social studies books at Sacred Heart, because “it doesn’t show the good things in Mexico.”

Some Mexican scholars argue that it is important for children to understand Mexican values and to have formed a national identity before they are immersed in another culture.

Jorge Bustamante, a sociologist and director of the Center for the Study of the Northern Border of Mexico, says the U.S. education system teaches that “the American way” is best and encourages students to assimilate into U.S. culture.

“The American educational system makes you feel like an outsider if you are not WASP (white, Anglo Saxon and Protestant). Generally, all of the heroic images are blond and blue-eyed. Perhaps some are black, but they are not brown-skinned Mexicans,” said Bustamante, who studied at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. His two children are in school in Tijuana, but he expects them to attend college in the United States.

“You must understand your own value system before you are ready to understand a foreign system,” he said.

Rejecting Culture Feared

If not, it is possible students will reject their own culture and, in extreme cases, turn against it. The schism, he said, can produce “our own version of Mexican racism.”

But the parents who send their children to study in the United States say they also take great pains to ensure that their offspring do not lose their Mexican heritage.

Maria Emilia Ollervides put her son and daughter in grammar school in Tijuana before sending them to junior high in San Diego.

“That way they acquire their roots. They know who they are and what it is to be Mexican,” she said.

Ollervides, a Tijuana native who learned English at a Catholic school in El Cajon, said she wants her 15-year-old son, Roberto, to experience a foreign environment as she did.

“If I put Roberto in a Mexican school, he will have an easier time. Here it is a little more difficult because he is not on his terrain, but that is going to make him that much stronger in the world,” she said.

No English at Home

Salman’s three daughters are forbidden to speak Spanish at Sacred Heart School and are not allowed to speak English at home. They are corrected quickly if an English word creeps into their Spanish vocabulary.

When their brother, Salim, attended seventh and eighth grades at Sacred Heart, he also went to public school in Tijuana at night.

Mexicans from the interior of the country often criticize border residents for becoming too oriented toward the United States, but for most in Tijuana the cultural blend is a fact of life--one they say many Americans fail to recognize.

“The culture along the border is that we are all Americanized and the Americans are Mexicanized. They don’t know it, but they are,” Ollervides said. “A lot of Americans miss a lot when they go across the border and don’t speak Spanish.”

Ollervides said her son’s St. Augustine education is essential for the future she hopes is in store for him. She would like to see him take over his father’s business, a chemical distributing company in Tijuana.

The parents say they believe home life has a greater influence on children than school and that they can instill Mexican values and traditions through their close-knit families.

In Car Pool 14 Years

The mothers, many of whom do not work outside the home, also focus a great deal of attention on their children. Rosario Salman has been driving in a car pool to and from U.S. schools for 14 years--three times a week for half of those years.

Concepcion Salceda, whose son, Ignacio, is a senior at St. Augustine, not only drives in a car pool, but volunteers all day each Wednesday at the school library.

“We expect Ignacio to read in both languages, to read both (U.S. and Mexican) newspapers and to discuss internal political matters in Mexico. He is not left out at home, and then he brings us into his world as well,” she said.

The Mexican students seem mature beyond their years and mirror the ambitions their parents have for them. Ignacio Salceda, 17, has applied to Harvard, Yale, Stanford and UC San Diego and says that even in Mexico, a U.S. education can only help him.

“Look, the (Mexican) president went to Harvard. Look at the Mexican cabinet. The treasury secretary went to Harvard and some of them went to the London School of Economics,” Salceda said.

Salceda, who was born in the United States and raised in Tijuana, will have to pick either U.S. or Mexican citizenship when he turns 18. Although both his parents are Mexican, Salceda said he believes he will choose the United States.

“I think I have become immersed in America. I am reading it, I watch it on TV and being at St. Augustine. My world view is more from an American perspective,” Salceda said.

“The United States is a huge magnet, and it attracts things. But your roots don’t disappear when branches come out of the trunk,” he said. “I have seen two countries. I live in two countries, two societies.”