Cultures Mingle in School Melting Pot

I’m thinking about junior high school. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but I read a booklet that 190 kids at La Merced Intermediate School in Montebello put together, and I started to drift back.

Two teachers at La Merced, Sue Brennan and Alyce Gold, encouraged their seventh- and eighth-graders to interview their parents and grandparents about how their families came to America, what rituals they brought with them and how family heritage has been passed on.

The idea, Gold said, was to cut through the unspoken barriers between kids from different cultures, barriers that can harden into prejudice if they are not explored.

“I think all children have the basic need to be like everybody else,” Gold said. “We wanted them to be proud of their backgrounds and not try to hide them. In many instances, they found out things they would not have learned had they not been encouraged to interview their parents and grandparents.”

I envy those kids. I started junior high in the early 1960s in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, a place that was so new that venerable merchants would quickly boast of “serving the community since 1958.” Everybody had just moved from somewhere else, starting fresh, and there seemed to be an overwhelming, unspoken push to assimilate.

So if you’d asked me what countries my classmates’ families had immigrated from--even my closest friends--I probably couldn’t have told you. If you’d asked me exactly what it was that made some kids seem different from me, beyond the Anglo-Latino line, I couldn’t have explained. Discussion of ethnic or racial or religious origins extended no further than occasional childish slurs.

That silence was the perfect vacuum for racism to fester. Talking about those differences, exploring each other’s heritage, would have broken through it, but we weren’t there to discover our differences. We were there to fit in. So we did not learn from each other. We made guesses about each other, and often they were wrong, and sometimes they hurt.

That will not happen among Gold’s and Brennan’s students. The booklet they created is a rainbow of tradition, a testament to the dignity of hard passages. Any child lucky enough to both contribute to a book like this and read the contributions of his classmates will be hard pressed to ever again dismiss someone simply because of color or traits or grammar.

See what you think. Slide your memory back to age 12 or 13, with its concomitant confusion, and listen to one of your classmates, So Ly, describe how she came from Vietnam:

”. . . We went on a ship with other families. . . . Every time the ship would shake kind of hard, I got real scared. Sometimes I yelled. . . . We reached an island in Indonesia. . . . The first few days I did not get much sleep at night . . . the wolves were howling. . . . In Los Angeles, my uncle was waiting. . . . After a few days my uncle found a house for us. . . . I do not have bad dreams anymore.”

Listen to Giovanni Mauro interview his grandfather, who came here from Italy in his 60s and described a youth of poverty and an adulthood spent in a rougher version of American sharecropping. Giovanni titled his interview, “Just Like a Slave.”

Listen to Cindy Gold interview her grandmother about the flight of Russian Jews, finding out “many things I never knew happened to her parents,” like the death of one child just before the ship sailed for Ellis Island and the death of another on board.

Listen to the stories of tradition: Clifford Chiu describing how Chinese parents choose a name for a child, Javier Ramos on how his father kills a goat for a feast in tribute to a newborn child, Liz Arenas on the fiesta de los quince anos , in which Latino girls celebrate their 15th birthday.

Listen to stories of holidays: Tina Zinman describing Hanukkah, Monique Viengkhou telling about the Chinese New Year, George Ramirez on how Christmas in Mexico, known as the Posadas, is celebrated over 10 days. Maydeen Masuda explaining why Japanese women are advised not to do housework on New Year’s Day and Betty Soto on the midnight fireworks of Guatemala’s independence day.

Listen to the superstitions: Norma Saucedo’s family cutting part of a plant and throwing it into the middle of the street for good luck, Josie Sirineo on when a sneeze means bad luck, Yvette Pacillas on hanging garlic over the stove, Arshakui Terzibashian on putting a horseshoe on the top of the front door.

Smell the home remedies: Picture Hiroki Noda’s grandmother mixing flour with vinegar and applying it to her children’s heads to cure fevers. (“I guess the smell was so bad that the fever was not much of a concern anymore,” Hiroki said.) Or John Wu’s parents’ memories of swallowing rhinoceros-horn power with water. Or Irene de Vera’s grandmother using the juice of smashed tobacco leaves to stop cuts from bleeding.

Listen, finally, to the stories of how tradition lives on:

In Ann Marie Cervantes’ family there is a wood-frame rocking chair made by her great-grandfather a century ago. In Julie Bonilla’s home there is a painting of her great-great-grandparents. In Carey Baker’s family there is a blown-glass vase made in Norway in the early 1800s, originally owned by Carey’s great-great-great-grandmother.

And in Jesse Robledo’s home is an old guitar that his great-grandfather used to play.

“It is pretty old, and when my Dad barely got it, it looked old,” Jesse wrote. “But after he cleaned it, it looked like new. Now it is red and orange and black, repainted. Sometimes I walk into my Dad’s room and play a couple of notes, knowing that one day it will be mine.”