College Class South of Border Mixes Sea, Sun, Sand

Jose Mercade spends three months a year in this tiny Mexican town. The Glendale Community College instructor knows every family here. He would like to see just one of the American students he brings each summer develop the same kind of intimacy with these people and their land.

On the shores of the Sea of Cortez halfway down the Baja peninsula, Bahia de Los Angeles is a remote community of 65 poor Mexican families. Its population has doubled during the last 15 summers as the unlikely second home for groups of faculty and students from Glendale Community College.

Every summer about 100 Glendale College students spend a few weeks in Bahia on a series of foreign study programs Mercade directs. They come to study marine biology, history, Spanish, ecology and art. But Mercade, who coordinates the programs taught by a number of Glendale College professors, says he also has a grander scheme in mind.

“Maybe when they go back to Glendale and they see a Mexican-American digging a ditch, they won’t be such harsh judges,” he said over tortillas at one of two restaurants in town. “They can see down here that the Mexicans have to live and struggle and love and carry on their daily lives too.”

Rich Sea Life

The Glendale College field station, where students are introduced to the life--marine and otherwise--of this place, is one of only two of its kind on the Baja peninsula. A number of other California schools brings students to Baja on various programs, and universities across the country have advanced research facilities that take advantage of the rich sea life in the waters off Baja’s eastern coast. But only Glendale and Mira Costa community colleges maintain permanent student study facilities there.

Bahia de Los Angeles is no Club Med. It can be challenging. The drive takes 12 hours. There are no phones in town and electricity is provided by a local generator that frequently fails during the day and is turned off at 10 every night. Fresh water is scarce, and so are showers. There is no escape from the stunning heat.

But there are also dolphins and whales and the chance to sleep on the beach beneath the stars. Outside the squat, sand-colored field station, dubbed “Casablanca de Glendale College,” students play volleyball and other sports after class while listening to reggae music.

The marine biology program, the first of a series of five courses offered at the field station this summer, is rigorous. In three weeks, 16 students complete the equivalent of a semester’s work--and get the same number of college credits it would normally take them months to acquire. Days typically blend four hours of classroom lectures with field trips to islands and reefs. A thick text and an exam at the end of each week ensure that students spend much of the balmy evenings studying.

The experience, instructors say, instills students with enthusiasm rarely found in the classroom. After four days on the program, students who didn’t know a mussel from a clam back in Glendale spoke animatedly about things such as red coral, sea cucumber and segmented worms.

Mercade, a counselor at Glendale College and director of the Baja program, is a Cuban native who came to the United States when he was 13. He says his mission is to expose public college students to the kind of foreign study available at private universities. He also says he sees the program as a small but important way of bridging the gap between America and its poorer neighbor.

“It seems to me that public education has become a rotten way to teach people about the world,” he says as he drives his Jeep over the town’s bumpy roads. “In private schools they give students a chance to experience the joy of more than just learning, of being students of life. There is no sense of joy in learning when you sit in a classroom and that’s it.”

Private colleges across the country offer experiences as varied as working with the Peace Corps in Thailand or studying the environment in Kenya. But few community colleges have programs in Third World countries.

“I see no reason why public colleges, where after all, the majority of Americans go to school, shouldn’t give Americans an understanding of the world,” Mercade says.

‘Paradise by the Sea’

Glendale College provides full financial aid for one student in each of the five courses every summer, and posters hanging from the campus center of the college on Mountain Street in Glendale exhort students to come and enjoy “Our Paradise by the Sea.”

But the Baja program is open to anyone, and students from colleges throughout Southern California take advantage of it. Only six of the 16 students on the marine biology program attend Glendale College. The others are from private schools, including USC, and public institutions. They said they come to take a good course and have a good time.

“Wow, look at him jump!” students screamed as a 7-foot dolphin arced high out of the water in front of their speeding motorboat. Within seconds, students who had been languishing in the sun on their way to an island reef came alive as Prof. Ron Harlen maneuvered the boat into a school of perhaps 100 dolphins. Four students jumped overboard to hear the dolphins in the water while two other boats came alongside.

“If nothing else happened the whole trip, this would make it worth it,” said Amy McMullen, a Glendale College junior from La Crescenta, as she treaded water a mile from shore. “Not a bad way to go to school. Four hours of class a day, all the sun in the world and playing with dolphins.”

The Glendale College program was the brainchild of former Glendale College biology professor Lane MacDonald, who traveled the Baja peninsula with a group of students in the 1970s and fell in love with Bahia de Los Angeles. He told Mercade about the small town with a lost, ancient feel, and enlisted his help in taking students down the next year. For the next seven years the college rented a house on the beach and offered marine biology, but few students knew about the program.

When MacDonald retired, Mercade expanded the program. In 1981 he leased a building from the Mexican government. Gradually he collected funds from the college and scoured the campus for surplus equipment.

Expenses for the program are about $50,000 a year. About 65% of that comes from student fees, which amount to $310-$410 per pupil, including room and board. The rest is funded by the college.

An Extra $7,500

This year, the college allocated an extra $7,500, which allowed Mercade to install a desalination plant and buy a new motor for one of the three 23-foot boats the college owns.

The college boats join others on the waters off Bahia de Los Angeles each day. Americans come seeking game fish, and Mexican fishermen ply the waters to feed their families and for commercial harvest.

As the sun rose one day recently, some students took a run to a nearby lighthouse, others bathed in the ocean using saltwater soap and others slept off their conversations of the night before.

The school day starts at 7:30 a.m. with two hours of lecture. Harlen, head of the marine biology program, talks about tides and winds and invertebrates while students try not to nod off in the intense heat.

The lecture one morning was too much for Mike Corona, a 19-year-old student. “I started getting into my typical 45-degree angle and I left,” he said laughing, sitting on the beach behind the station.

By noon, the lecture had given way to snorkeling and relaxing on one of countless tiny desert islands.

In 12-foot-deep water near a rock whitewashed with osprey and pelican droppings, Guy Van Cleave, a marine biology professor at Modesto Community College who is assisting in the program this summer, found a baseball-size rock he couldn’t stop talking about. Perched on a rocky outcropping, he turned his find over and over, speaking excitedly to a growing group of students about the snails and chitons, coraline red algae and sea squirts living on the small object.

Van Cleave and the other instructors want to show the students a new way of seeing. “Biology is not black and white,” Van Cleave said. “It’s a sea of grays.”

Back at the station in the evenings, students leaf intently through books on marine life, looking up the names of creatures they’ve seen during the day. And they begin to echo the words of their teachers.

“I’m a desert rat,” Laurie Burson said. “People say it’s a wasteland, but I really see a lot of life there.”

A number of the students said they were shocked at the harsh desert heat and the stark landscape when they arrived in Bahia de Los Angeles. And not all were happy with the primitive conditions.

To Greg Meyer, a naturalist who has managed the station for the last four summers, and to the other scientists who come to Bahia de Los Angeles again and again, the place is just right.

“That’s the challenge . . . to not react in a defensive manner when people complain about it, but to open them up to the incredible things that are here,” Meyer said. “At first it does seem to be a very stark landscape, and that’s part of the beauty.”

The students said their impressions of the desert and the sea are changing rapidly. Mercade said that is exactly what he’s after.

“I’m hoping that maybe one person who goes, after 20 years will be in a position of power . . . to preserve this incredible desert,” he said.

Sipping a margarita at the bar where the local fishermen go, he thought on that for a moment. “Time does not change here,” he said softly. “Everything but the kids who come down here . . . stays the same.”