For Teachers in Tijuana, Life Has Become a Hard Lesson in Poverty

Public school instructors in the United States say they have been historically underpaid, as demonstrated most recently by the teachers strike in Los Angeles. But most can generally expect to have achieved a measure of financial stability, albeit not complete independence, after two decades in the classroom.

Not so Jaime Chollet Silva, an elementary school teacher here for 23 years, who was among the hundreds of thousands of instructors throughout Mexico who walked off their jobs en masse last month.

To supplement his salary, Chollet works a double shift as an elementary school teacher here and, on weekends, puts in time as an exterminator. Three years ago, things got so bad that he crossed the border and headed for Los Angeles, where he worked for a year as an undocumented laborer, cleaning bathrooms and performing other menial tasks before returing to his family here.

“It was a difficult decision for me, as a professional person, to go to the north and do that kind of work, but I felt that I had little choice,” Chollet recalled last week as he gathered with other instructors at a largely deserted elementary school. “Hardly anyone can make a living just as a teacher in Mexico.”

Although Mexico’s seemingly interminable economic crisis has clearly hit the poor hardest, the nation’s middle classes have also been devastated, and perhaps no professionals have seen their standards of living decline as precipitously as teachers. Instructors say their real earnings have dropped by more than half since 1982, when the Mexican economy began to nose-dive and inflation began to surge.

One former university professor recalled how his salary dipped from more than $400 a week in 1981, before the great peso devaluations, to less than $100 a week in 1983.

Indeed, although no one ever got rich as a public-school teacher north of the border, the profession has been making a lot of people poor in Mexico in recent years.

In Tijuana, elementary and junior high school teachers earn about $50 a week. Striking Los Angeles teachers earn about $450 a week, spread over a full year, a beginning salary that amounts to about $23,400 annually.

Mexican instructors, once able to afford cars, houses and a modicum of a middle-class life style, now must scramble just to meet rent and mortgage payments and put food on the table. Most work double shifts to supplement their income. Often, they do triple time, filling in at universities and private schools. Many work weekends in assorted jobs, vending tacos, driving taxis, painting houses, whatever.

A good number, particularly along the border, have given up the profession altogether and have taken menial jobs in the United States, while others use their summer vacations to find work in the north, supplementing their meager earnings.

“Since I’ve been teaching, I would say half of my colleagues have left the profession,” said Rafael Navarro, who has been an elementary school teacher for 12 years. “They just couldn’t afford it anymore.”

Added Ignacion Montes, a 22-year-veteran, “It’s an honorable profession, but we haven’t been treated honorably.”

Teachers’ rapidly declining standard of living prompted almost 1 million instructors nationwide to stage a wildcat walkout a month ago. The work stoppage was not approved by the teachers union leadership, whom many grass-roots instructors accuse of corruption and failure to look out for members’ interests. Along with a 100% pay raise, school workers have demanded greater democratization of the Mexico City-based teachers union.

Another Increase Sought

Most of the nation’s instructors returned to the classrooms in recent weeks, after the government authorized a 25% raise, but in Tijuana and other areas, the work stoppage continued through much of last week. Tijuana’s 11,000 or so preschool, elementary and junior high teachers are demanding a “preferential” border salary--perhaps another 25% increase--to compensate for the high cost of living along the international frontier.

Most Tijuana teachers are expected to return to the classrooms this week, but they say their fight for higher wages will continue. There are threats of another walkout and even more severe actions--possibly occupation of buildings--after May 31. The school year ends June 30.

“The lucha (battle) goes on,” said Jorge Ojeda, a 23-year veteran of the Tijuana school system and a spokesman for the rebel instructors. “We have yet to receive a response that deals adequately with the needs of the teachers. We are looking for nothing more than to live with a certain dignity.”

That dignity is often not present in the classrooms, teachers say. Because of budget constraints, educators say it is not unusual for schools to be short on basic supplies, such as chalk and blackboards. Classrooms are sometimes packed with as many as 50 students. Some schools have had to operate without running water or electricity, occasionally prompting authorities to suspend classes. Parents and teachers have traditionally chipped in to improve the physical plants, but educators say the need to work so many hours has inevitably cut into their commitment to individual schools.

What has ultimately suffered, teachers here say, is the quality of schooling. “Unfortunately, all of this has repercussions in education,” said Ojeda. “If a professor has problems, if he’s unable to buy food for his family, or pay his bills, how can his work be excellent?”

The work stoppage has played havoc with the lives of parents here, many of whom work while their children are in the classroom. Although voicing worry about their children’s missed time in school, most parents, themselves well-versed in economic hardship, appear supportive of the teachers. Many marched alongside them during several recent large-scale protests here.

A Just Fight

“The teachers’ fight is a just one,” said Antonio Cureses, whose daughter has missed school during the work stoppage. “Not all teachers are saints, but mostly they try to do a good job. We all lose out if the good ones cannot afford to go on teaching and must find other work.”

During the past month, there has been little teaching but much spirited discussion on the grounds of most public schools here and in much of Mexico.

Just last week, the teachers of the elementary school Defensores de Baja California, in a poor neighborhood called Colonia Obrera, gathered in an office in the otherwise largely deserted campus and spoke of their problems.

Jaime Chollet Silva spoke of his weekend job as an exterminator, and of his time in Los Angeles cleaning bathrooms.

Oscar Sanchez, a teacher for a dozen years and one of the leaders of the work-stoppage movement, said he is considering working in San Diego during the summer to enable him to make some additions to his home. His wife is also a teacher.

“Our salaries are hardly enough to meet our basic needs,” said Sanchez. Later, he drove off in a 1977 Volkswagen bug. He said he had saved 1 1/2 years to purchase it, although he bought it used and battered. “Ten years ago,” he said, “in a month’s work, you earned enough to put down a car payment. All that’s changed.”

Another teacher, Maria Angelina Diaz Ortega, said she would like to retire, but retirement benefits--80% of pay--would hardly leave her enough to pay her bills. “I’ve reached a point in life where I’d like to relax and enjoy my family, but I can’t do it,” said Diaz, who has taught here almost 30 years. She spoke of other colleagues with 40 years of experience who also cannot afford to retire.

The principal, Juan Manuel Colado, said salaries are so low that school administrators like himself only earned a few dollars more a day than his teaching colleagues. “It doesn’t pay anymore to seek extra training, extra education,” said Colado, an educator here for 15 years. “You can imagine that effect that has on the schools.”

On the school grounds, a hand-written sign hung on a classroom building alerts readers of a charity group’s reduced-cost sales of staples, including cooking oil, bread, flour and pasta. Designed for poor neighborhood residents, the weekly sales are also attracting some of Tijuana’s less traditional impoverished.

“The sales help me keep down costs,” explained Jose Calderon de la Barca, an elementary school teacher for 15 years in Tijuana. “I always go.”