CAMPUS CORRESPONDENCE : The Burden of Having to Play ‘Ethnic Truth or Consequences’

As if the nation’s most rapidly growing and most poorly educated racial minority didn’t have enough problems, the best and brightest Latino students often encounter an obstacle placed in their path by an unlikely source--their elders.

Perhaps because of the ever-increasing number of human casualties in what President George Bush calls “the crisis in Hispanic education,” and the media attention it rightly generates, any conflict involving a choice between Harvard or Yale might seem foolish, even petty. Still, the obstacle is real and, perhaps because the phenomenon is ignored, it pollutes far too many young and promising minds.

The obstacle is confusion. Successful Latino students are confused because, unlike many of their young counterparts, they are listening to their elders. Unfortunately, what they are hearing is two conflicting messages.

One message is that Latino elders want their young people to change. Disproving former Education Secretary Lauro Fred Cavazos’ assertion that Latino parents do not value education is the glaring example of generation after generation of parents who have sacrificed much of their own lives to improve those of their children. For as long as Latino children have been allowed within the walls of public schools, their parents have forced them to attend and excel in the firm belief that education is the key to success. Along with this belief comes the parents’ entrusted responsibility to the school system that it fulfill its historical role as inculcator of mainstream values.

Far from being threatened by their children’s academic success, my own proud parents--and countless others--want nothing more passionately than for their children to surpass their every achievement. To live in a bigger house. To make more money. To live more comfortable lives. To adopt a new way of life that affords Latinos the opportunities they never had. It is the universal tale, disturbing to some, of author Richard Rodriguez--who, as a young boy, remembers being pressured by his parents to learn and practice English.

The last generation, in embracing this hope, naturally advocates that their children seize new opportunities to attend better schools, speak better English and even marry better people. And “better” often means “different.” In short, besides eventual happiness, the only return that Latino parents expect from their often costly education investment is progress. Indeed, of change. And should the system decide to reward them with admission to an Ivy League school or with high-salaried employment, it will be because the child has avoided becoming the parent.

Because that sentiment sounds harsh, even disrespectful, Latino elders, mostly those who think of themselves as leaders, seek to impart a second directive: Don’t change. Popular refrains encouraging young Latinos to leave their parents’ world behind are replaced by stern warnings: “Don’t ever forget where you come from,” my uncle implores me. “Don’t ever turn your back on your people,” others admonish. Most of all, in spite of mainstream success, don’t ever “sell out.” As a people well-versed in putting down those who try to put themselves above us, Latinos reserve a special contempt for their “mosca en leche”--a brown spot trying to become a natural part of white surroundings. As if to say that the life your family has led is not good enough for you. To say exactly what every Latino parent who sends their child to private school or college, in fact, says.

Inexplicably, what other cultures consider progress and their claim to the American dream, a cultura based on respecto considers a form of ungrateful betrayal. We say it with scorn: vendido. To their Yale graduates who do not speak Spanish, often because they never knew the language, Latino elders offer not praise for academic achievement but disappointment that the price they paid was the loss of that amorphous entity called culture.

The delicate, important question left these young Latinos is how could they have lost, or even misplaced, something that they never had, indeed, were never given. Still, seeking to avoid all this, their elders hold on to the romantic, but unrealistic, hope that education will not change the children.

In this game of dual directives, the stakes are high. Given the President’s “crisis,” and his ineptness in dealing with it, Latino students must take the education initiative in their own lives. Along the way, they need not be encumbered with the burden of playing “Ethnic Truth or Consequences” for the benefit of those who would have them travel simultaneously in opposite directions in search of a fantasy land where one can enjoy progress without change.