Educating Ruben : A DARKER SHADE OF CRIMSON: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano, <i> By Ruben Navarette Jr. (Bantam: $21.95; 270 pp.)</i>

“A Darker Shade of Crimson” is a very personal account of a very public issue: The way affirmative action affects the higher education of U.S. Latinos. The issue is especially crucial because in 1993 Latinos had an even higher drop-out rate than we did nearly a generation ago when affirmative action policies went into effect. Virtually 50% of students of Mexican descent who enter college don’t graduate.

In this memoir of his experiences as an undergraduate scholarship student at Harvard University, Ruben Navarette offers his own interpretation of what has thwarted these students’ paths.

Navarette, born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley, valedictorian of his high school graduation class, entered Harvard in 1985. Of the self-described “twentynothing” generation, bred on CNN and Bill Cosby, son of middle-class parents who believed fervently in the rewards of education and hard work, Navarette seemed the product of the American Dream. But even he had to struggle to establish a place for himself as a Mexican American within the monolithic world of Harvard.

However, if Navarette intends this book to be the “Odyssey” of a young man of Mexican descent who believes with such conviction that academic success is ultimately owed to his exceptional mind, we have already been delivered this view by Navarette’s mentor, Richard Rodriguez, and much more provocatively. Whereas Rodriguez has described his own work as “essays impersonating an autobiography,” “A Darker Shade of Crimson” comes off rather like an autobiography impersonating essays. I believe this is in large part due to Rodriguez’s deft hand at prose; Navarette’s narrative, in contrast, is fraught with the precociousness of a cosseted youth.

I have met many Latino students who have undergone many of the same frustrating, discouraging and alienating experiences that Navarette describes and the disenchantment he felt initially at Harvard appears well founded. To meet minority quotas, college recruiters will entice qualified Latinos with scholarships and promises that the university environment will provide support for their personal and intellectual growth. Once the students are there, however, they find themselves alone, confronting every form of elitism and challenged by the predominant assumption that they are there only because of ethnicity.

Latino alienation at Harvard helped spur the formation of such organizations as Raza, a Latino student support group. The youthful zeal of many Latino students who join such groups is empowered in part by their university’s denial that racism indeed exists.

In his early years at Harvard, Navarette joins Raza with similar enthusiasm. By the time he graduates, however, he leaves the organization, scorned by his fellow members for such politically incorrect gestures as publicly chastising United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez after Chavez had given a speech at Harvard. While researching a school paper on the conditions of Mexican fieldworkers in California, Navarette discovers Chavez’s high speaker’s fee, gets turned down for a personal interview and finally becomes disenchanted “with what I perceived to be the union’s elitism, materialism and overall irrelevance to the practical everyday concerns of farm workers. Gradually, a sour disillusionment permeated my sense of idealism. . . .”

However, Navarette insufficiently documents his claim that the 25-year-old organization, lauded internationally for having represented a segment of our poorest labor force with unprecedented results, has in fact turned exploitative. His confrontation of Chavez comes off as unwarranted and disturbing.

Navarette’s ulterior motives turn out to be no more than “sour disillusionment.” Whereas at 17 he likened Harvard to a “pretty girl” offering herself to him, when he graduates five years later (and no longer a virgin himself) Harvard has become the tested lover who has finally accepted him and therefore “all was forgiven.”

Despite Navarette’s pretensions of having learned the principles of Aristotelian-Platonic and Greco-Roman debate, the sophomoric analyses and self-serving reflections that fill most of these pages made me conclude that while the academic experiences of students of color need to be recounted, Navarette’s story should not by any means be seen as the definitive one. Nor should have his mentor’s.

Rodriguez’s “Hunger of Memory” played right into the fear of white middle-class America that affirmative action would give preferential treatment to previously underrepresented people solely on the basis of their ethnicity and therefore displace qualified Euro-Americans from the jobs and education they believed they deserved. Both men embrace the ideologies of white male educators who essentially espouse that achievement and excellence are just rewards of (traditionally male) individual competition. Both men, also, have wrestled with and succumbed to (at least in great part) the WASP American premise of assimilation as being ultimately the wisest route toward success, a battle not least of all painful because neither are white, Protestant or from truly privileged backgrounds.

Having said all this, I should point out that toward the end of his book Navarette does--finally--represent the controversies surrounding affirmative action in an articulate and forthright manner. It is only at this point that one gets a glimpse at the potential of this aspiring future educator. If Navarette had not yielded to the temptation of publishing his reflections on his undergraduate experience so soon after graduation, his odyssey might indeed have become a text that educators and lawmakers, for and against affirmative action, could cite with confidence. Navarette argues that affirmative action increasingly serves only those few exceptionally high-achieving Latinos, like himself, who are tracked into college prep courses and will no doubt compete easily with privileged whites.

Since Navarette’s background reads like the immigrant’s model for the American Dream so reminiscent of the European immigrants at the turn of the century, it cannot and does not address the issues of growing poverty and ongoing racism that affect a large portion of Latinos in the United States today. Therefore, with or without the testimony of “A Darker Shade of Crimson,” higher education for most of the millions of young Latinos in the United States will remain an impossible dream.