Community Essay : College Brings Alienation From Family, Friends : A USC student finds he must bridge a divide between his old and new identities.
My decision to chase a dream, return to college at age 24 and take the liberal arts courses that will help me become a journalist has forced me to be two people. One face is for family and longtime friends, another is for my classes and college friends.
My homeboys have not read Marx, Nietzsche or Freud. They do not care to probe the economics behind their being paid less, despite working more, than their fathers. They don’t want to hear about the Oedipus complex or the nature of good and evil. For them, intellectual theories are elaborate, unnecessary attempts to explain the inexplicable. Ideas do not feed their families and only seem to highlight the fact that I have begun to change. “That’s enough. Don’t read any more. I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” Fidel, my compadre, said after I responded to his request to read him a paragraph from one of my textbooks. He had telephoned while I was doing homework and jibed, “What the hell are you studying now?”
I also stumble to explain my studies to my parents. My father had a sixth-grade education. My mother earned her GED 15 years after leaving high school. I often reluctantly hand them my term papers they ask to see, knowing they won’t truly comprehend them. After a careful reading, my mother’s usual response: “You write so beautifully, mijo. I didn’t really understand all the words you used but we can just tell how educated you are.”
A senior at the University of Southern California, receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science this May, I painfully realize the downside to education, a subtle alienation from friends and loved ones. I understand more clearly why Latinos approach higher learning with trepidation. For beyond the barriers of low income and racism lies another fight, the struggle to blend old and new identities.
It is not that education is discouraged; my family is proud of me and would be crushed if I were to quit. But disproportionately few Latinos acquire higher learning and those who do often must balance an incompatible past and future.
I envision my old friends and new friends at my graduation party: Would they eat, drink and laugh together or huddle in separate groups? Which group would I join? Who am I?
That is why many promising Latinos I know who attend college choose to major in business or other fields with more easily identifiable rewards for their parents and themselves. “I’m learning how to start and manage a restaurant,” is certainly something my father, a part-time contractor, would grasp more clearly than the abstract knowledge I’ve obtained.
Noble careers that require no college sometimes seem even more attractive. My aunt, mother of an army sergeant, beams with pride at family gatherings when she recalls my cousin’s boot-camp graduation. Yet my mother struggles to explain the value of my work as a journalist. Amid the music, food and drink of the get-together, a reporter is not a craftsman with words, not a guardian of democracy, not a voice against society’s ills. Instead, journalists are perceived as the intrusive talking heads on the 11 o’clock news, the Latino ones pretentiously pronouncing their surnames with forced accents.
For other Latinos I know studying philosophy, sociology and literature, the struggle to retain identity is similar. In this political climate of Proposition 187, the demise of the Great Society and threats to affirmative action, analytical, creative Latino minds are needed more than ever. But the sacrifices are great indeed.
