Taking His Stand to Homeland

If you made a sequel about the extraordinary life of Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian immigrant who became the hemisphere’s most admired math teacher, you might start with his triumphant return to his native land.

The opening shot could show him gazing out the window of a plane descending into the harsh beauty of La Paz, a capital that crowns a mountain landscape. Cut to Escalante at the airport, the welcome from beaming customs and immigration inspectors, the ride past schools bearing the name of Bolivia’s modern-day national hero.

Or the film could open here in Cochabamba--a city with a gentle valley breeze reminiscent of Southern California--where Escalante has lived since last year. Pan across a cheering audience as Escalante announces he will run for mayor. Cut to a scene in which his wife persuades him not to run after all.

But the best beginning is in the place where Escalante, at 68, still feels most comfortable: a classroom. The setting is the Universidad del Valle on a recent Friday morning; two dozen students watch the maestro in action. He wears a brimmed cap, a maroon sweater-vest over a long-sleeved shirt, and square, tinted glasses on a mischievous, chiseled face that evokes his Aymara indigenous ancestors.

“The Aymara knew math before the Greeks and the Egyptians,” he says. “Math opens doors.”

Thirty-five years after he left La Paz on a journey north into the unknown, 25 years after he walked into Garfield High School in East Los Angeles for the first time, 11 years after Edward James Olmos immortalized his blackboard heroics in “Stand and Deliver,” Jaime Escalante has come home to Bolivia.

And like so many immigrants who work hard to conquer their new world while dreaming of the old one, he has experienced the bittersweet revelation that “home” can become an elusive concept.

Although he visited Bolivia regularly over the years, he is adjusting to the transformation, for better and worse, of this landlocked, impoverished and resilient nation of 8 million: the pollution that comes from economic growth, the graffiti that come from copying U.S. vices, the headaches that come from translating into Spanish the academic terminology he strained to master in English.

“Living here, you see the many changes,” he says, speaking with the courtly tone and strong ‘l’ and ‘s’ that characterize Bolivian Spanish. “I felt strange at first. I felt like a person who has come to a new country.”

At the same time, twinges of disappointment linger from Sacramento, where he retired after six years at Hiram Johnson High School. He never struck the magical chord there that had bound him to students, parents and community in East L.A., enabling him to lead the transformation of a troubled barrio school into an institution that produced more Advanced Placement calculus students than all but three public high schools in the country.

And he is still stung by criticism last year from some in the Latino community of his endorsement of a successful California ballot initiative against bilingual education. He says he took the stand because his experience as an immigrant and a teacher told him it was the right thing to do.

On balance, however, Escalante seems happy. He has not burned bridges; he intends to divide his time “70% in Bolivia and 30% in the U.S.” This month, he is on a U.S. trip taking him to California, to Denver to grade Advanced Placement math exams and to Kansas City for induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame. He also tries to keep up with the NBA, looking distressed about the elimination of his beloved Lakers in the playoffs.

New Life Becomes a Working Vacation

The serene rhythms of Cochabamba agree with Escalante and his wife, Fabiola, who was born here and looked forward to returning after years of big-city striving in the United States. They bought a high-walled corner house in a well-off neighborhood six years ago, originally intending it as a vacation home.

The word “vacation” apparently does not figure in the vocabulary of Escalante, who also speaks the Aymara and Quechua languages. He is determined to contribute to his homeland just as he contributed to his adopted land.

Although a part-time professor, he arrives at the university soon after 6 a.m., before most full-time professors, according to Vice Chancellor Carlos Goldberger.

“He was born a teacher and he will die a teacher,” Goldberger says. “Sometimes he has complained about the disorganization, [that] things are more disorganized in Bolivia than in the United States, and I say [the criticism is] good. We need to learn. He wants to plant a seed here in Bolivia.”

Escalante’s academic work is doubly a labor of love because he team-teaches with his son Fernando. They are also working together on workshops for educators and on a planned overhaul of the math curriculum at elementary, high school and college levels throughout Bolivia.

“For kids here, education is a privilege, while in the U.S. they take it like a punishment, they look for the easy way out,” Escalante says. “We want to make math more accessible. Bolivian teachers have a very old-fashioned method. It wears down the students.”

The move to Bolivia represents an adventure for Fernando, an earnest 29-year-old who grew up in Arcadia and earned his bachelor of arts degree at Cal Poly Pomona and his master’s in engineering at Sacramento State University. (His elder brother, Jaime Jr., also is an engineer and lives in Sacramento.)

Although Fernando’s Spanish is still improving, he looks comfortable in the classroom. He enjoys teaching and learning alongside a father who devoted years to young people outside his home.

“You know, I had never in my life really watched him teach,” Fernando says, sitting across from his father over fruit shakes at a downtown cafe after class. “I watched him, I saw how dynamic he was, and I said, ‘Geez, I wish I had him as my teacher.’ ”

As familiar as Californians are with Escalante, many do not realize that he is Bolivian. People routinely presume he is Mexican, Cuban or Colombian. Even Bolivians took awhile to catch on: He tells an anecdote about a journalist who asked for information about him years ago at a Bolivian Consulate and got a puzzled response.

“The Bolivians had never heard of me. But the Mexican Consulate had all the information you could ask for.”

Today, Cochabamba residents who stop El Profesor coming out of the cafe to shake his hand are well acquainted with his roots. His parents were lower-middle-class teachers. He demonstrated an early flair for academics at a prestigious Catholic school in La Paz and made a name for himself as a young teacher. He lived in Bolivia for the first half of his life.

At 33, feeling restless and claustrophobic, he went to Los Angeles. He lived with immigrant in-laws during the grueling early years, working at a diner and an electronics firm while learning English and getting his teaching credential.

Fame Follows Him Home

His subsequent stardom brought much-needed glory to Bolivia. The nation returned the favor: At least four schools around the country bear his name. Escalante shrugs off the accolades with side-of-the-mouth humor, such as his reaction when La Paz city officials showed him a park named in his honor.

“I said to myself: ‘This is great. Now I’ll never be homeless because I’ll have a park.’ ”

Although Escalante has never held political office, he was courted by U.S. political activists before he endorsed the anti-bilingual initiative last year. In 1997, he considered but finally rejected invitations to run for California superintendent of schools. He has met Presidents Reagan and Bush; his appointment to an education reform commission during the Bush administration remains one of the honors he most cherishes.

Although Escalante notes politely that President Clinton has lauded his success, he conveys the impression that he is not a big fan of the current occupant of the White House, whom he has not met.

“I’ve been labeled a Republican and I’ve been labeled a Democrat,” Escalante says. “My sons are Republicans, and my wife. But not me. I’m an independent person. If I find a person whose principles and ideas I like and does good for the country, I support them 100%, as I did with George Bush.”

Soon after Escalante’s return to Bolivia, a group of former students and fellow teachers got together and urged him to enter the political arena. He accepted their invitation to register as a candidate for mayor of Cochabamba for the New Socialist Falange, a small rightist party.

His tenacity, integrity and name recognition make him a potent candidate, admirers say.

“He has the ability to succeed in any field,” says Osvaldo Carmona, a retired teacher and boyhood friend. “He knows as much about politics as about math. He knows what to say and how to say it. People are tired of professional politicians. He is charismatic. He would be a great leader.”

Man of Science, Not Politics

Vice Chancellor Goldberger says he hopes Escalante will stick to the textbooks.

“He is a man of science,” Goldberger says. “It would be a big waste. You have to have a certain sneakiness to be a politician, and he doesn’t have that.”

Escalante apparently agrees. With the election half a year away, he now regrets his decision and plans to drop out of the race. He says Fabiola Escalante, a no-nonsense evangelical Protestant, persuaded him to resist temptation.

“I wanted to do something for my country, like I did something in East L.A. for the barrio,” he says. “But there was an obstacle: my wife.

“She told me at the dinner table: ‘I don’t know what bug bit you that made you get into politics. You are not a politician. At this age you don’t need to stain your name with politics.’ ”

In a world where celebrity usually represents an opportunity to cash in and rest on past achievements, Escalante does not slow down. Despite his talents, his travels, his brushes with presidents and movie stars, there is something that unites him to the scruffy and dignified armies of indigenous Bolivians who make an honest living in the streets each day: an appetite for hard work.

His son Fernando, who has accepted the weighty mantle of the Escalante legacy, sums it up this way: “There are some people who work out of necessity,” he says as his father watches across the table with a look full of gruff pride. “They go home, they kind of relax. They pick up a hobby.

“There are a few people, like him, who find their hobby is their profession. He comes home and he does math, that’s his hobby. He does math all day. I’m not as obsessed. But it can be contagious.”