Standing Apart

At Rio Mesa High north of Oxnard, the barrio kids from La Colonia huddle during the lunch hour on the handball courts near the gymnasium, a tightknit group of neighborhood friends burdened by stereotype as much as reputation.

The same is true for the Cabrillo Village boys at Buena High in Ventura, who position themselves along a cinder-block wall outside the administration building.

They stand apart, these barrio youngsters, from the white kids on campus, apart even from other Latinos.

And it’s the same story across Ventura County.

The students are separated not so much by race as by economic class, a widening divide that many educators and Latino advocates fear is pushing poor kids from the barrios toward a long, dark downward spiral.

It is as if they are branded in some fundamental way simply because of where they come from, neighborhoods that are mostly poor and nearly all Latino--tagged by some people as gang kids and lumped together as children headed for trouble and failure.

“I think there is a huge divide and it’s getting worse,” says Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez, a La Colonia product and the county’s highest-ranking Latino elected official.

“For a lot of kids, it’s becoming harder and harder to make it out of the barrio,” he said. “Some people are doing what they can to improve things, but nobody is really doing enough.”

Adds Ventura Unified School District Supt. Joseph Spirito: “We’ve got to change a lot of attitudes. We’ve got to set the bar higher and higher for all kids, not just for the wealthy children, not just for the white children.”

Rio Mesa senior Eric Soto knows about the divide firsthand.

A student once enrolled in the gifted and talented program in his elementary school, the 17-year-old Colonia native remembers a time when school held much promise. He played trumpet in Rio Mesa’s marching band and mariachi group. He thought about going to college and exploring his musical talent.

Those dreams, however, were derailed last year when he began cutting class, drawn more to hanging out with friends than doing schoolwork. Now scrambling to graduate on time, he blames no one but himself.

But he also suspects had he grown up outside the ghetto, someone might have stepped in to correct his wayward course.

“A lot of people, they just look at how we’re dressed and who we kick it with and they automatically think we’re gang-related,” said Soto, who considers himself lucky to still be in the hunt for a diploma when so many of his friends have dropped out of school altogether.

“They think we’re dumb and that ain’t right,” he said. “Some of us are smart too. Some of us want to learn, but they won’t teach us. All they see are Colonia Mexicans.”

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For many of those who live in the barrio, and many who have scratched their way out, there is a growing belief that there are two groups of Latinos in Ventura County.

There are those who are steadily filtering into the mainstream, young people who are connecting with school and preparing to take part in a rising tide of prosperity washing over Latinos across the Southwest.

Then there are those who are poor and living on the margin, kids who every day grapple with problems that have undermined barrio communities for decades.

Those problems extend beyond Ventura County.

Deborah Santiago, director of a White House initiative to boost Latino achievement, said she has found that educators nationwide engage in negative stereotyping of Latino students, set lower expectations for them and more often than not track them into general education rather than college prep classes.

This isn’t just an immigrant story, Santiago said, but one of first- and second-generation Latino youngsters languishing in increasingly isolated pockets of poverty.

“There’s no question that these problems are very much tied to socioeconomic status and much more concentrated in the barrio,” she said. “We are creating a society of haves and have-nots, and those on the lower end simply are not being provided the same opportunities.”

Many kids from more affluent communities have problems too, of course. And there are plenty of barrio kids who do well in school.

But in the barrios of Ventura County--from the Avenue area on Ventura’s west end to smaller, low-income Latino neighborhoods in Moorpark, Simi Valley and Camarillo--the problems are deeply ingrained and the wreckage more readily apparent.

“Too often for these kids it means they’ll grow up in substandard housing, they’ll go to substandard schools and be taught by substandard teachers, they’ll have fewer opportunities to get good jobs and they’ll live with the distinct possibility of becoming familiar faces with law enforcement,” said Oxnard attorney Oscar Gonzalez, who was born in La Colonia and raised in barrio neighborhoods in Santa Paula and Fillmore.

“There’s been tremendous progress made by Latinos over the years in achieving economic and social justice,” he added. “But there are still very isolated pockets of poverty where not much has changed in the last 50 years.”

The numbers tell a sobering story.

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In Oxnard’s La Colonia, for instance, fewer than two out of 10 adult residents are high school graduates. That compares with eight out of 10 countywide, according to the 1990 U.S. census.

The census numbers, the latest available, show nearly four of every 10 La Colonia children live below the poverty line, four times as many as in the county overall. Less than 2% of the barrio’s adult population holds a college degree, compared with 23% countywide.

La Colonia also is home to Cesar Chavez School, where 80% of the students struggle to speak English and 90% come from families so poor that they qualify for free lunches.

The school also is ranked the poorest-performing campus in the county by the state’s academic performance index.

Broaden the scope and a similar story appears.

Latinos drop out of school at a higher rate than their peers countywide. And they are disproportionately represented in continuation schools and other alternative programs, including those for juvenile offenders.

While Latinos make up a third of the county’s population, two-thirds of those enrolled in the county’s Gateway continuation high school and youth authority school are Latino.

Oxnard poverty law attorney Barbara Macri-Ortiz said she believes some educators are quick to develop negative assumptions about Latino students based on how they dress, who they hang out with and where they live.

And she said too many are quick to push barrio youngsters toward alternative programs, when they should be trying to figure out ways to keep them in school and on track.

“The schools are failing a lot of these kids,” said Macri-Ortiz, who over the years has represented several students facing suspension or expulsion. “And I don’t think, if they had blond hair and blue eyes, they would be getting the same treatment.”

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Indeed, while there are myriad reasons for why such troubles persist, there is mounting criticism of the job schools are doing to pluck barrio youth from the margins.

Educators across the county acknowledge the disparities and say they are scrambling to bridge the divide.

In school districts from Ventura to Fillmore, for instance, educators have introduced programs such as AVID--Advancement Via Individual Determination--which combines study skills, tutoring and mentoring to help low-income middle and high school students raise their grades and get into college.

“We are doing things to address those gaps and turn the tide, but it’s a powerful tide to work against,” said Jennifer Robles, bilingual program specialist for the Ventura Unified School District.

And at Santa Paula High, a largely Latino campus long pegged as one of the county’s poorest performers, officials have eliminated general education classes and funneled all students into college prep courses, raising expectations across the board.

Officials across the county employ a wide range of other programs and strategies aimed at keeping at-risk youth in school and out of trouble.

“I think there’s more of an understanding of what’s going on and more of us are willing to do everything possible to bridge those gaps,” Ventura school board trustee Cliff Rodrigues said. “There’s a growing realization that if we don’t take a different approach, more and more of these kids will end up in continuation schools, juvenile halls or out on the street.”

County schools Supt. Charles Weis said he believes the vast majority of educators, laboring under a growing list of classroom problems and demands, care about students and do all they can to ensure their success.

He said it’s also important to note that many kids who come out of high poverty, high-risk communities do well in school.

Nevertheless, Weis said too many are falling through the cracks. And he fears, given the current drumbeat for standardized testing and high school exit exams, more and more of these youngsters will buckle under the weight of disappointment and failure.

“I don’t think these kids are getting less of an education,” Weis said. “I think they’re all getting the same education and that might not be what they need.”

None of this should be taken to mean that barrios themselves are inherently bad places filled with troubled people, urban planners and social scientists warn.

Initially formed to segregate the Mexican work force from the city gentry, barrios proved to be places of refuge from Anglo discrimination during a 19th century surge of American expansion throughout the Southwest.

Even today, they play a similar role.

Not only do such communities serve as vital entryways for new arrivals, they provide a network of resources and support that has helped generations of Latinos survive, if not flourish, in the face of often difficult circumstances.

A change, however, has taken hold in the barrio over the past half century, experts say, one that has given rise to a culture of violence, gangs and drugs.

Coupled with a significant lack of investment in such communities, experts believe it is becoming increasingly harder for youngsters to make it out of the barrio. And that has led to creation of a burgeoning underclass, one that is largely uneducated and unprepared to compete in an economy with limited demand for unskilled labor.

“I don’t want to imagine the prospect where we are training a significant number of Latinos to become janitors, but that’s in fact what we are doing,” said USC professor Michael Dear, director of the Southern California Studies Center, a university think tank that explores such issues.

The barrio is being assaulted on other fronts as well.

Retired parole officer Jess Gutierrez, a substitute teacher at Oxnard High School and member of a grass-roots effort to stop gang violence, said a look at the criminal justice system will show how barrio youths are faring.

Already, Latinos are disproportionately represented in jails and juvenile halls, Gutierrez said. And he believes law enforcement officers have adopted a hard-edged approach toward dealing with barrio youths.

If a barrio kid cuts his hair short and wears baggy clothes, Gutierrez said, it’s more likely he will get stopped more often for questioning, regularly patted down for weapons and drugs and asked whether he is on probation or runs with a gang.

“Some people would say, ‘Oh, you’re making a big thing out of nothing,’ ” said Gutierrez, another La Colonia product. “Well, it’s only nothing if it doesn’t happen to you on a regular basis. Growing up, contending with that all the time, I know from personal experience it creates tremendous anger and hostility in people.”

Teenage residents in these communities privately say they are repeatedly stopped and questioned by police officers for nothing more than walking down the street.

They don’t want their names used for fear of retaliation. But they say it’s a fact of life that such harassment occurs over and over.

“They’ll stop you for no reason and ask you where you’re going,” said one youngster, a high school dropout in Oxnard’s La Colonia who wears his hair so short it leaves just a shadow of color on his head.

“They’ll pat you down, ask if you’re on probation and make you lift your shirt to check for gang tattoos,” he said. “They think we’re all gang-related just because of how we dress and where we live.”

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For their part--disputing the stories of barrio residents--Sheriff Bob Brooks, Oxnard Police Chief Art Lopez and Ventura Police Chief Mike Tracy say they believe such incidents are rare.

All three say officers and deputies are trained specifically not to use race, clothing or place of residence as the sole reason to stop and question someone. And law enforcement officers put their jobs in jeopardy if they violate those guidelines, the lawmen said.

Brooks said there have been fewer than 10 “racial profiling” complaints filed with his department since 1995. In each case, he said, the complaint was investigated and the deputy cleared of wrongdoing.

Still, regardless of whether deputies have probable cause to stop and question someone, Brooks said, he knows many will believe such actions stem from other factors.

“If you are sensitive to your minority status, very often you’ll exclude other things as being part of the reason you were stopped,” Brooks said. “I think the most beneficial thing we can do is try to give a good explanation for our actions. But you can’t always change perceptions, some of these feelings are very deeply ingrained.”

Cruise the barrio any afternoon and what you will see is the reality on the condition of young people in these communities.

On street corners and in alleyways, in neighborhood parks and ghetto apartments, you can find barrio youngsters who have dropped out of school and now find themselves drifting toward an uncertain future.

Former La Colonia resident Mario Gonzalez knows all about the undertow of the barrio underclass.

Like so many others born and raised in this community, he knows what it’s like to be discouraged by teachers and counselors from going to college.

And he knows how tough it can be to swim against the tide in a place where so many young people are dropping out, joining gangs and heading to juvenile hall.

Through Cal Lutheran University’s Upward Bound program targeting high school students with the potential to be the first in their families to graduate from college, Gonzalez earned a degree in 1994 from Cal State Northridge.

He now pulls down a six-figure income as an advertising account executive for a Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles.

But he returns to La Colonia nearly every weekend to visit his parents and remind his nieces and nephews that if he can make it, they can too.

“Basically, people like me have beaten the odds,” said Gonzalez, 30, the youngest of seven brothers and sisters and the only one with a four-year degree. “Hardly anyone thought I would get this far.”