Families Send Children Back Home for Traditional Education

Irma Padres has seen how quickly Mexican children can adapt to life in America, refusing to speak Spanish and resisting visits with grandparents across the border.

She did not want that to happen to her three children when the family moved from Tijuana to this San Diego suburb four years ago. So every morning, Padres gets up at 5:30 to drive her children over the border -- to school in Tijuana.

The Padreses are among dozens of families bucking the custom that for generations has led most immigrants to seek out American schools, along with jobs, in the United States.

Although some of her neighbors north of the border call her crazy, Padres, like others here, is willing to suffer early mornings and long days carpooling so her children can be taught the religion, culture and values that she feels they would not get in American schools.

Parents and school officials estimate that more than 100 students make the daily commute from their homes in the United States to a handful of private Tijuana schools -- such as Colegio La Paz and Instituto Cumbres.

The families will not soon reverse the more common tradition of Mexican families seeking better schools in the United States. But these committed parents believe they have the best of both worlds -- their children learn in Tijuana while living in the quieter, safer suburbs of San Diego County.

“When I cross the border into Tijuana, it’s hurry, hurry,” Padres said. “Everybody is honking. When I cross the border into San Diego, oh my God, this is heaven.”

To cut down on driving time, the families create carpools and apply for electronic passes that allow them to speed through a special lane at the border crossing in San Ysidro, when they pass back into the United States. But Padres said there are still some days when she spends hours in the car, making two or three round trips to take her children to after-school activities or parties in Tijuana.

“By Friday, I’m crawling,” said Padres, who takes care of her children full time while her husband works as an architect in Tijuana and San Diego.

Keeping her children in the private Mexican school requires discipline -- waking them each day by 6 a.m. and getting them dressed, fed and out the door with backpacks by 6:30 a.m.

One morning last month, they followed the daily schedule to the minute. There was just one glitch, a missing necktie for 14-year-old Francisco, which Padres quickly remedied by borrowing one from her husband.

Then the family piled into the minivan, made one stop to pick up another cross-border commuter, 11-year-old Georgina Pinos, and drove south into Mexico. They arrived just after 7 a.m., and the children headed to their classrooms at Colegio La Paz, a Catholic school that has 900 students from preschool through 11th grade.

Even though the Padres children said they would miss their friends in Mexico, they would prefer to attend American schools. Francisco, who spends his free time playing his electric guitar, said he hates waking up when it’s still dark and wants the extra month of summer vacation that his friends in San Diego have.

His 11-year-old sister, Barbara, whose shelves are decorated with pictures of Britney Spears and statues of angels, said she wishes she were in school in San Diego so she could carry lip gloss and a cellular phone in her backpack -- both banned at Colegio La Paz.

But Padres said the commitment to the school is working -- the children are learning English but are still keeping up their Spanish. And they see their relatives in Tijuana regularly.

Colegio La Paz, founded by nuns, sits above Tijuana on a hill, where streets are quiet except for the morning and afternoon rush of hundreds of children. Many of them represent the second or third generation in their family to attend the school, which is three stories tall and built around a central courtyard.

On a recent morning, the students watched an assembly to commemorate the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. The girls, wearing black pleated skirts, white button-down shirts and checkered jackets, and the boys, dressed in dark coats and ties, sang the national anthem and listened to speeches about Mexico’s wartime heroes. When one group of ninth-grade boys seated on the benches started to fidget, they were quickly reprimanded.

Elisa Perez Lopez, a nun who is principal of the high school, said she believes the spirituality, discipline and the unity of the campus attract families from both sides of the border. “Even though we have a lot of kids, we know each one,” she said. “This is a family at Colegio La Paz.”

The school also pushes its students -- sons and daughters of entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors -- to excel past their counterparts in Tijuana’s public schools, Perez said. “Our students have to want to succeed,” Perez said. “A school with lazy kids is a club, where they play, talk and eat. This is not a club.”

For Ruben and Minerva Padilla, who live in Chula Vista, the decision to send their children to the Colegio La Paz was based on academics and tradition. Minerva Padilla and her six siblings attended the school, and now most of their children are students. “There is something about Colegio La Paz,” she said. “It creeps into you. [The nuns] enforce a love of country and a love of the school.”

Four of the five Padilla children have donned the Colegio La Paz uniforms, with the eldest now a student at UC Riverside. The youngest Padilla is not even 2 years old yet, but his parents said he will follow the path of his older brothers and sisters.

The commitment to Colegio La Paz has come at a cost for the Padilla family -- nearly $200 a month in tuition per child, in addition to several hundred more each year in insurance, uniforms and books.

But Ruben Padilla, who works in sales at an automotive accessory company, said the tradition and sense of belonging at the school cannot be replaced. Minerva Padilla said she remembers wearing those same uniforms, sitting on those same benches and listening to the same lectures on morals from the nuns that her children now hear.

“You don’t pay that much attention then,” she said. “But when you get out in the real world, it comes back to you.”