Concern for our Latino youth and their lack of education

Yesterday I attended a meeting of several community leaders who are part of our local effort here in Louisville to help our Latino youth find ways to plan for going to college and getting a degree. This was not our first meeting. We have been meeting about this important initiative for several years now. 

Data about how Latinos are not as prepared for college as the general population was presented. Data was also presented about how almost twice as many Latinos will drop out of college in their first year when compared to the general population.

Everyone in this meeting expressed genuine concern.

Nothing was said about the many hurdles that Latinos face such as the fact that most Latinos who live at a poverty level do not have the privileges of aspiring to higher education because their culture emphasizes survival above enlightenment.

Perhaps this is difficult for the average American to understand. Just imagine if you were raised in Mexico before coming to the United States where you were used to getting up at 4:00 a.m. in the morning just so you would be the first in your family of four kids to get to use the one towel you shared with your family while it was still dry.

And, you would also find the good pieces of cardboard that you would slip into your shoes to cover the holes worn in them—taking out the worn, torn remnants of the day before. 

Imagine living together in a one room house constructed of adobe where the only space clear of spiders and their webs was in the middle of the shower’s water spray. 

I grew up in that house that my family of four shared with our aunt’s own family of four where we all slept on fold-out cots without blankets. It’s where I learned the meaning of sharing because we all recognized the lucky days when we could look forward to a diet of beans, tortillas and kool-aid. This was because we knew the burning hunger pains of days when we had no diet at all.

All of these experiences shaped me. I never judged my father for leaving us alone to fend for ourselves in Mexico. I was just super appreciative of when he would finally come back to us and especially when he brought us to the United States.

He was a linotype operator—he had a trade and, for the most part, he supported us during the times he was with us. He didn’t go to college. He didn’t expect us to go to college. We would be following in his footsteps if we could learn a trade like he did.

We moved around a lot as we found ourselves living in various parts of the southwest. I thought I lived a normal existence as a Mexican American living in America. I never knew what it was like to participate in sports like normal kids. I never played Little League baseball, football or any other sport when I was a kid. We learned to live in housing projects. We never had any kind of insurance. No health and no life.
Just survival.