Miguel Lopez didn’t want to leave class after the school bell rang because he feared the seven rival gang members standing in the hallway waiting for him.
He told his teacher of the situation. The teacher looked at Miguel, who was then a 15-year-old high school freshman, and said: ” `Don’t come to me with your problems. Go talk to your counselor.’ “
“I thought, `These teachers don’t really care,’ ” said Miguel, now 18 and attending Latino Youth Alternative High School. “If these teachers don’t care about their students, why should I care?”
“I’ll never forget that day because I was really scared. That was the last day I went to (public) school. The next day, I never showed up.”
Three years later, Miguel eagerly works on a classroom writing assignment at Latino Youth, a private campus in Little Village for dropouts. Miguel said he left Clemente High School nearly three years ago because he “was always being chased by gangbangers.”
In fact, many of the students at Latino Youth say they felt disillusioned by public schools. Some say teachers and administrators were uncaring and unresponsive; others say gang rivalries made it impossible to concentrate.
Founded 20 years ago by community activists led by Danny Solis, Latino Youth offers these teenagers-the majority are Mexican-Americans-a second chance to get a high school diploma, in a unique setting. They study economics, history and English from a Chicano perspective, meaning the school’s curriculum focuses on the contributions of minorities, particularly Chicanos.
Students learn about Mexico’s ownership and loss of the Southwest during the Mexican-American War, and they talk about such recent news events as the Indian uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and the Mexican presidential elections.
Names such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are replaced with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, generals from the 1910 Mexican Revolution revered by the masses for championing agrarian reform and opposing rich hacienda landowners.
Making learning relevant
The school also offers the same kinds of core academic courses (world history, physics, math) and electives (journalism, drama, music) as are found in public schools.
Rather than offering the standard foreign language courses in German, French and Spanish, Latino Youth offers a class in Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztecs who ruled Mexico before the Spanish conquest in 1521.
Nahuatl, by way of Spanish, gave the English language such words as coyote, tomato and chili, and is still spoken by 1 million people in central Mexico.
The school’s purpose is to make learning a relevant experience for Latino dropouts by giving them books and lessons heightening their awareness of Chicano history, said Esther Lopez, director of educational services at Latino Youth.
“Here at Latino Youth we recognize ourselves as who we are,” said Lopez, who is not related to Miguel Lopez. “We’re Mexicanos, we’re mestizos”-people of mixed European and Latin American ancestry-“we’re Chicanos, and we need to be affirmative about who we are, and then it’s very logical that you’ll move to a certain kind of curriculum.”
“Studying (Nahuatl) has much more application than German or French because it connects us to who we are,” she said. “Really, we need to go back to our history in understanding what the Chicano movement was all about. It was very definite about recognizing our indigenous (roots) and our mestizaje,” the mixture of Spaniard and Aztec blood. “This school comes from that tradition.”
Fighting dropout problem
Nationally, Latinos have the highest dropout rate of any ethnic group. About 29 percent of Latinos 16 to 24 years old dropped out of high school in 1992, compared with 14 percent of blacks and 8 percent of whites, according to the U.S. Department of Education. While dropout rates for other groups have fallen in the past decade, the Latino rate remains high.
According to federal studies, the main reasons Latinos drop out are dislike of school, the need to work and teenage pregnancy.
In an attempt to fight this trend, educators in the last five years have increasingly turned to alternative schools, said Jay Smirk, executive director of the South Carolina-based National Dropout Prevention Center. “It is important if you could get their attention and get them to learn of their culture and heritage. They need something they could relate to.”
Miguel Lopez, wearing baggy purple shorts that end just below his knees and a white T-shirt with purple etchings, anxiously fidgeted in his seat one recent morning at Latino Youth. Before being given that morning’s writing assignment, he left the classroom for a few minutes.
When he returned, he carried Luis Rodriguez’s book “Always Running,” which details Rodriguez’s involvement in a Mexican-American East Los Angeles gang in the 1960s.
Though he has read the book, Miguel, an active member of a Latino gang in Cicero, wants to read it again.
“It’s about everything that’s going on out on the streets-killings, drugs, violence, people going to jail,” he said, settling into his seat where, for the next hour, he quietly worked on his writing assignment.
One of a kind
Latino Youth, which has a day-care center for teenage mothers at the school, is the only alternative school in Chicago whose curriculum is overtly Chicano, a term that some experts say came from Nahuatl and that activists in the 1960s adopted as a means of proclaiming Mexican-American nationalism.
The campus is not recognized by the Illinois Board of Education, but administrators say they hope it will be by the end of the school year. The school has 22 funding sources, including city and state grants, as well as private donations.
About 90 students attend the school, with a selection committee of students and administrators deciding who gets in. This year Latino Youth received more than 80 applications for the approximately 35 student seats that opened in the fall.
“The fact that you are in a gang will not exclude or include you in this school,” said Esther Lopez. “The philosophy (with each student) is, something happened, and it probably wasn’t your fault. Come back and try again.
“So what if they are in a gang? They still need some kind of way to connect. What’s the alternative? We don’t need more jails. There is a significant number of Latinos who live in poverty. How can schools meet their needs? They’re not radical changes-like providing child care for students.”
When Miguel dropped out of Clemente, he worked two jobs; he was a daytime plumber and a nighttime assembly-line worker. On weekends he hung out with his gang. He did this for two years before going back to school.
“I didn’t want to sit like a couch potato. I wanted to do something with my life,” said Miguel, who hopes to go college to study either computers or architecture. “This is my second chance, and I’m going to take advantage of it. I don’t care what people think.”
Miguel joined his Cicero gang when he was 12, after an older cousin whom he admired became a member. Since then he has seen that cousin go to jail and his best friend killed in a driveby shooting.
“It’s hard for me to get out,” he said. “It’s not easy getting out. You get a good whipping. They jump you. I think I’m going to get out and the first thing that comes to my head is the beating . . . and I don’t want that. Probably one of these days I will, but not now.”
Miguel sees a future
Miguel was fearful of harassment from rival gangs once he decided to go back to school. But at Latino Youth he found that gangs weren’t tolerated, which made him feel at home.
“I went into the classroom and they were talking about where you came from,” he said. “It freaked me out. They never gave us this in regular high school. They always gave us Abraham Lincoln, blah, blah, blah.”
“This is the first time I’ve stayed (awake) in a history class,” he said. He had never heard about Indian agrarian reformer Emiliano Zapata, he said. “He was like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. I never really knew about this until I came here.”
“I never had plans to go to college, but these teachers help you,” said Miguel, eldest of six children and the first in his family with plans to go to college. “Now, I tell myself I’m going to go to college.”
While at Latino Youth, Miguel hangs out with friends such as Victor Plascencia, 17. After school, the two boys linger outside, teasing the girls who walk by and shaking hands with the boys. Latino Youth has motivated Victor in more ways than one.
“You learn about Mexican history-what happened in the past and how we’ve suffered,” he said. “To me, before, `Mexican’ was a word for a human being coming from Mexico. Now I know in the future we’ll be the fastest-growing” minority group.
Like Miguel, Victor wants to go to college. He hopes to become a social worker.
“I’ll have the knowledge of what I’ve been through,” Victor said. “A lot of social workers have never been in (a gang). They just talk about statistics. I have knowledge of it . . . the good sides and the bad sides.”
