Karla Coleman saw Mario De La Haye stroll across Lake Forest College’s green, tree-shaded campus, saw his short-cropped Afro haircut, saw his brownish skin color and saw a brother.
“I had him stereotyped as a black,” said Coleman. “Then he opened his mouth and really tripped me up.”
Coleman, of the Englewood neighborhood, thought she knew pretty much everything there was to know about Hispanics. That was until she met De La Haye, a Panamanian immigrant from the Marquette Park community who spent a week with her last month at the private Lake County campus in a multicultural summer camp for parents who do volunteer work in the Chicago public schools.
“It was like, where are you from?” she said, recalling her initial reaction to De La Haye’s Caribbean-accented English.
Coleman, De La Haye and 30 other parents were brought together by the 25-year-old non-profit Illinois Ethnic Coalition for the Chicago Public Schools to answer the question: Can’t we all get along?
The public schools thought the question was important given that the system is almost 90 percent minority, with blacks and Hispanics the two largest groups. And of those groups, only Latinos have shown consistent growth, doubling their enrollment since 1970 to the point that they now account for almost 30 percent of the system’s more than 400,000 students. During the same period that the Latino student population surged, black enrollment dropped by about 85,000, although blacks remain roughly 55 percent of the student population.
The result has been friction over everything from bilingual education, which some blacks (and whites) believe siphons too much money away from general programs, to tussles concerning overcrowded schools, such as the fight earlier this year at Daley School in which Latino parents protested a plan to bus their children to roomier schools in what they called “dangerous” black neighborhoods.
But Millie Rivera, executive director of the Latino Institute, a non-profit organization that deals with research, training and advocacy, said Latino concerns about overcrowded schools and busing are no different from black community concerns. “Neither of us want our kids spending two hours of their school day on the bus,” she said.
During the 15 years blacks have controlled school headquarters at Pershing Road, Latinos haven’t always felt their needs were adequately addressed. Now, a new system adopted by the state legislature last spring has transferred power to Mayor Richard Daley’s hand-picked management team, leading some in the black community to fear their concerns will not get the same attention as in the past.
“Everyone’s got their really small piece of the pie and each group feels the other group is getting more,” said Jeryl Levin, executive director of the Illinois Ethnic Coalition.
The summer camp for parents was the brainchild of Belkis Santos, outgoing assistant superintendent for human resources, who brought together four groups of parents involved in bilingual education, special education, Chapter I funding and early-childhood-education issues to participate.
Instead of thinking of each other as haves and have-nots whose children have competing educational needs, the goal of the week was to get the parents of kids in these programs to see they have much in common. The project was all the more challenging because the parents came from areas as distinct as the predominantly black housing project of Cabrini-Green and the primarily Mexican-immigrant neighborhood of Pilsen.
On top of that, the parents faced the problem of how to translate their experience to hundreds of others they work with who did not attend the week-long session. “The success of this week is personal,” said one Latino parent. “It’s not a joining of communities.”
They broke down the old stereotypes through storytelling; workshops conducted by the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange of Washington, D.C.; a bus tour of some black neighborhoods; watching movies; and holding frank rap sessions about what they thought of each other.
In one exercise, the parents were given racial and ethnic labels and asked to associate ideas with the labels. Some in the group heard Latino and instantly thought “taco,” “music,” “big families” and “not English-speaking.” Others heard Asian and immediately thought “alien,” “smart,” “chinks,” “small feet,” “yellow.” White males were thought of as “racist,” “hard-working,” “powerful” and “dishonest.” And blacks were described as “noisy,” “unorganized,” “beautiful” and “oppressed.”
The group saw the ethnic putdowns as a way their various groups have been demonized, leading to a heritage of slavery, holocaust and gang carnage. The discussion led De La Haye to conclude that all the groups present were talking about a shared experience: the loss of generations of their own people.
That didn’t mitigate the pain the Asian labels had on Jae Choi, a Korean-American businesswoman and civic leader from Albany Park.
“My son was born Dec. 4 at 12 o’clock at night at Illinois Masonic Hospital,” Choi said. “He is not an alien. He is not an immigrant.
“I’m an immigrant. But I tell you every election year I go and vote, and that’s a heck of a lot better than 60 percent of the rest of Chicago,” said Choi, as the parents broke out in a chorus of amens and a clatter of clapping.
The walls began coming down quickest during the storytelling hours led by George Bailey, a teacher of English and writing composition at Columbia College. Bailey made the parents form groups of five or six to tell stories and then made them get into another group to write their stories.
“I couldn’t believe it when Alejandro Chaparro told me the story about his uncle being attacked by the Ku Klux Klan,” Coleman said. “I never knew that Mexicans were victims of the Klan, too.”
She said that forcing the parents to keep mixing in different groups brought the diversity of the group home to her.
“We knew Latinos weren’t all from Mexico, but we didn’t expect, like, Ecuador,” said Coleman, nodding to Norberto Paredes, 75, a volunteer at Funston School in Logan Square.
Nelson Benitez, 45, another Ecuadorean who is a volunteer bilingual instructor at Coonley School, where he has a daughter in 8th grade, said eliminating stereotypes did not necessarily eliminate legitimate disagreements over how resources should be spent.
“I fear that as groups we are going to fight,” Benitez said. “The biggest problem is that blacks and whites want to keep a monolingual system. They don’t want to spend money on bilingual education.”
From the 1988-89 school year to 1994-95, the bilingual-education budget more than doubled, from $13.9 million to $30.7 million, while the total school budget increased 45 percent, from $2 billion to $2.9 billion.
In comparison, in 1994-95 special education had a budget of $127 million, Chapter I $261 million and early childhood education $38 million.
But Virdia Hatchett, 48, who is vice chair of a Chapter I parent-advocacy group, sees potential for a coalition between blacks and Hispanics, not a rivalry.
“Latinos have the same needs we do,” said Hatchett, who is black. “We are both trying to improve the quality of the education for our children.”
But even listening to fellow workshop participant Julia Xiques’ story of her flight for freedom from communist Cuba did not convince Hatchett that blacks and Latinos are in identical predicaments.
“There’s no water I can cross to get to a country where I might be freer,” Hatchett said. “I feel empathy for her, but it does bother me that she is freer than I am. I am old enough to have lived through the struggle with Martin Luther King, but I can’t live in places like Cicero–and Julia can.”
Yet whether the Latino immigrants came legally to the U.S., as Xiques did, or illegally as some have, Hatchett does not fault them for coming and putting their children into the Chicago public schools.
“They are trying to do the best they can for their children,” she said. “If I were in their position I would do the same thing.”
