Rant #2: Documentation

Back at Berkeley, I remember the reactionaries at BAMN endlessly shrieking about boosting minority enrollment. At the time I thought them short-sighted for focusing on the last step of a systemic problem, effectively protesting the symptom rather than the disease. They should be looking, I thought, for a long-term solution, not a band-aid: ways to make sure more minority students are prepared to go to college, made competitive by any standards, so this perpetual fight about quotas, lowered standards, and the displacement of qualified white and Asian students can someday end organically.

I've only been in LA for a few months, but it's already clear that my stance was not broad or strong enough. I was (and am) deeply concerned with the institutionalized racism that prevents minority students from achieving at the same levels as their more affluent caucasian counterparts, but I had largely ignored another issue: that of the children of "undocumented workers" or "illegal immigrants" or whatever else you want to call them. Like it or not, a significant percentage of minority (ie Latino) students in Los Angeles are undocumented. Many of them are in my ESL classes or have gone through the ESL program in the past, and many of their families chose to relocate to this country because of the educational opportunities it affords. The irony is that while all students are all entitled to go to high school, their undocumented status prevents them, unless they have private funding, from going to college. Ever tried securing a federal loan without a social security number?

As a result, some incredibly bright and highly qualified students are prevented from going any further than community college. Of 500 students graduating from my school last year, 174 were undocumented, many of them at the top of their class. Lest you think that being "at the top of the class" in a low-performing urban high school means nothing, consider our '05 valedictorian, who in her senior year passed five AP exams across multiple disciplines - English literature, statistics, environmental science, biology, and Spanish language - and now attends prestigious Long Beach City College. This year, the top two contenders for valedictorian are in the same boat. My colleagues joke thinly about marrying them off to American citizens.

It's true that not all undocumented students far outperform the national average. For every student like our valedictorian, there are a handful more who simply shut down and stop trying at all. When you ask them why, they explain to you, quite simply, that since they cannot go to college in this country, they see no point in preparing for it. It's a tough point to debate.

We need to take a good, hard look at our national values. We claim to value hard work, education, and self-improvement above all else. But who works harder than those who come to our country and do the exhausting physical and "menial" labor that native-born, "established" Americans would never touch? Who works harder than their children, who often come here neither speaking nor reading a word of the language, who must become fluent despite home lives conducted primarily if not entirely in Spanish, who daily must prove themselves and their right to be here?

If people want to do something about the racial and ethnic makeup of our colleges and universities, instead of just screaming about it, they'd do well to divide their problems between these dual problems: Why are so few minority students adequately prepared for college? And why are some highly qualified minority students kept out?

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An interesting sidenote: between previewing texts for my English class, I'm working on Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser's follow-up to the bestselling Fast Food Nation. It's a collection of three long essays discussing America's black-market staples: marijuana, pornography, and unpaid labor. The labor section discusses the worst-off of California's immigrant farm workers, the strawberry pickers, and focuses on three geographic areas: San Diego, Santa Maria, and Watsonville/Salinas. So it seems that I'm from all the interesting places in terms of the study of misery.

Madness, incidentally, would be a great book to read while you're waiting for Shame of the Nation to come out.