Being Poor & Mexican-American in the United States

Growing up Mexican-American in the United States was growing up to be White. I was raised In South Texas, in a predominantly brown town, but let’s be real…the town was run by the minority White folks. So, to say that I fully embraced my culture, my history, would be a lie. I was more White than I should have been. From the time I was born, the society in which my ancestors fought in wars for tried to rid me of my heritage. Forget that my Great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were veterans and saw bloodshed for this country and forget that my ancestors where here long before Texas became Texas. None of that matters when you are growing up brown in America.

Why is that? Why are our White brothers and sisters so scared of allowing us an equal playing field? Stop right there if you think we have always had equality because if you do, you are sadly mistaken.

Let me give you a brief history of my family’s field and you decide if I have had an equal chance at life. Were opportunities there? I’m sure…but were they ripe for the picking? Absolutely not! All four of my grandparents did not make it passed 6th grade. I am not talking about great great great grandparents. I am literally talking about two generations ago, my own grandparents, growing up in the 1900s in America, South Texas to be specific. They had to drop out of school to help support their families. My grandmothers worked for White families, some who partied all weekend and left their filth for one my grandmother’s, who literally was under age, to clean up on Mondays.

My Grandma - Omelia Dunne

My Grandpa - Steve Dunne

My Grandpa Luciano and my Dad

My father was the only one to graduate from college in his family of seven and although my mother was certified to cut hair, neither her nor her siblings graduated from college making it 1 in 10 people from my parents families who went on to pursue and obtain a degree in higher education. This is not to say that the rest of the family was not successful, quite the contrary. We have many successful people in the family without college degrees, very successful…but that is a story for another time.

         (Dad as a young boy)

       

      

             Ramon Garcia (Dad) as he served in Vietnam.

Am I blaming my family’s beginnings on all Whites? Absolutely not. Not by far. We all have a burden to carry and some of the most unbelievably degrading comments have come from people of my own ethnicity.

To be perfectly clear, there were Hispanic teachers and school personnel who degraded us. They degraded my father, telling him he had no business going to college. He needed to settle for a trade. That is all he was good for after all. This is a man who was an English Language Learner, who would work after school to help his family and come home and study until late in the evening/morning, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam for our country, who has a masters degree, who is one of the smartest people I know. Yet, he was told by the same education system that is supposed to educate that he should settle for a trade! You betcha it infuriates me.

       (Mom and Dad at Dad’s college graduation ceremony)

Oh no, it didn’t stop there. In the late nineties my sister was told she could not be in an advanced math class and this was by a teacher who was brown. So I am not getting it twisted, we are all to blame…browns and whites. Just so I am clear, my sister did join that math class after my father fought for her. She ended up being a math coach in Austin ISD and is now a principal. Damn, do we have to fight for our education! It shouldn’t be this way. What about those who can’t fight? What about our Abuelitas who couldn’t fight? Our families with different languages? It shouldn’t be this hard to let us even the playing field. And yet, here we are.

Ladies and gentlemen, my ancestors have literally been here since the early 1800s and it took my family almost 200 years for its first representative to obtain a college degree. You tell me if we are starting with a leveled playing field? I think not.

My family went from one person, my father, having a college degree to now all four of his children having college degrees. My youngest sister has her bachelors degree from UT Austin. My middle sister, the principal, obtained her bachelors from UT Austin and went on to obtain her masters degree. I have my masters degree and my brother has a PhD.

It took one person, my father, to make the change, but our history is so much more. We have struggled to be who we are. We have struggled with our Spanglish roots, with our TexMex language, with degradation as eyes roll when we pass by in cars booming, Spanish music blaring. We have struggled, when in the 1990s my college roommate asked me to do the cleaning because that is what my people do. We have struggled.

Despite our struggle, the education gap is closing for my family but for so many other Latino families it has shown no signs of closing and for no fault of their own. They are simply a part of an education system that speaks about diversity and inclusion but in reality is all about exclusion.

The education gap that exists has everything to do with race, has everything to do with poverty, the higher costs to get educated, and has everything to do with bias, including bias in the minority cultures towards one another. We all must do better. We are Americans, no matter the race, the skin color, or economic status. Together we are better.

(Above are my mother and father - high school graduation)

Thank you, Mom & Dad…for never forgetting who you are or where you came from and for working to change the trajectory of life for your family.

Sí se puede!