A LEARNING PASSION
SOCIAL ISSUES: Poor Mexican Indians built their own school; an O.C. resident hopes to fulfill their wish of a better one.
AT HOME: Abran Morales, 8, rests after reciting Bible passages for his father, Eduardo Morales Miranda. The father was so concerned about his children's education he began teaching them after school, using a wall as a blackboard.

by MINERVA CANTO Community News Jan 23 2000, Orange County Register
Photos by ANA VENEGAS/The Orange County Register

The Pedregal San Julia colonia of mainly Mixtec Indians is a 10-minute drive from the U.S. border. But although "the other side" is not far away, it might as well be the moon for a community where the Mixtec language dominates, setting them apart from most of their Spanish-speaking neighbors, and even further from their neighbors to the north.
They are the poorest of the poor, these migrants from Oaxaca who travel thousands of miles north to a city where the indigent abound — but there is at least the possibility of work.
John Diaz, a San Juan Capistrano business owner who has a home in Tijuana, also believes a well-built schoolhouse could mean the difference between life on the fringes of survival or life with more potential for these children. He is organizing a volunteer work force to build classrooms. Diaz decided to help the indigenous community after hearing about their plight last month, then seeing their need firsthand when he visited the neighborhood. "I think those children, if they had a better education, a good school," Diaz said, "they could grow up to earn a decent living."

THE SCHOOL: On weekdays, more than 280 children crowd into Centro de Educacion Preescolar Indigena (Center for Preschool Indigenous Education), basically eight makeshift classrooms built by the parents. All classrooms lack electricity and water. Two have no windows, and the daylight streaming in from the open door on a sunny day does not quite illuminate the two back rows of desks.
The child-size desks in the larger classes those holding nearly 50 students are so tightly squeezed together that children practically elbow each other. There is a bathroom for girls and one for boys, but neither toilet flushes. The need for a bigger and better-built schoolhouse grows more urgent each week, as buses drop off more indigenous migrants who make their way to their new homes on the dusty hill. There is no end in sight to the growth. The migration is continually spurred by longtime political unrest over indigenous rights and by natural disasters such as last fall's floods that wiped out thousands of homes.

These migrants, who usually sell food from carts or gum or crafts at the border, earn an average of $10 to $30 weekly. It is a small sum that is still much more than they could hope to earn in their hometowns. Already, the children are living up to their parents' hopes simply by learning to write their names and read simple words. Most parents use their thumb prints as a signature on their children's report cards because they cannot sign their names.
The children go to school not only to learn the kind of lessons that children everywhere are taught, but also to learn Spanish, Mixtec and the occasional English word. About 70 percent of the children are Mixtec Indian and the others are native Spanish speakers.

"We teach them to value the indigenous language," said school director Ruperto Galindo Bautista, a Mixtec Indian. "Each teacher commits himself to helping to rescue the Mixtec language. But because many follow the dollar and English represents the dollar for them, English is also taught." It all began with 12 children.
About two years ago, the school-age children were turned away from a nearby school for lack of space. Unwilling to allow the children to abandon schooling, community leader Marcos Flores Juarez "Don Marcos" to all here offered his small home as a place where children could be taught.
As the community grew, however, he realized that the children needed more. Flores, who spent five years working in farms in California, Oregon and Washington, went to Mexican government officials to ask them for a school.

First, the people had to persuade the government to give them land — no small feat in a country where public resources are stretched thin. Then, they had to ask for classrooms. They got two, but realizing it would be many months before the classrooms would be built, Don Marcos gathered the parents and told them what they had to do.
Brick by brick, plywood sheet by plywood sheet, the men, women and children of Pedregal San Julia built eight classrooms. Each parent was responsible for digging a 2-meter-square hole to level the ground where classrooms would be built.
But their labor was not enough. Although the classrooms were built with the occasional help of a bricklayer, most of the rooms are so crude that light streams in through gaps in the walls and ceiling. Most importantly, the parents say, the school lacks lighting and water and is too crowded. The parents also would like a fence for security at a school where each adult is responsible for the safety of more than 30 children.

EDUCATION AT ANY COST: Diaz, long an advocate of helping children, is looking for people willing to donate their time to travel with him to Tijuana to build classrooms.
"If they don't have money, that's OK. We just need volunteers. If I get 10, 15 people, I'll take them down myself. I'll rent a van. I'll do whatever I have to do," Diaz said. "All I ask is that if anyone has benefited from getting an education, you recognize that this can make a big difference in these children's lives."
As a Parent-Teacher Association leader at San Juan Elementary, Diaz was a pioneer in encouraging a record number of Hispanic parents to spend time with their children, ask about their school day and help with their schoolwork. He knew it was a recipe for their children's success in school.

It is one that Morales and his wife hope will work for them.
As a child, Morales was forced to abandon school after the eighth grade so he could support himself after his parents died. Now, at 40, he is thought to be elderly, his deeply creased face a tell-tale sign of a lifetime of toil.
He began giving his children daily after-school lessons soon after he visited his son in his first-grade classroom and found him in the back, the designated spot for the student with the lowest grade.

"I asked the teacher why, and she said, 'Your son doesn't know how to read,' " Morales said, looking down sadly as he recalled that day.
To teach his son to read, Morales painstakingly wrote dozens of letters on a wall in one of the two minuscule bedrooms in his home. The wall contains the alphabet, dozens of word fragments that spell out complete words when placed together, and a phrase from the Bible.
Then he found a large piece of plywood, painted it green and used it as a blackboard. The board also serves as a door separating the kitchen from the bedroom.

Morales bought a colorful book filled with lessons and activities for the children: Abran, 8; Sara, 7; and Marcela, 5. The couple debated whether to use the money for food or the book. They chose the book.
But now the book is tattered and the children have written all over it, so they use what they have. "We tell them, 'You get your mom's Bible. You get your dad's Bible,' " said Adela Gonzales Doroteo, motioning to her two oldest children. Their life of hardship is one they do not want their children to share.
"He who doesn't have an education, won't succeed in life," Morales says.
"I've had a hard life. I work selling gum, washing cars. It is not a good life. I came here intending to cross to the other side, but I had no family there so I had nowhere to go. Now, I am too old to do much else."

Tijuana's displaced Mixtec Indians face language problems at home and abroad
CHORES: Samuel Morales, 9, right, stays after school as Omar Villegas Ventura, 9, left, and Maria Virirana, 8, sweep the classroom at the current, crowded school for indigenous children in Tijuana. Students perform maintenance duties.

The survival of Mixtec Indians living in the simple homes hugging the dirt hills depends on how well they learn to navigate the intersecting worlds of their indigenous community, mainstream Mexico and the United States.
"Society has told them, 'To succeed, you have to speak English,' " said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center of Human Rights in Tijuana. "Speaking Mixtec does not give you prestige and status in Mexico. You have to know Spanish for that."
For the children of Pedregal San Julia, that translates into school lessons that are sometimes trilingual. On a recent weekday, roosters crowed in the distance and the occasional dog wandered by outside the first-grade classroom where teacher Venancio Salazar Lopez was prompting his class to repeat new words they had learned.
"Tres. How do you say it in Mixtec?" Salazar asked, loud enough to be heard above the excited din of 43 students. "Oni!" many students yelled out.
"And in English?" Salazar prompted. "Three!" the students yelled out again.

Learning Spanish is a necessity for this community set adrift in mainstream Mexico after being displaced from tiny pueblos in Oaxaca. But because long-term schooling is a vague possibility because of the high poverty rate, fluency in English is a dream, often on par with crossing "to the other side."
Their million-dollar view of glittering lights on the other side of the border, the United States, is the closest most of them will ever get to it. . Lacking resources, most stay in Tijuana. They learn Spanish, though they continue speaking Mixtec in their community. Instead of the sandals and simple clothing typically worn in their hometowns, they buy shoes and jeans.

Televisions suddenly become affordable because the community is so near the border, with people finding ways to buy used ones or barter for them. But phones are still a luxury that almost no one in the community can afford. Instead, they communicate with their relatives in southern Mexico by using public telephones or using an informal-courier system of migrants.
They find jobs as cart vendors or sell trinkets, usually near the border or on the tourist strip on Avenida Revolucion. It is there that the U.S. influence is the strongest, where they are in close proximity to people living in the United States.
The debate over assimilation vs. preserving the newcomer's culture, takes on new tones. With their own country never quite knowing whether assimilation or preserving their culture is best, many find it easier to hide their ethnicity.
Thus, they straddle theborder of their own community in addition to Mexico and the United States, a new twist on their legacy of oppression from their lighter-skinned compatriots.

"It's like they see us as ugly ducklings," said Ruperto Galindo Bautista, a Mixtec Indian and principal of the school in Pedregal San Julia. "I don't know if it's because we're darker-skinned or shorter."
Indigenous people have had to contend with being relegated to the lowest rung on the social ladder since the Mexican conquest, when the Spaniards asserted their authority by claiming superiority.
"The border," Clark Alfaro said, "presents new challenges and possibilities for them."

Copyright 2000 The Orange County Register

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