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Looking for a place to sit

Young teens struggle socially with language, culture obstacles

Feeling like an outsider.

It’s been the topic of many songs, books and movies about teen angst, and with good reason. Today’s younger generations of Latino students in America are discovering that getting an education also means having to figure out which group you fit in. Acceptance is the goal, but the struggle can take its toll.

For Christina Bustos, the cafeteria was where she learned she wasn’t like the other kids at her school.

“I was one of two Mexican kids at my table. We both drank chocolate milk and (the others) drank white,” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘That must be because we are Mexican.’ ”

Like any child attending school, Bustos wanted to fit in. With a Latino father and Anglo mother, however, it wasn’t that easy. Because she did not speak Spanish, she found herself in a limbo of sorts, as neither the Latino nor Anglo kids were completely accepting.

“I continued to have these same issues through high school. I was never really ‘Mexican’ enough for my Chicano friends,” says Bustos, who now finds herself back at school as a sixth-grade teacher.

Among young Latinos, there are stories of trying to find out where they belong among classmates. Sometimes it is a language barrier: speaking Spanish may keep them apart from other students, including Latinos who speak only English. For those who speak English only, students who share the same heritage may exclude them from conversations en español.

With the name Rosa Xochimilco Sanchez, it’s unlikely anyone would doubt her recollection of learning Spanish at a young age from babysitters Rosa and Tomás Corral. (The Corrals are known by many as owners of Scottsdale’s Los Olivos restaurants.)

“I’m told that I used to translate for my parents,” she says of her Spanish-ancestry dad from New Mexico and her Anglo mother from Fargo, N.D. Sanchez reached high school at a time when the school was seeing an increase in a larger immigrant student population. She had forgotten much of the Spanish she’d learned; her teachers grouped her with English-speaking students.

“I was kept with the kids from Scottsdale,” says Sanchez, who is now married and uses her husband’s surname of Leonard.

For other assimilated Latino students, speaking English put them between two camps of taunting.

“I got it from both sides: Why don’t you speak more? Why didn’t you learn from your parents? Why do you need to know Spanish? Who do you think you are?” recalls Christina Bustos, now a graduate of Arizona State University and an archivist for the Scottsdale Charros.

For assimilated Latino boys, the latter question can mean feeling caught between being a good student or part of a gang, or being ostracized altogether. One male teen, who didn’t want his name used, had been pressured to join a gang in his freshman year. He believes his American-born parents had it easier when they went to high school. “At least they didn’t have to put up with the gangsters always being after you,” he says.

And one 13-year-old, the son of an Anglo father and a Latina, says no one wanted to sit next to him at lunch, or talk with him on the playground, because he didn’t speak Spanish. “I wish I did speak Spanish, so I could understand what they (other students) were saying about me,” he says.

For Spanish-speaking students, the stakes were just as high and the social pressures as tough.

As a young girl in 2001, Issa Olmedo arrived from El Salvador, knowing only Spanish. She recalls feeling “really different” from others, so her first four years were spent with others sharing her native language. She met her best friend, also from El Salvador, and other Salvadorans and Mexicans.

“I felt more connection to them than White people,” she admits.

For California native Desaray Klimenko, Spanish was the language she and her siblings learned from their grandmother, who raised them but did not speak English. When she entered kindergarten, she sensed she was “treated a bit differently because I spoke Spanish.”

SEARCH FOR SELF-IDENTITY

Maria Chacón, a history teacher at Central High School in Phoenix, said she spends time talking with students about the cultural issues that arise in establishing their identities.

“It’s very important to have those discussions,” she says. “I want them to know there are opportunities.”

Chacón says such conversations already are happening more and more at home. “We’re now in an era when students get to decide where they want to go. They have support from previous generations,” she says.

This was not the case in the 1980s when she attended high school. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Chacón emigrated to the United States when she was 3, was deported when she was 13 and was here illegally until she was 18, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was instituted. “I saw myself as girl who had to find her own way,” she adds.

All of the young students interviewed have found their place, but it hasn’t always been easy. (Read about ASU programs that help young teens make the transition to higher education on Pages 51 - 52.)

“By fifth or sixth grade, I knew there was a different tier,” says Rosa Leonard. She tried to recover her Spanish skills in high school but “I was frustrated. They used to teach (how to say) colors and I wanted to know how the language worked.”

She was the only Latina in some classes; even at her mother’s family reunion, she felt different because she was the only dark-skinned one there. Moving on to ASU, she tapped into her family’s artistic side by joining a club devoted to Latino arts, but when she attended one of its events, she was shocked to hear works filled with what she considered hatred toward Whites.

Christina Bustos’ search for her identity started within her family. She recalls seeing the movie La Bamba and asking her father about his own life.

“He always told me he lived in a tent but I never believed him until I saw what exactly he meant: picking fruit,” she says. Her Anglo mother tried to support Bustos in her search. “She would take me places no matter what I wanted to do -- car shows even,” Bustos recalls. “She never made me feel like I had to conform to the White culture.”

Klimenko, who will be a senior at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, recalls feeling like an outsider at Cheer Camp at Northern Arizona University, where she would “see rich White girls. I felt out of place a bit.”

With an appreciation for the risk that her mother took to bring her to the United States for a better education, she “had to reach out” to Anglo English speakers to make friends. However, she is more comfortable hanging out with kids from Mexico. “I don’t have to pause and think, ‘In English, what is that word?’”

LESSONS LEARNED

The students who were interviewed now look at their school experiences with maturity. A few have taken steps to study more about their cultural connections, and some of their faculty are more aware of the differences among Latino students.

“Now teachers understand that culture is very important in the development and education of students,” Chacon says, noting other Central High School teachers have asked her how to engage Latino kids. “Teachers want students to be successful.”

Issa Olmedo, a junior at Corona del Sol High School in Tempe, has found ways to surmount the divide she experienced in middle school.

“I’d try (to make friends) but they didn’t like me at all,” she recalls. But she spoke English fluently by 2005, and began participating in school activities such as color guard and the marching band. She made more connections with Anglo students as she shared information about her Salvadoran culture. Today, she says, there is common ground to “talk with both.”

“Now there’re kids who travel from one group to another. Kids are more open to experimenting, to identify their comfort groups for crossover,” says Maria Chacón.

Olmedo has set her goal on becoming a doctor, eventually going to Africa to treat people in need.

“My main goal is to help people in the world,” she says.

After competing nationally, Desaray Klimenko is attending the Junior Statesman Scholar of American program at Princeton this summer. She wants to become an architect.

In pursuing her college education, history major Rosa Leonard took classes in Latin American and Chicano studies as a way to tap into her roots while fulfilling her degree.

“I loved feeling that I could study aspects of my culture,” she says. Because of all the classes she took, “at this point I identify myself as Hispanic. It’s an apt term: a person of Spanish-speaking origin.”

Among the siblings raised in her household, “I am the only one who calls myself Chicana; the others (two brothers) are ‘Hispanic,’ ” Bustos says. She continues to improve her Spanish through immersion programs in Mexico. “I want to find out more about where my roots come from, about how the Chicano ideals and the Mexican history mesh together,” she says.

However, there is much more at stake. As a teacher at William T. Machan Elementary School in Phoenix, a predominantly Latino school, “I want my students to see me continue to find out who I am, appreciate where I have come from and value language, so that they do not have to go through what I went through,” Bustos says.