My educational inheritance amounted to my mother’s Mexican grade school education, my grandfather’s eight grades in San Diego, and my uncle dropping out in 1944 from the 10th grade in San Diego. That allowed him to misrepresent his age so he could go across the Pacific to fight the Rising Sun.
Amid the worldwide turmoil, my life was that of a World War II kid in a segregated city in California that was the key to war in the Pacific. School was my life when the war ended. Interestingly, I didn’t have a male teacher until the sixth grade. Women taught me to read. I loved reading.
At 12 I entered the new Horace Mann Junior High School campus and its library. That took my breath away. The librarian told us there were more than 3,000 books in the library. I asked where the fiction books were. She showed them to me and asked if I liked fiction.
“Yes,” I answered, “I wonder if I can read them all before I leave this school. “By the way,” I asked, “who is Horace Mann?”
At 17 I graduated from Hoover High School as an honor student in the college-credit honors history program with only 11 members of a senior class of 812. I was the only “minority,” other than “Jewish,” in the honors program.
Many of the Mexican American and Black students that entered Hoover with me did not graduate. Kids could legally quit school at 16, and many did. They needed work, and their families needed money. The federal minimum wage at that time was a dollar an hour.
The only person I knew attending college was a friend of my mother, and her family criticized her for not working to help support the family. She worked part-time at a San Diego library on 28th Street and National Avenue, 20 blocks from my first school, Lowell Elementary. Every day after school I would walk to the library where she worked. She would bring me books in English to look at and read with her help. The books kept me company.
I did that for two years. In 1950 we moved away from Barrio Logan to East San Diego — a very white East San Diego.
Barrio Logan was overpopulated yet heavily overlooked by city politicos. Most alleys were unpaved. Industrial and commercial buildings were interspersed with residential units. Zoning punished residential homes and their owners. There was a car junkyard bordering my school. Parks were miles away. Few people had cars because none were made during the war.
Most women worked in the tuna packing plants a few blocks from school. The air always smelled like fish.
My old Lowell Elementary is now Perkins Elementary, named after a Black educator. In 1996, 50 years after I attended it, a man named Kenny Rogers was concerned by studies showing that by third grade, children either could read at grade level or not. If they could not, the studies showed, they would likely never finish school.
Rogers decided to do something about the pending problem of millions of California Hispanic and Black children who would enter adulthood without being fully educated.
He started working with 12 second graders. He and friends organized their efforts at Lowell Elementary, but with little money or support. He worked with children who looked and spoke like me 50 years before. Many, like me, were from Mexico with little or no English when they woke up on their first morning in America.
Teachers volunteered; the effort grew and continues to grow. It is now called Barrio Logan College Institute. This school year, the institute is helping 200 children ranging from second grade to twelfth grade who are graduating. It is also opening facilities in El Cajon and Chula Vista.
In El Cajon, they are working with Middle Easterners who have escaped the turmoil there and have been making their way 12,000 miles to San Diego County, where over 100,000 have settled. The facility in Chula Vista is 60% Mexican American, with students from less affluent, older areas of Chula Vista and National City.
Without the institute, how many kids would work their way through local middle and high schools and present themselves as applicants to some of the best colleges and universities in the world? In fact, San Diego State University offers guaranteed admission to the institute’s graduates.
The 18 part- and full-time institute staff work at running the program by recruiting students and their families, tutoring students as individuals and teams, participating in workshops for students and their parents, as well as helping parents with services of various sorts to help them support their children.
This is a program that deserves to be offered in cities across the United States for students of all ethic backgrounds. Think of Arab-speaking neighborhoods in Michigan, or Spanish-speaking populations in Chicago, Houston and Miami.
The Barrio Logan College Institute is making college attractive and achievable for 200 children today, 200 tomorrow and on-and-on. Imagine how Hispanic, Middle Easter and other ethic groups’ presence in colleges and universities throughout America would increase if similar organizations were in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami and Phoenix.
Wake up, American foundations. Millions of willing children can use your help. Use the Barrio Logan College Institute as a model of how to find willing youngsters that thirst for and need a college education.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant, prolific author and host of the Contreras Report on YouTube and Facebook.
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