David Gribble visited the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School, Chicago
THE DR PEDRO Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago has about seventy students, aged between fourteen and twenty. Most students and staff are Puerto Rican, but there are also Mexicans, African-Americans and whites. The atmosphere is boisterous, friendly and informal. It is difficult to distinguish staff from students. Twice a week there is a class called Unity, when the whole school comes together to listen to announcements, make plans and solve problems. 'There's a different racial mixture here,' you might think, 'but this is a typical cosy refuge for the children of the wealthy, liberal middle class.'
Here are two extracts from interviews with students:
By where I live there was this one lady that had a little girl - she was into alcohol and drugs and her little girl was about to get raped by another man, older man, and the police came and took the little girl from her. And now, the years passed and she is like too much into alcohol and drugs and she passed away - last year.
How old was the girl that the man wanted to rape?
The little girl? She was like five or six.
The reason why some of the students won't be able to go over there [to a new site for the school] is because of other gangs, violence and all. Misunderstanding between the gangs. Most of us, like myself, we used to be in gangs, and now that we're out of that they still know us out there and especially on Division, there's a lot of people that recognise our faces, so it would be a danger to us, and mainly to the other students of the school if we keep on going to the school while they move over there on Division.
So who are these gangs?
They are the Dragons, the Jivers, the Almighty Imperial Gangster Nation, the Manialand Disciples, the Gangster Disciples, the Milwaukee Kings and the Spanish Cobras.
Have you suffered yourself from what these gangs have been doing?
Yeah. I used to be an I.G. and I used to gangbang* and I've been shot, stabbed. I've seen my family, most of my family die. All around me my best friends getting killed. Just this week, on Wednesday, my cousin, eleven years old, he just got killed, and all through this, over little misunderstandings and everything. And even just because of the gang colours that people don't know that they're wearing. They get shot over stupid things.
Marvin Garcia, the principal of the school, illustrated the situation like this:
'I remember a young woman that she told me that she was running money for cocaine from the stock exchange into the drug dealers. All these people, all these rich people getting high, and what she was doing was bringing the money to the drug dealers, and she was making good money doing that. Who can compete with that? There she is, fifteen years old, she had nice clothes, she had nice gym shoes, a nice jacket, and all she was doing was running the money. That's it. She was really open about it.
'But there's one thing, though, that we have going for us, and that's the ethical struggle. We say "Look, maybe there isn't an option, but let's understand that when you're doing this you're bringing down the community, poisoning the community. You're destroying life. You're doing the opposite of what we're trying to do. We're trying to uplift the community. We're trying to help people to take control of their lives, and live their lives with dignity, and what you're doing is objectifying our community, enslaving our community. It's a reality that it's very hard to get out of. We can't compete. We'll help you, we'll help you go to college, we'll help you, but it's very difficult."
'There are four main threads to the help that the school gives. Firstly, the school provides a safe environment, where students are treated with respect and affection, and are able to behave naturally. Secondly, it provides a straightforward route to conventional qualifications and entry into college. Thirdly, it builds their self-esteem by teaching Puerto Rican and Mexican history and Latin-American literature. Fourthly, it gives an opportunity for the students to become agents for change.'
The school does not just discuss social problems and come to agreements about them. It also takes action. Students and staff have participated in demonstrations in support of funding for young people, particularly young people who have been expelled from school; they have campaigned for funding for alternative education; they have participated in rallies against police brutality, and helped to create programmes to raise awareness around HIV and AIDS in the community. As Marvin said, 'It's about moving from the language of critique to the language of possibilities.'
This is how one student described this process:
When I was taught Puerto Rican history, they didn't only teach me the history of Puerto Rico as, you know, the Spanish invasion, and all of that, they also taught me about the struggles that are happening in our day. It's really unfair, what the US government is doing, colonising Puerto Rico, and it really interested me that the school was actually doing something about the Puerto Rican political prisoners and all of that. The teachers always tell us, if you're not interested in it, you don't have to go on the marches. I was interested, I've been to a lot of marches. I went to New York, that was last year, and it was about the political prisoners, and I've been to Washington too, for the political prisoners, and now that they're out, we feel that we have accomplished our goal.
The students at the High School learn that they can achieve for themselves, and that they can change the world. I asked those I interviewed what they hoped to be doing when they were twenty-five. They hoped to become an actor, a mechanical engineer, a journalist, a cop (to help the community), an accountant, a marine biologist, a student at an art college, a family man and a doctor. Some of these students come from extremely hard backgrounds; one young man, for instance, told me he had been living on the streets at the age of eight because his mother had turned him out of her house. They all live in an area of gang warfare. 'This is not really what you would call a school,' said one student. 'It's more like a second home for most of us.'
Jesse Mumm, who works at the school, describes it not as progressive, or democratic, or free, but as liberating. It was not founded to demonstrate some educational philosophy, but to help to solve urgent problems. You could say it was to provide a second home for people who hardly had a first home. The fact that the home provided so closely resembles other schools that perhaps describe themselves as progressive, democratic or free, demonstrates that such education is far more important for those from poor backgrounds than it is for the well-off. For the well-off it is merely appropriate and agreeable: for the underdog it is salvation.
* 'Gangbang,' in this slang, does not have any sexual connotation. It means simply to take part in gang activities.