By Jenny Patiño –
I was three years old and my mother took me to my tia’s classroom on the rancho. My tias were teachers and needed my mother to make student costumes for a baile folklorico. Walking into their classroom, I thought I was in a scene from “Carrusel,” an old telenovela about kids in primary school. Upon seeing my tia Chenta walk to the head of the classroom, I jumped up and shouted “¡presente, maestra!” just like the kids in the opening credits.
Jenny Patiño
I can’t remember if my middle sister was there with me, but she would have been about two years old. Twenty years later I’m at school in the United States, completing degrees in Art History and Creative Non-Fiction at Columbia College Chicago, the school that both of my younger sisters want to attend. The youngest, Melissa, just began her first semester in the Art and Design program. While she and I were both born in Chicago and are eligible for financial aid. My middle sister was born in Celaya on a visit to our seriously ill grandfather. She had no choice as to where she would be born or where we would eventually live. Now, while Melissa and I have the privilege of pursuing a higher education, my other sister is not even eligible for loans. She is undocumented.
Because of the long application process, my parents barely became residents recently. It might be another half a decade before my sister can become one too. Until then she is unable to legally leave the United States—not even to visit family. Much less to attend school.
Although President Obama pledged to bring undocumented immigrants out of “society’s shadows,” the economic crisis has shelved those concerns. My sister is currently teaching herself and my boyfriend’s 11 year old daughter how to play the drums. She has the makings of a wonderful music teacher. But she is outside of Obama’s teaching grants. And without immigration reform or the DREAM Act, she is unable to go to college at all.
This is the second generation in my family in which there has been an educational disparity between sisters. Despite decades of educational reform after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, there were still areas in the central region of Mexico, closest to the capital without primary schools until the 1960’s. When education finally arrived in the rancho of Galvanes, my mother was not able to attend, although her sisters were. My grandparents needed my mother to tend to animals, and to work the land. She secretly taught herself to read in between chores with borrowed magazines.
Because of continuing economic disparities, many children, especially girls, are still held back from school in Mexico today. My aunts became teachers active in the rural literacy programs, helping to establish schools in the hills of Guanajuato. With their help in passing equivalency exams, my mother eventually completed her primary education at the age of 36.
I have seen my tias Chenta and Melo only twice since my mother, my sister, and I left Mexico to follow our father to Chicago. Other than my mama, I don’t believe I will ever meet more ferociously loving women in my life. I have come to associate them with Diego Rivera’s 1924 mural La maestra rural, at the Secretaría de Educación Pública in Mexico City. The mural depicts a circle of peasants of all ages surrounding a teacher with workers toiling in the background. The shape of an armed bodyguard on horseback protectively borders the mural on the left.
That mural is from an era in which teachers were regularly murdered by caziques who wanted to keep peasants under control. When violence erupted in Oaxaca this year over the shooting death of a teacher during a union clash–the first time since the mass protests in 2006– I was reminded how much being an educator in Mexico continues to be a dangerous profession.
What did it feel like for my aunts to have to leave their sister at home while they went to school? Did they feel slightly guilty, angry and determined–the same way I feel now? How much did it shape their lives? I have so many questions. But when I ask about not going to school, my mother is likely to cry. And my aunts, wave the past away with a hardness in their jaws. They are more likely to laugh about intervening in crooked elections, than to discuss painful things.
Whether she was present for my first memory of being in a classroom or not, my sister deserves to shout “¡presente, maestra!” now. One of Obama’s first actions as President was to implement teaching grants. Investing in education is the surest way out of any economic crisis—whether personal or national. But our goals for education and the economy can’t be achieved without the DREAM Act, which could legalize upto a million undocumented youth. We can’t extend an opportunity to one part of society while denying it to another. While they may not all be blood, there is always, always, a sister in our community—near or far—that needs our help to get an education.
Jenny Patiño is a student at Columbia College Chicago.