“You love making us write, don’t you?” says an eighth grader after being assigned to write two pages on Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
“But why?” he asks, though he continues copying down the assignment.
She and I had met in this very building, at 4600 S. Hermitage, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, ten years earlier. She was an eighth grader dreaming of becoming the first in her family to go to college, the sixth of nine children raised by a single Mexican-immigrant mother. I was a 28-year-old middle-class transplant from North Carolina stumbling through my second year as a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, an outsider to my students in almost every way.
Five years later she was standing in front of her own classroom in the school where she’d spent nine years as a student. Given that less than 13 percent of Chicago Public Schools teachers are Latino, even though Latino children make up more than 36 percent of the system’s student population, the power of Serrano’s presence is difficult to overestimate. But more important than her coming back to Seward was what she’d come back to do. “I want to be honest with these kids,” she says. “I want them to see a bigger picture, because when I was growing up my sense of the world was isolated and narrow. I want them to question, to understand themselves in this world, to understand why things are the way they are, and to be able to use that to overcome whatever they need to overcome. I want them to understand the system so they can look at it and say, ‘You know what? That’s not right.’ I want to let them know that a better future is possible.”
When she was growing up, Serrano wouldn’t have said she was poor. “It’s just the way it was,” she says. “Sometimes you don’t realize you’re poor until you have something to compare it to.” Almost everything was shared. For several years she and her three younger sisters slept in the same queen-size bed with their mother. “The babies would be close to my mom, somebody would get the wall, and somebody would sleep at the feet,” she says matter-of-factly. “Now that I think about it, I actually didn’t mind being at the feet. Sometimes you had more space there.”
At the end of her sophomore year she attended a Latino leadership conference. “They had all these workshops on empowering yourself, and being proud of who you are, and moving on to your next step in life, and it just really motivated me,” she says. “I saw that there really were other options after high school. I got all these brochures from different colleges and took them home to show my ma. She was like, ‘What are you talking about? We can’t afford college.’”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
All but one of Serrano’s older brothers and sisters had left high school before graduating to get jobs and help their mother pay the bills, but she went to her school counselor’s office to ask about scholarships and loans. “He wasn’t rude–not in a blatant, openly racist way,” she says. “He was just like, ‘Well, what’s your GPA? Oh, well, it’s not too high. I don’t think you qualify for this.’ He was all nonchalant, like he didn’t care. He got out a box and gave it to me, and he’s like, ‘Well, look through these and see if you find anything.’ Talk about a mess–it was just a bunch of papers about colleges and scholarships, not even organized or anything. And that experience made me think, ‘You don’t give a shit about us. If I wouldn’t have come down to the office on my own you wouldn’t have done anything for me!’ I was really upset.”
