Is There Anything More Wasteful and Useless Than a Quinceañera?
The unpopular observation that Latinos often choose work, traditions, and family over educational opportunities
In a meme about “Things Overheard in Los Angeles” two women are having lunch out in the city when one says to the other, “Look at that guy. He could be your future husband.”
The second woman immediately quips back, “No, my future husband is at work right now.”
Eating midday in Los Angeles you can often wonder why so many establishments, from gyms to Trader Joe’s, are so damn crowded. Shouldn’t everyone be clocked-in to their 9-to-5 ? Everyone in the city can’t be an unemployed actor or unsigned screenwriter. Or can they?
Actually, some are teachers. This one particular spring afternoon, I was on vacation (I worked at a year round school at the time) enjoying my day off at a Noah’s Bagels in Larchmont.
A little Latino boy and his mother entered the shop. Shouldn’t this little dude be in school? was my first thought. But maybe he was also off-track just like me. The mother-son team was hawking handmade bookmarks. Their dour, unsmiling street peddling was very reminiscent of Mexico where anywhere from Tijuana to Mexico City you can encounter really young children selling gum or stickers or something random you don’t really need like homemade ukuleles.
When I visited Oaxaca this past winter, children were peddling their own drawings ripped from the pages of a regular old notebook. The drawings weren’t very good even if their attempts at copying SpongeBob Squarepants were cute. What was obvious was that the children had learned how to trade on the pity and guilt of the tourists walking by en route to indulge in moles and mezcals. Juvenile street peddling is almost a Mexican artform.
However, it’s not like I haven’t seen kids hustle or be entrepreneurial in the United States. Beside the proverbial summer lemonade stand, there is Girl Scout cookie season which turns little girls into predatory saleswomen peddling diabetes in a box. There are also small business gardeners who often bring their sons along to help trim clients’ yards and those kids selling chocolates in parking lots. Point being, I would never begrudge a parent instilling a tenacious work ethic in their children.
But what happens when working doesn’t just supplement an education so much as supplant it? What happens when a fetish for a strong work ethic surpasses the push for schooling? Honestly, there are better ways for a child to spend his time than hawking bookmarks…especially in the United States.
Surely, I was being overly-judgmental about this poor woman’s child rearing. I admit it. I don’t know her exact situation. “Perdóname, perdóneme, perdóneme,” I ask the social justice gods.
Friends who have grown up poor and undocumented have communicated to me how their guardians often took them out of school early either because they didn’t have child care later on in the day or the household’s laundry had to get done. One acquaintance, who is now a successful lingerie and undergarment designer, told me he actually got his start by selling bras on the street with his mother when he was a boy.
The hustle is real, and the entrepreneurial spirit is admirably strong in the Latinx community no doubt. Lessons are definitely learned on the street even by children who go canning and trash-picking with their relatives in order to help supplement the household income by recycling.
I would never begrudge those activities unless, of course, the collecting of cans took priority over attending kindergarten.
Is the privileging of work over school in Latino communities so much of a sacred cow that such a choice can be left unquestioned? When the choice between having your kid work versus go to school or to the library or participate in any number of extra-curricular academic programs arrives does making children work always have to take precedence?
I recognize I have a strong middle-class bias, but as I sat in Noah’s Bagel’s I really did become upset and question, why was this little dude spending his time out here selling something as useless as a bookmark? I knew for a fact there are a plethora of FREE after school and off-track programs in the area at local libraries, schools, parks, and nonprofits. Maybe by hawking bookmarks in Larchmont he was learning valuable entrepreneurial skills or building character or spending quality time with his mother, but I think that reading of the situation is being overly generous.
No one wanted a bookmark.
I have observed numerous times over my career what I assumed to be a Latino bias for choosing work over school.
Latinos may pay a good lip service to valuing education but often when life presents a challenge that calls for a choice between having to work and going to school, work is always chosen over education. Time and time again I have witnessed Latinos choose work, traditions, family, boyfriends, nice expensive cars over educational opportunities. I mean, is there anything as stupidly frivolous and expensive than a quinceañera? The extravagant celebration represents a backward sense of priorities in our culture. There has to be better options for spending money than on what amounts to a much-delayed gender-reveal party.
Author Rigoberto Gonzalez’s memoir Butterfly Boy recounts in vivid detail his arduous journey from farm working in Indio, CA to achieving a university education. In his book he offers up heartbreaking scenes where the men in his family often disparage his struggle to get an education. His grandfather even suggests that Gonzalez’s poor eyesight is not congenital but caused by too much reading.
There is another scene where his father can’t attend his high school graduation because he decides he has to work on his truck instead. When Rigoberto asks whether a truck is more important than his son, the father answers “for getting to work it is.” When he works up the courage to tell his family he got accepted into the University of California Riverside on scholarship, the men of his family only berate him and become agitated as he asserts himself. He asks for a ride to the university. They refuse. He then devises a plan to have his brother steal his father’s Ford Mustang in order for him to drive Rigoberto to UCR. They get caught sneaking the car out. The father relents but demands that Rigoberto reimburse him for gas.
During my time working on my teaching credential a bunch of us young Latinx novice teachers formed a clique that was half study group, half friendship circle. We all hung around each other excited about building up our new careers as educators. However, there was one woman who seemed always distracted by some kind of family drama.
The benefit of the credentialing program we were enrolled in was that it was free. But because it was free, attendance was mandatory. A participant could not miss many days or else they could be dropped from the program jeopardizing both their credential and ultimately their job as a teacher. The program was a good deal as long as you followed the parameters.
This one young woman had already reached her limit of missed days, and she was not keeping up with her assignments.
As friends, we all checked in with her. “Girl, what’s wrong?” we inquired. She confessed her mother ran a puesto, a booth, at a local swap meet selling pants and shirts. The mother kept pressing her daughter about helping out with the booth. Because her daughter couldn’t always be there manning their store the mother was laying into her daughter, guilting her that helping to run the booth was part of her familial obligation. The mother was arguing that the family’s economic livelihood should be the daughter’s priority not completing her credentialing program.
As her friends and fellow cohort of student teachers were all incredulous. We understood how important the puesto was to the family’s short-term economic survival, but our friend’s job as a teacher was much more valuable economically in the long run. Finishing her education as teacher was the obvious priority over running some two-bit swap meet booth. How could her mom not see that successfully completing her credentialing program was above and beyond the importance of some inky dinky puesto?
Our friend preserved through her mom’s demands and years later she was named one of California’s Teachers of the Year.
I don’t know for sure if this situation is particular to Latinos. But as someone who is Latinx and has taught in majority Latinx communities, I have experienced many Latinx mamis and papis and grandmothers and uncles give lip service to valuing education until education gets in the way of work. Work then always becomes their priority.
Yes, this is a generalization. There are families all over bucking this traditional ethos, thank God.
Two women are having lunch out in the city when one says to the other, “Look at that guy. He could be your future husband.”
The second woman immediately quips back, “No, my future husband is in class right now.”