FARMWORKERS PLANT THE SEED OF KNOWLEDGE AT WILSON HIGH
By Rebecca Schoenkopf
The men at Wilson High School a couple of Saturdays ago were mostly in the audience, tending small children dressed in their quinceanera and wedding-party best. The women at Wilson High School were mostly onstage, dressed in caps, gowns, tears and broad smiles.
September 10 was the culmination of Project Avanzando’s six-month program, funded by the US Department of Education, shepherding farm workers through the process of getting their GEDs. “Pomp and Circumstance” swelled throughout the school theater for the 65 men and women filing onto the stage from as far away as Palmdale and Lancaster; 89 percent of Project Avanzando’s students had passed their GED tests and were receiving high school diplomas.
Project Avanzando, now in its tenth year in the Southland, provides transportation, childcare, and six months of tutoring at eight sites, two nights a week, three hours a night. In some cases, they help students pay the fees for their tests. They check in frequently when a student starts missing class or showing up unprepared. They cheerlead their students constantly, through long nights and strife at home.
Back in April, I visited Burnett Elementary, where Ana Vasquez was teaching area and perimeter to 17 students—16 women and one man—for the math section of the GED. Ten years ago, Vasquez was a student in Avanzando’s first class. Now she’s getting her master’s at Cal State Fullerton.
Patricia Feliz, the program’s director, told me about the upheavals that can happen at home when a woman (most students are women) starts to better her situation. Men start worrying they’ll be left behind. There was one woman in particular who, after a promising start, began skipping classes. Project Avanzando checked in with her. “It turned out her husband had left her,” Feliz said, “and she wasn’t sure if she was going to be homeless the next week, the husband was threatening to have her kids taken away from her because she wasn’t home with them at night, she was here in class. And I just told her, you know what, you are probably one of the most intelligent people I know! Because you’re here, and you’re passing your tests, and there aren’t very many people who could go through everything you’re going through and still hang on!”
The woman Feliz was speaking of in April did pass her GED. She had to skip the ceremony, though, because of more tsuris at home—the husband in jail, the children detained. Rather than miss a weekend visit with them at the foster home, she missed the caps and gowns. Feliz’s heart was with her. Mine was too.
It was easier for Antonia Zapata. Her husband was miffed, too. When I visited her at her job in La Puente this week, she mentioned, frequently, el machismo de Mexicanos. (She speaks English, but was shy about it, preferring to express herself properly in Spanish, which I don’t speak. Her friend Elizabeth translated.) “My husband was really upset with me going back to school and leaving the family aside,” she said. Elizabeth’s translation then switched pronouns: “She was gonna learn, get her high school diploma, or she was gonna make more money than he was. Sometimes in the Hispanic families, they feel that they’re superior to the women, so he didn’t want her to be more superior than him.”
But Zapata’s husband isn’t pissy any more. “Now he’s even proud of me and tells me that he’s proud, and he even sometimes helps me with the homework,” she said. So what changed his mind?
