Making Something of Themselves: Latino Soul Making in an Urban Setting by Latino Youth Collective

Making Something of Themselves: Latino Soul Making in an Urban Setting

JosĂŠ R. Rosario Professor of Education Felipe Vargas Research Assistant Center for Urban and Multicultural Education School of Education Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis 902 West New York Street Indianapolis, IN 46202

ABSTRACT This essay documents the story of the El Puente Project, a three-year demonstration program based in Indianapolis, Indiana. El Puente, which is Spanish for “the bridge,” brought together the Hispanic Education Center (HEC), a 501(c)(3) community-based organization, and the Center for Urban and Multicultural Education (CUME), a unit of the School of Education at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis. The partnership aimed to engage Latino students in school and community life in an effort to retain them in school and encourage them to pursue a post-secondary education. In reporting on this partnership, the essay frames the plight of immigrant Latino youth as a struggle with “soul-making,” with what Anthony Appiah (2005) calls “the ethics of identity,” what to make of themselves in the world they live. The general lesson the essay draws is that immigrant Latino youth demonstrate an acute awareness of how their ethical project as Latinos is implicated in the larger cultural and political struggle for equality and social justice facing their own community.

INTRODUCTION What should we make of ourselves? How this fundamental question is answered is central not only to the development of nations, as Richard M. Merelman (1984) suggests in writing about cultural politics in the United States. It is critical as well to the growth of persons as individuals. In The Ethics of Identity (2005), Kwame Anthony Appiah, describes the matter this way: Each of us has one life to live; and although there are many moral constraints on how we live our lives…these constraints do not determine which particular life we must live…This means at least two things. First, the measure of my life, the standard by which it is to be assessed as more or less successful, depends… on my life’s aims as specified by me. Second, my life’s shape is up to me (provided that I have done my duty toward others), even if I make a life that I could have made…Thoughtful friends, benevolent sages, anxious relatives will rightly offer us both assistance and advice as to how to proceed. But it will be advice, not coercion, that they justly offer. And just as coercion will be wrong in these private circumstances, it will be wrong when it is undertaken by governments interested in the perfection of their citizens. (p. xii) In Appiah’s world, we all share an “ethical project” in “soul making,” in constructing an identity or creating a life for ourselves. This project is ethical as opposed to moral in that the soul making it entails “has to do with what kind of life it is good for us to lead” and not about “what we owe to others” (p. 230). For Appiah, who is following Dworkin (2000) in this regard, the former is about “convictions,” the latter about “principles.” How we approach the project as an ethical enterprise is ultimately an existential or individual concern that others can support but not determine or control. We create a life for ourselves, according to Appiah, by working with and working on what we have been given to construct an “ethical self.” Appiah summarizes this formation process as follows: To create a life…is to interpret the materials that history has given you. Your character, your circumstances, your psychological constitution, including the beliefs and preferences generated by the interaction of your innate endowments and your experience: all these need to be taken into account in shaping a life. They are not constraints on that shaping; they are its materials. As we come to maturity, the identities we make, our individualities, are interpretive responses to our talents and disabilities, and the changing social, semantic, and material contexts we enter at birth; and we develop our identities dialectically with our capacities and circumstances, because the latter are in part the product of what our identities lead us to do. A person’s shaping of her life flows from her beliefs and from a set of values, tastes and dispositions of sensibility, all of these influenced by various forms of social identity: let us call all these together a person’s ethical self. (p. 163)

Like the rest of us, Latino immigrants are burdened with what ethical self to make in a land they too have come to claim as theirs. While this issue remains largely unformulated and implicit in reported accounts of Latino youth development, there is much we know about the support that seemingly matters most to Latino immigrant youth as they struggle to make a life for themselves in a strange land (Garcia, 2001; Lockwood & Secada, 1999; Reyes, Scribner, & Scribner, 1999; Santiago & Brown, 2004; Siobhan & Ramos; Valenzuela, 1999; White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, 2000). The kind of “best practice” that appears to benefit Latino youth in constructing identities they can call their own include programs that: •

have adequate funding and provide comprehensive services, including case management;

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provide services in Spanish and consciously and explicitly incorporate Latino cultures into the program;

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actively involve parents in the academic experiences of their children, value parents as an asset and a resource, and are sensitive to family circumstances and traditions;

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explicitly provide tools and opportunities for youth development and involve youth in the process;

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have a dedicated and professional staff with a significant Latino presence;

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involve the community as a support system to help youth achieve their goals;

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create an authentic sense of community among participants through mutual caring and support.

This essay documents how Latino high school youth in the El Puente Project, a three-year demonstration program that sought to build on this “best practice,” fared in grappling with what to make of themselves in a community they often experienced as unfriendly and unconcerned about their lives. A three-year demonstration program based in Indianapolis, Indiana, El Puente, which is Spanish for “the bridge,” brought together the Hispanic Education Center (HEC), a 501(c)(3) community-based organization, and the Center for Urban and Multicultural Education (CUME), a unit of the School of Education at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis. In reporting on the work of this partnership, our purpose is to contribute another perspective to the bourgeoning literature on what works best for Latino youth as they struggle with what in Appiah’s view is “the ethics of identity,” how to construct a life in the world they find themselves. The account provided here is based on data collected during the course of El Puente’s development and implementation. While much of the data was obtained through participant observations, interviews, field notes, case studies, and program documents, some of it came in the form of quantitative measures (i.e., test scores, GPAs, course failures, and attendance rates) requested from the local school district participating in the project.1

WHAT IS EL PUENTE? El Puente was launched in May 2001 as a three-year demonstration premised on social justice. The project assumed that to ensure the development of social and human capital within the Indianapolis Latino community, Latino youth must be assured fair and equal access to resources and opportunities. Convinced that identities are constructed out of the material conditions and circumstances available to us (Dworkin, 2000; Margalit, 2002; Appiah, 2005), the project proposed to support immigrant Latino youth in high school, encourage them to graduate, and prepare them to pursue a post-secondary education. We were quite conventional in assuming that high school graduation and access to college provided a most promising path to a productive and flourishing life. While this perspective might appear assimilationist in orientation, sacrificing pluralism at the expense of integration was not our purpose. We were only emphasizing the critical role formal education plays today in the formation of identity in a highly competitive, marketized, and globalized society. Program goals and components El Puente’s mission to support Latino youth in making something of themselves, through educational enrichment and advocacy, was guided by four goals: (1) increase parent expectations, participation in, and knowledge of how to support students’ secondary and post-secondary goals; (2) increase student leadership skills and involvement in school and community service; (3) increase student academic performance and social preparation for college or post-secondary education; and (4) increase student understanding of cross-cultural communication and global issues, as well as familiarity with the technology that supports global interconnectedness. Pursuit of these goals sought to provide Latino youth with challenging contexts, the kind of opportunities that would help them develop confidence and capacity to complete high school and acquire access to post-secondary schooling. The project was particularly concerned as well with engaging Latino youth in the development of the leadership and civic engagement skills required to strengthen and contribute to the growth and vitality of their local community. El Puente was designed to support as many as 200 high school students and their families with comprehensive services embodied in four major components: youth leadership, academic preparation, parent involvement, and cultural and global awareness. In youth leadership, the aim was to convince students that they had a powerful role to play in shaping their own lives. We sought to engage them in recognizing and valuing the advantages of developing one’s full potential, owning up to one’s rights and responsibilities, demonstrating respect for one-self and others, and contributing to the development of one’s community through service to others. Overall, we envisioned empowering high school Latinos to empower themselves. Academic preparation and cultural and global awareness were meant to complement leadership development by expecting and rewarding scholarly achievement, graduation from and learning beyond high school, and understanding and appreciating human diversity in language and culture. Parental involvement was intended to support and reinforce the other three. Without mobilization and active participation of parents, not just at home but also at school, “best practice” told us, not much else would matter. Population Served During its three-year demonstration phase, El Puente reached 201 families, slightly more than it projected. Approximately 140 of these families were connected to the two target high schools, and 61 were connected to the target middle schools. This total represented 6 % of the total Latino students enrolled in the city school district (3571); 41% of the total Latino students in the target high schools (345); and 32% of the total Latino students in the middle schools (193).

A breakdown of the gender and distribution of students who were still active in the project when demonstration ended is shown in Table 1. Most of the students, which represented

the bulk of all those recruited over the three-year period, came from families where parents were employed fulltime (78%), had not graduated from high school (80%), and whose net income was less than $19,520 per year (77%). A large majority of the students (68%) also came from families whose country of origin was Mexico. Table 2 shows the country of origin of all students enrolled over the three years. Much to our surprise, over 95% of the students served by the project turned out to be â&#x20AC;&#x153;undocumented.â&#x20AC;?

WHAT DID EL PUENTE ACCOMPLISH? El Puente was never meant to function as a “controlled experiment” in the classical sense of the term. Neither resources nor interest permitted it. The project was always seen as a modest programmatic opportunity to demonstrate that much of the literature on what works for Latino students made sense: that with authentic caring, academic and emotional support, the right guidance, parent involvement, and clear expectations Latino students would rise to the occasion to meet the challenge of how to go about constructing a life for themselves. Are there data, however, to suggest that we were correct to assume as much? In this section, we consider student retention and attendance at post-secondary programs and institutions as measures of the project’s ability to support students’ quest to make something of their lives. Retention After its first year, El Puente’s attrition rate was near 50%. In years two and three, the rate dropped to less than 5%. As shown in Table 3, of the 140 enrolled in El Puente, 85 were still

in school when demonstration ended, and 56 of these were still active in project activities. Twenty-three (23) of the 140 either transferred to other in-state (15) or out-of-state schools (7), or returned to their country of origin (1); 31 graduated from high school; and 1 was expelled from school and dismissed from the project. Only 19% or 27 students enrolled left the project for reasons other than transfers or moves (i.e., work, family responsibilities at home, or project activities did not meet their needs). None dropped out of school, and, while they perceived the schools as tough environments with a long history of violence and racial tension, all those who reached their senior year while in the project graduated. Attendance at Post-Secondary Programs and Institutions Keeping El Puente students in school and getting them to graduate was not easy. But perhaps more difficult still was helping students secure access to post-secondary schooling. What made this particularly challenging was the immigration status of many of the students the project served. Since the majority of them (over 95%) were “undocumented,” securing the financial resources necessary to cover college costs was a major obstacle for them. Nevertheless, all students who reached their senior year while in the project graduated, and most went on to pursue a college education. In 2003, for example, all ten El Puente seniors graduated, three with honors. Of the ten, five enrolled at a local technical college in Indianapolis, one returned to Mexico to work, one started a family, and three were working to save resources to enroll at the local technical college, whose changes in residency requirements made it more affordable for non-permanent residents.2

In 2004, twenty graduated. Of the twenty, four went on to private universities, four to four-year public universities, eleven to two-year technical schools, and one went to work. While only one of the graduates qualified for financial aid, ten received modest scholarships from private sources. Most, however, went to work full-time to cover costs.

WHAT DO WE MAKE OF THESE RESULTS?

As noted earlier, to the extent El Puente was not a classical experiment, with the usual features typically associated with such an enterprise (i.e., random assignments to control and experimental groups, strict controls on delivery of treatment, and corresponding systematic collection of data), it is impossible to explain fully why we were successful in retaining students and assisting them in gaining access to post-secondary education. The best we can offer is a reasoned hypothesis based on project data, as well as on a series of in-depth case studies of all project graduates. That is one purpose of this section. The other is to summarize the general lesson we draw from the experience. Explaining the Difference Four primary factors appear to explain why some students chose to follow the path we carved out for them and others did not. The first is self-selection, which speaks to how students came to participate in the project. The other two confirm findings from the psycho-cultural literature on why Latino students succeed and defy the odds. They refer to the characteristics or traits of the students who elected to participate: a predisposition to succeed and a resiliency to persevere. The fourth also confirms findings in the literature. It describes how El Puente functioned, and we call that El Puente as “familia” and support system. Self-Selection Students chose El Puente for a variety of reasons. Some chose it because it gave them something “fun” to do; others because their parents, siblings, or friends encouraged them to; still others because of the program opportunities it offered. But not a single student enrolled because he or she had no other options. All enrolled out of choice, and the mere fact they did sets them apart from others: they saw value in constructing a life according to the terms we set out for them. Thus, it is likely that the students performed well because they are the sort that would, as some of the research literature suggests (see, for example, Ford and Harris, 1996; Garcia, 2001; and Valenzuela, 1999). In the absence of a comparable group against which to judge how project students may have differed from others, particularly those who, when given the chance, opted not to join, we are left with identifying student traits that may explain why students opted to participate, remained in the project, and follow the college tract. Two stand out in particular: a predisposition to succeed and a resiliency to persevere. Predisposition to succeed and resiliency to persevere By predisposition to succeed we mean a student’s inclination or personal desire to perform well and achieve personal goals. Resiliency to persevere describes a student’s unwavering determination to confront and overcome obstacles that appear to interfere with the pursuit of personal goals. In Garcia’s (1999) words, resiliency describes the “ability to succeed regardless of challenging or threatening circumstances. Resilient children,” he adds, “are able to do well in school despite family, community, or social circumstances that are not congruent with academic success” (p. 146). Students who chose to participate in El Puente and worked dutifully to stay on track appear to share both traits. The cases of Jaime Santana and Ana Mendoza typify what we mean. Jaime Santana. Born in Puebla, Mexico, Jaime joined El Puente in his freshman year. When he was eleven years old his parents moved without him to Chicago, Illinois, in pursuit of “a better life for themselves and their children.” When the day came for Jaime to follow his parents, he received a bus ticket to the MexicoArizona border. From there he negotiated a price with a coyote for safe passage into the United States.

On the first day of the journey, he and others traveling with him were stopped and robbed of everything they owned. They continued on their way only to be caught by immigration officials and returned to the border, where he rested with a group of paisas before trying again. While his second try failed, the third proved to be a blessing in disguise. After two days in the Arizona desert, one with no food or water, he was picked up by a family and taken to a holding house where arrangements between a coyote and his parents were made. By the time Jaime arrived in Chicago, he was twelve years of age. His new environment proved much different from his rural Puebla. He was beaten up soon after arriving and forced to join the local Latin Kings street gang, in part for safety, but mostly because that is what most of the other newcomers he knew had done to survive. A year later, he was happy to hear some good news: his father was moving to Indianapolis. Jaime had always “just gotten by in school.” Now in his senior year, he is an officer in NJROTC with a 3.9 GPA. Along the way, he learned to fight and how to survive. He was determined to make something of himself, “to be,” as he put it, “somebody.” He now attends Indiana University and majors in telecommunications. Ana Mendoza. Much like Jaime, Ana was born and spent the first 12 years of her life in Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico. Her family emigrated in the summer of 1997 to the southwest side of Indianapolis, Indiana. Her experiences document a difficult transition to American society for her and her single mother, who was struggling to raise four children. Ana was accepted into the Math/Science magnet program at East and graduated with honors. She was a member of the Mayor’s Youth Council for Community Service as a senior, and that experience led to her current participation on the Mayor’s Commission on Latino Affairs. Furthermore, she received awards from the Indianapolis Urban League, the Hispanic Education Center, and is a Who’s Who Among American High School Students. As a child, Ana had dreams of being a doctor because she “would see that they helped people.” As a witness to the dedication of a doctor in her community, she told herself that she also wanted to help others. At some point, she realized she could serve her community in many other ways. Currently, her main goal and priority is to complete a college education. She enjoys the hard work of community service and is happiest while helping others. Given her age, her thinking on community engagement and social reform is enviable. She believes the political system in America has “too much cheese and onions.” Ana believes that the body politic of Hispanic communities “do not understand what is really happening to our people. They only know what is going on through others and many critically important things tend to get lost in translation.” The people in positions of control and power are supposedly helping the Hispanic community but seem always to fail because of their misconceptions of the imigrantes. Ana believes that she inherited her drive from her father, who now lives in California. She claims her father was involved in the worker’s union in Nayarit and was also the president of the colonia. Although she has selflessly dedicated herself to the Hispanic community by learning, leading, and serving, Ana is not satisfied with her achievements. Because she is a non- permanent resident, she is legally barred from the opportunities afforded to U.S. citizens. Her “undocumented” status has been a heavy burden on her life chances, the betterment of her family, and her psychological and/or mental health. She would like to be able to qualify for financial aid or at least take out loans that would permit her to attend school full time. She lives with and copes with a reality, she thinks, that the majority of society cannot comprehend. Ana began thinking deeply about the obstacles she would have to overcome soon after beginning her studies at the Math/Science magnet program. Ana recalls that her mother had not always been very supportive of her community involvement and academic pursuits. She attributes school and El Puente with the discipline and structure she needed to meet the challenges she faced. The teachers in the magnet program “were very insistent,” she recalled, and “provided all the support we needed, and had high expectations in every area of our work. They were continually monitoring our grades. If they went down or if we failed to submit assignments,”

she added, “we would be asked why it was happening or if there is anything that they could do to help us succeed. It made a difference.” In her sophomore year, Anna realized her quest to make something of herself was very different from that of others in her magnet program. “Every door she knocked on and every person who answered her phone calls” confirmed her devastating realization: she would never be able to enjoy her liberties and freedom as other human beings do in this land simply because of who she was when she was born. She feels her capacities are indirectly questioned when she overhears “folks talking about immigrants and describing them as having nothing to offer this nation and that all newcomers are nothing, invisible, worthless.” Ana believes such encounters have motivated her because she knows that those claims are not true. She “is somebody” and generous with others, and believes that she does more than most. She also understands that many people fortunate to have been born here, take their advantages for granted. She no longer feels as if she does not matter and realizes that it is more important for her and her family to go to school and fulfill their dreams. Now attending a two-year college, she is confident that she will get into a university and continue her studies. Our claim here is not that the predisposition to succeed and resiliency to persevere reflected in these cases alone account for the differential influence the project may have had on students and other students. These traits undoubtedly need to combine with other factors, such as academic and parental support, mentoring, and willingness to stay the course. Our claim is much more narrow, and to assert differently would require more research. We claim only that we seem to have found a theme that appears consistently in research and narrative accounts of why some Latinos and other racial minorities overcome obstacles to make something of themselves, to succeed, as we typically define the term, and others do not (see, for example, Garcia, 2001; Reyes, Scribner, & Scribner, 1999; Rodriguez, 1982; Comer, 1988; Suskind, 1998; Thomas, 1967; Valenzuela, 1999). El Puente as “familia” and support system In their study of school dropouts, Gary Wehlage and his colleagues (1989) point to several practices that contribute to student engagement and high school completion. Chief among these is the ability of school personnel to create communities of support that demonstrate concern for how students perform in genuine, effective, and caring ways. In their assessments of what works for Latino students, Valenzuela (1999) and Reyes, Scribner, and Scribner (2001) reached similar conclusions. Our own work confirms these findings. Functioning as a kind of familia, a safe haven, a place of cultural affirmation, personal security, and emotional support and safety, the project managed to create a plausibility structure (Burger and Luckmann, 1966) they trusted and that worked to protect, nurture, and motivate them to perform. For Angela, El Puente was for the person “who really needs help to learn and become someone in life.” “It is good,” she said, “because…they care about you. El Puente is not for people who just don’t care and just want to have fun and do whatever they feel. They help us want to work hard because nobody can take away our education.” In the view of Cesar, “El Puente helps students stay in school, graduate, attend a college or university… it advocates for our social development and helps us become leaders.” To a project graduate now completing his associate degree, “El Puente is a family that will always support you and be there when you need it.” Cristina left Upward Bound and decided to join El Puente because she “felt more comfortable among Latinos and the project provided a stronger sense of family.” She also thought “it was good to get involved, and they seemed like they cared…they monitor you, they call you whenever they have new meetings and things like that.

Specially, they call the parents…because my counselor or nobody that spoke English never called my parents, not even my teacher. I liked it because they helped my parents out by teaching them to understand how the systems work in school, like how to understand the credits that need to be earned and all that. It’s great because they always knew what’s going on in school. El Puente was always there when I needed information, like on scholarships and so forth.” Enrique summarized student sentiments this way: When I first arrived, I was extremely quiet. I had two jobs and hardly spoke to anyone. But now I speak more and get along with everyone in El Puente. I joined El Puente because I wanted help setting goals, choosing a university, and obtaining scholarships. The young people who join El Puente need to want to do well. That’s the only way to get ahead, get a career, and meet one’s objective. For me, it is not the idea of realizing the American dream, staying here, and overcoming barriers. It is about returning to our country and working so that the people won’t have to leave their families. The solution is not to bring people here while your country is left without meaning. El Puente helps [us] have an open mind towards the world we live in, which is always changing. El Puente is very concerned and involves us in our history and culture, so that we can come to know who we are and where we’re headed. After the first year, El Puente’s attrition rate was near 50%. In years two and three, the rate dropped to less than 5%. So while it may have served as a safe haven and support structure, it appears that El Puente was not for everyone. The project seems to have attracted a particular kind of student, the sort with the characteristics described earlier. Students who perceived the project as helpful and supportive tended to stay. Those who perceived it solely as a “hang out,” an opportunity “to be with friends and have fun,” tended to leave. Not a single one of the twenty-one who did not stay long graduated. A More General Conclusion As noted earlier, El Puente was always seen as a demonstration project offering support to Latino youth in their struggle to make a life for themselves. The project sought to do this through the conventional approach of keeping them in school and on the path to college. Judging from the results, it is fair to say the strategy worked. But what can we conclude in some general way about identity formation among immigrant Latino youth? In Hopeful girls, troubled boys: Race and gender disparity in urban education, Nancy Lopez (2003) explains her “educational trajectory” in terms of “two narratives.” The first, she argues, “would focus mainly on my individual characteristics, such as my parents’ ‘family values,’ my intelligence. My self-esteem, and my willingness to work hard and raise myself ‘by my bootstraps” (p. 98). She refers to this explanation as deriving from “a hegemonic, ‘commonsense’ perspective.” In opposition to this view, she posits “a counterhegemonic, critical perspective” that would explain her “educational attainment as being due in large part to my serendipitous birth during the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement and the expansion of educational opportunity programs for low-income, racially stigmatized students” (p. 98). Unlike the first perspective, the second pushes for “a more holistic analysis, which examines historical forces, social movements, institutions, and larger processes,” to provide “a second and more substantial explanation of the educational attainment of an entire category of students…involving not just students’ individual characteristics or their families, but rather

larger social structures, such as the school system itself, race, gender, and class stratification” (p. 98). While we agree with Lopez that to account for the life one has constructed for oneself there is need to combine the “two narratives” she describes into a more robust explanation of one’s trajectory, our experience with El Puente students tells us something more. It points us to the fundamental role individual agency, or sheer will, plays in this ethical project. As noted earlier, the life one carves out for oneself surely rides, although not exclusively, on the biographical and historical contexts in which one finds oneself. As Appiah suggests, creating a life “involves developing an identity, enmeshed in larger, collective narratives but not exhausted by them. It involves social forms…that…make certain activities and projects possible. It involves, equally,” he adds,” a sense of belonging, of being situated within a larger narrative or narratives” (p. 231). Being implicated in a broader narrative, however, does not absolve one from the ethical imperative of what to make of oneself. Ultimately, we are all individually responsible to carve out an identity from what we are given. El Puente students seem to have understood this quite well. This is evident not only in the cases noted earlier, but in others as well. Consider Juan and Chuy, for example. Comparing his plight to the plight of African American students, Juan framed the issue of agency this way: They [African Americans] are always blaming White people for this and that; they are always blaming White people for them being poor, for them being like that. When in reality you have to be; if you want to fight for your people, you, you, I don’t know, you put your pants on and you do something. You know? If you want to stay in the hole is because you want to. Like Martin Luther King did something for his people…I mean instead of blaming other people, just, you know, believe in yourself, and go on. This tendency of African Americans to blame others for their misfortunes was an outgrowth, in Juan’s view, of a “resentment” towards Whites that could be traceable to the legacy of slavery. Yet, he tended to view African Americans as victims substantively responsible for shaping their own lives. Poor Whites fared no different to Juan: “it’s like a chain you know. Black people blame White people; those White people, they try to be Black and they blame, I don’t know, minority groups, one other person, for not being, not speaking English, or not dressing like [them], when in reality, they don’t have a culture either.” Chuy, who found migration to America a challenge, interpreted individual agency in terms of a “dicho” (a saying): “a donde fueres, has lo que vieres; a donde vayas, has lo que vea” (wherever you go, do what you see). For him, social mobility and “place making” entailed “self-transformation through learning.” He believed that “to come out on top,” one needs to change, and “this change is usually something that helps you.” When asked if he would give up his language to better himself, he said it would be a “challenge” but that he “would do it.” Pushed a bit further and asked if he would consider giving up being “Mexicano” as he sought to construct an identity, his response was less certain. That “is much more difficult to change,” he said, “because being Mexicano is something that one carries inside and cannot change,” even to be “Americano.” El Puente students seemed to have understood the central role individual agency plays in making a life for oneself. According to Juan, the key was to have “faith”: “You just have to have faith, you know. You can be anything you like if you just believe in yourself. You can accomplish anything.”

These same students, though, typically failed to act on the difference between constructing a life and living out that life in the company of others different from them. This is the distinction that Appiah, following Dworkin, draws between ethics, views about what life to live, and morality, principles governing our relations to others (Appiah, 2005; Dworkin, 2000). In failing to understand this difference, El Puente students appeared confused about two kinds of obligations, those owed to themselves as they struggle to construct an identity and those owed to others as they accommodate that identity to the ethnic and cultural diversity surrounding them. It was not unusual, for example, to find El Puente students racializing and stereotyping others, particularly Whites and African Americans. They were certainly not free of the “black-brown” tensions uncovered by Mindiola, Niemann, and Rodriguez (2002). According to Juan, who was opened about the ‘odio’ (hate) he felt against ‘morenos y gringos’ (Blacks and Whites) when he first came to Indiana, Latinos were treated as “inferior” and often told that “you Latinos are like the new ‘niggers’ ” and to “go back to where you come from.” It was also not unusual to find El Puente students so wedded to the idea of self-determination that they tended to blame themselves and absolve others of responsibility and wrongdoing for conduct that reasonably could be construed as irresponsible and unjust. Although students felt encumbered, as Michael Sandel (1984) would put it, their encumbrance seemed constrained, as extending only to themselves and their own ethnic group, whose well-being they saw very much tied to their own. As the student cited earlier noted in his remarks, making something of oneself was not about “realizing the American dream, staying here, and overcoming barriers. It was about returning to our country and working so that the people won’t have to leave their families.” This kind of communitarian sensibility is what led several project graduates to create CHANGE (Comunidad Hispana Asistiendo a Nuestra Gente), a service-oriented organization dedicated to the improvement of Latino life in Indianapolis. CHANGE was their way of “giving back” to others, if only to their own. Thus, the larger lesson we take from El Puente is that Latino immigrant youth are not blind to the ethical imperative of what to make of themselves. Neither are they blind to the individual responsibilities entailed in this project. And they certainly appear to have a clear sense for what they as Latinos owe, in a moral sense, to other Latinos in their community. These sentiments may not be expressive of their cosmopolitanism, of being citizens of a larger America, let alone the world; but they are surely indicative of how acutely aware they are about the way in which their ethical project as Latinos is implicated in the larger cultural and political struggle for equality and social justice facing their own community. If we fell short in our efforts, it was in helping them construct a broader conception of community and culture.

For a fuller account of findings reported here, see Rosario and Vargas (2004).

El Puente never envisioned reforming the residency requirements of Indiana colleges and universities. But it did not take long after launching the project to see the need for intervention in this area. Since most of the students the project was attracting were “undocumented,” a condition that made them ineligible for in-state tuition, as well as state and federal financial aid, seeking changes in college residency requirements became inevitable. The project partnered with a coalition of “concerned citizens” who lobbied state colleges and universities for reform in their admissions practices. As a result, project students became eligible to pay in-state fees at the local technical college as long as they had: (1) attended one or more Indiana high schools for at least three years; (2) graduated from an Indiana high school or received a high school equivalency diploma in Indiana; and (3) signed an affidavit pledging to apply for permanent residency of the U.S. as soon as they are eligible. This change in policy has already affected hundreds of students across Indiana, an outcome the project never imagined pursuing or expected.

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We enrich, support, and advocate for the education of Latino youth.

A Partnership Project of the Center for Urban and Multicultural Education (CUME) School of Education Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) 902 W. New York Street Indianapolis, IN 46202 José R. Rosario, Ph.D. Professor of Education and El Puente Project Director