Amá, Your Story Is Mine: Walking Out of the Shadows of Abuse

School

~ 101 ~ School ~ Amá was right when she used to look at us and say, “How many years I wished that you girls would grow up, thinking it would make my life a lot easier.When you were small, I knew I could make you happy if I gave you a piece of candy or an old toy. But now that you are young ladies and make your own decisions , I worry a lot more!” Amá suffered because school was the least of our priorities .We wanted to make her happy, but she didn’t understand that for us, school was a waste of time. The teachers did not want the Hispanic children there, and knowing that we were unwanted, we didn’t want to be there either. Amá didn’t understand school grades; at the end of the year she just wanted to know if we had passed to the next level. Little did she know that our report cards showed D-minus in every subject. Teachers just promoted us because they didn’t want us for another year. The teachers often picked on the ones they thought most stupid, not recognizing the children’s lack of participation and listlessness as exhaustion. Many of the ones they called lazy were working ungodly hours in the fields, trying to help their mothers avoid eviction from their homes. We all knew this, but we had too much pride to tell the teacher, for if the teacher found out, the whole school would know. We were each other’s support, spending our days planning how to get back at the teachers when we got out of school. We dreamed of running them over with trucks, of putting rat poison in their coffee cups.We often told each other that when we made it big, we would come back and laugh in the teachers’ faces. I was used to one teacher or another twisting a knot in my hair and swinging me from one side of the room to the other. ~ 102 ~ I came to a point of almost welcoming the moment. I didn’t go meekly—I pretended to enjoy the ride. An obese male teacher made my friend Juana sit in the front row for no apparent reason. She had thick legs and couldn’t close them together. He would ask her to read, and then his eyes would roam up her legs while his wet mouth hung open. One day she caught the dirty, bug-eyed expression on his frog face, as he was lecherously watching her legs. So while she read, she slipped her hand down under the skirt between her legs and made a gesture with her middle finger. His jaw dropped open, mouth agape, but he had to swallow her insult.What could he say to her? I decided to teach him a lesson, so the next day I put a pack of thumbtacks on his chair. As I hoped, he sat down without looking first. He howled in pain, his face and bald head turning red with rage. He threatened to suspend us all unless the culprit was found. My friends kept their word and didn’t tell, but that didn’t stop him from guessing that it was me. He came toward me and suddenly yanked my hair. I thought he was going to take a piece of my scalp. All the “rejects” of the class—children of migrant farm workers, fatherless children, and those who spoke no English— knew we did not deserve to pass at the end of the year. We hadn’t learned even the basic skills to work in the factories. The teachers had this “reject” group push our desks into the hall and, day after day, had us counting the cracks in the walls and the tiles on the floor. Of course, we would just play, carefully keeping our ears tuned to the sound of a teacher’s footsteps. Most of us dropped out of school because we couldn’t stand the pressure of both school and home. Some who left went to work in the fields just like their parents. Others became just what their teachers had called them: “Nobodies.” For many years I felt victimized by teachers who seemed to be deaf and blind to both my language and my life. In those ...