Learning the Possible: Mexican American Students Moving from the Margins of Life to New Ways of Being

1. Introduction: Urgency of Incompleteness

1 1 Introduction Urgency of Incompleteness Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search—a search which can be carried out only in communion with others. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed they still have hope. They are still there. We know they are, but too many today choose to ignore them. They, the marginalized,1 are the students who have been discarded, forgotten, in the name of everything in the history of our schools. Color. Language. Economics . Efficiency. High test scores. They still have hope that they can have an experience that may change something about their lives, their schooling, their learning. They still have hope that they can make something of their lives. They just need that right experience. Often it takes just one experience. Perhaps one book. Maybe one person. One event. One chance at an opportunity. And such an experience may greatly change those who come from the margins of life. Often, the change comes as the fruit of struggle for these individuals, and new visions of what is possible emerge. In successful education reform efforts, sometimes these experiences can be crafted by design in schools or programs, when coupled with a sense of hope. And at the heart of these reform efforts are the students and their experiences. In those reform efforts, learning 2 LEARNING THE POSSIBLE in various forms occurs, followed by stories. This book tells such stories. They are stories based on the study of experience, learning, and identity/ies of marginalized Mexican American2 students in their first year of college through the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP). They talk of how this experience changed who they were and how they saw themselves as students. The CAMP experience provided them with opportunities to prove their abilities as students; to have the opportunity to practice that which is required to be a successful student; to see what was possible in their lives in a community with others who had the same aspirations of success. The CAMP experience was a chance at achieving academic and professional goals, and to be put on a path to get there. The first year of college through CAMP was redemption. This book examines the student lives of Laura, Cristina, Luz, Maria, and Ruben,3 each with his or her own unique struggles and successes in the first year of college through the CAMP program. CAMP, a federally funded, one-year scholarship, is designed to help college students from migrant and/or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, most of whom are of Mexican descent, succeed in their first year of college. CAMP’s principal objective is to put the students on a trajectory toward eventual completion of a bachelor’s degree. Each student entered the program impacted by a particular life situation going into their first year of college—the consequences of extremely low self-confidence; struggles with the English language ; clashes between gender-role expectations and the desire to pursue an education; teenage motherhood; and a history of gang membership. Research shows that in the first year of college the daily situations and minor details of life often add up to larger issues and present overwhelming obstacles (Brooks and DuBois, 1995). For the CAMP students, the weight of the particular life experiences they took into their first year of college made academic success seem elusive , unattainable. In the US schooling system, the student of Mexican descent is no stranger to adversity in life and learning. This Latina/o subpopulation continues to deal with the complexities and difficulties of poverty, peer pressure, crime, discrimination, language, and the like getting in the way of success in school (Donato, 1997; Gándara and Contreras, 2009; Moreno, 1999). Such issues are spilling over into Introduction 3 the college-level experience for growing numbers of Mexican American students. The problem of noncompletion of two- and four-year degrees has become almost as pervasive as the high school dropout situation for students of Mexican descent. Although more Latina/o students than ever are enrolling in postsecondary institutions, in terms of completing a bachelor’s degree they continue to be the least educated major racial or ethnic group (Fry, 2002, 2004, 20011). In 2010, only 13 percent of 25-to-29-year-old Hispanics had completed at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 53 percent for non-Hispanic Asian young adults, 39 percent for white students, and 19...