From the Barrio to the Board Room: Second Edition

By becoming educated, you can understand the social injustice and economic issues that exist out there. What you capture in the classroom is something that nobody can ever take away from you. And you can choose to make it a positive experience! From the Barrio tells you that it does not matter where you are born, what community you grow up in, or where in society you may be; what matters is you and what you want to do with your life.

Everything that Robert has shared-the words, his commitment and his philosophy-is a reality. He is living proof that a kid from the Barrio can make it, and his story will change lives. Chicagoland's Largest Hispanic Bilingual Newspaper. December 20, Martinez Illinois State Senator. Previous studies based on CILS and other data have shown that fluent bilingualism is significantly associated with positive outcomes in late adolescence, including higher school grades, higher educational aspirations, higher self-esteem, and lesser intergenerational conflict Peal and Lambert ; Hakuta ; Rumbaut ; Portes and Hao The CILS-IV interviews confirm this result, indicating that instances of success-out-of-disadvantage are almost invariably undergirded by strong parental controls, leading to selective acculturation.

These results are congruent with the theoretical expectations of the model. Raquel Torres is the oldest daughter of a Mexican couple who emigrated illegally to San Diego after living for years in Tijuana. The mother has a ninth grade education and did not work while her three children were growing up; the father has a sixth grade education. While living in Tijuana, he commuted to San Diego to work as a waiter. At some point, his commuter permit was taken away and the family simply decided to sneak across the border.

They settled in National City, a poor and mostly Mexican neighborhood where Raquel grew up monolingual in Spanish. As the result of her limited English fluency, she had problems at El Toyon Elementary, but she was enrolled in a bilingual training program where children were pulled out of classes for intensive English training.

It was while attending elementary school that she noticed how poor her family really was. She wanted jeans, tennis shoes, popular toys that she saw other children having, but her parents said no. On the other hand, discipline at home was stern: Mine was on biology. Carranza, a Mexican-American himself and a Vietnam veteran, took a keen interest on his students.

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Raquel graduated with a 3. At the time, her family had moved to Las Vegas in search of work, but Raquel wanted to be on her own. She had clearly outgrown parents who, at this time, had started to be an obstacle. As a result, she got some lip from several fellow students who criticised her for getting an unfair advantage. But she strongly defends the program: Besides, the Program made me work harder.

Raquel graduated from UCSD with a 3. After graduating, she took a job as a counselor in the Barrio Logan College Institute, another private organization helping minority students like herself attend college. She is currently planning to enroll in a doctoral program in education. Her advice for immigrant students: First, the stern traditional family upbringing that we saw previously kept her out of trouble, although it set her back in English.

Then she encountered the AVID program which provided her with personalised educational assistance and the first inklings of what college life would be like. Finally, she met Carranza and her future took a decisive turn. The French teacher did not ask whether she was going to college, but what college she would attend. Stern immigrant parents may instill discipline and promote selective acculturation in their children, but they are often helpless in the face of school bureaucracies. The last bid of important outside help that Raquel received was enrolling in the now phased-out Affirmative Action Program.

The program allowed her to attend a first-rate institution, rather than a regional college.

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A constant in our sixty-one interviews, in addition to authoritative and alert parents, is the appearance of a really significant other. That person can be a teacher, a counselor, a friend of the family, or even an older sibling. The important thing is that they take a keen interest in the child, motivate him or her to graduate from high school and attend college, and possess the necessary knowledge and experience to guide the student in this direction. Neither family discipline nor the presence of a significant other is by itself sufficient to produce high educational attainment but their combination is decisive.

This finding is important because the creation and support of such programs is within the power of external actors and can be strengthened by policy. While the character of family life or the emergence of a really significant other is largely in the private realm, the presence and effectiveness of special assistance programs for minority students is a public matter, amenable to policy intervention. The programs and organizations that proved effective were grounded, invariably, on knowledge of the culture and language that the children brought to school and on respect for them.

They are commonly staffed by co-ethnics or, at least, bilingual staff. In this sense, AVID and similar programs both depend and promote selective acculturation as the best natural path toward educational achievement.

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The modest home of Jose Donato Esquivel and his wife, Griselda, in a working-class neighborhood of San Diego, is vintage Mexican, featuring a living room replete with family portraits, velvet-covered furniture, and lots of lace. Born in Tijuana, Jose, now aged 51, met Griselda in that city, to which her family had moved from Monterrey. Jose managed to graduate from high school, but then had to drop out to go to work; Griselda has a grade school education and has worked cleaning houses all her life.

It was in San Diego that Jose and Griselda had their three children. In San Diego, Jose Sr. Despite both working outside the home, they held tightly to their children. Discipline at the Esquivel home was tight. Griselda asserts that she and her husband nunca les dimos libertad we never gave our children freedom. Luis was not allowed to have friends his parents did not approve of. A curfew was not necessary because the children were expected to be at home most of the time. Even while attending college, Luis was persuaded to continue living at home.

He was a big man in his city, fathering many children by different women, but he managed to care and inspire respect and admiration in all of them.

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As an accountant, Donato Sr. The proximity of San Diego to the border and the presence of kin in Tijuana allowed him to travel there several times. Later in life, when he could afford it, he travelled to Mexico City to learn more about the country and its customs. Meanwhile, his good grades and good disposition for schoolwork caught the attention of a high school counselor, Janina Fernandez, who eventually helped him with his college applications.

Robert Renteria (Author of From the Barrio to the Board Room)

With her assistance, he also gained admittance into a program for minority high school students that took him to the University of California-Berkeley for three summers in a row, all expenses paid. Luis graduated with honors from Morse High School in and was admitted to Berkeley. It was at this point that his father intervened: We have good universities here.

There, he did exceptionally well majoring in math, one of only 50 students in a class of 20, who did so. In , he graduated with a 3. His parents attended the ceremony: He has married a woman of Mexican descent, also a college graduate. They both maintain a strong interest in things Mexican, travelling there frequently. He despairs at the low achievement of these children, handicapped by their lack of English and poor families.

For Don Jose one university was as good as another and, crucially, he wanted his son at home. There is, however, one other factor that this story illustrates with singular clarity, namely the importance of symbolic assets, cultural capital , transformed from the country of origin. Children exposed to those stories often introject them, using them as a spur to achievement.

This cultural capital brought from abroad actually has two components. The first is the motivational force to restore family pride and status. Regardless of whether the achievements of the past are real or imaginary, they can still serve as a means to instill high aspirations among the young. This know-how consists of information, values, and demeanor that migrants from more modest origins lack.

Regardless of how difficult present circumstances are, former middle-class parents have a clear sense of who they are, knowledge of the possible means to overcome the situation, and the right attitude when opportunities present themselves. These two dimensions of cultural capital converge in cases where both family lore and the habitus of past middle-class life are decisive in helping second generation youths overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In the case of Luis Esquivel the towering figure of his grandfather played a decisive role. While his father, the son of a single mother forced to go to work early in life, had dropped significantly in the social hierarchy, he kept very much alive the memory of the achievements and demeanor of his own father.

While not part of the CILS sample, the story of Dan-el Padilla provides another suitable illustration of this pattern. Dan-el was the Latin Salutatorian at Princeton University in which he majored in Classics, graduating with the highest honors. He is a black Dominican migrant who grew up in the Bronx with his mother and siblings. The father returned to the Dominican Republic and never came back.

All the while, he attended the worst public schools in the Bronx. A junior high school teacher gave him a book on classics and that little gesture set his course. The boy persisted, graduated from high school with highest honors and gained admission to Princeton. After delivering his address in Latin in May , he proceeded to announce that he himself was an undocumented immigrant. Though black, both parents were university-educated and the father had been a prominent functionary before losing his job in a government change. He refused to stay in the United States for fear of having to toil in menial jobs beneath his dignity.

It was the mother who migrated and faced life in dire circumstances in America for the sake of her children.

Despite terrible conditions in the Bronx, Dan-el always kept alive the memory of that middle-class life and schooling in his native country. When his teacher gave him that book on classics, he fully understood what it meant. Cultural capital brought from the home country is a product of selective acculturation. Referring to the theoretical model in Figure 2 , it is clear that dissonant acculturation deprives youths of this resource, as they lose contact or even reject the language and culture of parents.

Whatever resources are embodied in that culture effectively dissipate.

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Consonant acculturation is less problematic but, as both parents and children strive to Americanise, it is unlikely that family memories and ancestral cultures can be used either as an anchor or as a point of reference. Only selective acculturation provides a natural path to make full use of symbolic resources brought from abroad. Soon, one-in-four of all young Americans will be an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. This surging population cannot but have a deep effect on the entire society and, especially, on the cities and regions where it concentrates. Following the lead of classic assimilation theory, some scholars have advanced a highly optimistic prognosis about the future of this population: There are valid grounds for this prognosis since the majority of this population is managing to do well in school and avoid the pitfalls that can derail their progress.

However, this optimistic outlook neglects two facts: Young men and women from these groups are also assimilating, but they are doing so to sectors of U. The concept of downward assimilation was coined to capture this reality. The contemporary research literature on poverty and juvenile delinquency commonly deals with outcomes of the process. To do so, it is necessary to learn about the specific histories of each national minority, including the characteristics of the immigrant generation and the political and social context that it met at arrival.

Aggregating a number of such groups into pan-ethnic categories obscures rather than clarifies the causal processes at play. The data analyzed in this paper is more appropriate for clarifying how the process of segmented assimilation unfolds. It focuses exclusively on the second generation and identifies individual nationalities within it.

This article presents a synthesis of more recent findings showing how the process plays itself over time and what effects school context, academic outcomes, and selective acculturation have on it. These effects are of two types: The first set of effects indicates that school contexts, in particular the average status of the student body, has a reliable influence on adult outcomes, even when controlling for family characteristics. They also show that school outcomes — academic achievement and educational ambition — play a strong inhibiting role on downward assimilation reinforcing those of parental SES and intact families.

Finally the results point to the resilient effects of certain national origins, used as a proxy for a negative mode of incorporation. These effects are impervious to mediation by school characteristics or academic outcomes and impinge directly on the likelihood of downward assimilation. The second set of effects draws on the intervening variables identified in Figure 2 to show how factors associated with selective acculturation may countermand the power of exogenous determinants and lead, in exceptional cases, to educational and occupational success from backgrounds of severe disadvantage.

These factors are associated, first, with authoritative parenting and prevention of dissonant acculturation; second, with the presence of significant others and external assistance programs; third, with the preservation of cultural skills and family memories brought from the home country. What practical lessons can be derived from this analysis? A first is the difference that an immigrant population bifurcated by human capital can make.

If all contemporary immigration were composed of professionals and entrepreneurs, most of the negative outcomes linked to downward assimilation would go away. That scenario will not materialise, however, because of the persistent and growing need of the American economy for low-wage manual labor Massey et. This structural demand in large sectors of the economy such as agriculture, construction, and personal services virtually guarantees that poor immigrants will continue to come. To the extent that they bring their families along, the problems associated with low parental human capital and a negative mode of incorporation will continue.

A second lesson is how these initial disadvantages transform themselves into objective outcomes. While over 40 percent of Mexican-American youths in the sample were burdened by premature childbearing and 20 percent of Mexican-American, Central American, and West Indian young males had already been incarcerated for a crime, just 50 cases or less than 1 percent of the original sample managed to overcome the consequences of a heavily disadvantaged upbringing. In the long term, these are unacceptable outcomes since, if projected into the future, they would lead to an increasingly unequal society, the expansion of areas of poverty associated with particular ethnicities, and the perpetuation of an urban nightmare of crime, drugs, imprisonment, and death.

The third lesson coming from these results consists of factors that can make a difference in leveling the field for disadvantaged children of immigrants. Making successful outcomes less exceptional among this population should be a public policy priority. The tools to accomplish this goal are at hand in the creation and support of voluntary after-school programs, in the promotion by teachers and counselors of a selective acculturation pattern, and in the creation of incentive schedules for school personnel to take a real interest in the future and prospects of immigrant students.

Firms and employers who profit greatly from immigrant labor should also accept part of the financial burden required to insure that the children have at least a fighting chance to attain the American dream. This indicates both the very low level of human capital of Mexican immigrant parents and the considerable educational strides made by their children in the U.

The very low levels of parental human capital trumped, in this case, a favorable mode of incorporation linked to their refugee status. They are found in http: Alejandro Portes, Princeton University. William Haller, Clemson University. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.

J Ethn Migr Stud. Author manuscript; available in PMC Apr Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Alejandro Portes, Princeton University;. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. Abstract This paper summarises a research program on the new immigrant second generation initiated in the early s and completed in The Model The theory of segmented assimilation consists of three parts: Open in a separate window.



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Paths of Mobility across Generations: Much like stepping out on an empty dance floor, we took the risk of looking like fools by dancing alone. Did it pay off? Check out this article by Erin Cohen. Robert Renteria has figured out how to speak to young people. He did it through creating a book they see themselves in, then relating to them through comic and coloring books, and now through music.

If you want to learn how to speak to America's youth, take a listen and then follow his lead. RTC's executive team shares a little about where we come from, who we are, what we believe, and who we're here to serve. Yes, vulnerability is sexy. I've been fortunate to generate a good response to our work from folks on Twitter.

So when Robin Sharma asked me to write about his work via a Tweet, I dove in.