Why the Music Stopped, CONT...

On the pavement lay a teenage boy. His enormous dark eyes seemed to want to escape from his chiseled, high-cheekbone face. His chest was heaving frantically as if he wanted by the force of his will to extricate the knife sticking out of his body. His pristine white T-shirt became red all too quickly. By the time an ambulance arrived, his chest had stopped moving and his eyes were closed as if simply taking a respite from the horrors of that morning. Teresa got out of the bus, stunned, “not knowing whether this was real or a grade B television show.” Teachers frantically pulled everyone away, hoping that this could somehow help the students forget this scene. Unfortunately, for many it would not be the last.

According to IUPLR in the same survey, almost 30 percent of Hispanic males carried some kind of weapon in the 30 days before being interviewed, a figure very close to white male students; Latina female students were twice as likely to carry weapons as their Caucasian female peers.

As if drugs and violence were not enough danger to teenagers, other seductions lurk in the barrios and schools. Sitting in a wheelchair gave Ricky plenty of time to sit and watch the comings and goings of his neighbors in this ironically named barrio, La Colonia Hermosa (Beautiful Neighborhood). He saw many of the other problems that Hispanic teens encounter. Next door to him lived the Garcías, whose three-bedroom brick house was the best house, the mansion of the neighborhood. Mrs. García ran a brothel near the Mexican border, while the husband trafficked in drugs and contraband. Police arrested him and, while out on parole, he fled to Mexico and now cannot return to the United States. The couple’s children had very independent lives. Two dropped out of school before they even reached high school. They were married and divorced by 18 and left their young junior high school dropout wives to raise their children.

Ricky would also talk to another neighbor, Socorro, a 50-year-old toothless and tired woman who had three children from three different fathers. Her eldest girl, Linda, became pregnant at 13. After Socorro finished beating her up, she went to school to pick up her belongings and never returned. By the time she was 18, Linda also had three children with three different men.

Linda tried to work as a waitress, but she was often fired because she had to miss work to take care of her kids if they were sick or if she could not find a relative to care for them. Linda’s younger sisters, who already had two children each, were on welfare and spent most of their time in unemployment lines. Their young children often were left unsupervised. Conditions were ripe for the vicious cycle to continue. The children of unwed mothers grow up to become unwed mothers themselves. They then drop out of school as teens. For them, life will be full of menial jobs and poor pay, and they will have little time to care for their own children.

According to the National Latina Institute of Reproductive Health, in many Hispanic communities teenage pregnancies have as their root the belief that “motherhood is the biggest goal a woman can aspire to.” Their life is filled with a feeling of loneliness and despair. Few get sex education classes. Three out of every five Latina girls become pregnant at least once during their teen years. The rate is 50 percent higher than the national average. And because Latinas are less likely to have abortions, the birth rate among them is now higher than that of African-American and white women.

Schools are left with the de facto responsibility of serving as surrogate parents, counselors, therapists, and of course as disciplinarians. John Cavazos, director of student support services in the McAllen, Texas, Independent School District, explains that “disciplining students is not an easy task and finding the qualified personnel to do so is a challenge.” His truant officers “have to be trained in education, criminal justice, psychology and social science.” In areas where many of the kids they encounter either use or sell drugs or are in one way or another working with drug dealers, truant officers must be trained to face all types of problems. These are the issues that first lead to truancy and then to students dropping out of school.

All these problems explain why Hispanics still have dropout rates that are consistently 2.5 times higher than those of African Americans and almost 4 times those of white non-Hispanics.

Even before Ricky’s dolce clarinet tones had ceased, there was little beauty in La Colonia Hermosa. There is even less beauty in knowing that many Hispanic kids live in neighborhoods like that—or worse.
 

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