At the end of that summer, I returned to Santa Clara with mixed feelings. I was glad to leave behind my tiresome and tedious janitorial work and escape my father's depressing moods and strange behavior. But I was worried about him and I was sad to leave my family. They were still struggling to make ends meet even though I had given them my summer earnings. Trampita's salary from working at my old job while going to school, Torito's take-home pay from picking carrots after school and on weekends, and my mother's earnings from taking care of babies for migrant families and ironing for them were barely enough to pay the monthly rent and buy groceries and other basic necessities.
I too had a financial challenge: financing my second year of college. I managed to pay for tuition and room and board with scholarships I received from the university and the Santa Maria Valley Scholarship Association and by borrowing another thousand dollars from the federal government under the National Defense Student Loan Fund. But this was not enough. I had to find a job. My family needed help and ! had to buy my books and pay for living expenses such as clothes, toiletries, and laundry.
The first week of September, I moved into room 225 of McLaughlin Hall and registered for classes. Smokey and I agreed to room together that second year, but we hardly spent time together. He was busy with extracurricular activities and classes and I was occupied with studying and work. That fall I took seventeen semester units. The classes and professors I most enjoyed were History of Philosophy with Father Austin Fagothey, who was the chairman of the Department of Philosophy; History of Christianity with Father Bartholomew O'Neill; and Latin American Literature with Dr. Martha James Hardman de Bautista.
The second week of classes I went to see Dr. Hardman de Bautista about being her reader. The door to her sparsely decorated office in the basement of O'Connor Hall was open. I poked my head in and knocked. "Come in, Mr. Jiménez," she said, smiling and placing a book on her desk. As usual, she was wearing sandals, a long one-piece white dress bound at the waist by a wide, colorful woven sash, and a small mantle over her shoulders fastened at the front with a straight silver pin. Her yellowish-brown hair was parted in the middle and pulled back with a headband. "I enjoy having you in my class."
"Thank you, Professor." I was surprised she had already learned my name. "I like outclass. It's small," I added nervously, trying to make casual conversation.
"Yes. And everyone in the class is a native Spanish speaker, mostly from Central America, except for one student. Please have a seat." She brought her chair from behind the desk and sat facing me. She had a radiant round face and large blue eyes. "So, what can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if you needed a reader." I proceeded to tell her why I needed a job, without mentioning my family. I did not feel comfortable telling her about my home situation. She listened intently, and at the end of my explanation she asked me questions, in Spanish, about my language background. She then switched to English.
"You're Mexican, aren't you?"
I was amazed that she knew this.
"Yes, I am Mexican, but I was born in Colton, California."
She must have noticed my surprise because she said, "I can tell that you're Mexican by your intonation and some of your vocabulary. You see, I am an anthropological linguist, I study languages."
"What languages?" I had never heard of an anthropological linguist before.
"Currently I am doing research on the language of the Aymara Indians of the Andes. I'm studying the phonological and grammatical structure of their language." She became more and more animated, and her face became flushed as she described her work. "The majority of the Bolivian population, the country where I've done most of my research, belongs to Aymara and Quechua Indian groups. Yet education in Bolivia is delivered solely in Spanish without regard for the indigenous languages, and as a result there is social, economic, and racial discrimination. My hope is that once we create a written language, the Aymara speakers will learn to read and write it so that in the future they will be able to document their own history, in their own language!"
I admired her enthusiasm. "That's very interesting. What you're saying relates to what we're studying in your class about pre-Columbian literature and the Spanish Conquest."
"Exactly! Now, would you be interested in helping me with my research? I need help coding and cataloging the data I collected on the Aymara language, I have it on hundreds of index cards."
I did not respond right away because I was not sure I was capable of doing the work. Noticing my hesitation, she said, "I'll show you how to do it; it isn't difficult. And I have grant money to pay you."
"Thank you, Professor. I'd like to try it." I felt slightly more confident. She then carefully explained to me how she wanted the data coded and cataloged and gave me a key to her office so that I could do the work in the evenings and on weekends. She also hired me as a reader, correcting papers and quizzes for her elementary and intermediate Spanish courses.
My flexible work schedule for Professor Hardman de Bautista made it possible to get two other part-time jobs, I worked in the language lab two hours a day, and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I tutored students in Spanish at Bellarmine College Preparatory High School in San Jose, which was a little over a mile from the university. I worked an average of twenty-five hours a week.
I enjoyed working at Bellarmine, but it was time-consuming and frustrating. It took me approximately forty-five minutes to walk to and from campus, and when no students showed up for tutoring, I did not get paid. So I tried to get another job on campus by taking advantage of my experience working as a janitor. I wrote a letter to the president of the university, Father Patrick Donohoe, suggesting that students be hired to do the custodial work in the dormitories in exchange for room and board. I argued that by having students do the cleaning, other students would be less likely to mess tip their rooms and the hallways. I described my extensive janitorial expertise and concluded by offering my services. I never got a response.
I was more successful in marketing my typing skills than my janitorial experience. In high school, I took a typing class and did very well in it because of my typing speed and accuracy. I was so fast that my mother called me a typing machine. "You got fast fingers from picking strawberries and cotton," she told me. I approached a few classmates of mine who were approximately my size and weight and told them that I would happily type their papers in exchange for clothes or money. I ended up with a beautiful light blue alpaca sweater, some nice long-sleeved striped shirts, and some cash.
At the end of the month, after paying living expenses, I sent home any money I had left over. It was not much, but my family appreciated it.