CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FUTURE IS FEMALE
Ana Elena Soto-Harrison, forty-seven
Mexico City/Longmont, Colorado
YOU SEE THEM OUT IN THE STREETS, taking public transportation, cleaning the train stations, driving the buses. They’re in the restaurants cooking, waiting on tables, washing the dishes, and sometimes they even own the restaurant. They work in practically every industry in the country, from the fields where our food is grown, to the hospitals where the sick are treated. In spite of this, they are still living in inequality.
One of every five women in the United States is Latina. By 2060, they are projected to make up one-third of the female population in the country. A quarter of female students in public schools are Latina; in states such as California, Texas, and New Mexico, the figure rises, with Latinas representing one-half of all school-age girls.1 And of all the Latina women in the United States, 64 percent are Mexican.
Clearly, the future of Latinas in general, and those of Mexican origin in particular, is relevant to the future of the United States as a whole. But in terms of education, few Latinas make it to college: less than 8 percent of college degrees are awarded to Latina women in the US. Access to higher education continues to be a challenge, and as a result they face limited career options.
Ana Elena Soto recognized this, and as a Mexican in the United States, she got the right to work to reverse those limitations, one girl at a time. In February 2017, she succeeded in getting seven Mexican families to consider the possibility of their daughters pursuing a higher education after graduating from high school. Ana gave them information on financial aid, how to apply to college, how to get scholarships and counseling, and about other options in different areas. The following year, and every year after that, Ana will try to reach many more.
Ana met her husband, Easton Harrison, in Mexico City while Easton was there on business. One day as he was walking along Paseo de la Reforma, a pretty girl caught his eye—Ana Elena. They struck up a conversation and their friendship began. The friendship blossomed into a romance and later marriage.
The couple settled in Houston, Texas, because Easton’s four children from a previous marriage lived there. They lived in Houston for four years, but because of Easton’s job, they would move several times in the coming years. First they moved to Boise, Idaho, where they spent three years and welcomed the birth of their daughter, Rosana. Then they relocated to Sandy, Utah, where their son, Gabriel, was born. Their next stop was Sparta, New Jersey, where they stayed the longest, from 2004 to 2013. Finally, the Harrisons moved to Longmont, Colorado, where they have lived for the past four years. A small city of 86,000 residents, one-fourth of whom are Latino, Longmont is thirty-three miles from Denver, the state capital.
Ana’s experience living in such different places across the US has given her a fascinating perspective and valuable insights into the country. Ana and I met decades ago when we went to the same school in Mexico City. I think of her as a warm, loving, cheerful person, with a quick sense of humor and a facility for connecting with people. In early 2017, after not having seen each other for more than twenty years—except briefly at a school reunion event—we got together in Los Angeles. Ana got out of her car with her family: Rosana, a pretty fifteen-year-old girl; Gabriel, tall for his fourteen years but still with the face of a little boy; and Easton, her “gringo” husband, tall like his son. They are all bilingual, and Ana talks to her children in Spanish. My old friend has the same bright smile I remember—she is full-figured, with the same curly hair as always and friendly hazel eyes. Her warmth is reflected in her family life.
“Houston was the hardest for me,” Ana told me a few weeks later on Skype. “I had just left behind my job, my family, everything I had in Mexico, and moved into a small apartment, with no furniture, with a television, a bed, and nothing else, in a new country. My English was not very good, but I’ve always been very social, so the hardest thing was being at home,” she said, referring to her life with few friends and before having children.
Ana remembers her first experience with discrimination in the United States, right there in Houston. One weekend she and Easton went out to dinner at an upscale seafood restaurant. They were seated at a table and started talking to each other in Spanish. A few minutes later, they noticed that the man sitting at the next table was visibly uncomfortable.
“I can’t tell you if I felt angry or afraid or sad speaking my language and seeing the reaction on that man’s face. Feeling like you don’t fit in, that attitude of ‘I don’t like you speaking that language because you’re in my country’ in his body language, his expression, everything. I didn’t make a scene, we just left. Easton supported me. He was going to say something, but I told him I just wanted to leave. I had to let him know what it feels like when you know you’re not welcome, something he’s never going to feel because he’s Anglo.”
Although that episode was painful, it was practically the only discrimination Ana faced in Houston. She says Utah and Colorado were similar, with hardworking people originally from Zacatecas and Durango, from rural areas and ranches in Mexico, with a basic level of education.
“In Utah, I met people who had crossed the border undocumented,” she says. “I remember one woman who made a deep impression on me. When I met her, she said, ‘Someday I’m going to have a pink Cadillac just like Mary Kay,’ the line of cosmetics that gives a car away to its best salesperson. Twenty years later, she has her Caddy. She really did it.”
Things were a bit different in Dover, New Jersey, where Ana made friends with a group that included many Mexican families but from a higher socioeconomic background than what she had seen in Utah or in other Mexican communities in the New Jersey area. Most of the Mexicans Ana became friends with were professional couples who had left Mexico for good job offers in the United States. Ana felt comfortable in this group, who were also raising their children with typical Mexican family values such as having strong ties with their culture and their family back in Mexico, cooking traditional Mexican cuisine, and celebrating holidays like Día de los Muertos to remember their ancestors.
“Dover has a strong, completely Latino neighborhood,” she says. “That is where you go to wire money to Mexico, and you know it will get to your family there with no problem, or where you can go to the market and buy your nopalitos. And you know what makes these communities strong? Their kids play soccer at the YMCA and at the park with the Boy Scouts, and the families go to the church brunch on Sundays. I found a community there that really blended into US society. I suppose that’s because it’s near New York City, so New Jersey has accepted Italians the same as Puerto Ricans, Ecuadorians, and Salvadorans. There’s an easier coexistence that recognizes your culture, your food, and in general sends the message that you are welcome there.”
When the Eastons lived in Texas and Utah and her children were little, Ana found it challenging to work or participate in activities outside of raising her kids. But since she has been active all her life, when her children were a little older and they lived in New Jersey, Ana began volunteering at their elementary school, where Rosana was in fourth grade and Gabriel was in third. She thought that if she got to know the staff, maybe in the future the school might let her teach. When she presented them with her idea, the school accepted, and Ana began teaching Spanish. With ten classes in the school, the teachers devised a plan so each class could have two forty-minute Spanish lessons per week.
“It was amazing; it gave me a real ego boost,” she remembers. “I realized I could do it. [The children] were very interested. They were so grateful and ready to learn. Children bring that sense of wonder they have to language too; they are surprised by what they can do. They start off saying ‘Yo puedo hablar español,’ ‘I can speak Spanish,’ even though they have no idea what they’re saying!” She laughs. “I found they had a real hunger to learn.”
Unlike what Ana experienced at the restaurant in Texas, Ana says neither she nor her children experienced any discrimination in the years she worked as a volunteer Spanish teacher at their elementary school in New Jersey. And as is often the case with children of immigrants, Ana’s kids were able to use their bilingual skills to help others: Rosana was once called to the nurse’s office at school so she could translate for a girl who only spoke Spanish.
Although Ana was not paid a salary for her work teaching, she could see that her students, their families, and other teachers truly appreciated the value of learning another language. When she announced that she would be moving to Colorado, many parents sent Ana messages of thanks, and she received over three hundred cards and letters from students.
“That says a lot, too, because the demand is there, but the school could not make a job offer,” Ana emphasizes. “Rosana is proud that she can speak Spanish. This generation is very different from earlier generations that were not allowed to speak other languages. There is more openness. Swing states [neither overwhelmingly Republican nor Democrat] like Colorado are very flexible. You can make a difference there.”
When Ana arrived in Colorado, she quickly met other mothers in her area. One of her neighbors invited her to participate in a group, the Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO), an international organization with a mission to improve educational opportunities for women and increase their representation in culture and the arts.2 “To make their mark,” Ana explains.
Enthusiastic about PEO’s work, Ana started participating right away and soon found a path to making her own mark with a particular group: girls from Mexican families in Longmont.
Latina women in the United States are in many ways a diverse group. The three largest subgroups of Latina women are: Mexicans, representing 64 percent, followed by Puerto Ricans and Central Americans, at 9 percent each. The sum of these three groups makes up more than 80 percent of all Latina women living in the United States, and overall they have lower levels of income and education than the general population, although other smaller segments of the group, like Cubans, at 4 percent of the Latina population, and South Americans, at 6 percent, tend to be a bit better off financially.3
This is important, because Latinas are not evenly distributed throughout the country. There are many more Latinas of Mexican origin in the Southwest, while in the Southeast, Latinas of Cuban and South American origin are strongly represented. The Northeast has higher numbers of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans: Dominicans make up 3 percent of all Latinas in the US, and in the Midwest, the dominant groups are Mexican and Puerto Rican.
Although the common language for all Latinas is Spanish, and the different nationalities share some cultural references, there have been important variables in immigration patterns in terms of when people arrived in the United States and the conditions under which they arrived. What motivates someone in Mexico to migrate is not the same for someone from El Salvador or Cuba, and US immigration law has different provisions for each country of origin. For many years, the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which allowed people to stay in the country once they set foot on American soil, applied to Cubans. And for years, Salvadorans have had temporary protected status, while Mexicans are not even given the right to a hearing before a judge if they are apprehended at the border, because of a binational agreement allowing Mexicans to be immediately repatriated.
Considering these differences, it’s only natural that not all Latina women share the same experiences, backgrounds, needs, or opportunities. But given the large percentage of Latinas who come from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, overall this group still has limited financial and educational resources compared with the general population. Even though some parents of Latina girls have great aspirations for their daughters in terms of getting a college education and achieving career success, young Latinas are the least likely to earn a college degree of any group.4
The gap in educational achievement between Latinas and girls of other ethnic groups can easily be explained by the poverty and social disadvantages Latinas experience: one of every four Latinas lives below the poverty line, and more than half are low-income. In 2014, to be considered below the poverty line, a family of four had to earn less than $24,000 per year. For people living in countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, and Cuba, that might seem like a fortune, but in some major cities in the US, that amount would barely cover the rent and utilities for a two-bedroom apartment. Nutritious food, transportation, childcare for working parents, clothing, medicines, and health care—not to mention books and educational materials—are unaffordable luxuries on such tight budgets.
Latino children are also least likely to attend preschool.5 In 2012, 63 percent of Latino children ages three and four did not attend preschool, compared with 51 percent of white and African American children of the same age.6 Considering all of these factors, many Latino children enter kindergarten with academic disadvantages compared to their peers from other ethnic groups.
Aside from a lack of early childhood education, the language issue can be another obstacle. Around half of all Latinas in the United States enter school with Spanish as their primary language. The problem is that in spite of this country’s rich history of migration and the advances that have been made in this area—especially in southwestern states like California, where official materials are printed in several languages—in primary education, a lack of English is viewed as a problem that needs to be “fixed” and is said to impede the child’s academic progress. This view fails to recognize children’s abilities in their native language and consider them an asset.7 While other children are learning the regular curriculum, many Latina girls are still learning English, on top of grappling with all the previously mentioned disadvantages.
In this context, Ana got involved with PEO and discovered how the group worked on community, health, and recreation issues, ran a meal delivery program for the homeless in the winter, and organized book groups. She was pleasantly surprised by how warmly she was welcomed into the group, and how everyone in it liked the fact that she was from Mexico. It wasn’t long before a neighboring chapter of the organization told her it needed someone whose native language was Spanish to work on an education conference for girls going to college—a manual needed translation.
Ana hesitated, because even though her English is good, she was afraid some technical details in the manual might get lost in translation. But with Easton’s help, and understanding this was important work, she took it on. The manual explained to parents how to apply for college loans and other forms of financial aid. Later Ana also translated the event’s program and the questionnaires given out to participants to evaluate how the program went. It seemed only natural, then, that Ana join the outreach team to get Spanish speakers to attend the conference.
She loved the work. Ana had to give presentations to parents, especially mothers, explaining the conference’s mission. Her first presentation took place at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, where she attended services every week along with a large number of Latinas. Ana asked the church administration if she could hold an event there. The church agreed, and she gathered a group of forty young people and their parents one Wednesday evening, three weeks before the conference.
“I started off telling them we all want a bright future for our families, and we know that is related to our level of education,” Ana says. “And if fathers and mothers get on the same page and think about building a career, there’s opportunity for advancement. When you listen to teenage girls talk, they’re talking about who’s dating who, who are they going to marry someday—these are high school girls. And their parents . . . I don’t know if it’s because they’re from rural areas, but they think about how they want a good husband for their daughter, a nice boy who doesn’t drink too much. They’re not thinking about a boy with a college degree. I think in some Mexican families, there’s still this idea they have to make sure their daughters don’t get pregnant out of wedlock. Their goal is to have their daughter graduate high school, and if she doesn’t get pregnant first, all the better.”
Although Ana’s assessment about the educational gap might sound harsh, statistics support it. Even though Latinas have made progress in rates of entering high school, after that the gap gets wider: one of every five Latinas between twenty-five and twenty-nine lacks a high school diploma, compared with one of every twelve women from other backgrounds. What’s more, 36 percent of Latina women who did not finish high school say they dropped out because they got pregnant.
Progress has been made in higher education as well, but Latinas still lag behind other ethnic groups. In 2013, 19 percent of Latinas between twenty-five and twenty-nine years old had earned a college degree, compared with 23 percent of African American women, 44 percent of white women, and 64 percent of Asian American women. For advanced degrees, only four of every hundred Latina women had earned master’s degrees, compared with 5 percent of African American women, 11 percent of white women, and 22 percent of Asian American women.
“At a certain point in the presentation, all the girls got very quiet,” Ana remembers. “I said to them, ‘I need to hear what you think, what are your priorities, your hopes and dreams.’ They told me they wanted to finish high school and get a job at Kohl’s, which isn’t bad, but it made me realize that for them the highest goal is to finish high school, and after that whether they go on to college or not is a matter of luck. So I tried to steer the discussion towards what we want to do with our lives and what we can do with our lives. And if I tell them they could go to college, a lightbulb turns on. They say, ‘If I could go, that would be great.’”
Ana’s presentation was such a success, the girls got excited about going to the education conference and asked if they could bring their mother, their aunt, their godmother, and how much did it cost. The parents were also interested. As soon as Ana told them the conference was part of a movement of women supporting the advancement of other women who want to succeed in education and in business, the young women started asking questions.
What really worked for Ana during her presentations was sharing her personal story with the families. She told them she came from a different country, too, and that, upon arriving in the United States, she found a place very different from what she knew. She told the parents that she, too, had had to learn through her children how things were done: math might be the same here and there, but the system for teaching it in school is not the same. Ana had to reeducate herself through them. The college application and financial aid systems also work completely differently in the US from those in Mexico, and it seemed complicated to Ana. But thanks to this conference, Ana got to know other parents, and now she knew how to get things done.
The group in the church that day had an unexpectedly emotional response to Ana’s presentation. Many parents acknowledged they were intimidated, because they themselves only went to school until sixth or seventh grade in Mexico. They asked Ana what they should do if they could not pay the $45 registration fee that day, but it was decided that the conference would waive the fee for ten low-income attendees, seven for families recruited by Ana. They thanked her for making the information available in Spanish.
The conference was held on February 25, 2017, at a community college in Longmont. There were forty-four attendees, including those recruited by Ana. Six speakers gave presentations in English and four in Spanish on topics including how to instill good habits for success in school, financial aid, security on campus, and how to cope with an “empty nest” when children go away to college. For the high school girls, there were talks on how to prepare for college interviews and how to have fun safely on campus.
“[The families] were so grateful, and you could see how eager they were to find out more; they wanted more for their daughters,” Ana says. “The mothers are worried that their girls are growing up, that they already have boyfriends. They say things to me like, ‘I’ve told my daughter if she wants to be a pediatrician, she has to work hard and forget about boyfriends.’ These women are from Durango or Zacatecas; they come from small towns that they’ve left for their family. Some are single mothers, but they all want their daughters to go to college. They can see how an education could give them a different life. And I think many of these parents have not had the chance to really think about their children’s future, so we are kind of one step ahead of them. And having the information in Spanish definitely makes them feel more comfortable—if this woman speaks my language, I can ask her anything. Even though some are bilingual because they’ve been living in the US for a long time, there is always more trust when you talk to someone who comes from the same place as you. The tone was, no one knows it all here, because we all come from a place where things are done differently. It’s not just the language [we are learning]; it’s also being a parent. No matter how many manuals there are, we’re still learning all the time.”
The comments Ana received after moderating and translating a workshop for parents at the conference were all expressions of gratitude. In the workshop, she emphasized that not everyone is cut out for college and that technical school can be a good option for some young people.
“You don’t want to fall into the belief that if you don’t go [to college], you won’t go anywhere,” Ana said. “One of the speakers talked about how she set up her beauty salon in a spa, because when her father told her he wanted her to continue her education, she decided she would study something she could finish quickly, so she could start her business.”
Ana beams with satisfaction when she talks about the results of her participation in the conference, but she says she wishes more people could have attended. Her goal for the coming years is to increase the number of participants, and she had done an evaluation to see what improvements could be made. She now knows that more time should be devoted to talking with the parents of daughters who have only just started high school and are not prepared to decide on college. Ana’s goal is to tell them, without disparaging anyone’s job, that girls have a great number of options open to them as they begin to build their lives, beyond marriage or working as a salesclerk in a retail store.
“The great thing about the project is [that] in the future we can educate our people at churches and recreation centers, even at Mexican restaurants,” Ana says. “We can pull in those young people and make them aware that there is so much out there beyond high school.”
The night of November 8, 2016, as the results of the presidential election came in and it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win, members of demographic groups that had been the target of the candidate’s vicious attacks during his campaign began to feel how the next four years were going to weigh on them. Among all of them, one group of almost two million people became the most vulnerable: young undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexican, known as Dreamers.
These young people, who arrived in the United States as minors, were hurt by the disparaging comments Trump made in the months leading up to the election about their origins or immigration status: he disparaged them for being immigrants, for being Latinos, for being Mexicans, and some for being Muslims. But beyond insults, the Dreamers received a direct threat: DACA, the temporary protected status granted by the Obama administration, would be removed once Trump was elected. These young people would once again be left without access to higher education and in a legal limbo that would make them immediately vulnerable to deportation.
When I spoke with Ana about this four months after Trump took office, he still had not taken any action to cancel DACA. Political analysts agreed that the new administration would keep this up their sleeve until the right time came to use the issue as leverage while negotiating other difficult issues in Congress.
As congressional representatives and other elected officials play politics with the lives of millions of people, the fear of what could happen to anyone who is undocumented has put many people on edge.
“Now they’re afraid. They’re not paralyzed, but they are scared, in suspense,” Ana said, talking about what she has observed in Colorado. She tells me a story as an example. “The couple who cleans our house don’t give out their business cards to anyone anymore, because they’re undocumented. They’re afraid someone will find out they are working under a false Social Security number. The wife told me, ‘We want to buy a house. We could pay a down payment in cash, but how are you going to build up any credit if you don’t exist as a person? If you’re a ghost who pays taxes and generates income, who’s working, but has no options?’ They are clinging to the hope that these next four years will pass quickly and that a friend will help them get their house, managing the paperwork. They have enough savings to start to build up some capital, but they’re afraid that if they get caught in a raid and get deported, they’ll lose everything.”
Ana told me this couple has three daughters, all Dreamers. One is finishing up nursing school, knowing that if DACA is repealed, she will not be able to practice her profession. As someone who came to the US with a green card and legal permanent resident status, Ana despairs at the prospect of not being able to do anything to help this family.
“It’s like these people live in a kind of submarine, underwater all the time. You can’t see their faces or the color of their skin, and they’re extremely hardworking. Once I asked her, ‘Would you go back to Mexico?’ And she said, ‘No, our life is here, our granddaughter, our history, part of our family is here. There’s no going back.’ This is how a lot of people live, and I don’t know if I could dare to do it. It takes a lot of nerve to make your life in a different country and even more to do it undocumented. Trump needs to get closer to our community that he assumes he knows, but he doesn’t know at all. It would be great if he could see things from our perspective, what our young people have to put up with in this country, and it’s a lot. To understand how we live, our values; see our talents and give us a chance to shine.”