And her movement friends who still speak to her do so in tones of pity. "It must be tough being out there all alone," one said recently. "It's not so lonely," Callaghan replied. "There may not be any liberals out here with me, but there are plenty of the people that liberals say they want to help."
Still, there may be hope. People do change. Fernando Vega did. Vega, in a very real sense, is responsible for everything that happened to Rosa Torres, the Peruvian immigrant whose daughter got snarled up in Redwood City's TBE program. Fernando, you see, was the guy who got the Redwood City schools started down the bilingual path nearly three decades ago.
Not that he meant Rosa any harm. In fact, his story is, in many ways, similar to hers. Fernando is an American--born in Houston, he grew up right on the border in Brownsville, Texas--but his parents were Mexican immigrants. They spoke only Spanish, but Fernando's dad was a demon about learning English. Sometimes he would make the boy come out with him and lug backbreaking loads of shingles under that scorching Brownsville sun. "It's hot, no?" his father would ask after they'd been at it for a while. "Yes, Papa," Fernando would gasp. "Remember it, then," his father commanded. "And stay in school."
Fernando did, until World War II broke out. Then he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and learned to fix planes. After the war he got a job with Pan Am. He was such a good mechanic that after a while, the airline asked him to train others. So in 1958 he left Brownsville for San Francisco. With his wife and six children, Fernando settled in Redwood City.
It was a small town in those days, without many Hispanics. But Fernando never had any trouble until his eldest son Oscar was ready for high school. Together the two of them sat down and planned the courses Oscar would need to go to college. Algebra, civics, biology. But when Oscar came home from his first day of school, he had a new schedule: general math, ceramics, and woodworking.
"This is not what I want for my son," Fernando told the guidance counselor. "You never consulted me about these changes."
"The courses you wanted for him are reserved for kids who are going to college," the counselor explained. "And, let's be realistic, Oscar isn't going to college. But if he comes to these classes every day and behaves himself, he'll get a diploma."
"This school doesn't belong to you!" Fernando growled. "I pay taxes for this place!" He stomped out. After some angry talk at a school board meeting, he got Oscar back into the college prep classes. But every time one of his children started high school, Fernando had to go through the whole damned thing again. After a while, other Hispanic parents were calling, asking for his help with their kids. He got to be so good at it that he was elected to his own seat on the school board.
It was around 1970, when Fernando was visiting one of the schools, that a teacher approached him. "Mr. Vega, you know we're starting to get a lot of immigrants from Mexico here," she said. "And some of the children don't speak a word of English. I've got three in my class right now and I don't know what to do with them. Is there any money we could use to hire some teachers' aides who speak Spanish? Just to get them started."
Fernando called the superintendent, who remembered getting a notice that there was some federal money available for a new program called bilingual education, taught partly in Spanish, partly in English. Fernando, bemused, gave it some thought. Back in Brownsville, he'd learned English sink-or-swim in the first grade, and things had worked pretty well--not just for Fernando, but for a lot of Mexican kids who were allowed to attend school on the American side of the border. One of them even became the valedictorian of his high school class.
On the other hand, you had to be open to new ways of doing things. When Fernando started out in the Army Air Corps, everybody carried a slide rule to calculate things like fuel consumption. But these days, all the pilots and flight engineers carried little electronic calculators. That was progress. This bilingual education, it was progress too. "Let's get some of that money," he told the superintendent.
Fernando couldn't believe how quickly things moved after that. They hired teachers, not aides, with the federal money--and because bilingual teachers were hard to come by, they accepted some who Fernando privately didn't think were very good. But there wasn't much he could do about it. They needed more bilingual teachers every year, because the program was getting huge--new waves of immigrants were pouring in, but none of the kids seemed to be moving over into English classes. It was all a little disquieting, but before it reached the point of alarm, Fernando left the school board. His kids had all graduated, and it was time to do something new. He won a seat on the city council, then became an official in the state Democratic Party, finally a national organizer. The problems of Redwood City's schools were a distant memory.
Until the day in 1988 that Oscar stopped by the house. Fernando's eldest son now had a little boy of his own, Jason, who just two weeks ago had started the first grade. Funny thing, though--his class was taught in Spanish, a language the child didn't know. When Oscar went over to the school to ask that Jason be moved into an English classroom, the principal said there weren't any.
"Besides, he needs to learn Spanish," the principal added. "It's a shame he doesn't know his native language."
"English is his native language," Oscar retorted. "He's an American. He's never even been to Mexico." The principal just shrugged.
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