Post by Bozur on Apr 15, 2005 13:44:17 GMT -5
NYTimes.com > International > Americas
COMING OF AGE
At 15, Dreaming Big Dreams: Oh, to Be a Scholar
By TIM WEINER
Published: April 9, 2005
MEXICALI, Mexico
Janet Jarman for The New York Times
Alicia Álvarez, 15, is extra bright, studious and hungry for further education, but in Mexicali that hunger is not likely to be satisfied.
ALICIA ÁLVAREZ lives two miles from the American border and light-years from the American dream.
Growing up in Mexicali has made her a realist at 15. She has no taste for romances and soap operas. Harry Potter stories and a horror movie at the mall are as far away as fictions take her from her city's heat and dust.
Alicia has a fierce intelligence, and it fires her only soaring ambition: to get a decent education, schooling that could lift her up and out of her surroundings into a better life. It looks to her as likely as a trip to Mars.
"It seems impossible," Alicia said with a shy, distant gaze. She has started high school, having proved herself one of the brightest girls in her city, a straight-A student with an exceptional aptitude for math.
"My family has no money for college," she said. "I probably will never get to a university, though I would love to.
"My education has been hard. My teachers are trained in teaching, not in math and science. It's a struggle for them to teach me what I need to be taught. To learn what I want to know. And I want to know so much."
She finds herself, like her country, poised with one foot in the door of opportunity and one stuck in the poverty and powerlessness of the past. But with her fine mind, the idea of having a better life than one's parents, while distant, is still a shimmering possibility.
Her father, David Osuna, 46, works part time selling used cars. He has good weeks and bad weeks. Her mother, Alicia Álvarez, 48, keeps house. They have provided their children with the basics of life: food, clothes, shelter. Their slender, dutiful, deep-thinking daughter is a bit of a mystery to them.
Alicia's brothers, David, 21, and Luis, 16, are in awe of her intelligence, respectful, sometimes distant. David is the one in whom she sometimes confides her dreams.
ALICIA'S uncle and godfather, Abel Álvarez, 56, knows her aspirations. He grew up behind a plow, and then crossed over the border when he was her age to work the fields of the Imperial Valley in California. He now earns a good living in construction, a self-made man who builds malls in El Centro, Calif., 15 minutes north of Mexicali.
He has watched Alicia grow up with a mixture of pride and worry.
"It's not a lot easier growing up in Mexicali now than it was 40 years ago," he said. "The pie's a little bigger, but a lot more people want a slice. Growing up here, you go up against all that, and with the United States and all its riches just over the line."
Mexico's economy has been flat for almost five years. Poverty is ever-present. The middle class is small; it has been shrinking for a generation. Stealing into the United States is often the only way out.
Alicia has seen what is over the line, having traveled with her uncle and cousins on short trips to Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. "I love Riverside best of all, it's so pretty," she said. "So much greenery, so many trees. It's the cleanest, greenest place I've ever seen."
But Alicia says the idea of sneaking across the border to live and work holds no attraction for her. "I don't want to migrate," she said flatly. There is no legal path for her, and she does not want to be an outlaw.
She is a bit better off than many other young Mexicans, especially the millions living in the countryside whose families struggle for enough to eat, and she would not risk what little she has for a gamble in a strange land.
Still, Alicia sometimes feels the walls of her cinder-block house closing in on her. The heat rises above 100 degrees in Mexicali for almost half the year. The house is crowded, and the closeness sometimes chafes at family life and familial love.
"We quarrel sometimes," she says. "We don't always get along. My parents don't always think the way I do." When the little house gets too hot, too close, she finds refuge in books, or when there is a little money to spare, alone at the movies, at a mall a mile from home on the edge of the city, near where the desert begins.
She has become, of late, more of a loner, though she has a best friend, Karen Aguilar. "She is my one close friend, Karen, and no one else," Alicia said. "We grew up together. We shared secrets and all that. We used to spend all our free time together. But now she works, and I have to study, and time seems so short."
Karen, 16, used to visit Alicia almost every day. "We'd go hide in her room, play music, dance together, talk about boys and things," Karen said. "If we went out, it would be to walk to the mall, look at clothes. She is often a shy girl, but with me, she'll open up."
But things are changing. Karen's father forbade her to go to Alicia's 15th birthday celebration last year, a day that serves as the formal presentation of a girl as a woman in Mexican society. It traditionally is marked first with a formal Catholic Mass, then with the best party a girl's family can afford.
Karen's parents are Jehovah's Witnesses, and they objected to her going to a Catholic church. The schism almost broke Alicia's heart. While not a deeply devout Catholic, Alicia took the ritual seriously - the Mass is the last of its kind that a Mexican girl receives before her marriage.
Karen's absence was marked by an empty chair at the party afterward, held in an electricians' union hall. A D.J. played Eminem. Many of the girls danced with one another in a tight circle, dressed in tube tops, hot pants and tiny minidresses, making sexy hip-shaking moves stolen from music videos.
Alicia danced chastely, outside the edge of the circle, moving slowly in her creamy beige gown.
The priest and her elders had said this was to be the most beautiful day of her life. On the first night of summer, under a new moon, she was turning from a girl into a woman. The party made her parents happy, and that made Alicia happy.
But the ritual was a little empty, like her friend's place at the table, and the romance of it all felt rented, like the hall. She was dancing alone, a world apart.
SHE has once or twice held hands with boys. There have been "little kisses," but nothing else, she says. She is not ready for the intensity and confusion of sex. Her mind is growing fast. But her body is starting to catch up. Sometimes she feels that when she looks in the mirror, she sees a different person every day.
"I know I'm changing," she said. "I'm not the same as I was when I was a child. But I'm not grown up either.
"There have been guys who say they want to be my boyfriend," she said. "I tell them no. I tell them I don't want that. I tell them I'm special. I'm different. I haven't been attracted to them. I tell them that, and sometimes it makes me feel ugly. But no one whom I've been attracted to has asked me.
"Boys are not what I think about, not that much," she said. "What I think about when I'm alone is growing up. Because I have to grow up, I have to think about high school, and then how I am going to find a way to go to a university despite having no money? If I get there, what I am going to study."
Mexico has made strides in public education over the past 25 years, particularly in primary schools, but not nearly enough. Only one of seven children entering first grade finishes high school.
"Maybe half the students who finish eighth grade don't have access to a good high school," said Rafael Rangel, chancellor of Tec de Monterrey, Mexico's most prestigious university. "We haven't built enough high schools or trained enough teachers. It's a terrible situation. Many of the kids who do make it through high school have no access to a university."
"There's no bigger problem in Mexico," he said.
If Alicia is struggling for answers, so is her country. Her life is a long list of questions, including the biggest of all: what she will be when she grows up.
"Maybe the best I can hope for is to find a teacher in high school who can teach me accounting, and then a job keeping the books at some business," she said. "Still, I would love to be a real scholar, to go to a university and make my life better than that."
COMING OF AGE
At 15, Dreaming Big Dreams: Oh, to Be a Scholar
By TIM WEINER
Published: April 9, 2005
MEXICALI, Mexico
Janet Jarman for The New York Times
Alicia Álvarez, 15, is extra bright, studious and hungry for further education, but in Mexicali that hunger is not likely to be satisfied.
ALICIA ÁLVAREZ lives two miles from the American border and light-years from the American dream.
Growing up in Mexicali has made her a realist at 15. She has no taste for romances and soap operas. Harry Potter stories and a horror movie at the mall are as far away as fictions take her from her city's heat and dust.
Alicia has a fierce intelligence, and it fires her only soaring ambition: to get a decent education, schooling that could lift her up and out of her surroundings into a better life. It looks to her as likely as a trip to Mars.
"It seems impossible," Alicia said with a shy, distant gaze. She has started high school, having proved herself one of the brightest girls in her city, a straight-A student with an exceptional aptitude for math.
"My family has no money for college," she said. "I probably will never get to a university, though I would love to.
"My education has been hard. My teachers are trained in teaching, not in math and science. It's a struggle for them to teach me what I need to be taught. To learn what I want to know. And I want to know so much."
She finds herself, like her country, poised with one foot in the door of opportunity and one stuck in the poverty and powerlessness of the past. But with her fine mind, the idea of having a better life than one's parents, while distant, is still a shimmering possibility.
Her father, David Osuna, 46, works part time selling used cars. He has good weeks and bad weeks. Her mother, Alicia Álvarez, 48, keeps house. They have provided their children with the basics of life: food, clothes, shelter. Their slender, dutiful, deep-thinking daughter is a bit of a mystery to them.
Alicia's brothers, David, 21, and Luis, 16, are in awe of her intelligence, respectful, sometimes distant. David is the one in whom she sometimes confides her dreams.
ALICIA'S uncle and godfather, Abel Álvarez, 56, knows her aspirations. He grew up behind a plow, and then crossed over the border when he was her age to work the fields of the Imperial Valley in California. He now earns a good living in construction, a self-made man who builds malls in El Centro, Calif., 15 minutes north of Mexicali.
He has watched Alicia grow up with a mixture of pride and worry.
"It's not a lot easier growing up in Mexicali now than it was 40 years ago," he said. "The pie's a little bigger, but a lot more people want a slice. Growing up here, you go up against all that, and with the United States and all its riches just over the line."
Mexico's economy has been flat for almost five years. Poverty is ever-present. The middle class is small; it has been shrinking for a generation. Stealing into the United States is often the only way out.
Alicia has seen what is over the line, having traveled with her uncle and cousins on short trips to Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. "I love Riverside best of all, it's so pretty," she said. "So much greenery, so many trees. It's the cleanest, greenest place I've ever seen."
But Alicia says the idea of sneaking across the border to live and work holds no attraction for her. "I don't want to migrate," she said flatly. There is no legal path for her, and she does not want to be an outlaw.
She is a bit better off than many other young Mexicans, especially the millions living in the countryside whose families struggle for enough to eat, and she would not risk what little she has for a gamble in a strange land.
Still, Alicia sometimes feels the walls of her cinder-block house closing in on her. The heat rises above 100 degrees in Mexicali for almost half the year. The house is crowded, and the closeness sometimes chafes at family life and familial love.
"We quarrel sometimes," she says. "We don't always get along. My parents don't always think the way I do." When the little house gets too hot, too close, she finds refuge in books, or when there is a little money to spare, alone at the movies, at a mall a mile from home on the edge of the city, near where the desert begins.
She has become, of late, more of a loner, though she has a best friend, Karen Aguilar. "She is my one close friend, Karen, and no one else," Alicia said. "We grew up together. We shared secrets and all that. We used to spend all our free time together. But now she works, and I have to study, and time seems so short."
Karen, 16, used to visit Alicia almost every day. "We'd go hide in her room, play music, dance together, talk about boys and things," Karen said. "If we went out, it would be to walk to the mall, look at clothes. She is often a shy girl, but with me, she'll open up."
But things are changing. Karen's father forbade her to go to Alicia's 15th birthday celebration last year, a day that serves as the formal presentation of a girl as a woman in Mexican society. It traditionally is marked first with a formal Catholic Mass, then with the best party a girl's family can afford.
Karen's parents are Jehovah's Witnesses, and they objected to her going to a Catholic church. The schism almost broke Alicia's heart. While not a deeply devout Catholic, Alicia took the ritual seriously - the Mass is the last of its kind that a Mexican girl receives before her marriage.
Karen's absence was marked by an empty chair at the party afterward, held in an electricians' union hall. A D.J. played Eminem. Many of the girls danced with one another in a tight circle, dressed in tube tops, hot pants and tiny minidresses, making sexy hip-shaking moves stolen from music videos.
Alicia danced chastely, outside the edge of the circle, moving slowly in her creamy beige gown.
The priest and her elders had said this was to be the most beautiful day of her life. On the first night of summer, under a new moon, she was turning from a girl into a woman. The party made her parents happy, and that made Alicia happy.
But the ritual was a little empty, like her friend's place at the table, and the romance of it all felt rented, like the hall. She was dancing alone, a world apart.
SHE has once or twice held hands with boys. There have been "little kisses," but nothing else, she says. She is not ready for the intensity and confusion of sex. Her mind is growing fast. But her body is starting to catch up. Sometimes she feels that when she looks in the mirror, she sees a different person every day.
"I know I'm changing," she said. "I'm not the same as I was when I was a child. But I'm not grown up either.
"There have been guys who say they want to be my boyfriend," she said. "I tell them no. I tell them I don't want that. I tell them I'm special. I'm different. I haven't been attracted to them. I tell them that, and sometimes it makes me feel ugly. But no one whom I've been attracted to has asked me.
"Boys are not what I think about, not that much," she said. "What I think about when I'm alone is growing up. Because I have to grow up, I have to think about high school, and then how I am going to find a way to go to a university despite having no money? If I get there, what I am going to study."
Mexico has made strides in public education over the past 25 years, particularly in primary schools, but not nearly enough. Only one of seven children entering first grade finishes high school.
"Maybe half the students who finish eighth grade don't have access to a good high school," said Rafael Rangel, chancellor of Tec de Monterrey, Mexico's most prestigious university. "We haven't built enough high schools or trained enough teachers. It's a terrible situation. Many of the kids who do make it through high school have no access to a university."
"There's no bigger problem in Mexico," he said.
If Alicia is struggling for answers, so is her country. Her life is a long list of questions, including the biggest of all: what she will be when she grows up.
"Maybe the best I can hope for is to find a teacher in high school who can teach me accounting, and then a job keeping the books at some business," she said. "Still, I would love to be a real scholar, to go to a university and make my life better than that."