Manuel Martínez giving a talk at Ohio State in the spring of 2006.

As a faculty member of OSU I was asked to write “Mi experiencia” for the summer issue of ¿Qué Pasa, OSU?, which is prepared for Hispanic/Latin@ high school seniors who are getting ready to go to college.

I am sharing my experience with those who are going to make a difference in the future of this country, their community, for their people and their families. I remember a sociologist, a colleague of mine a few years ago, telling me that I was a sociological anomaly. He said that I was a “statistical miracle.” A one in a million coming out of the barrio, he said. I dare say that you’re each a statistical miracle. See, according to the sociologists out there, the first-generation, working class, minority student is more than likely going to fail. He or she, say the numbers people, doesn’t have the support groups, the mentors, the guidance. We’re prone to all the temptations and are “at risk” for falling into the pitfalls that have claimed so many of our friends and relatives. But somehow you are making it — they’ll say. It’s a mystery.

But we know better than that. Those students who are ready to continue on to college know that somewhere along the line, we have to make a decision — we have to decide that we are not going to let the obstacles keep us on the outside looking in. By the grace of God, and the encouragement by a teacher or two, or the words of our mothers or fathers, or a tia or tio, or a grandparent, we figured out that if we keep moving forward we’ll get “inside” — we’ll gain access.

I’m going to get autobiographical on you right now. I’m going to give you the two instances which determined my path to this point, that taught me to keep on moving forward.

The person in my life that gave me the encouragement and guidance that I needed was not an educated woman. She could barely read or write. She didn’t go past the third grade. She spent her entire childhood and much of her adulthood as a migrant worker in south Texas and the Midwest, living in a tent, moving from town to town. Her mother died when she was nine and as the eldest she had to take care of her five brothers and sisters and her father.

My grandmother, Maria Martinez, used to call me on the phone when I was in grade school to ask me how to spell simple words or even numbers so that she could write out a check. But my grandmother was a proud woman, indomitable, with a spirit that was never broken. Even when she broke her hip at the age of 68, she got up as soon as she could, learned to use a cane, and get this — went back to work. She was tough as they come and she was strict with me. I lived with her for two years when I was only six. My grandmother never let me miss a day of school. She knew the value of education. She also knew that in her day, as in mine, there was a fair amount of racism in the school system. On my first day of school, I couldn’t speak English. So I was segregated. My pal Rudy and I had to sit in the corner by ourselves and watch the other kids learn. Even though our school was in the heart of the Mexican side of town, there were no bilingual programs. So we sat there six or seven hours just watching.

On the second day of school, my friend Rudy, bored and tired, fell asleep at his desk. Our teacher, Ms. Kraus, came up behind him with a yardstick and struck him in the back to wake him up. Splatt!!! Right across that boy’s t-shirt clad back. Ms. Kraus didn’t know how to speak Spanish, but she could communicate when she wanted to, and what she taught me that day, was that I wasn’t welcome, that I was going to be excluded; that I didn’t know the rules, that it might be better for me to give up. And you know what, many such as me did. Less than 50 percent of Mexican American males on San Antonio’s West Side, where I grew up, finish high school, and that’s today! The number that enter college and graduate is much less than that. So Kraus’s lesson was learned by many of my schoolmates. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go back to school. The next morning I pretended to have a stomachache.

My grandmother, she didn’t let me get away with it. She sent me back everyday. But each day, I hated it worse and worse. I’ll never forget what my grandmother did to impress upon me the absolute necessity of demanding my education. Now “demanding” is a word in need of definition, because there are different ways of demanding things. One can demand overtly, loudly, or one can demand patiently, insistently, quietly — one can demand something simply by not giving up, by being there and insisting on one’s right to access. Now I’m a writer, and I want to share a short story I wrote about how my grandmother impressed upon me the need to return back to that unfriendly, daunting, scary, threatening environment. It’s called “El Burro” and it’s quite short. Bear with me:

My grandmother, my dad’s mother, took me to a shoe cobbler one day. Some little shop where the guy probably lived, right there in the neighborhood. Shabby and plain, with an unvarnished floor made of dull wood. Two or three chairs with his work bench in the middle of the room. He, an old man (he seemed ancient to me, only six at the time) greeted my grandmother by first name, “Rosita,” he said smiling, a few crooked teeth poking from below his wrinkly brown lips. I could feel his warmness. Nice old coot, offering his hospitality which my grandmother took. “Got some shoes for you today, Lencho.” She held out a pair of old lady shoes for the guy to take. He grabbed them, happy-like, a regular business man, he walked immediately to his bench and began to re-heel my grammo’s gray shoes. “This boy, he looks like a good boy,” Lencho said as he tap-tapped with a little hammer, like some elf from a fairy story. “Oh, he’s okay, but he’s gonna be a burro.” The old man stopped tapping for a second to peer over at me with a mock-penetrating look. “You don’t wanta be no burro, boy.” He started tapping again, but kept talking too. “I’m a burro.” I looked over at my grammo because I wanted to laugh at the old man who’d just called himself a burro. She was listening to Lencho and so I stifled the instinct and looked back at him. “Yeah, I never wanted to go to school. My momma, she needed me to work anyway, so she didn’t care if I stopped going to school. Now all I do it fix these shoes, when I get shoes.” My grammo started talking to him now, ignoring me. “I’m a burra too, Lencho. I have to clean houses for those old rich white ladies over on the north side of town.” She shook her head slowly. “’Magine that. Me, an old lady, cleaning houses for ladies the same age as me.” Lencho brought over the shoes, now re-heeled. “Look at us,” he said looking at me, “a couple of burros, and you with the chance to go to school.” He shook his head sadly. I’d disappointed this man that I didn’t know. “He’s gonna be a burro too,” she said matter-of-factly, “I know it. That’s what he wants, all the time pretending to be sick, coming home crying early from school because he don’t like it.” Those two, old lovely burros looked at me so sad. “Well, here’s your money,” my grammo said handing Lencho a couple of bucks. He took it, put it in his apron and my grammo took my hand and headed for the door. As we walked out, I heard “heeehaaaw!”

The next day, I pretended to be sick again.

Manuel Martínez (left) with his brother and grandmother in 1970.

Now, I did pretend to be sick again the next day, and the day after that, but each day, my grandmother made me go back. She taught me, through her own persistence, that one had to be determined. I moved back home with my parents a couple of years later, but by then my grandmother’s lesson had become much more impressed upon me than the lesson Ms. Kraus had given me that first week of school. But both lessons were important, because Ms. Kraus taught me that there would always be irrational, even cruel, people at the entryways of places that I wanted to enter. I learned from Ms. Kraus that my efforts would often be met with indifference.

I’m convinced that indifference is even more deadly for the child than outright cruelty and meanness. With meanness, the child can at least react with a hatred or anger that immures him or her from some of the effects of that behavior. But with indifference, the child learns that he or she simply does not matter, does not exist; that he or she is not important. But my dear old grandmother showed me that I could not allow cruelty, indifference, or ignorance to block me. Rather, I must demand entry through quiet determination.

I’m not going to stand here and lie to you and tell you that after my grandmother’s lessons, I became an ace student and learned to love school. In fact, I spent the next ten years failing courses, getting kicked out of two different high schools, even getting into skirmishes with the law. In short, I did some crazy things. I graduated in the years when you could earn a D average and still make it, and so by the skin of my teeth, I finished high school. I graduated in the bottom ten percent of my class, and there were over 600 of us. That means there were over 540 students that did better than me. But you know what, all that time in school, I knew I wanted to succeed, that I wanted to be something—I wanted to be a lawyer. Now, I didn’t know what it meant to be a lawyer. I had no idea. I just knew that this was something successful people became. I had no idea about what it took to succeed in school, much less what sort of steps were necessary to actually reach that goal. I had people in my corner, my mom, my girlfriend, my grandmothers, but no one had ever been to college. In fact, neither of my parents had graduated from high school.

Now I was smart. I think many of you will relate to this. I read everything I could get my hands on. My family respected books. I grew up in a religious family and as children we were called upon to interpret the Bible passages, and I’m not talking NIV Bible passages, I’m talking King James Translation. That’s like reading Shakespeare. So let me tell you, I could read! So when I got set to take my SATs, I was ready for the verbals. I scored high enough to get provisional entry into St. Mary’s University. Provisional meant, “okay, let’s see how you do this first year. If you do alright, we’ll let you stay.”

A month before I graduated from high school, my grandmother, Maria Martinez, died from cancer. She never got to see me walk the stage. But before she went, she called me into her room and told me a secret. She said, “I’m going to leave you my house. I want you to use the money to go to college. But you have to promise me that you’re going to go and that you’re going to be something big.”

Now, my family was poor; poor like government cheese and food stamps. My mom with no high school and no job experience, five children, and a husband who’d walked out a few years before, made do with what she could. So I was a working man by the time I was 12 years old. My first job was as a newspaper boy and on the first day, I got hit by a car and broke my jaw and crushed my upper teeth, but that’s another story. My grandmother’s second gift to me, that house, allowed me to enter St. Mary’s and to give the money I received as rent to my mother, so that I could cut down on work and concentrate on my studies. But it wasn’t enough. I didn’t do very well my first year. I went on scholastic probation and was about to get kicked out of school, my only chance, gone.

I remember sitting in a used car that I pawned my saxophone to buy, so that I could get to school and work, sitting there frantically cramming for a history test that I had not had the time to study for because I was still working and because I was used to simply doing what I had to do to survive, and it suddenly dawned on me. I was struck as if by a jolt of electricity. I put the book down and looked at myself in the rearview mirror, and I knew that it was TIME. It was time to choose. Was I going to make it or not? Was I going to let the obstacles and demands by those indifferent forces—be they uncaring bosses, poverty, laziness, craziness, or even plain fear—keep me forever on the outside of that doorway labeled “success”?

Manuel Martínez graduating from St. Mary’s University, where he earned a B.A. in history and English.

My grandmother’s question to me seemed so real at that moment—was I going to be a burro? If I was, then I needed to quit wasting my time in college. If the answer was that I was going to succeed, I needed to make the decision. Now here’s where it gets tricky, because I can’t exactly define for you what that DECISION is. Only you know, because if you’re reading this here, you’ve made it within yourself already at some point in your life. You’ve said to yourself, this is IT, it’s TIME. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m going to find out how, and I’m not looking back.

You know what? I didn’t look back. I finished with a 4.0 the last six semesters of my undergraduate years. I made it my overarching goal that I would bring my 1.4 GPA that I’d earned my freshman year up to a 3.5 GPA by my senior year so that I could graduate cum laude and be inducted into the honor society. I earned a scholarship to Ohio State for a master’s and a series of scholarships for my Ph.D. at Stanford, and I think I made my grandmother proud.

But to return to my main theme, I succeeded through the faith my grandmother showed in me, and I now feel very deeply that it is my responsibility to pass on the secret to success that my grandmother bestowed to me. To survive, you must demand quietly through your determination, upon access, and you must insist within yourself that you will not allow anything to keep you outside those doors. Now that you’re ready to take the next step, take some time to reflect upon what you’ve learned about what it takes to succeed. Pass it on. That’s your responsibility, that’s your very special knowledge. The sociologists are right in one respect — you are the exception to that rule which specifies that a person that is born with so many obstacles in the way, will most often, and most tragically, fail in the face of indifference, poverty, and ignorance.

You are each a miracle, you’re exceptional, and you deserve to succeed. But you are going to have to remember a few things in order to gain that success:

1. Remember this, and it’s a tough lesson to learn, a tough thing to hear. You will encounter indifference as you continue up the ladder of higher education. Most Latin@ students that I counsel make the mistake of thinking that they are being signaled out, that various forces are arrayed against them. But the plain truth is that most of the folks you encounter along the way won’t really care one way or another whether you succeed. They’ve got their own problems, their own goals. So you need to be fueled by this indifference, by underestimation. I survived by deciding that I would show them all what I was capable of doing. It worked for me because I didn’t allow myself to feel sorry for myself. I made it my goal to demonstrate to the naysayers that they were wrong.

2. Take help where it is offered. Don’t close off avenues that might help you to move forward. Anyone can help you. If they’ve succeeded, take their advice to heart. My mentor wasn’t Latin@ or a person of color; he was an older white gentleman from the South of all places. But he took the time to mentor me, to show confidence in my abilities, to take me seriously and to impart wisdom about writing, researching, and getting ahead in academia.

3. You will have to become a scholar on your own. That means that you will have to listen very carefully and you will have to be curious and you will have to set up a plan to satisfy that curiosity. Listen and ask questions, write down the names of books, critics, and theories that you should be familiar. Take the time to read, make notes and study. This is no longer about jumping through hoops. It is about transforming yourself from a student to a scholar.

4. Remember the sacrifices of those that have come before you. Remember what you have gone through to get where you are right now. I grew up in a neighborhood where you could be shot, where people were in very dysfunctional situations: drugs, prison, alcoholism, poverty, racism and prejudice. Always remember where you’ve come from because it will help you to keep university situations in perspective. When I was at Stanford and I had friends freaking out over papers and research projects, ready to crumble from the so-called pressure, I remembered where my people came from and what I’d already undergone, and I thought, this isn’t anything I can’t handle. I will get through this.

5. Keep your eyes on the prize. You are doing this not only for yourself, but for your family, for your community, for your people. This world is in terrible shape. And we need leaders that are thinking about more than getting ahead. We need people at the helm that understand need and injustice, and who have the will and desire to make a difference in this world, in this country, and in the barrio. You are a statistical anomaly. You are a miracle. Be a force to reckon with. Make up your mind to succeed.

I’ll leave you with this poem that inspired me throughout my education:

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
--T.S. Eliot