The Freedom Writers Diary - Erin Gruwell [87]
Sometimes, I close my eyes and I can hear the wind blowing against the trees surrounding the river. I remember sitting on a hard tire in the middle of cold, murky water. I was terrified that the river would swallow me alive. All I wanted at that moment was to be in the arms of my mother, who was on another tire behind me with my younger sister. After my brothers, sister, mother, and I made it across the river, we were taken to a man’s house. He was a “coyote” and was supposed to help us get through our second obstacle—the border, without getting caught by Immigration. I guess you could say he knew what he was doing because I am here today.
Since I’m an illegal immigrant, the obstacles didn’t stop once I got across the border. My freshman year, I thought I was going to kicked out of school because of Proposition 187. Now I can’t get a part-time job, or apply to college. On one occasion, I even blamed my mother for all of the troubles that I’ve had, because I don’t have the necessary papers to be in this country. Blaming my mother was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. She only wanted what was best for us. If she had known that in this country of “dreams” everybody talked about, things would be harder than they seemed, she wouldn’t have brought us here. She would have raised us in our own country to the best of her ability.
To this day I can’t decide whether my journey here was taken in vain. I was brought here to have a golden opportunity, but unfortunately, it’s not being given to me. I know it won’t be easy, but I won’t stop until I have gotten what I came here to get: my education. You know, come to think of it, my journey here was for that purpose. I must fulfill my dream of becoming an educator and helping young people like myself.
Diary 103
Growing up, I always assumed I would either drop out of school or get pregnant. So when Ms. G. started talking about college, it was like a foreign language to me. Didn’t she realize that girls like me don’t go to college? Except for Ms. G., I don’t know a single female who’s graduated from high school, let alone gone to college. Instead, all the girls my age are already knocked up by some cholo. Like they say, if you’re born in the ’hood, you’re bound to die in it.
So when Ms. G. kept saying that “I could do anything,” “go anywhere,” and “be anyone”—even the President, I thought she was crazy. I always thought that the only people who went to college were rich white people. How did she expect me to go to college? After all, I live in the ghetto and my skin is brown.
But Ms. G. kept drilling into my head that it didn’t matter where I came from or the color of my skin. She even gave me a book called Growing Up Chicano about people who look like me, but made it out of the ghetto.
In class today she made us do a speech about our future goals. I guess some of her madness was rubbing off on me because I found myself thinking about becoming a teacher. I began to think that I could teach young girls like me that they too could “be somebody.”
I had planned to tell the class that I wanted to become a teacher, but after hearing what everybody else wanted to be…a lawyer, a doctor, an advertiser, I announced that “Someday I’m going to be the first Latina Secretary of Education.” Surprisingly, nobody laughed. Instead, they started clapping and cheering. Someone even told me that they could picture me taking over Secretary Riley’s job. The more they clapped, the more I began to believe that it was actually possible.
For the first time, I realized that what people say about living in the ghetto and having brown skin doesn’t have to apply to me. So when I got home, I wrote