Breaking stereotypes

Latinos don’t fit neatly into simple clichés

By Taryn Luna

The Gresham Outlook, Aug 8, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Society often gives into preconceived notions about people, judging based on ethnicity, appearance, denomination, media portrayals or livelihoods.

From repercussions of slavery to Japanese internment camps during World War II, few minority groups in America have been spared the pain of negative stereotypes.

“There’s been quite a history of stereotypes placed on Latinos,” said Shannon Valdivia, an instructor of speech communication at Mt. Hood Community College. She teaches courses in cross-cultural communication.

“It started off that they were lazy and stupid and drunk all the time,” Valdivia said of most common stereotypes. “Then it was that Hispanic men were extremely sexist and treated their wives badly. Then it was they were gang bangers who love to fight, and of course, they were illegals.”

While she admits there are bad apples in every bunch, it’s not true for everyone.

“The Latino experience is so different in real life. It’s extremely diverse,” she said.

Today, more than two thirds of Latinos in America are legal citizens, as are three fifths of the Latinos in Oregon, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic Center.

Based on a study conducted from 2005 to 2007, the Census Bureau estimated there were 18,590 Latinos in Gresham, making up 18.3 percent of the population.

Sgt. Manuel Hernandez of the Gresham’s Police Department, who heads the East Metro Gang Enforcement Team, said there were about 700 documented gang members in Gresham last year. Hispanic gangs used to control most of Rockwood, but his team has seen an influx of African American gangs.

The facts don’t support all of the stereotypes.

THE DANGERS OF STEREOTYPES

In a culture where people have a need to symbolize everything they encounter, they rely on these common stereotypes to define things they haven’t experienced for themselves, said Dr. Naomi Abrahams, chairwoman of the sociology department at Mt. Hood Community College.

“People learn from their own environments, and because our society is still very segregated, we learn from the media and other examples that are given to us,” Abrahams said.

Valdivia and Abrahams agree: The American media provides inaccurate portrayals of Latinos.

“Nine times out of 10, when you see Latinos on television, they are the criminals on ‘Law & Order’ or the suspects on television news programs,” Valdivia pointed out.

When people decide to venture across socioeconomic and cultural lines to work with other ethnicities and types of people on equal playing fields with equal status, they can discover the falsehood of stereotypes they previously believed in, Abrahams said.

But sticking to their own comfortable pocket of society, relying on information from third-party sources, and stereotypes of what they haven’t experienced to paint a portrait of the world around them is easier than crossing cultural barriers to learn for themselves, she said.

The danger of stereotypes is they can become real for those who believe in them and those who are subjected to them.

“If people believe a situation is real, it is real in its consequences,” Abrahams said.

Racial profiling is a prime example.

People with darker skin are stopped by police more than people with lighter skin, although there is no evidence that they are more likely to be breaking the law, she said.

Latino children often are categorized as “slow,” and are then tracked and treated that way in classrooms for the remainder of their education. Some are labeled slow because Spanish is their first language, others are categorized that way, Abrahams said.

This is where self-fulfilling prophecies come into play.

“If you beat a child down enough and tell them they aren’t capable, they are going to believe it,” Valdivia said. When a child has been told by teachers that he’s slow throughout his education, the chances that he’ll attend college severely decrease, she said.

TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY

As the American economy continues to suffer and immigration issues become the topic of more heated debate, Valdivia hears from both sides of the argument in her classroom.

Some of her students sympathize with illegal immigrants and think Americans are being selfish. Valdivia asks those students how they would feel if someone broke into their home, attempting to explain how some Americans feel about illegal immigrants trespassing in their country.

Other students express frustration toward the 11.9 million “illegals” estimated to be living in the United States, accounting for 4 percent of the nation’s population and 5.4 percent of the work force, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“I remind these students that illegal immigrants don’t qualify for financial aid and don’t get help to go to college,” she said. “They don’t qualify for most public assistance or social services and most who do have been granted that assistance by the U.S. government. Should they be upset with the immigrants because the government decided to give them assistance?”

A common complaint about Mexican-Americans, who accounted for 37.8 percent of an immigration boom to the U.S. between 1970 to 2000, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, is that they don’t fall in line with the American way or embrace American culture.

“With Mexico being so close, Mexicans are the least likely to assimilate into American culture,” Valdivia said.

Immigrants who have an ocean separating them from their homeland assimilate more naturally, she said. For many Mexicans, the possibility of returning to their home country is higher, especially those who come to the United States for seasonal work and leave in the winter.

THE STRUGGLE

Gloria Wiggins, division manager of El Programa Hispano in Gresham, a Catholic-based charity serving the needs of low-income Latinos, said if people could see through the eyes of a social worker they wouldn’t think of Latino immigrants as people who come to United States and aim to freeload off public assistance.

“They don’t qualify for any assistance,” she said. “And their children can qualify for about $60 a month in food stamps.”

Because they are struggling to survive in their native countries, Latino immigrants often leave their families behind to come here and do jobs that nobody wants, without any insurance, for basically nothing, she said.

The 2005-07 American Community Survey found that 25.9 percent of Oregonian Latinos were living below the poverty line, compared to 12.3 percent of Caucasians. It’s safe to say the sunken economy is hitting Latinos harder than most.

Since Christmas of last year, Wiggins said El Programa in Gresham has seen a 20-percent increase in the amount of people who walk through their doors due to the collapsing economy, boosting the number of people they serve to at least 20,000 annually.

Before Christmas, when Gresham was in a state of emergency due to an unusual snow storm, El Programa gave away 300 turkeys from its office to needy families on a first-come, first-serve basis. After just two hours, all the turkeys were gone.

Despite the hardships Latino immigrants face on American soil, it’s often far better than the life they left behind, she said.

Taryn Luna is an Oregon State University student who is interning this summer with The Gresham Outlook.

Legal migrant laborer came to U.S. to make a better life

Cipriano Diaz-Delgado, 68, of Gresham crossed between Mexico and the United States legally in 1987 with a work visa in hand.

He’d spent decades struggling to provide for his family while living in Guadalajara. Then, when he found himself out of work, the allure of the American Dream was more promising than life in Mexico.

Diaz-Delgado’s sister lived in Oregon, so that’s where he settled. He’d spend 15 years living alone in cheap apartments in East County before he could afford for his family to legally join him.

“I could talk to you all day about how hard it was to be alone and away from my family,” he said. Every time he put food in his mouth, he worried that his wife and daughter might not have enough to eat.

When he arrived in East County, he joined the industry he was most familiar with and became a farm worker. With the help of a certificate he received more than 20 years earlier from the Braceros Program, he was able to secure a green card.

Diaz-Delgado worked at Fujii Farms in Troutdale, timber mills in both Scappoose and Washington and other farms and nurseries in the area. On $35 a day, he barely had enough to pay his bills and send money to his family. Wages were never consistent and neither was the work.

Because of his ethnicity, he said people looked down on him – and still do – assuming he’s uneducated. Work outside of agriculture was hard to come by and work inside the industry was just plain hard.

His employers treated him and fellow Latino coworkers as if they had no rights – they weren’t allowed to talk, make noise, received minimal breaks and were expected to work harder and longer than others, he said.

Since his retirement in 2004, Diaz-Delgado collects $593 a month in Social Security benefits. After paying rent, the family is left with about $150 for food, electricity, heat, water and telephone bills.

He said he’s frugal with the electricity and often watches television in the dark.

“It’s very hard to depend on such a limited amount of money,” he said.

Diaz-Delgado hopes that if his wife passes the citizenship test she’s preparing for by attending classes at El Programa Hispano, she will be able to stay here because her green card runs out in 2010. He became a citizen more than three years ago and accompanies her to each class.

When her memory seems to lapse – due to the after effects of surgery to remove a brain tumor – Diaz-Delgado asks her how many stars and stripes are in the American flag. It’s the one question she never forgets.

While Diaz-Delgado says he’s been judged in this country by the color of his skin, he knows it’s not important.

“It’s not what is on the outside that counts, it’s what is inside your heart,” he said.

Instead of spending time and effort fighting prejudice, Diaz-Delgado said people should seek common ground.

“I want people to know we are good people,” he said.

Gerald Guerrero

Age: 41

Occupation: Insurance agent

Hobbies: Classic cars, including his 1968 factory black Ford Mustang he plans to give his daughter on her 16th birthday

Family: Married, one daughter

Bio: As the son of a former farm worker, he spent summers picking in the Lage Orchards of Hood River. “You bear with it, but you know you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life,” Guerrero says of his grueling summer work. Not wanting to “kill himself in the elements” as his own livelihood, he attended Mt. Hood Community College and graduated from Portland State University with a degree in business administration. As a year-round worker, his father’s hopes of returning to Mexico with his family to start his own business took a backseat to child rearing, as he and his wife had three children. Now his son is embarking on a new business venture this month by opening his own insurance agency on Powell Boulevard, enabling him to work with a variety of insurance providers to insure more of his customers at better rates than he could with his previous employer, where he was an agent for 11 years. For one year Guerrero won’t be allowed to contact his previous clients and his new shop must be at least one mile away from his current location. With half of his clientele being Hispanic, a culture that values trust and relies on word of mouth to find proper service, Guerrero says he should survive just fine.

Wayne Machuca

Age: 48

Occupation: Instructor of computer information systems at MHCC

Hobbies: Vacations to the Oregon coast with his family.

Family: Married with three sons and one daughter

Bio: Machuca can trace his family’s roots to Kingston, Texas, Hammond, Ind., and Guadalajara, Mexico, but the 1918 flu epidemic wiped away most of the details of his heritage when it hit northwest Indiana. Machuca grew up in Hammond and was the only Hispanic in his class. Before he could conquer the stereotypes others placed on him, Machuca says he had to break the stereotype he had of himself. After high school, he majored in computer science at Purdue University. He financed his own education with a variety of jobs before moving out west to California in the 1980s and receiving his master’s degree from Golden Gate University. During his years in Visalia, Calif., where he taught at the College of the Sequoias, he witnessed an influx of Latinos to the area and sat helpless as the city, schools and social services weren’t prepared to meet their needs, he says. Expecting a wave of Latinos to hit East County in the near future, his department at Mt. Hood is training to be aware of teaching styles and ways of reaching students who might not be fluent in English, but are still intelligent people, “as opposed to saying, here’s the class, learn it or fail,” he says. “I’m absolutely convinced that people, regardless of denomination, creed, gender, ethnicity, or whatever, just want to be treated with respect,” he says.

Cece Sattergren

Age: 57

Occupation: Academic adviser

Hobbies: Spending time with her two rescue dogs

Bio: Sattergren grew up in Guanajuato, Mexico. Following a cultural custom, her parents sent her to Dublin, Ireland, when she was 17 years old to learn English. It was an opportunity that ignited a life-long affinity for travel. She received a master’s degree in history from the Universidad de Guanajuato and transferred to Southern Oregon University with a student visa through an exchange program in the 1970s. After earning a master’s degree in social science from Southern Oregon, she attended the University of Southern California and earned a master’s degree in public administration. She’s taught courses in Mexican history, Caribbean history, South American history, and Spanish at Mt. Hood Community College. Among a long list of achievements and involvements at the college, she is now an academic adviser, which she says is more rewarding than teaching because she gets the chance to work one-on-one with students and make a bigger impact on their lives. Sattergren petitioned to be a U.S. citizen in the early 1990s, which she said wasn't easy. Her marriage allowed her to become a legal alien resident, but she decided to become an official citizen because she wanted the right to vote.

Manuel Hernandez

Age: 37

Occupation: Gresham Police Department sergeant, head of the East Metro Gang Enforcement Team

Hobbies: Hitting the great outdoors with his family

Family: Married with three daughters

Bio: Hernandez’s parents are from the Mexican states of Nayarit and Jalisco. He grew up in Fresno, Calif., where his father worked as the foreman on a 3,000-acre farm, and predicted his son would follow in his footsteps. After working alongside his father throughout his childhood, Hernandez wanted something different, but wasn't sure what that was. When he turned 18, his father got a job growing the crops for Duck Pond Cellars and they moved to Oregon. While working as a manager of a gas station in Sherwood, a coworker convinced him to go on a ride-along with a Sherwood police officer. That’s all it took to push him in the direction of becoming a police officer. “The excitement of the job, the allure, if you will,” he says. “It was exciting, never boring.” Hernandez graduated from Western Oregon University with a degree in law enforcement in 1995. He’s been with the Gresham Police Department for 12 years. His team tracks the whereabouts of more than 700 known gang members and 129 different gangs, which are predominantly African American and Hispanic, he says.