Two Strikes Against Me
by Ruben Garcia
Content Warning: hate crimes and physical violence.
Ruben Garcia writes a blog and hosts a podcast, “Man With a Heart.” Visit him at https://www.facebook.com/Manheartlove/
As a 9-year-old living in a migrant worker camp in North Plains, Oregon,I had to watch my back. I had just moved to North Plains with my nine brothers and sisters and parents so we could work in the camp. My stomach was churning. I could feel my heart pounding and sweat collected under my armpits. I knew that the kids on the bus most likely were going to ask if we lived in the dirty, run-down camp next to the bus stop. “Lazy Mexicans that pick berries live at that camp,” “I heard one kid say as we boarded the bus. I turned around and yelled, “I work every day from six in the morning until five in the evening...You have no right to call us lazy.”
At school, the secretary handed me a note to give to my mom. She said loudly, “Please bring this note back with your mother’s signature so you can get your free lunch.” Later that day I was called to the office, where many kids watched me enter. The secretary said, “The deadline for signing up for free lunch is over so you will have to work the food line to get a free lunch.” I was starting school late that year, in October, because I had to work until we finished picking the season’s berries. She told me, with the other kids listening, that I’d need to bring coffee containers for collecting leftover food from the school lunches. Once again, I could feel beads of sweat gather in my armpits. My heart pounded with shame. The word would soon get out. All the kids I met in class that day saw me at lunch. My face was red, my palms sweated, my heart raced as they watched me put leftover lunch food in coffee cans. They pointed and whispered. They laughed behind their books. “Look, he’s taking our left overs home to feed his beaner siblings,” one kid said. As the school year progressed, I experienced name calling and bullying: “hey, wet back, b*****, n*****, go back to Mexico,” kids told me. I began to realize that I had two strikes against me: one was being poor. The second was having brown skin.
One day a couple of pick-up trucks drove up to the camp in the late afternoon. The trucks were full of white supremacists in their twenties. They waved sticks and bats, along with sharp objects. Many of them had tattoos of swastikas on their arms and on their foreheads. I was young, so I stayed to the side, but my oldest brothers jumped into the fight. As the men got out of the trucks, I could hear weapons clinking on the pavement. They began hitting camp residents. I could hear fists hitting heads. I saw blood splattering as they threw blows after blow. I heard one man yell, ‘Long live white power, we will teach you not to live in our town!” Men with sticks pounded some of my brothers’ heads. Blood streamed from the sides of some of the men’s ears. I heard a loud crack and looked down to see an attacker throw a brick at my older friend, Thomas. Thomas cried out, “I can’t feel the whole left side of my head, someone please help.”
That year, I was awakened to the existence of hate groups woven into the fabric of other white families. They taught their children to hate. For me, it was an awakening to the fact that my brown skin would always be a challenge. I had to prove I was equal to white skinned people. That night I looked in the mirror and realized my brown skin and black kinky hair made me different. I wasn’t sure why I was viewed as different; I felt like I looked the same as everyone else.
A year later, when I was 16, I was still living in North Plains. My hope for a future was slowly fading. That year, when I met with my school guidance counselor, he said, “I know that your father worked in a factory and as a machine operator. You should stay in your family business and someday you could get promoted to a foreman.” This was a defining moment for me. I realized school was not for me. I felt, alone, desperate and misrepresented as a young Mexican teen with few options and no family or sibling support. I soon understood that between shame, white hatred and being poor, I had nothing to win and everything to lose if I stayed in school and continued living in North Plains. I decided to quit my cooking job in Hillsboro, stop going to school and move to Beaverton to change my life. I bought my first car for $500.
One Saturday night I was driving around town with my two older brothers. We were almost out of gas when we pulled into the Shell station on the corner of Murray and Tualatin Valley Highway. I was taking the gas cap off when I heard a voice say, “You fucking Mexican, you don’t deserve any gas.” A group of about six young white men approached the car. I could hear them yelling, “we’re going to kick your black ass and kill you if we have to.” They had pulled both my brothers out of the car and had begun punching them in the face. After blow after blow, they shoved my brothers’ faces down on the ground. They began hitting me and I fell to the ground, where boots smashed me in the head until I blacked out. I vowed to forget that experience, put my feet on the ground and push forward.
While living in Beaverton, I worked as a cook, ran a fast food restaurant, was an Outdoor School counselor and also owned a lunch truck, a café, two coffee stands and a catering business. I also finished furniture. I was in a constant reinvention mode, always wanting more but lacking the confidence, experience or know how. I was spinning my wheels and wasn’t truly grounded. But I knew there was more to life than just working to survive. As I rounded my thirties, the old messages from my younger years kept playing back in my mind, “You're not good enough, your ethnic background makes you inferior, your past defines you.” But my thirst for knowledge kept nagging at my heart. I kept hearing the school counselor say, “You should become a machinist like your father.” It was time to make a change.
I enrolled in a community college to finish my diploma. The ghost of my past kept talking to me in my sleep and stirring my soul to do more. Over the next five years, I finished college, earning a bachelor's degree in social science. I was the only member of my family to earn a college degree. At graduation, when I walked up to receive my diploma, I felt like I finally was worth something of value. I was proud; my life was starting anew.
The following year I went to work for Multnomah County as a Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) school site manager, an after school program for at-risk kids. We were faced with a failing school, with the majority of kids Latino and African American. That year, I began bringing in partners to help provide after-school life enhancement classes. I built partnerships with about thirty non-profit organizations to help provide support and enhancement for children who were at risk of failing or dropping out. The original state score was a D. In two years’ time we were able to help kids in SUN schools succeed in Math, Reading, English and Spelling.
During this period, many parents asked me to advocate for their children. “They don’t have a chance and they need a voice and support from the county to succeed in life,” they told me. Having experienced similar issues as a child, it was easy to understand their concerns. Stanford University took notice of our program’s success and invited us to present to seniors and school administrators. They eventually used our model in many of their Northern California after school programs. I asked myself, “ How could I have made a difference in all this?” I felt like there had to be a mistake; how did this come to fruition and was it really my doing? Suddenly I was making a difference for kids growing up with similar challenges that I had faced as a child. Suddenly there were scholars from a top university asking me for advice about how to set the wheels in motion for their schools.
Today I’m 58 years old, I have earned a Bachelor's in Social Science and a Masters in Education. I have spoken about the SUN program at Stanford University and have spoken at national grief symposiums. I have worked as a grief counselor and as a recruiter, earning a decent living. I have managed to eliminate the first strike against me--growing up poor. But the second strike against me I deal with every day.
In spite of my education and accomplishments, people still judge me by my skin color. People still ask me to pump their gas while I’m at a gas station. They ask me for chips and salsa when I’m out to dinner and making my way to the bathroom. And just a few months ago, a woman asked me to fix the pins stuck in the bowling lane when I was out bowling with friends. The second strike against me remains. I’m still trying to figure out ways to overcome it--for me and other people of color.