Writer Jennifer De Leon shares how her strict, immigrant father instilled a love for education
Editor’s Note: Jennifer De Leon is a Jamaica Plain-born and Framingham-raised, Guatemalan author. Her book, “Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education,” has been selected by the Huffington Post as one of “The Ten Books That Could Change Your Graduating Senior (And Their World!).” The following is a special blog entry written exclusively for ElMundoBoston.com. You can meet De Leon at the Xfinity Latino Family Festival at Fenway Park on August 10th at the Casa Guatemala table in Concourse B.
By: Jennifer De Leon
“After four years of college and two more in graduate school, and still no husband, my father still shakes his head and even now and says I wasted all that education,” writes Sandra Cisneros in her essay “Only Daughter” in Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education, the anthology I edited and recently published with the University of Nebraska Press.
For so many her words still ring true today. When Cisneros recently shared this quote on her Facebook page thousands of people “liked” and commented on her status. They confessed that their fathers—and husbands and brothers and sons—were card-carrying members of this head-shaking group.
When are you going to be done with school? What’s the point of getting an education if you’re going to end up alone? Don’t you want a family?
So many women can relate to her. Yet, I don’t count myself among them.
My father was born in Tiquisate, one of many villages that dotted the southern coast of Guatemala. He lived on a farm, in a simple house that sat beside a long row of lime trees in one direction and on the other, a dusty dirt path that led to the rest of the world. At the age of twenty he moved to Los Angeles.
Although he originally planned to live in the United States for a few months in order to save enough money to buy a motorcycle back home, he stayed longer. In fact, he has now lived in the United States for over forty years. One of the main reasons he stayed: education. Not his, but the education of his daughters.
Let me back up a bit. After living in Los Angeles, my father followed a job opportunity to Boston. He and my mother married, worked, had a baby, worked, had another baby (me), bought a house in Framingham, worked, and had another baby. Notice a pattern? Maybe it’s the Mayan blood pumping through our veins, but Guatemalans know how to work!
Growing up, every meal, movie stub, or TrapperKeeper represented a sacrifice—nothing was taken for granted. Nothing was wasted. We recycled yellow tubs of margarine before it was the cool thing to do on Earth Day. We hung clothes outside even when snow patches blotched the stiff grass.
My parents urged my sisters and me to study hard, earn good grades, graduate from high school, go to college. To them, it was a simple path, unlike the one they trail blazed to get us to the United States in the first place.
“Go to school so you can get a job where you don’t have to work with your hands,” my father always said. Is it ironic that I grew up to be a writer? I work with my hands every day. But yes, I knew what he meant. And I knew that my path to college and beyond was simple in comparison to the curvy, uphill, grueling ones that my ancestors faced.
As a teenager I often referred to my dad as strict, paranoid. Did I mention strict? You never let me do anything! I whined about not being allowed to sleep over friends’ houses, go away to summer camp, talk to boys on the telephone, or wear makeup. When I got my eyebrow pierced at seventeen, my father threatened to take it out with a pair of pliers.
All I wanted was to be like my friends. Their fathers seemed to encourage their innocent crushes since the fifth grade. They even drove them to the mall to get their noses pierced. They picked them up from the movie theater and gave boyfriends rides home. I couldn’t imagine my dad doing that, ever. I was well into my twenties before I ever brought a boyfriend home!
So why was my father so different from the American fathers on TV? Unlike my friends’ fathers in Framingham? Because he is Guatemalan. At least that was the answer I had for a long time.
As I grew older, I realized that his protective nature stemmed from more complex soil; in other words, I finally grasped that he was afraid a boy would get in the way of my education, that some inevitable heartache would prevent me from achieving my dreams, reaching my goals.
However, when it came to school all bets were off. He drove me to the library, picked me up from after-school clubs, and even drove me to visit college campuses during my junior and senior years of high school. He supported any and every activity or field trip or project that fell under the canopy of “school.”
Once I caught on to this, the road ahead had no limit. I had him drive me to classmates’ homes across town (yes, even boys) because I had to work on an Othello presentation and I even convinced him to let me travel to Zimbabwe on a community service trip because it would look good on my college application. When it came time for me to go college, he let me go.
He wished for his daughters an iron-proof protection plan and for him that meant education. If we were educated we could always find work. We would always be able to support ourselves. We wouldn’t have to rely on anyone else. Certainly not a man. Still, his friends and sometimes even relatives would question how and why he could let his hijas live away from home. He was not the norm. I know this. I am grateful for this.
So what made my father different from many other traditional Latino fathers? Don’t all parents in general want the best for their children? I suppose that was where the difference lay. “Best” is subjective. Sandra Cisneros’ father wanted the best for his daughter too. Only for him, that meant a husband to take care of his daughter.
Through my work as an educator and a storyteller, from my experience as a first-generation college graduate, and as a daughter born to Guatemalan immigrants, I wanted to create a space where Latinas in particular (because, sorry guys, we do face our own set of barriers) could share stories about college.
It is a time when so many of us are bridging worlds, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. We live in a double-existence. We receive sturdy messages from multiple communities. Earn your degree! Find a husband!
I wanted to create the book I needed in college. Wise Latinas is a collection of testimonios where Latinas reflect on their experiences while inspiring others to pursue their academic and personal goals.
Maybe some day Sandra’s father’s words won’t remind readers of something they, too, have heard from the men in their lives. The more we work to share the many narratives from within our community, including that of my own father, maybe he won’t be the exception.
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Jennifer De Leon is an author, an educator in Boston Public Schools, and an instructor at Grub Street Creative Writing Center. She is the editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2014.
