Between Two Countries
The lives of border crossing students
By Fernanda Paramo
By Fernanda Paramo
What's better than going to sleep late and waking up even later? Pizza, probably. Sadly, that lifestyle is given if you are on weekends vacation and if you're too rich to work. It's a given fact that most students around the world have to wake up pretty early to go to school. Of course some wake up earlier than others because of the distance their school is from their house. But what about the students that wake up at 4am because they live in another country?
I woke up at 5:15 in the morning. I took a shower and got changed, it was 5:45 and when I had breakfast it was 6:00 a.m. so naturally it was time to go. "Ana Lucia" (who did not want to use her real name), her mom, and I got into the car and took off. But there were a few stops; we picked up a couple of other students, all going to the same school. At 6:30 we made it to the SENTRI line where we commuted for about 15 or 20 minutes. (SENTRI stands for Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection, and is a card issued to pre-approved travelers that lets them cross the border in specific primary lanes.) If we used the normal lane, it would take three, four, maybe five times as much. During that short time, the girls would finish homework or go to sleep. “On other days, when we don’t get as much homework, which was rare,” she emphasized, “we would have a conversation about school or we would all simply sleep despite the never-ending discomfort.” If none of the above applied that certain day, they would simply listen to music and ignore whatever was happening around them.
With the lack of traffic, we made it to school at 6:40 a.m. leaving the girls 5 minutes to find their way to their classrooms. Ana Lucia snaked through hundreds of students who were rushing to get inside a room in time. She walked up staircases, through long halls and more halls and more stairs until she made it just in time. That was repeated throughout the day on loops. When it came to lunchtime, I got to see my friends and we talked about my project. "Yeah, crossing gets really annoying," one said. "Especially if you live further away from the border," another adds. She tells me that she lives in Tecate and that it takes an hour, sometimes more to get to school in time. That lasted 40 minutes, then it was the loop once more. There are many people who are almost too surprised with the fact that students from all ages cross an international border everyday to get to school. But of course, they are not the ones who have spent many years doing such thing. The time it takes to get to school isn’t frustrating, at least not all the time. Whether you get to school early, on time, or late, the most important thing is that you’re there to get the education needed. The amount of students that cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day to get an education is unknown. “Juan Rodriguez”, a former high school student in San Diego that lived in Tijuana, thinks more than 100 students in his high school lived in Mexico. Many high schools today require their students to show proof of their American residency; if they fail to do so, they will likely end up being expelled. Overcrowding is one of the reasons the schools started to take such strict actions. Many parents filed complaints against the school because their child was late. In Calexico, measures such as these cost the district 300 students and nearly $2,000,000 in state funding. San Diego Unified School District holds 131,252 students. Out of those students, 46.5% are Hispanic and 26.5% are English learners. But why are so many students crossing the border from Mexico to go to school in San Diego? Surely, there are many schools in Tijuana? I met with Ana Sofia Saracho, a student studying in Colegio la Paz in Tijuana. "I went to school in San Diego my whole life, but I didn't like the high school I was in, so I came back to Tijuana and I like it here much more," she said with a small smile. She told me that the school she was in was too much to handle and the waking up early and coming home late was too stressful. "It would take me nearly an hour to get to school and an hour to come back. Now it only takes me 10 minutes or maybe less to get to school. I am much happier and the work we get is still kind of difficult but much less frustrating than before." Many parents that I've talked to believe that the education level in the U.S. is much higher than the one in Mexico. And they aren’t wrong. According to a San Diego State professor who focuses on trans-border research, the resources in Mexican public schools lack in both amount and quality compared to American public schools.
My parents believe there's more opportunities in the U.S. and more academic preparation for the future. They would know, they've had three of their four children go to school in San Diego. So I asked, "Why don't Tijuana residents send their children to Tijuana schools? Is the education system in Mexico so bad that teenagers all across the border feel forced to study in a foreign country?" To which they answered, "Education in Mexico isn't bad. It's excellent... in private schools mostly." Oh. So, that supports the SDSU professor's research. According to my mother, Mexican education has been privatized too much. Lucky are those who can afford a private school. But those who can't, which are sadly a lot, still get an education, but from a school with bad quality and and bad government funding. As of 2012, the United States ranked 17th in educating. That is not as high as one hopes to be, especially if you are in the United States, who is considered one of the most powerful countries of the world. In 2007, the national education budget on public and private schools in the U.S. was of $1.3 trillion. In Mexico it was $20 billion. A very obvious reason as to why students migrate daily between the two countries. Economic disparity is an issue that pushes both legal and illegal students towards the United States. I got the opportunity to interview Robert Kuhl, director of High Tech High Media Arts. I asked how border crossing affects the students. "I remember a student we had and she was constantly late. We talked to her about it and told us about the fact that she wakes up at 4 a.m., gets dropped of at the border and commutes by foot, then takes the trolley to drop her sister off at her school and takes the trolley to get here," Kuhl explained. "But she took advantage of the 4 hours of commuting daily and got nearly a full-ride scholarship to CalArts in San Francisco." Waking up before 6:00 a.m. seems and at times feels like a nightmare. Commuting for an hour and getting stuck in traffic for another hour does too. Having an after school activity and pounds of homework to do makes that nightmare much worse. "I sometimes have really bad impulse of dropping out of school in general. It gets incredibly stressful," Ana Lucia tells me with a bitter tone. We left class at 2:15 in the afternoon. We let ourselves off school campus and found Ana Lucia's mom waiting in her car. There we waited for her carpool to find us. At 2:30, it was time to leave, the time to take the road back home. |