Orlando Santiago seeks change. As the father of three students in the Springfield school system, his calls for progress in public education have sounded similar to the angst expressed by the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. "Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury," the signers wrote of the retaliation by England's King George III against reasonable requests by the colonists.
At press time, Santiago was in the running to be the only Latino on the School Committee, a race he ran two years ago but lost by a few votes. People who had promised that they would go out and vote didn't show up. Maybe they will have learned by now that voting is not only a right, but an urgent affirmation of their civil rights.
Last year, Springfield was directed by the U.S. Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act, specifically the part that requires bilingual material and personnel to be made available on Election Day in communities where more than 15 percent of the population speaks a language that is not English. It is the price the country pays for having triggered enormous migrations—look at Lowell and the Cambodian community there—and for having conquered nearby and distant lands, such as several Mexican states and Puerto Rico.
Santiago has loudly criticized the school system's infrastructure, both physical and bureaucratic, which leaves students and teachers at insurmountable disadvantages. If you thought classrooms with water leaks were bad, how about classrooms that don't even have enough desks?
More than half of the 28,000 children in the system are Latino, with blacks the next largest population and whites and Asians as the minority. Yet most of the teachers, administrators and staff are white and monolingual. In a system with a growing number of students who speak Spanish, Russian, Somali, Vietnamese and other languages, Santiago is sometimes the only one passionately speaking a language every parent can understand—Educate our kids!— in the city's Tower of Babel.
While there are committed people there who go above and beyond to help students, these are the exceptions, if one is to judge by the system's results. More than half of the Latino students leave school long before graduation, and black students are not faring much better. This is a horrific statistic.
It was discouraging that Santiago was the only Latino running for school committee in a city where a third of the population is Latino. But before Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, before Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus in 1951, blacks had endured hundreds of years of not being able to drink water wherever they pleased. Change comes slowly, one drop at a time.
The legacy of the civil rights movement is being picked up by people like Santiago, who see that without active participation in politics, the losers will always be people of color.
Springfield is the region's city. We have to feel like Springfielders for the city and the region to succeed. JFK's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" declaration means nothing today if left to stagnate by itself on the pages of history.
From the Pioneer Valley's cozy suburbs, it is too easy to look at Springfield as a faraway place. But there is a civil rights crisis going on there, right now, and people who retroactively admire the movement of the 1950s are sitting this one out. Mostly, the agents of change are older people with bad backs and weak knees but unwavering conviction. They have kept faith with Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to stay the course "until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."?
Natalia Muñoz is the editor of La Prensa of Western Massachusetts (www.LaPrensaMa.com).
