Jose Lopez walked into the teachers’ lounge at Tuley High one day 20 years ago, hoping to relax for a few minutes between classes. One of his fellow teachers, who had been his own teacher a few years before, was napping on a cot with a sign across her body that read “Do Not Disturb, Puerto Rican at Work.”
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At about the same time, Lopez worked on a citywide study of Puerto Rican students, which found that almost 75 percent of those who made it to high school dropped out. And contrary to his expectations, the most motivated, aware students were the most likely to quit school. He concluded that was at least partly because there were so few Latino faculty members, “no role models to identify with who were not janitors, security guards, or cooks in the school.”
The school also supported Puerto Rican independence from the United States, and in June 1983 FBI agent William Dyson Jr. led dozens of FBI agents and Chicago police officers in a raid on the center, seeking evidence to link the school with the FALN, the main Puerto Rican independence group. The agents found no evidence of any connection, but they did cause thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. Lopez says the Puerto Rican community came through with more than $3,000 in donations for repairs the same day, from little bags of change to $20 bills.
Students at the high school do take their education to the streets. At the Humboldt Park Puerto Rican parade in June they handed out 3,000 brochures titled “AIDS . . . what you need to know to live”–a vital message in a community where 10 percent of the population is estimated to have AIDS. The brochures were produced by students at the high school and included free condoms.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
