West Covina High School had a vastly multicultural student body where the cool kids were Asian American, the advanced placement students were African American, and the stoner-surfers were Latin American. Our student body did not endorse any stereotype. It felt like a place where everyone intermingled. Well, mostly everyone.
There was a group of overachieving, predominately white students at our school that were fascinating to me. They were highly academic, very polite, but they seemed—by and large—to keep to themselves. Not all of them, of course. Just the crème de la crème. As the senior class president, I had to interact with everybody. But my god was the white junior class president and her all-American cohort, a force to be reckoned with. Her name was Susie, and she was a wholesome soon-to-be valedictorian. Her family had been in West Covina for many years. I’m sure they were there long before it became as diverse as it was at this point. If there was a junior versus senior activity, Susie and the juniors would always win. The homecoming float, the lunch tug-of-war, the assembly cheer competition. They took high achieving to another level.
One morning, after our all-grade Associated Student Body meeting, Susie invited me to attend the school’s campus ministry with her. Like 85 percent of Latin America, I grew up a Roman Catholic. Jesus of Nazareth was not someone I had asked for in my life, but he was someone engraved in my psyche. I knew how to recite every major Catholic prayer in Spanish before I even knew how to speak Spanish! The Christian Campus Ministry sounded like the English version of things I had traditionally grown up with.
I showed up to my first campus ministry meeting during lunch. It was held in my old wood shop class. As I looked around the room, I quickly realized that this was where all the high-achieving white students—and a few of the white-passing Latino students—met. The star wrestler, the star theater student, the majority of the student government, and Susie were all there. They were all surprised—even a little elated—to see me there. The guys all shook my hand and a few of the girls gave me hugs. It was a lovely and welcoming environment. They opened with a prayer, and then went straight into having a discussion about how secularism was a huge threat to our nation. Huh, I thought. That’s interesting. I was listening to a lot of Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy at the time, so I thought the biggest threat to our nation was the financial oligarchy that controlled the United States government, which consequently meant that we should really take money out of politics. Secularism? I had never considered that could be a huge threat to the United States of America. How naive of me. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know what “secularism” meant. But I really liked the positive energy when everyone was welcoming me to the group, so I went with it. “Boo to secularism,” I said as I made a mental note to look up the word in the dictionary (no smartphones yet, remember) when the meeting was over. They then announced that they would be going next month to Tijuana to work with an orphanage down there. It sounded like a lovely trip that I wished I could attend, but for obvious reasons could not. Before I left, Susie invited me to attend Tuesday night Christian church. I was shocked. Church for me was always early in the morning, on Sundays, and always in Spanish. Tuesday night? “Yeah, it’s so much fun,” said a jubilant Susie.
“Sure, I’ll go.”
I went to Christian church and Susie wasn’t wrong. Tuesday night Jesus church was fun. It was very lively and featured an in-house rock band. It was almost like a mini concert. It turned out a sea of white teenagers rocking out in a safe space to Jesus Christ, their lord and savior, was a great time. They were no Zack de la Rocha or Tom Morello, but the Christian band definitely redefined what church could be for me. We hugged one another. High-fived. It was delightful.
When I got home, my mom asked me where I had been. Ironically enough, she was working at the Della Martin Center in the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena at the time. Della Martin was a young woman from a rich family who thought she was mentally ill as a child and committed her to a sanatorium for life. Della was released at the age of seventy-three and inherited her brother’s ten-million-dollar estate. The official reason for her commitment was because she was considered a “religious fanatic.”
I told my mom that I had just attended “Christian church.”
“That sounds lovely,” my mom said, with some reservation in her voice because, to her, Jesus should always be experienced in Spanish.
Curious, I asked my mom: “What is the difference between Catholics and Christians?”
My mom thought about it for a second but didn’t seem to know. “As long as everybody is worshipping Jesus, that’s all that really matters.”
“But aren’t Catholics Christian?”
“Of course,” my mom said, leaving me more confused than when I’d started.
I showed up to school the next morning with a big smile on my face. I was still high on Tuesday night God. I noticed that all the kids I saw at church the night before didn’t seem so happy. They weren’t smiling or hugging anybody—not even me. No high fives. The weight of the new morning seemed to have gotten them down. But… not even one high five? I ran into Susie and thanked her for inviting me. She was truly happy that I had attended. Then I asked her: “By the way, what branch of Christianity is the campus ministry?”
“We’re just Christian.”
“I know,” I replied, “but what denomination?”
“None. Just Christian.”
“Yes,” I continued. “I grew up Christian, too, but as a Catholic. What is the campus ministry?”
Susie blinked a few times, baffled by my question. She then smiled—first smile of the day—and went about her business. Now curious, I caught up with my old wood shop teacher, the one who hosted the campus ministry meetings in his class. He was a jolly older white man with thick glasses he would wear only when doing woodwork. I asked him the same question I’d asked Susie. He proudly explained that they were Evangelical Protestants.
“Awesome,” I said. “I was just curious. Oh, one last thing, why is secularism so bad?”
“The separation of church and state is not right. It’s the reason for all of the moral decay in the White House.”
My wood shop teacher was referring to the Bill Clinton scandal, where the president had coerced a young woman into having sexual relations with him in the Oval Office.
“Yeah, I get it,” I said. I actually didn’t get it. I was too young and there wasn’t enough high-speed Internet at the time for me to research further. I thanked my wood shop teacher and went on about my day. I was a little baffled by what I was learning in American history class versus what the campus ministry was preaching. The Founding Fathers of the United States demanded secularism (i.e., the separation between church and state) exactly because they felt that was the key to strong governance. Going against secularism seemed un-American to me. But then again, I wasn’t American, so who was I to judge?
At the Della Martin Center, my mom took an elderly white lady who was suffering from dementia on a walk. My mom always enjoyed the soothing, outside live piano music that some of the patients recovering from drug addiction would play. In the middle of their walk, the elderly lady turned to my mom, frightened. She demanded to know what she was doing—“You’re trying to kidnap me, aren’t you!” My mom tried to calm her patient down, but it was no use. The lady fell into an anxiety attack, grabbed a nearby metal ashtray, and cracked my mom across the face with it. The ashtray hit my mom between the eyes, cutting a major artery. Blood started to gush out of her face upon impact. Unable to see through the pain, she instinctively focused her attention on helping the elderly lady, as opposed to helping herself. It was now nearly impossible to calm the patient down with all of my mom’s blood squirting everywhere. My mom could have sued the hospital. At the very least, she could have received worker’s compensation. But she wanted none of that. She was an undocumented worker and too scared to fight for any of her worker’s rights. But more than that, she was just happy that her patient was now calm.
At home, I was shocked to see my mom in bandages. I was upset that she couldn’t go to a hospital. Instead, my pediatric surgeon dad patched her up at home. She insisted that she was okay. “We have to thank God that nobody was seriously injured,” said my mom, her eyes now nearly swollen shut. As you may have imagined, my mom returned to work the next day with stitches, her face covered in bandages, and looking like a North American raccoon. This was her life in the Della Martin Center.
At school the next morning, I sat by the tree in the quad reserved for seniors, thinking about my mom’s bruised-up face. I watched as the students from the campus ministry walked around, not talking to anybody but themselves. It was high school. We all kept to our own groups. I did, too. But something clicked for me that morning. I decided that I wanted to do a better job at welcoming others into my circle. I didn’t want to act one way with the people I loved outside of school and then another way with people in class. I needed to be better about being compassionate with everyone around me. My mom was. She was clobbered in the face with a metal ashtray, and yet showed great compassion to the lady who had caused her so much pain. I still had so much to learn about trying to create my own heaven on earth. A heaven, by the way, that hopefully didn’t require proof of citizenship.