ncle raise him under the directions of his father that he is not to know how he died so he won’t learn to hate and cause violence. As he grows up his guardians constantly tell him that one day he will be a great leader to his people and lead them towards a better life. He believes this and through grade school and high school he is very resistant to anything he experiences in school or otherwise that undermines his Mexican heritage. Unlike his many Hispanic classmates, Gualinto graduates and decides to go to college. The reader is set up to believe that Gualinto becomes maybe a lawyer or politician to help his people. When he returns to his hometown, however, he is now in the Army as a border security agent. He is basically a spy on his own people. When he returns he comments, “Mexicans will always be Mexicans. A few of them, like some of those would be politicos, could make something of themselves if they would just do like I did. Get out of this filthy Delta, as far away as they can, and get rid of their Mexican Greaser attitudes” (Paredes 300). This exhibits a fictional account of how the university system or American ideology can turn a person of color into someone who despises their own race. What then Paredes asks is to be done about this situation? Gualinto was in a bilingual education program and he seemed even through high school to feel that his culture was important and white America was something to resist. Did the prospect of money make Gualinto forget his people or was he just whitewashed? These are all questions that basically lead to the conclusion that because of the dominant white power structure in the U.S. it is extremely difficult for a person not of U.S. origin to have any kind of social mobility without losing their cultural heritage. I went to school in Oxnard California where about 70% of my high school was Hispanic. In elementary I witnessed bilingual education in other classroo...
