From OAXACA To UCLA PART 1

Conrad Fox, TheNewsMexico.com - 5/15/2002

It has been a long search, but Felipe Lopez has found himself.

From the maize fields of Oaxaca, he has crossed a desert and a border; he has spent time in Los Angeles kitchens and stuffy night school classrooms; he has been rejected by his countrymen and welcomed by foreigners. A Zapotec Indian, he abandoned his native language in favor of English, and later Spanish. Now, a doctoral student at UCLA and co-author of the first Zapotec-English-Spanish dictionary, he has come full circle.

"I feel I am at ease," he says. "I have come to revalue my language."

Sierra de Juarez	UCLA Campus

Lopez grew up speaking Zapotec, the language of roughly 400,000 indigenous people in the southern states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Veracruz. Like most Zapotec towns, his was poor, remote and cut off from the life of mainstream mestizo Mexico. Lopez learned some Spanish in school, but after dropping out of sixth grade, he soon forgot it.

At 16, he took a bus to Tijuana and snuck across the border in the dead of night. In Los Angeles, he worked in a series of restaurants, where his Spanish speaking Mexican co-workers derided him as a "stupid Indian."

"This was a really painful," he says. "All the discrimination this made me reject who I was."

To win acceptance, the young Lopez effected the tough, gangster look of the Mexican cholos. He quickly learned English, and much later Spanish. He only felt comfortable on the weekend, when he and other Zapotecs would gather for pick-up basketball games and to talk their native language.

"And after the game," he says sadly, "you go home and feel the loneliness and longing again."

Quiet, soft-spoken and erudite, Lopez today is the only person from his town to have gone to college. He has a Master's degree in Latin American Studies and is currently doing a PhD in urban planning, focusing on the role of immigration and support groups in the development of Mexican towns. Now comfortably rooted in the U.S., with an Anglo wife and two young children, he still keenly feels the hopes and pains of his native people.

"We bring a history of oppression," says Lopez. "Yet we've come to get ahead and we really take advantage of the opportunities here."

For Lopez, the opportunity was education. Even as he worked as a chef at a well-respected French restaurant, he attended night school, and later was offered a scholarship to UCLA. The sheer will to succeed and encouragement from his future wife - overcame his own fear of what he calls his "education gap."

"It was embarrassing to go to school and find out there had been two world wars," he recalls with self-effacing good humor. "People would look at me like 'where have you been?'"

  

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE ON PART 2 OF THE STORY Conrad Fox, TheNewsMexico.com - 5/15/2002 reporter@novedades.com.mx © Copyright 2002 TheNewsMexico.com All Rights reserved.

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