A TEI Project

Interview of Vahac Mardirosian

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. Session 1 (April 29, 2010)

Espino
This is Virginia Espino, and I'm interviewing Reverend Vahac Mardirosian at his home in Carlsbad, California. Today's date is April 29, 2010.Okay, Reverend, I'd like to start with I guess you can tell me your birth date and then move on into your family history and what you remember about your parents and even possibly your grandparents.
Mardirosian
Well, I do not have an exact birth date. I celebrate October 22, 1924, because the aunt who came with my father from Aleppo, Syria, to Veracruz, Mexico, decided that I was born in October 22. But my parents migrated from Aleppo, Syria, which was part of the Ottoman empire and was taken over by France after World War I when the Allied occupied the land in the Middle East that was before the Ottoman empire.My parents grew up in a little village outside of the city of Harpurt, Turkey. Harpurt is a fairly large city, more or less in the middle of the Anatolia peninsula, the peninsula of Anatolia in Turkey. They were rounded up by the Turkish army to be deported into the desert, and large numbers of Armenians were exterminated, in fact, by their long marches that they made them do. My mother Maritza Teboyan was saved by some American missionaries in Turkey, and so the Turkish government did not want to get in trouble with the United States, so they permitted the missionaries to protect Armenian children who they could gather in their orphanages because the parents were killed.My father Yeghia was taken prisoner, or was inducted into the Turkish army, not as a soldier but as a slave laborer, and was used to work in the mountains opening roads in Turkey during the years of 1915 through 1918. In 1918, when the war ended by the win of the Allied forces, England and France occupied much of the land that was in the Middle East, part of the Ottoman empire, and France occupied Lebanon and Syria. England occupied Iraq and Palestine. So my parents reunited in Aleppo, my mother having been saved by the missionaries, and my father having escaped from the army and finding refuge under France's flag in Turkey. So they were married, I believe in about 1921, '22. They had a small child, a girl who died after birth, and in 1924 somewheres I was born.In the 1890s, some of the relatives of my father had migrated to the United States, so one of my uncles, one of my father's uncles, sent my father some money from United States to Aleppo to migrate to United States. But in 1922, the American Congress passed some very restrictive immigration laws that permitted only one hundred Armenians to be admitted into United States, and there were thousands of Armenians who wanted to come, escaping the massacres.So the second-best choice was to migrate to Mexico, and so we landed in Veracruz in 1925, and my father lived in Mexico City through 1927. I had a sister Shinorig who was born in 1927 in Mexico City, and because the uncles of my father wanted to see my father, they urged him to move closer to the border, and so in 1927 my father came from Mexico City to Tijuana to be close to Fresno, where my relatives lived. Fresno was Little Armenia in those days. A lot of Armenians had migrated to United States, and they settled in Fresno, California, because the climate was very close to what they had back in their country.And so I grew up in Tijuana, but in 1931, when I was in first year of elementary school, my mother died at age thirty, thirty-one. And my sister, who was two and a half years younger than I was, and I were left orphans during the brunt of the depression that encompassed all of United States and Mexico. So my father did not know the language, and there was no work, and he became a Fayuquero how do you say that in English? [peddler, in English] He would take merchandise from a store in his back and go into the colonies of Tijuana to send huaraches and serapes to the people at a very, very hard time.My sister and I were left by our own devices, and the Mexican mothers in the community looked after us. So the idea to help Mexican children I guess is based on my recollection of Doña Julia, who had eight children, and of the husband who made a living selling leña, firewood that he would go and collect in the hills. She would spend the whole day in the little kitchen. Their house--they had eight kids. Their house was two rooms, one the kitchen and one everything else. So he would feed all of us eight children and then he would say, "Ahora si Oaxaca, te toca a ti, pásale." And she would feed me frijoles and tortillas ["Now its your turn, Oaxaca, come on." Oaxaca is a play on my name, Vahac].I went to school in Tijuana and was very unhappy that I was an orphan, because I saw all the other children with their mothers. But I guess that that idea of self-reliance was sort of imposed on me. So when I was seven, I started selling newspapers and shining shoes in town in order to get enough money to buy--with twenty cents Mexican money, I would buy five loaves of bread, birotes, and cheese, and that was my lunch.
Espino
You say you were an orphan, but you still had your father.
Mardirosian
I had my father.
Espino
What kind of relationship did you have with him?
Mardirosian
Well, he spent his whole time looking for ways to put a few cents together to survive, and he was absent most of the time. But he was a disciplinarian, and I could see him working very hard. He was left when he was maybe thirty-two, thirty-three years of age, so he was kind of absent, although he would cook for us sometimes. In the morning he would make breakfast and leave, and the rest of the day we were on our own. We would go to bed when it was time to go to bed, whether he was there or not.
Espino
Did he have any beliefs or ideas about education or about how you should do in school? Did he instill--
Mardirosian
Well, he was very, very adamant that I go to school, and I had no trouble the first two years. But then when I went to third grade, the teacher and I did not jive very well, and he would punish me with a ruler in the hand, and I would play hooky. In third grade, out of 180 days of school, I attended sixty days and would spend my days working for the local theater, giving out leaflets for the shows. That way I could get to the movies for free. And when I would come home my father would ask, "Did you go to school?" And I said, "Yes." "And you're a liar," and he gave me a good licking, very hard.But I could not make any connection with that teacher, and I was getting into the wrong kind of company, people much older than I, that I would not go to school, would ditch school. But they were more fifth, sixth graders, and I was just a third grader. So my father, when I started--I had to repeat third grade, and then my father went to the teacher of the third grade, the second teacher, and gave him a little booklet and said, "Teacher, I want you to sign your name every day that Vahac shows up." And the teacher did that for about thirty days and called my father and said, "I'm not going to do this anymore, because he hasn't missed a day." And that teacher, Manuel Cuevas, changed my life. He made me think that I was the fourth person of the trinity, taught me to recite poetry, and I know the poems that I learned in third grade to this day.
Espino
Do you have an example?
Mardirosian
"Guarneciendo de una ria la entrada incierta y angosta sobre un peñon de la costa que bate el mar noche y dia se alza gigante y sombria ancha torre circular que un rey mando edificar a manera de atalaya para defender la playa contra los riesgos del mar."
Espino
That's beautiful.
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
So then at that time you already were fluent in Spanish?
Mardirosian
Of course. That was my mother tongue, because my mother died when I was seven, and the Armenian that I spoke was only kindergarten Armenian. So I did not speak Armenian very much in my childhood. I spoke Armenian with my father, but not a whole lot. So in third grade, fourth grade, I went to the school where only boys--in 1934, from 1932 until 1935, all the boys went to one school and all the girls went to another school. In 1934, when Lazaro Cardenas was elected president, he made mixed schools, and so fifth and sixth grade I went to Escuela Alvaro Obregon, where they were mixed. And I have some pictures of my class, graduating class from elementary school in 1938.
Espino
Well, the neighborhood that you lived in, can you describe the conditions, maybe a little bit about your home, where you lived, what it looked like?
Mardirosian
In 1928, when my parents were moved to Tijuana, this uncle sent my father five hundred dollars, and at that time he bought a house in Tijuana on Calle Tercera, Third Street, in the center of town. Tijuana had about five thousand population in those days. So we had a relatively good house that was bought before the depression in '28; two bedrooms, kitchen, and a living room, and a small yard where my father would cultivate chile, beans, corn, eggplant, all kinds of vegetables, because he came from a village, and the Armenians in his village were all farmers.But when I was five years old, my mother said to me, "Vahac, I want you to be a doctor." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "So you can cure me for free." The idea of becoming a doctor was put in my head by my mother at that time.
Espino
She was already sick.
Mardirosian
She was a very sickly lady, with whatever she went through. I don't know; I was very young. So she died at Mercy Hospital here in San Diego, but I never learned the illness. During her illness, my father sent my sister and I to Fresno to her sister Aghavnie, who now was living in Fresno and migrated. She married an Armenian who was an American citizen, so she could migrate to Fresno, and we spent the summer there when my mother was dying in the hospital. So she died about the end of August. In September we came back from two months in Fresno and started school again.
Espino
Do you remember that your father had any other relationships after that? Or were there other women who kind of became the mother?
Mardirosian
Well, I suppose that he saw women, but he did not marry and so he stayed single. I migrated to United States in 1943 to come to seminary to study, and then my father got his cuota, to enter United States in 1944. So he came in 1944 to Fresno, and he got married. He was married in 1947 with an Armenian lady back here, and he lived--I guess he was in his mid-forties, so he was a widower from 1931 to 1947, seventeen years.
Espino
Okay. Before we go on, let me get back to your early childhood education in the neighborhood that you lived in, because you mentioned that you were very poor and your father was working very hard just to put food on the table. But it sounds like you lived in a--you didn't live in a very poor neighborhood, because you were home owners.
Mardirosian
We were home owners, yes, but--we had a house, and it was in the center of the town. We were maybe five blocks, six blocks from Avenida Revolución, where the life of Tijuana was Avenida Revolución, older part. But it's interesting that there were no liquor stores anywhere in town except in that one street. So I grew up, never tasted beer or any kind of liquor. Well, I came to United States at nineteen, but lived like in a village that had no connection to what Tijuana was for the American tourists that came. During the years of the Prohibition, Tijuana was the place where they came to drink, but that never touched the rest of the town. Very interesting.
Espino
Do you remember that that was a part of an area so close to your home, or are you looking back in hindsight?
Mardirosian
Well, it was several blocks, but our social life was around the one block that we lived on. There was a park, Parque Teniente Guerrero, two blocks away from my house, and on Sundays we used to go around the--the park was one block and they had a walk all the way around. All the boys would go like this, and all the girls would go like this, and twice they would see each other.
Espino
But do you remember that Americans or people from the United States were coming to Tijuana to drink? Did you know that when you were growing up?
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, I knew that. We were playing football in the street on Calle Tercera with a can, and the first thing that I remember of American tourists was that they came in a car, this was maybe '32, '33, and they saw the children playing in the street, and they slowed down the car and threw a bag of oranges, "There." And that didn't set good in my head. I learned in school that when you give a gift, you kiss it and give it in the hand. So we used to call Anglos the barbarians of the north, because the barbarians invaded Europe from the north, and Mexicans at that time were very touchy, because they wanted to annex Baja California in 1911, '12, during the revolution, and Teniente Guerrero fought them and they were stopped. This was not the regular army of the United States, but Felix Busteros wanted to take over. While the Mexican Revolution was going on, this peninsula was practically empty. The Terretorio de Baja California in those days had less than fifty thousand in the whole peninsula, from Tijuana all the way to La Paz. That way they were not states, they were territorios.
Espino
Although you were not a Mexican national, were there ways--can you talk to me a little bit about the ways you identified as a Mexican?
Mardirosian
Well, the kids, when I first started school, would tease me. They would call me "El Turco." There were about fifty kids to a classroom, fifty kids to a teacher. Most teachers were very young, in their early twenties, but they were very devoted to teaching. Lázaro Cárdenas was a teacher when he was seventeen in Michoacan when he joined the revolution, and when he became president in 1934, his goal was to build, to raise a school every day of the year. For the six years that he was in the presidency, he got several thousand schools going in Mexico. But in Tijuana we had two schools, one for girls and one for boys. Escuela Alvaro Obregon was for girls, and [Escuela] Miguel F. Martinez was for boys.In third grade I got a lot of enjoyment out of learning, and I started reading even in second grade, because the principal of Miguel F. Martinez, when my mother took me to school for the first time to enroll me, asked my mother, "What's his name?" And my mother says, "His name is Vahac." He says, "What?" "Vahac." My mother could not speak Spanish. And thought, well, we'll call him Oaxaca, so Oaxaca was my name throughout school, and I'll show you my sixth-grade certificate of graduation from sixth grade, "Oaxaca Mardirosian."In fourth grade, well, in second grade I began reading Walter Scott, Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs. These were the only books that were in the library, and the library was in the back row of the Principal's office. It has a stand there. And I would borrow the books and read them. In the fourth grade I remember that in those days the Mexican national anthem had ten stanzas. Each stanza has ten lines. You know the Mexican "Mexicanos al grito de guerra"?
Espino
Grito de guerra, that's all I know of that, just that part. [laughs]
Mardirosian
[recites] "Ciña ¡oh Patria! tus sienes de oliva de la paz el arcángel divino, que en el cielo tu eterno destino por el dedo de Dios se escribió. Mas si osare un extraño enemigo profanar con su planta tu suelo, piensa ¡oh Patria querida! que el cielo un soldado en cada hijo te dio." That's one stanza. There are nine other stanzas that long, and the fourth-grade teacher gave as homework to learn all ten stanzas, on a Friday. Next Monday he said, "Who has learned the Mexican anthem?" And the only one who got up and recited all ten verses, a hundred lines of the Mexican anthem--I learned them over the weekend. And he said, " No les da verguenza? Aren't you ashamed of yourself? The only one who learned the Mexican anthem is not even a Mexican." [laughs]
Espino
How did you feel when he said that?
Mardirosian
Well, I feel that I became a Mexican in my thinking, because the formation of a child is, of course, first at the home. But because the environment of the country was different from my home, once my mother died I was immersed in Mexicanness, and I absorbed the culture of Mexico. And it's not--villagers all over the world are pretty much the same. Their frame of reference is their little town or their community, and the customs are inherited from one generation to the other, and they are preserved pretty much that.And during the 1930s, while President was Cárdenas, he made the Mexican educational system a socialist system, and there was a conflict between the state and the church in Mexico, Mexico being a Catholic country, and Catholicism was 99 percent of the population were Catholic, but the socialist idea of creating the state separate from the church was pushed by Cárdenas. And so I absorbed the ideas of social justice and the subjugation of the poor by the landowners of Mexico. The principles of the Mexican revolution, which antecedes the Russian revolution--Mexico's revolution started in 1910, and the Russian revolution was in 1917. The idea of equality and social justice was pretty much what I absorbed from those days, along with literature. So my formation was based on the currents, social currents that prevailed in the country at that time.
Espino
When you learned the national anthem, a lot of times kids, they just memorize and they just regurgitate. They don't really think and understand about the meaning of what they're saying. I know this is a long time ago, but do you remember that experience for you, if it was something that you embraced the actual meaning, or was it something that you were just memorizing?
Mardirosian
No, I think that I--I got a taste for literature, for learning to live vicariously in other places. For instance, the "Three Musketeers," the "Voyage to the Middle of the Earth," the ideas of Dumas and the writers of France of those times gave me an understanding of society maybe a little bit beyond what my age was at the time.
Espino
And I think also your experience. You talked a little bit about what it was like to lose your mother and to be on your own, self-reliance.
Mardirosian
Well, I was very sad, and I wanted to die, to be with her. And I was very much of an introvert, until I went to church for the first time. I went to a Baptist church in Tijuana. I was about fourteen, and it was the year that my sister died. She died when she was twelve years of age, from cancer, and that was very traumatic, because she would mother me. Although she was two and a half years younger, she had the instinct, woman's instinct. She would look after me. She became very stabilizing, because we were the two of us.
Espino
That's a lot of loss for someone so young, for you.
Mardirosian
But when I was fifteen, this Russian boy was a friend of mine in school. His parents had migrated from Russia to Siberia from the West Coast and settled there. We were walking one day, and he was carrying a Bible, and I said, "What book is that?" And he says, "This is a Bible." "What's that?" I'd never seen a Bible. So he gave it to me and I opened it in the Book of Numbers, and I started reading about genealogy. Said, "What is it?" [laughs] "I don't understand it." He said, "Well, why don't you come to church and maybe you'll understand better." I said, "Okay, I'll go," curious. And my sister and I went to church in 1939, the Sunday before Mother's Day, and I liked the hymns that they sang at church, and I became very touched, taken by the melodies of the hymns. So we went back the second Mother's Day, and then I became a regular churchgoer.In June, my sister was taken back to Fresno for a visit after schools were out, and within a week that she was in Fresno she was brought back, because upon getting to Fresno she complained about pain in her leg, and they did not know what to do with her, so they decided to bring her back to her home. And my father took her to the hospital in San Diego, and they said, "It's gangrene that has eaten her bone." And so she lasted only until August. From June to August the knee grew this big and opened up and started suffering something terrible, and she died in August of '39.By then I had been going to church and find my voice. Very quickly, the pastor got me to be a Sunday school teacher at fifteen. He was opening a mission in Ensenada, and after the morning service he would take me with him to go to Ensenada. We would get there about four, have a service from four to five in the chicken coop behind a house of one of the members, and then drive back to Tijuana for the 7:30 service. This was the old road to Ensenada, not the carreterra nueva but the old one. And when we went to that mission, and very, very poor people gathered, about fifteen or twenty people in this gallinero, the idea of helping people was born in my heart. And when the pastor would go in his pastoral visits in Tijuana, sometimes he will take me with him, and after he read the Bible and prayed, he would put his hand in his pocket and take a coin and give it to the lady, because he saw that they did not have enough tortillas to eat. That moved me, and I said, "I want to do that. I want to be a minister."And when I was nineteen--but when I was fifteen, second grade of high school, finished elementary school in sixth grade, started high school first year and started the second year, finished the first semester, in May of 1939, no, in May of 1940 my father said, "There is an Armenian who is opening a new store, shoe store in Tijuana, Zapateria Tip Top. I want you to go to work there." This was a Friday. "You go there on Monday." I said, "Dad, I only have one more month to finish the year." He said, "In that month, the job is not going to wait for you. And why go to school the second year when I don't have the money to send you to a university in Mexico City or Guadalajara? You're going to learn a trade." On Monday morning I was there, started working and worked as a shoe clerk at Zapateria Tip Top until I was nineteen. And I learned English. "The leather is there in every pair. That's why they look better, last longer, and cost less."
Espino
You had American customers?
Mardirosian
To a few American customers. The idea of working and earning a living was more or less natural in those days. When you were fifteen, sixteen, you had to learn only the kids of the rich went to college and went to a profession. So I was working at the shoe store, going to church and visiting with the pastor, but finally the pastor said, "You ought to go to seminary, and I'll make arrangements." So at age nineteen I got a visa as a student, got a student visa to enter United States July 3 of 1943.
Espino
During all that time, that was, what, about four years?
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
From the time you were forced to leave school to the time you left for the United States, it seems like you were always stimulated by literature, by your education. How did you fill that gap during that time? Do you remember anything specific?
Mardirosian
Well, I was an avid reader. I would read books and magazines. I used to sell magazines, and I like reading. I enjoyed reading and read whatever was available to me at that time. And the idea of going to school to become a minister became very attractive to me, because going to school again was a goal. When I told my boss that I was going to quit my job to go to school, he said, "Vahac, you're crazy. You have been with me more than three years. You have learned what I do. In another year you can start your own business. You know what to do." He was an Armenian who came penniless to Tijuana and ended up owning Cesar Hotel in Tijuana and became a millionaire. He said, "You can be a rich person, rich man in two or three years just doing what you're doing now for your own. If you go to become a minister, you're going to spend the rest of your life like this," asking for alms. [laughs] And he was a prophet.
Espino
Did that make you think twice? Or how did you feel about that?
Mardirosian
Well, I was set on learning. In fact, the four years of the seminary I did in three, because instead of taking twelve units I would take eighteen or twenty, twenty-two units per semester. And when I finished school, finished the seminary, the president said, "I cannot give you a degree, because you don't have a high school diploma." And I said, "Okay." This was in Los Angeles. So I went to high school, John Polytechnic High School, and met with the principal, and I said, "I've gone to high school in Mexico a year and a half, and here are my transcripts." In Mexico you don't take five or six classes per semester. You take twelve classes per semester. So he saw my transcript for the three semesters that I had completed. "Enough credits to graduate, but you have to take two classes that are required by California State system. U.S. history and civics, government are required. Here is the book of civics. Here is the book of history. Go to it. Come back in six weeks and pass the exam that is given and you get your high school diploma." I have it right there.
Espino
How old--you were about in your twenties at that time?
Mardirosian
Nineteen, nineteen, nineteen. No, wait, wait. I was twenty-two. We had just got married [Eunice Barocio]. We finished school in 1946 and got married in June 23 in 1946. I wanted very much to have a family, because I had grown up by myself and my goal was to have a family, and we do have a family.
Espino
A beautiful family.
Mardirosian
Did you see the picture?
Espino
I didn't, but I'll look at it before--well, I met your beautiful wife and your lovely daughter [Eunice aka Junie]. But before we go on into what happens after, are you ready to take a break? It's been about fifty minutes that we've been talking. Can you go a little bit longer, or would you like to take a break?
Mardirosian
Let's take a break. Let's take a break.
Espino
Okay, I'm going to pause it then.
Espino
Okay, we're back, and I want to pick up where we left off, which was your experience at the Baptist seminary, the Spanish American Baptist Seminary. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like for you when you first got there?
Mardirosian
The Spanish American Baptist Seminary was founded in 1922 by the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which is an organization of the American Baptists. The Baptist denomination in United States is quite fragmented. There are maybe fifty different varieties of Baptists in the United States, but the two main groups are the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Convention. This division was caused by the Civil War. The southern states separated from the northern and formed their own organization. So American Baptists are the northern Baptists, is the more liberal of the two groups.And in 1922 the board, which has its headquarters in Philadelphia, decided that the Spanish population of California and the Southwest merited having a school for training pastors for the churches that were being started in the early part of the 1900s. There was a church started in Santa Barbara, one in Los Angeles, in several cities. So by 1922 there were about fifteen Baptist congregations in southern California, and so they decided to create a school to train ministers. The seminary had its first graduating class in the twenties, towards the end of the twenties.During the thirties there was a growth of new congregations, because during the depression the American churches were places where poor people would go for food or clothing. And so these churches thought that it would be good to start congregations with the people who were attracted to them because of the things that they were able to provide. So in the 1940s there were about thirty congregations, and I started the seminary in 1943, during the war. I came with a visa, a student visa from Mexico. We had a consulate, American consulate in Tijuana, and I went and applied, and since I had an acceptance letter from the seminary, I was granted a visa.At that time the seminary provided housing and meals for the students in the building that they built in the thirties, so it cost thirty dollars per month for room and board for students, and of this thirty dollars the seminary itself provided ten dollars, a scholarship of one-third of the cost, and various churches in the Los Angeles area would sponsor a student. So the Baptist church in the city of Monrovia Baptist church provided a scholarship of ten dollars for me, and I had to work and earn the other ten dollars, usually by cutting lawns in the area, and later I went to work for May Company as a bus boy. Well, I would bring merchandise from the depositories in the seventh floor to the floor where the May Company did business and was making fifty-five cents an hour. I worked there for more than a year, saving my money to buy a ring for my girlfriend, Eunice Barocio], and she was very excited to receive an engagement ring, and I gave it to her at the chapel in the seminary.We graduated in 1946. The class that started with me graduated in '47, four years. The seminary course was four-years long, but I did it in three, and Eunice was at the seminary for two years. They had a special program for Christian education, so the women would graduate with a certificate to allow them to teach Sunday school and also I guess they had a notion that pastors' wives should have some knowledge about the work that their husbands were doing. So it was very convenient for us, because Eunice was able to be a very effective, efficacious, is that a good word--
Espino
You're right, yes.
Mardirosian
--pastor wife when we took our first church. When we graduated from the seminary, the cura, missionary said, "Vahac, there is a church that has an opening because they don't have a pastor, in Topeka, Kansas." And I said, "Well, I'll take it. Where is Topeka?" So we went to Topeka in the middle of winter, in October. Pretty soon--I'd never seen snow, of course, from California--at twenty-five below zero, and it was quite a revelation for me. But we were very, very happy there for the first three years. We had our first daughter there. Gracie [Mardirosian] was born in 1947.And then in '49 the church in Chicago called us. In the Baptist churches, the congregation decides who they want as pastor and extends an invitation to the person that they feel will have the qualities that they're looking in a minister. So the Baptist churches are all self-governing. There's no hierarchy. Each church is a law unto itself, and they are all independent congregations but associate with each other as a fellowship, as a convention, as a group of churches in which they belong. But the internal affairs of the local church are totally the responsibility of the local church.
Espino
Well, before we move on to your experience outside of California, I'm wondering how you functioned in Los Angeles, because you didn't speak English.
Mardirosian
Correct. The schools--the seminary had about four or five faculty. It was a small group. We had about--the year that I entered we had about thirty-five students, male, and in 1944 they admitted for the first time nine women as students for this certificate for missionaries. So the group of students was--they were assigned, the students were assigned various churches so they would have some practical experiences about the work of the churches.
Espino
Right, but how did you function with your language?
Mardirosian
Oh, on the language. With great difficulty. In high school I took three courses that I failed. I failed in typing, I failed in English, and I failed in shorthand, because I thought that those were women's jobs, and I was not going to lower myself to type or to take dictation or to learn English, because English was the language of the barbarians of the north. [laughs] And I just did not conceive--when I came to the United States I would cry because I would hear people talking and understanding, and I did not know what they were saying, and I was so desperate that I would say, "How on earth am I going to learn these devils' language?" that was so strange, foreign, unwelcome to me. But I learned that either I learn English or stop eating, and since I wasn't very inclined to stop eating, I began to practice.When I went to work for May Company, there was very little interaction. I would get a cart with four wheels, of course, and would go there, and they would send so many dozen this, so many dozen that, and go then to second floor, third floor, fifth floor, and I would go around. But I would start speaking, asking questions or instructions, and little by little I acquired that language.Then when we took our first church, I was still in the United States legally as a student, so when we moved to Topeka, I immediately had to enroll in a college and take twelve units of college course in order to satisfy my legal status. So I took English 101, and the teacher said, "Well, this is a snap course for you guys." They didn't use you guys in those days, but said, "All you have to do is write a five-hundred-word composition of whatever topic you may choose per week for sixteen weeks," and that was the semester. So I went home and got a five-hundred-word composition in Spanish. Eunice translated to English. We bought a typewriter, typed it to double-spaced, handed it in and got a B in the course.
Espino
You never had to speak a word of English.
Mardirosian
No. [laughter]
Espino
Well, okay, but one more thing. Just to get back to the actual Spanish-American Baptist Seminary, was the curriculum in English or was the curriculum in Spanish?
Mardirosian
The curriculum was in--they used English textbooks, but the lectures were in Spanish, and the interactions with the instructors were in Spanish. And I was able to read English quite a bit, because I was good at reading. I read a lot and began having a reading knowledge of English, because in the course we would get the ideas in Spanish and read them in English, but we would speak in Spanish. The lectures were in Spanish, the questions were in Spanish, and I was the questioner for all the instructors. [laughs]
Espino
You're a great student.
Mardirosian
Very inquisitive, very.
Espino
Well, Spanish American makes me think that these people who worked there or who went there were from Spain. Is that a correct assumption?
Mardirosian
No. Spanish American in those days encompassed all of Latin America, because they used Spanish as the language, and they were Americans, and in Latin America we always considered ourselves Americans. Mexico is part of the American continent. Mexico was a North American country. And, of course, the United States sort of had the notion that they were Americans and everybody else was something else, maybe Spanish Americans but not Americans. And the two words are indicative of the language mainly, not Spain as a country but the language.
Espino
So you found people there who were from other parts of Latin America?
Mardirosian
Yes, yes.
Espino
Can you tell me a little bit about who went there and who you met?
Mardirosian
Yes. The composition was very mixed. We had, when I went, about three or four Puerto Ricans, about five or six from Mexico, two from El Salvador, two from Nicaragua, some from Colombia, mainly Central America, Mexico, and some from California and Texas. These were the countries represented. The parents were from various countries but born here in the United States, and we had a number of those at the seminary. Some of them, the suspicion was that they went to seminary to avoid being drafted for the war. [laughs] Because students for the ministry were exempted from the draft. And remember, the draft operated from 1940 until '45, all through the war. But if you were a 4-D, the classification was 4-D, you were exempt. When I first got to the seminary, I received a letter from the local board and was classified 1-A. The moment I came into the United States I had to register for the draft, and registered and was given a classification of 1-A, but then the seminary president had to go to the board and explain that I'd come from Mexico not to be drafted into the U.S. Army but to study for the ministry.
Espino
How did you feel about that? Okay, there's two things. There's the idea that you could possibly be drafted into the U.S. Army, the barbarian of the North army, and then the other thing, what I've heard in some of my other interviews is that you felt guilty if you weren't serving, the Americans, people from the United States. Was there that kind of pressure?
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, yes. No, but I had a very fixed idea in my own head. I am from Mexico, I'm a Mexican, I'm here to study for the ministry, I want to study and be a minister and go back to Mexico and be a pastor in Mexico. That was my idea. There were no seminaries in Mexico, so this was just next door, a hundred miles from Tijuana, and so my idea was to go back to Mexico to be a pastor there.However, when I was finally called from a church from Mexico to be a pastor in Monterey, I learned that I could not be legally a minister of religion, a pastor of a church in Mexico, unless I was a native-born Mexican, and this law was passed during the revolution. In 1917 the Constitution of Mexico was passed. The Constitution said that no person who is not native-born in Mexico of Mexican parents can be a minister of religion. This law was passed because during the revolution in Mexico, of the six thousand priests that served the churches in Mexico, four hundred were Mexican natives, and the rest were from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, all foreigners who have come to Mexico to be curas, priests in churches, and all of these people had family in the foreign countries, and a lot of money was going out of the country to support the families of the priests, and the government thought that in order to avoid this fuga de visas, they'd better make sure that the priests had their families in Mexico. That's why they had to be Mexicans of birth. That's the Mexican Constitution.And so when I went there, they told me, "Well, we can maybe make an exception for you," the people in Monterrey. At that time the mayor of the City of Monterrey was a member of the Baptist church in Monterrey, but he couldn't swing it, so I returned to the United States.
Espino
When was that?
Mardirosian
In 1962.
Espino
Oh, I see.
Mardirosian
1962.
Espino
Much later.
Mardirosian
Yes, much later.
Espino
So even after you had spent, what, fifteen years in the U.S., you still had designs to go back?
Mardirosian
Oh, yes, yes. Well, I wanted to repay to the Mexican community as serving in Mexico, and, of course, Eunice is from Mexico City, and she was happy with the idea of going back. But by then I was the director of Spanish-speaking work, a staff position, like you say in there, and my supervisor, the director of the Baptist denomination here in California, said, "Well, take a leave of absence. Go see what's there, and if you think that God calls you there, you'll stay there. If not, come back and you have your job." So I did that.
Espino
Okay. Well, I don't actually want to leave the Spanish American Institute yet. I still want to get a little bit more of a sense of what the teachings were and if you found those teachings different from what you had experienced in Mexico and what was the objective of the goal of your education.
Mardirosian
Well, the courses were New Testament, Old Testament, the Bible, practical courses like pastoral ministry, the duties of the pastor, what does a pastor do, [unclear] how to preach. A course was in systematic theology, which we studied; psychology; music; Christian education; courses that are pretty standard in all seminaries. The idea simply was to have people who spoke Spanish and were native Latin Americans to be pastors of Latin American churches in the United States. And so it attracted students from Central America, Mexico, and from the churches in the United States. At that time there were churches in southern California, northern California, there were churches in Chicago, New York, some in the central area of the United States, Kansas, Missouri, Denver, Colorado, so there were a scattering of churches in the United States, and the seminary provided pastors for these congregations.
Espino
Can you tell me anything about specific objectives in teaching or in serving the Spanish-speaking community? Did they have courses about how to do that or how to approach that community?
Mardirosian
Right. Remember that we are working in a country that is predominantly Catholic. The Baptist churches believe that the Catholic church in its hierarchy, in the domination of Rome over the entire world Catholic church is contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. The New Testament in the Baptist understanding was made up of local congregations who had their own pastors. The Baptists believe in the priesthood of all believers, that there's no intermediary between God and an individual believer, that we do not need a priest to go to God. We go directly to God. The idea of making Mary something like a goddess, where in the New Testament, in the Bible, very little is said about the Virgin Mary as being anything other than a young woman who was conceived by the holy spirit and gave birth to a child, and her role as the mother of Jesus was simply to be the mother of Jesus, that God visited the world in Jesus, his son, who is the savior of mankind, and we go to the father through Jesus as our--that's the only intermediary between the believer and God. And saints and the virgin are all inventions of the church that are not in the Bible in any way.So the Protestants, of course, go back to Luther, who preached that Rome had gone astray by creating this bureaucratic-dominated establishment and that the churches had to go back to being directly dependent upon God and not through a church, not through a hierarchy.
Espino
Was your mission then to--
Mardirosian
To gain converts to that belief. So the idea is to make disciples, if they are Catholic, so that they would become believers according to the Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian theologies, who are more similar among themselves and different from the Catholic church. Remember, we are pre-1963, because--
Espino
Vatican II.
Mardirosian
--because the new pope in 1963 changed the world, changed the church totally, to the extent of calling the Protestants "our brothers," and revolutionized the church, although there has been a swing back. [laughs]
Espino
Well, that's very interesting I think for Los Angeles in particular, because there are so many Catholics that are Mexican.
Mardirosian
Right, right, right.
Espino
So do you have any examples of any specific people maybe that you were able to convert to the Baptist way of thinking, or what did you say to them, that kind of thing, what kind of experience was it.
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, when I came to the church in Los Angeles, it had thirty-eight members. This was 1952. By 1955 we had a congregation of over two hundred people, and we had a brand-new building on which I worked with my hands. The church where that congregation met was in Rose Hill. You know Rose Hill? Next to El Sereno?
Espino
Yes.
Mardirosian
Well, the City of Los Angeles bought the property from the church, which was owned by the Baptist hierarchy of the California Baptist Convention, and they received the money for the building, so the congregation had no place to meet and no money. And I was called, I started my ministry July 1 of 1952. We were supposed to vacate that building by the end of July, so I had one month to find a place to have our church, and the Baptist denomination had another property, empty, about ten miles from here, and the president of the board said, "Well, you are welcome to use that building if you want to. It's ten miles from where you are." So between July 1 and August I got the church to raise enough money to buy a little bus. We called it El Toñito, because it was a small bus. And we would gather some of the people who did not have transportation in this bus around Rose Hill and take them to Soto and Olympic.Then I started looking around on Huntington Drive, and I found this man who was selling, an Italian who was selling his house and next to it had a lot sixty-feet wide and two hundred feet deep, and he wanted fifteen thousand dollars for the house. And I said, "I don't have fifteen thousand dollars. How much would you sell me the lot for?" He said, "I'll give you the lot for three thousand." So I said, "Well, we'd better raise the money to buy that lot." So we were able to make a deal with the owner and raised three thousand dollars from the congregation. I had them borrow the money, to give it to me to buy the lot, and we bought the lot in '52 when we got there.Then I went to the board and said, "I need a loan. I got an architect to draw me the plans for the church, and he said, 'It'll cost you about twenty-six thousand dollars to build this church.'" And so I said, "We'll raise six thousand and borrow twenty thousand from the board," and that's what we did and started the foundations in '55 in March, and by November we had completed the building. And the steeple, from here, from the top of here to the bottom of the street, fifty-five feet, and nobody would get up there and paint the steeple. So I got the two by fours around this place and got up, standing on a two by four, painting the metal--the very tip was a metal piece about five feet, because it had hijole! [Spanish for "oh my Goodness"] I've done some crazy things in my life, but that was the worst one.
Espino
Oh, it seems like you're not going to let anything deter you with completing your objectives. But I still want to ask that same question. If you remember a specific experience, maybe a one-on-one encounter with somebody who you were able to bring to your church who was from a different religion, or how did it happen?
Mardirosian
Well, no, we preached and then we asked for people who make a profession of faith if they want to convert to the Baptist or the Christian beliefs, and then we baptize them. We baptize adults and we make them members of the church. And they are normally not many rich people, but ordinary people from the community. I know that one of the people that was from another church that I built in Belvedere, Art Torres, became a--I baptized him. He became a convert.
Espino
It sounds like people came to you.
Mardirosian
Right.
Espino
You weren't knocking on doors--
Mardirosian
No.
Espino
--bringing people in.
Mardirosian
No. Members of the church invited, and they came to the church like I went, and listened and liked what I heard, and people came and I was a mean preacher. I'm not a big worker, but I'm a big talker.
Espino
[laughs] How about the idea--I think you mentioned it earlier. I'm not sure if it was part of the Spanish American Institute, but maybe it was about an original idea, which is Americanization.
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
Was that part of your project, especially someone who's not--
Mardirosian
No, no. When I went to Chicago, there was the Baptist church in Chicago was formed or funded by people who wanted to Americanize, Latinos that went to Chicago. And when I went to Chicago in '49, there were about fifty thousand Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans but a sampling of many other nationalities from Latin America, and they had Hull House or the houses where they would bring people to Americanize them, to teach them, to prepare them for citizenship and the way things were done in the United States.But in southern California, the idea was to--well, one of the things in the Protestant church is that by and large they're not supposed to use alcohol or smoke, so that people were able to save money in those ways and have a moral life raising their children and their families, for men to be loyal and faithful to their wives and wives to be faithful to their husbands and such. So it was more an effort to make them better Christians, let's say, followers of the teachings of Jesus about personal morality, but also about social justice, which I found in my preaching, in my involvement in the community later on, and even in the parent institute, the idea of creating this sense of family unity or support for children, communication with children and what they are supposed to do as a family.
Espino
Did you have any involvement in any issues at that time in the early years?
Mardirosian
Prior to the walkouts, I didn't know where the mayor or where the city hall was or anything like that. But I learned quite quickly. We had a sit-in at the Office of the District Attorney.
Espino
Well, we're going to get into that the next time that we talk, but before we go on to that, I wanted to talk a little bit about what was it like for you to live in Topeka at that time, and what was it like ethnically, racially, politically.
Mardirosian
Yes. In Topeka the members of the church warned me. "You know, don't go to downtown to a restaurant, because they will not serve you." This was prior to '54, prior to Crawford. But Eunice and I went, and we never had any--but they were very afraid. Now, remember, these are people who were recruited by the railroad. The Santa Fe Railroad runs from Los Angeles to Chicago, and every ten miles they had a crew of Mexicans to take care for ten miles of track, to make sure that the track was--because this 110 degrees in the summer, and in the winter they had a lot of sustaining. They had to do repairs to sustain the--and nobody would do this work except the Mexicans. So the Mexicans were recruited from villages of Mexico, very humble, very ill-educated people, for the work that they had to do.And the Mexican church was way out there in the poor section of town where all the Mexicans lived. Within the area of the Mexican church in Topeka, within a mile, two thousand Mexicans lived within a mile from the church, and all of the Mexicans were--because there was a roundhouse in Topeka. Roundhouse is where they repair the cars of the railroad, railroad cars, and they worked there. All of the Mexicans worked, three, four hundred of them worked there, and their families made up the two thousand population. So discrimination was very much a factor. I didn't feel any personally, but members warned me, "You're Mexican. Don't go there."
Espino
But did they come to you with some of their problems and issues, as somebody who was a leader, a religious leader?
Mardirosian
Well, I would not stand to discrimination, because it was not in my experience. Remember, they were the inferiors, to Mexican eyes.
Espino
Even to your own--I'm sorry, could you repeat that?
Mardirosian
The Anglos in my eyes were less than Mexicans, so I wouldn't consider them my superiors until later, when I went--I was pastor in this church for seven years, built the church, and then I caught the eye of the head of the organization, and he brought me to the staff of the headquarters of the Baptists in southern California. At that time there were about three hundred churches forming this organization, more than about a hundred and fifty thousand members of the Baptist churches in southern California, and I was a member of the board of a staff of about fifteen people that served those. And at that time then, I did feel myself less than all these big gringos, until the walkout. [laughs]
Espino
But I guess my point is--and we'll talk about what you just said later, because that's pretty interesting as well--but I want to know if people came to you, if the members of your church, the people who looked up to you for spiritual guidance, if they came to you with complaints or issues of discrimination--
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
--examples. Did they?
Mardirosian
Well, I was not--for instance, in the church that I was in Topeka, there was only one dropout in the families, because I would go to the houses of the people and make sure that their kids were in school. I was very adamant about making sure that members of the church, members of the congregation would not allow their children not to finish school. I had one dropout in my congregation of two hundred people. So every year we had a special celebration of the graduates of elementary, junior, and high school, and I would urge them to go to college.And I had several of the members of my church--[Jesus] Salvador Treviño is one of the members of my church who is--you know Salvador Treviño? He works for NPR. He's a producer of television programming in Spanish for a national radio program. He wrote a book in which he--Salvador Treviño, you can look him up in the computer. He wrote an interesting book about his experiences, and he cites much--well, he is one of the ones that pushing people out of Lincoln Heights. He went to Lincoln Heights and graduated and became part of my army.
Espino
You don't mean Jesus Treviño?
Mardirosian
Si.
Espino
The filmmaker?
Mardirosian
Si, si, Jesus Treviño. Jesse.
Espino
Jesus Treviño.
Mardirosian
Did I call him Jesse?
Espino
You called him Salvador.
Mardirosian
Jesse Salvador Treviño.
Espino
Okay. Yes, I have met him.
Mardirosian
Jesus Salvador. Oh, you know him?
Espino
Yes. Oh, I met him only once. He was one of your members of your church.
Mardirosian
Members of my church, his family, his mother and father. There is another man who is a member of my church who's quite a capitalist, lives in Newport Beach. What's his name? [laughs] I was going to say Spumoni; that's what I had for lunch. No. It'll come to me.
Espino
Right. That's interesting. So that was your goal from the very first church that you started, which was in Topeka, Kansas, was to make sure that the kids were completing each level of their education.
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was very, very--I like school. I like education. I think that education is--I keep telling parents, "Your children are going to Hell if you don't prepare them for college."
Espino
And then you moved on to Chicago. How long were you there, and what was that experience like?
Mardirosian
Three years. I had a very interesting experience. You know, in every congregation there is someone who is more or less the leader, and in this congregation in Chicago there was a woman who liked to tell the preacher what to do. So when I went to Chicago, I started going to--it took me more than ten years to complete my B.A. degree, so part of it was done in Topeka. When I moved to Chicago, I took two courses, six units of course in Roosevelt College in Chicago, and this woman thought that I was robbing the church because I was using six hours to enhance my education, which in my mind meant that I would be a better-prepared person to do a better job with the congregation, but she thought that I was robbing the church of time that they owned. So we had a disagreement.And I called the deacons in the Baptist church. There is a board of deacons elected by the congregation who sort of see to it the well functioning of the congregation. I called the deacons and said, "You either calm this woman and make her take her place and not challenge me," because she would deride me as a young pastor, "or I'll leave, and you have to find some other pastor." So they said, "Pastor, we can't deal with that lady." [laughs] So I said, "Okay. Find another pastor." And I went to a man that was the president of an insurance company in Chicago, and I said, "I need a job." And he said, "Okay. I'll give you a job in the actuarial department of the company." You know what an actuary is? Actuaries are the ones that do the math to establish the rates for the premiums for the insurance policies. And I became an actuary.I left the church on the last Sunday in September, and Monday, the first Monday in October I was working in this office. Then on Sunday, the following, the first Sunday after I was out of the church, went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and found a Christian center and asked that I be allowed to invite any Latinos in Milwaukee who wanted to come to a service in their property, because I had good relations with the Baptist denomination. They inquired about what kind of a bird I was, and they allowed me that. So I started a congregation in Milwaukee that winter. And I remember going from Chicago to Milwaukee in the middle of winter. It's a ninety-mile distance. It took me about four hours, because very slow moving. But we had a service in the afternoon and came back, and Monday morning I went to work. And after a year, the congregation was big enough to call their own pastor, and then I came to Los Angeles.
Espino
That's fantastic that you were allowed that flexibility to make your own decision. Did you have any issues with the people above you?
Mardirosian
No, no.
Espino
For leaving the church?
Mardirosian
No, because remember, Baptists are very independent, and my reputation was built on the kind of person that I am and that people recognize. I had a good name. The Bible says, "Among all things, seek to have a good name." And so I have a good name. It's nice.
Espino
So tell me, then, when you got to Los Angeles, did you have your two daughters already?
Mardirosian
That was an adventure, because the church in Los Angeles had thirty-seven members. They were a very small congregation, and they offered me a hundred and eighty dollars a month salary, and fifty dollars towards the rent of a parsonage, of a house. This is 1952. You could rent a house for fifty dollars, sixty dollars. And they allowed me a hundred and twenty-five dollars for moving expenses from Chicago to Los Angeles. So it cost me a hundred and twenty-five dollars to send the little furniture that we had, and I had fifty dollars to my name and a car. So I made cuentas how much I was going to use for gas, nineteen cents a gallon. Remember, these are 1952 dollars, which are worth about--a dime from the time of Eisenhower is more than a dollar today. And with fifty dollars we came--we used to sleep in the car right next to the police station in every town, because I felt that that would be the best place to sleep--and ended up at the Spanish American Baptist Seminary in Los Angeles.Remember, I left six years before. I left in '46, came back in '52, and I asked them if they would let me sleep there for a few days while I found a place to live. And they allowed me a month, so ended up from Chicago to 512 South Indiana in East L.A. with seventy cents in my pocket out of the fifty dollars, and I paid for gas, for changing the oil in the car, and for all the meals. Now, we would buy a loaf of bread and a pound of salami and two quarts of milk, and we would feed the two girls. My daughter was five. Gracie [Mardirosian] was five and Junie [Mardirosian] was two, and we drove across. I remember seeing the Mississippi River when we crossed over in St. Louis coming down.
Espino
Did you do any sightseeing, other sightseeing on your way besides that?
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, we came and then slept in Denver and then down towards the Grand Canyon to Phoenix and Tucson and across and through Pomona entered on the 10 Highway into East L.A., and the car came all the way. The last place where I put fifty cents of gas in, in Pomona.
Espino
That's incredible. I'm surprised that your wife was so agreeable. Did she have a decision? Did she have a choice?
Mardirosian
She has been terrific, loyal and a hard worker. Within the two months that we were in Los Angeles, I said, "Honey, we cannot make it with a hundred and eighty dollars. Either you have to find a job, or I'll have to find a job, because we're going to be in debt. We just cannot afford the rent and utilities, the food, the gasoline and clothing for the girls, medicines." So she went to work for Pacific Bell, pulling the wires in, I remember, connect--
Espino
Yes, operator.
Mardirosian
--operator, and then was secretary. She worked there for, oh, about four, five years. Then she took a job in Union Bank in Los Angeles and worked there and was given eight shares of stock at the end of the year, and with that money later we were able to put the down payment on buying a house. It was her doing.
Espino
Did she want to go back to work? Was she happy about that?
Mardirosian
Well, she did not work for the first five years, and she was not crazy about it, but she knew that she had to do it. In fact, there were thirteen churches in Los Angeles, and twelve of the pastors' wives were employed outside of the house. Only one pastor that had eight kids had a wife stayed at home.
Espino
Who watched your children while she worked?
Mardirosian
Well, we had a member of the church who would--remember, Gracie was five. She started first grade when she was six. She came with half a year of kindergarten and started kindergarten in Los Angeles in '52, and Junie stayed with the families, with a woman who charges fifteen dollars, and Eunice was making something like forty-five dollars a week, so we paid fifteen and we had thirty dollars to live with.
Espino
And was it a full-time job that she had, like a forty-hour-week type of job?
Mardirosian
I had a full-time job. Baptist ministers have a sixty-hour week.
Espino
Right. No, I mean Eunice. It wasn't a part-time--
Mardirosian
Eunice had a forty-hour job, forty-hour job. I would take her in the morning and then Gracie to Alhambra. The office of Pacific Bell then was in Alhambra. It was about four to five miles away. On the way, I would leave my daughter at school, and then in the evening I would go and pick her up and bring her home. We lived in El Sereno. We lived in Pueblo Avenue.
Espino
Well, we didn't really talk about how you two met, how you met Eunice. You told you met in the seminary.
Mardirosian
We met at the seminary.
Mardirosian
But you obviously were raised in Mexico, but you weren't Mexican. Was that ever a problem for her, or for her family?
Mardirosian
May have been for her relatives, but was not a problem for her, because I acted like a Mexican.
Espino
Do you remember certain characteristics that you had that were typically Mexican? I wouldn't know the difference between somebody from Mexico or somebody from Puerto Rico or El Salvador. Seems like at that time there were a lot of different groups at that seminary.
Mardirosian
Well, I guess the common factor was the Latin heritage, Spanish heritage, the church, although these were all Protestants. Culturally they'd still be having the culture of Latin America. I was taken as a Mexican by my fellow ministers. They didn't make any special determination that I was not. I was elected the president of the Mexican Revolution years. [laughs]
Espino
The interesting thing is that some of the churches that you were head of, they weren't Spanish American. Like the one in--
Mardirosian
They were all Spanish-speaking, though.
Espino
Right, but like the one in Illinois was called the First Mexican Baptist Church.
Mardirosian
Right, right. And so at first the Mexican churches in California were all labeled Mexican churches, because the predominant group was Mexican. In New York, they were not Mexican. They were more Puerto Rican. But in Chicago, the one that I was pastor at was the First Mexican Baptist.
Espino
Well, I think we're going to leave it right there, and we'll pick up more next time, so I'm going to stop it now.
Mardirosian
Okay. All right.[End of interview]

1.2. Session 2 (May 6, 2010)

Espino
This is Virginia Espino, and today is May 6 [2010], and I'm interviewing Mr. Vahac Mardirosian at his home in Carlsbad, California. Okay, Mr. Mardirosian, or can I call you Vahac? Or do you prefer Reverend? Reverend, that's better. We're going to pick up where you moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. Can you tell me about just deciding on where to live and finding a home and finding a place for your daughters [Gracie and Junie Mardirosian] in school?
Mardirosian
Yes. We moved from Chicago in the end of June of 1952, made a trip in a car with my two daughters. Gracie was five, and Junie two years old, and came to be pastor of the Rose Hills Mexican Baptist Church, which was located in Rose Hills, which is a neighborhood adjacent to El Sereno in Los Angeles. The church was using a building owned by the Baptist organization, and the City of Los Angeles had purchased that building because they wanted to expand public housing that was adjacent to the church in Rose Hills.So when we got there, the church had only one month left to stay in that building, and the Baptist organization had another building about eight or ten miles away, and they said, "Well, you can use this building," which was way out away from the neighborhood, but it was available. So that one month that we had there, July, we were able to raise some money. The church had only thirty-seven members, but we raised about a thousand dollars, and we bought a little bus to transport the older people that did not have transportation to the new church building. We began our meetings there, and we felt very strongly the urge to return to our neighborhood, but we did not have any money. So we started a building fund, and within one year we had raised three thousand dollars, which I was able to buy a lot on Huntington Boulevard where it meets Monterrey Road in El Sereno.So we kept on raising funds and by 1955 we dedicated our new building. It took us only three years, and the building was built by the members themselves. We had a work crew of four men each night from six to ten. They would come four nights a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Saturday we had eight men working in the building, so we'd alternate. Each member had to work one week and rest one week, and so over the course of about eight months, from March until November, we worked that way. We had a superintendent of the building which guided us in all the technique to do it, and he worked himself in rough carpentry and would teach us how to do rough carpentry, and then he did finish carpentry and put up the roof, and in November we dedicated this building.By then the membership had grown, and the capacity of the church was two hundred, and we had a full house every Sunday. Then we started a second service, so we had a service in Spanish from eleven to twelve, but a service in English from ten to eleven. So I recruited an assistant pastor who did the preaching in English from ten to eleven, and then from eleven to twelve I preached in Spanish.We did well in that church. I was there for seven years. In the course of the seven years--in 1956 we did not have enough room for all the members, so I thought of starting a second church in the next Lincoln Heights, which was adjacent neighborhood, and within a year we had a pastor installed in that church. And then in '57 we started another church in the west side of the city, and we started that going on, giving some of the members of the church to go to the west side of the city to start that other church.By 1959 I caught the eye of the organization of the Baptist churches, and they asked me to serve as the director of Spanish-speaking churches throughout the state. So I had to resign from the church and became the director of Spanish-speaking churches in the state, and I had to travel through southern California, Arizona, and Baja California, where we had other congregations, helping the congregations secure pastors and buildings and doing administrative work, looking over the welfare of the churches, which were about forty-two in southern California and about ten in Baja California and about five in Arizona, so I traveled to those. I did that--
Espino
Let me ask you before we keep moving forward. You said you started with thirty-six members in the very beginning--
Mardirosian
Yes, yes.
Espino
--before you built your new church. What do you think the draw was to your church? If you could recollect, what do you think people were looking for when they came to you? Because in a short period of time you built your congregation up to more than two hundred in less than a few years. So what was the draw that didn't exist before, maybe?
Mardirosian
Well, hard work. [laughs] I don't know. I guess people seek fellowship. They seek identification with other people, and they're attracted to people that are interested in them, and I was very interested in the welfare, so I visited the houses of the members very systematically, almost went to every house at least once a month or every two months, and I asked members to invite their relatives and friends. And I guess my sermons were attractive to them, because they kept coming. Visitors would come.I think that the idea of preaching God's love for us is a good message. People want to feel that someone is interested in them, that God loves them, and the heart of the gospel is expressed in the verse from John, Gospel John :3:16, says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life." That's the message of the gospel, and that's very attractive. And to convey that not only with words, with deeds. And Eunice [Mardirosian] was a very great help in reaching out to women, helping them organize their households better, organize their children better.I was very flabbergasted when I learned that the dropout rate in East Los Angeles was in the 40s and 50s [percentages]. There were no dropouts from the congregation, because I visited every house and would ask the parents, "How is your child doing in school?" And in the course of the services, every year we had a graduation celebration of all the people who finished sixth grade or ninth grade or twelfth grade, and I was pushing them towards schooling, more schooling for them.All in all, I think that pastoral work is very important to the growth and well being of a congregation.
Espino
At that time did you offer any other types of classes other than religion classes in your church? And service-oriented classes?
Mardirosian
No. No. Well, I recommended people to go to night school to take English, but we did not offer classes for other skills in the church. We concentrated pretty much in helping individuals in their homes. I did counseling in their houses according to their needs, psychological and financial and so on, but it was on the basis of the need of the parishioners, different households, different members.
Espino
Can you talk to me about what it was like leaving that role and taking on--because I'm assuming when you became director of the southern California Baptist Spanish American or Spanish-speaking Baptists--
Mardirosian
The Spanish churches, yes.
Espino
--that you had to leave some of that work behind.
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, I guess my objective was to help pastors, the other pastors, produce some of the result that I had been able to see in my own congregation by advising or inspiring them to do the things that I did that worked to improve the congregation. So in other words, my role was, how can we make other congregations grow? Because many of these other congregations had been in existence for twenty or thirty years, and they had not grown. So the pastors were somewhat interested in seeing what I had done and to see if they could use some of the ideas that I'd put to work in my own congregation, and that was the idea, that I was willing to do that in order to enable forty other congregations to do the kind of thing that our church had done.
Espino
Can you talk to me a little bit about some of the success stories of those other congregations that you recall?
Mardirosian
Well, I helped some of the pastors build new churches, helped them find money and find properties that would be appropriate for them. These were the fifties and the early sixties. The Latino population was relatively small in California in those days, as opposed to now. Several of them were able to build new buildings, and I did also start an idea of encouraging more young people to go into the ministry, so some of them, like Leonel Robaina, David Luna, several other young people, Frank Martinez, embraced the ministry and followed with their own ministries in other places.
Espino
And then to change gears a little bit, you had to decide how your kids were going to be educated. Did they go to public school, or can you tell me a little bit about how you chose--that move from Chicago brought you to Los Angeles, and you had to find schools for them. You already had your home and your church and your neighborhood, but how did you decide about what kinds of schools they would go to?
Mardirosian
Well, we went to the public schools. My two daughters went to Sierra Park Elementary School, then the junior high school, and they started at Wilson High School. But then in 1962--I started the work with the Baptist denomination in '59. In '62 we bought a house in Monterey Park about two blocks from East L.A. College, just overlooking East L.A. College. But Monterey Park was part of the Alhambra school district, so my daughters went to Alhambra High School.And then I started my college education myself in Topeka, went to Washburn University. Then when we moved to Chicago, I went to Roosevelt College, and then when we moved to Los Angeles, I started in the Cal State L.A., which in 1952 had its headquarters in the Los Angeles Junior High School on Vermont Avenue. You know where that is?
Espino
Where LACC is now?
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
Where L.A. City College is right now? It's on Vermont in like the Hollywood-Silverlake area?
Mardirosian
Right. Yes, yes. And the state college started there, and then they bought property in El Sereno and moved the campus there. So I started in '53, started taking courses, and graduated in '59. I always took two courses per semester, because I was working full-time and finally graduated from Cal State L.A. in '59. Then I started my master's degree program, took a master's in sociology and took all the courses from 1962 until '68, and by then I had completed the courses and I had to do a thesis to get my master's degree. And all hell broke loose, and I never finished. I put in forty-two units of graduate work on sociology, but never got my master's degree.
Espino
You deserve an honorary master's degree from Cal State Los Angeles, and I'm going to talk to somebody about that. I'm joking, but, well, but you did something really important with your work with the students and the parents at that time.
Mardirosian
Well, in sociology I learned between a crowd and a mob. [laughter] I don't know if I showed you a letter from Renee Nuñez. I tried to make a group and not let it turn into a mob. I was--
Espino
Well, before we go into that part of it, can you tell me about any influential professors that you had at either LACC or the early years of Cal State Los Angeles? You didn't go to East L.A. College, then.
Mardirosian
No, no. I went to Cal State L.A.
Espino
Cal State. A lot of people that I've interviewed have talked about Helen Bailey. Did you ever encounter her?
Mardirosian
No.
Espino
She was very influential for like Julian Nava and a few of the other people that I've interviewed.
Mardirosian
No.
Espino
So maybe you could talk to me a little bit about any--
Mardirosian
I was sort of--I was not a full-time student, and my concentration was in my work, so the courses that I took--I did not live on campus or spend any time on the campus. I would come from my house to the course and go back to work, so I did not maintain or create a relationship with any of the professors. I took the courses that were required to get--and my bachelor's degree is in education, and my master's degree was in sociology, and I would think, well, if I ever failed as a pastor, I can always turn into being a teacher. [laughs] But I never taught school.
Espino
And there's nobody that stands out in your mind as far as influencing your direction, your philosophy, your perspective in the course that you took?
Mardirosian
I was inspired more by ministers. Harry Emerson Fosdick was one that was influential in my thinking. He was more or less considered a liberal theologian.
Espino
Well, talk to me a little bit about him and how you came across his--was he alive at the time, or was it his writings?
Mardirosian
He wrote some books that I read, starting back in Kansas. Then when I went to Chicago, I went to Roosevelt College, which was just starting in the fifties, early fifties or late forties, and was named after Eleanor Roosevelt, and that was more or less a liberal college.My main influence, I guess, was I was very taken aback by the Mexican Revolution. I felt that the idea of "Tierra y Libertad" as was the motto of Pancho Villa and what--
Espino
Emiliano Zapata.
Mardirosian
--Emiliano Zapata, yes. The Bible speaks a lot about social justice, the idea that every human being is just as valuable as every other human being, that God does not make a hierarchy, that poor people are just as important in the eyes of God as rich people. In fact, I think it was Lincoln said, "God must love poor people. He made so many of them." And I felt inspired by the idea that the land must belong to those who work it. "La tierra debe pertenecer a los que trabajan en ella."
Espino
Well, that sounds a little bit like socialism. Did you ever dabble in those kinds of theories?
Mardirosian
No. One time a lady called me and invited me to a meeting, to a socialist meeting, and I said, "No, I am going to stay with the gospel." Well, the first church would gather money from the rich people and gave to everybody according to their needs. That's in the Book of Acts. You haven't read the Book of Acts? [laughs]
Espino
No.
Mardirosian
Yes, it's there.
Espino
Well, one of my favorite lines is--I think did you just say the poor shall inherit the earth?
Mardirosian
Oh, yes, yes.
Espino
But I'm just interested in how those ideas cross over or don't cross over into other areas of philosophy and of thinking.
Mardirosian
Well, I was very, very taken aback by what Stalin did with communism. He killed ten million people. Who wants to become a communist in those conditions? I remember somebody saying that a man, a Frenchman was a communist, and saw in the press that the average Frenchman has 5,600 francs, and he had 5,700 francs, so he quit being a communist.
Espino
Well, during those years of the fifties there was the [Joseph] McCarthy House--did that affect you at all? Did you have any of your members who were going into these different organizations?
Mardirosian
No. I hated McCarthy because he was so outlandish in his charges and his attempts. No, I am very much a follower of the founders of this country and the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of the Constitution and the amends, the ten amendments of the Constitution. Democracy is very much what I think should be the norm for our society and the way this country has managed to keep some of those ideals, even though the tendency of humans is to become, in the words of Rubén Darío, "El hombre para el hombre siempre es un lobo."There is a poem in Spanish that was very influential to me. Se llama "El Sembrador." [recites] "De aquel rincón bañado por los fulgores Del sol que nuestro cielo triunfante llena; de la bendita tierra donde entre flores se deslizó mi infancia dulce y serena; envuelto en los recuerdos de lo pasado, borroso cual lo lejos del horizonte, guardo el extraño ejemplo, nunca olvidado, del sembrador más raro que hubo en el monte.""Aún no sé si era sabio, loco o prudente aquel hombre que humilde traje vestía; sólo sé que al mirarle toda la gente con profundo respeto se descubría. Y es que acaso su gesto severo y noble a todos asombraba por lo arrogante: ¡Hasta los leñadores mirando al roble sienten las majestades de lo gigante!""Una tarde de otoño curioso subí a la sierra y al sembrador, sembrando, miré risueño. ¡Desde que existen hombres sobre la tierra nunca se ha trabajado con tanto empeño! Quise saber, curioso, lo que el demente sembraba en la montaña sola y bravía; el infeliz oyóme benignamente y me dijo con honda melancolía: -Siembro robles y pinos y sicomoros; quiero llenar de frondas esta ladera, quiero que otros disfruten de los tesoros que darán estas plantas cuando yo muera.""-¿Por qué tantos afanes en la jornada sin buscar recompensa? dije. Y el infeliz me contest, con las manos sobre la azada: -Acaso tú imagines que me equivoco; acaso, por ser niño, te asombre mucho el soberano impulso que mi alma enciende; por los que no trabajan, trabajo y lucho, si el mundo no lo sabe, ¡Dios me comprende!""Hoy es el egoísmo torpe maestro a quien rendimos culto de varios modos: cuando oramos solo pedimos el pan nuestro. ¡Nunca al cielo pedimos pan para todos! En la propia miseria los ojos fijos, buscamos las riquezas que nos convienen y todo lo arrostramos por nuestros hijos. ¿Es que los demás padres hijos no tienen?... Vivimos siendo hermanos sólo de nombre y, en las guerras brutales con sed de robo, hay siempre un fratricida dentro del hombre, y el hombre para el hombre siempre es un lobo.""Por eso yo me impongo ruda tarea y sé que vale mucho mi pobre ejemplo, aunque pobre y humilde parezca y sea. ¡Hay que rogar por todos los que no ruegan! ¡Hay que llorar por todos los que no lloran! Hay que ser como el agua que va serena brindando al mundo entero frescos raudales. Hay que ser como el aire, que siembra flores lo mismo en la montaña que en la llanura. Y hay que vivir la vida sembrando amores, con la vista y el alma siempre en la altura.""Dijo el loco, por entre las breñas del monte siguió trepando, y al perderse a lo lejos, aún repetía: ¡Hay que vivir sembrando! ¡Siempre sembrando!..."
Espino
That's beautiful. That's Roque Dalton?
Mardirosian
Blanco Belmonte, el poeta espanol.
Espino
When did you learn that, do you remember? What part of your development did you--
Mardirosian
In elementary school I learned poetry.
Espino
But this is specific, because it--
Mardirosian
This one came much later. I think that I saw that maybe at the seminary, maybe, and I was taken by it.
Espino
It sounds like it's almost something that you've lived by, the words in that poetry, as far as not praying just for yourself but for everyone to have food and to have--
Mardirosian
Well, five hundred thousands parents have gone to court. That's a few.
Espino
That's a lot. Well, let's talk about, then, how you got involved with the walkouts. What was your first interaction with that whole episode in Chicano history?Do you want to take a break? Okay, and then we'll talk about that.
Espino
Okay, we're back. We left off--I had just asked you about the walkouts. And before we start, can I just ask you one quick question? It's been called blowouts and also walkouts. What is your memory of how the kids described the student protests?
Mardirosian
I think that they were intrigued with the word blowouts, because it was more dramatic than walkout. But during that time, of course, there were sit-ins and sleep-in and walkouts. Those were words that fitted an environment. All over the United States there were protests, and protests not only in the United States but in many countries, including in Mexico City, when in 1968 we were having the sit-in, the Mexican Army was invading La Plaza Las Tres Culturas, and they had many deaths. The soldiers shot on people in Mexico City, the same time that we were having the sit-in, the sleep-in in the board of education.
Espino
Were you aware of that at the time?
Mardirosian
Yes, yes.
Espino
How did you--was it through radio, TV, newspaper?
Mardirosian
Well, it was very, very sad to hear that the Mexican Army had tried to disperse the crowds, the protesters, by using force. This was the year of the Olympics in Mexico City, so the whole idea of having the Olympics in Mexico was used as an excuse to have a demonstration against the government or against the authorities of the university, which ultimately was the federal government. The Mexican system puts a lot more emphasis in the executive branch than in the legislative branch.But the Monday, March 1, we were having breakfast with a group of ministers in a place called La Placita Community Center on Indiana Street in East Los Angeles, and it was around nine-thirty when we heard that a large group of students had walked out of Garfield High School. So immediately, the ministers felt that the confrontation with the sheriffs in East L.A.--there are no policemen, but there are sheriffs, county sheriffs, because East L.A. is not an incorporated city, it's part of the County of Los Angeles--and we felt that we should go to be intermediaries between the sheriff force and the students, to avoid any violence. So about six or seven of us went directly from the meeting to the office of the principal of Garfield High School, and we found out then that some other students from Roosevelt, Wilson, and Lincoln had also walked out that same day.So we went to the principal. Colonel Murphy was principal of Garfield High School. The school was built originally for twenty-five hundred students. It had forty-two hundred students, so the hallways looked like sardines, because they were so--the space was so crowded you could not move in to elbow yourself. We went to the office and said, "We are ministers from East Los Angeles, and we want to help in pacifying the students." So the principal said, "Go in the crowd outside and find ten of the leaders and bring them with you, and I'd like to talk with them." So we went and it was raining, and the students were all assembled on Atlantic across the street from this church there on Atlantic near Whittier. I don't remember now the name of the church, but it was a large church within about three blocks of the school. And the students had asked the priest to let them get out of the rain and go into the church, and the priest denied them. They did not let them in.Anyway, I was dressed in a dark suit, and they thought that I was a detective. They wouldn't talk to me. I said, "No, I'm a preacher." So I gained the interest of some of the people there and explained what the principal wanted, so they chose ten people, and when we came in there, I saw that the principal had brought in the clique of parents who were the superintendent's cabinet or kitchen cabinet. These were people who were very supportive of the superintendent and very much against the students who had walked out, and ten students who had not walked out, to confront them with the ten students who had walked out, and so not very much was accomplished.But the parents of these students immediately gathered that same day into the church where, the center where Reverend (Tony) Hernandez was the director, on Brooklyn Avenue relatively close to Garfield. So when the meeting there broke out, we decided that we were going to see Julian Nava, which was the only member of the board who was Latino, to see how we could make the peace, and drove all the way to Northridge to see Julian. Julian happened to be an in-law of Reverend Hernandez. Reverend Hernandez was married to Julian's sister Lucy. So we had Julian and Tony, myself and two other people in Northridge, and we decided that we were going to invite the parents of the students who had walked out, or some of the students who had walked out, to come to the center where Tony was the director.And the place got filled out with a lot of students and a lot of parents, and then the group said, "Well, we need to choose a leader." Now, the students were suspicious of the older people. They felt that they would not support them. And the parents were suspicious of the students, and so there were several candidates to be president of this group. And one of the students, well, it was an older student by then, Al Juarez, was a candidate to be chair of the group, and I was a candidate, and I won the election. So the group decided that the name that they were going to choose was Educational Issues Coordinating Committee [EICC], and I was to be the chairman, and we were going to meet every night.The next day, some of the parents told us, told me and other people that some of the students had been arrested. And so we decided to go, a group of parents to go to see Evelle Younger, who was the district attorney. So we went to see--about ten people, some parents, two or three ministers and, of course, myself, and we went and we said to the--we moved into the Office of the District Attorney. The secretary said, "What do you want?" I said, "We'd like to talk to Mr. District Attorney Evelle Younger." So he was not there. His deputy came out and said, "What do you want?" We said, "Well--." I became the spokesperson. I said, "Well, Evelle Younger came to East L.A. in September saying that if we had any problems that he would help us. So we have a problem, and we need his help." "Well, he's not here. What do you want?" "Well, since some of the children of these parents have been arrested, we want to know where they are." And the man said, "Well, they may be at Juvenile Hall, they may be at the jail in Lincoln Heights, they may be here in the central jail. We don't know where they are." I said, "Well, we want you to find out where they are and tell us, and we'll sit here until you do." He didn't know what to do. [laughs]So we sat there. This was one o'clock, two o'clock. We hadn't had lunch, so we were angry. Three o'clock, four o'clock, five o'clock, nada, sitting there. The media started coming. So finally we got word that in the same building where Evelle Younger was, was also the offices of Sheriff Peter Pitchess, the sheriff, and he sent word that he wanted to talk with three of the people who were sitting there. So three of us went down, and he was sitting in his chair and he said, "You're Armenian. I'm Greek. The Turk really [unclear] get us a lot of pain." I said, "That's true." He says, "Well," he said, "I'm not going to be a babysitter for the school district. If the students don't do anything illegal, I'm not going to do anything." So we said, "Well, if the sheriffs get out, move out of the schools, the students will go in, and if there are anybody arrested, should be let go." And so the news that night was that Peter Pitchess had decided to withdraw the sheriff deputies, and the police department in Los Angeles in the other schools did the same thing, and so there were no more arrests.And those two days, the day of the walkouts and the day of the sit-in at Peter Pitchess' office, we were able to pacify the movement, and the parents decided to stay as a group and meet once a week. We had meetings for about two years, pursuing the goals of the students, what the students were demanding, that their demands were met. We moved from the center where Reverend Hernandez was the director to Euclid House on Whittier and from there to International House on Boyle, and we had then over the course of the year hundreds of parents every week coming to us for all kinds of grievances on welfare, on the draft and all kinds of business. And I had to steer around and say, "Well, we're going to stay with the schools." Those were the first days of the Educational Issues Coordinating Committee.
Espino
Do you remember what you said to those young people on the stairs that was able to win their trust?
Mardirosian
I really don't know. I guess, you know, communication has three channels. The words we use communicate, our tone of voice communicates, and our face communicates. I have an article that says that the words communicate 7 percent of our meaning, our tone of voice communicates 38 percent of our meaning, and our face communicates 55 percent of our meaning. So I guess the students saw my face and that communicated an honest desire to help them. And so if someone communicates to you and you are convinced that that person has goodwill and a willingness to help you, you are going to accept him.
Espino
Did those students stay with you throughout the EICC, some of those same ten students?
Mardirosian
Oh, yes, yes, throughout, yes.
Espino
Do you remember their names? Can you name them?
Mardirosian
Well, we have a list here and there in those papers.
Espino
Okay. Anyone specific stand out in your mind? I know it was a long time ago.
Mardirosian
The names Rodriguez, the Rodriguez brothers. I want to remember names, but it has been forty years, '68 to '08. [laughs]
Espino
So then you get into the office and you find that there's a group of people who are against the position of the--
Mardirosian
Of the walkouts, right.
Espino
What was that like? Can you maybe give me some more detail of that encounter and what people said?
Mardirosian
Well, of course, we immediately gathered that they had been brainwashed by the principal, who felt that this was a breach of the purpose of the school. He said, "Well, the school is here, and it's paid by the citizens to teach, and these students are in the street. They are breaking the rules, and they should be punished for it." The punitive aspect of the situation was the most important question in the mind of the principal and of the people that supported the principal. How dare these people go out in the street like savages when this very nice man is here and he's doing a very nice job, and these teachers are all very nice teachers, and they're doing their utmost best for the welfare of the students, and the fact that 57 percent of the students drop out of Garfield that year made no conscious--it was not the consciousness in the part of the people there.There is an article that the faculty of Garfield wrote in the newspaper explaining their position and so on. This was a breach of the contract, and they were out to punish the guilty so that they would not encourage others to do the same thing.
Espino
At that moment that the cabinet or you said the superintendent and the principal, at the moment that they were challenging the students, who spoke up for the students? Did they speak for themselves, or did you--
Mardirosian
Yes, the students, some of them, Monteczuma Esparza--
Espino
Jesus Treviño?
Mardirosian
Jesus Treviño expressed the ideas of the students. Paula Crisostomo, the girl that was in the movie--the original version of that movie that you saw the other day was fifty-five minutes long and was made by UCLA. You should find it there. It's big extended interviews and explanations of the initial walkout. Apparently you have not seen that.
Espino
No.
Mardirosian
It's there. You should look for it. I had a copy. I had a copy of that, but when I started the Hispanic Urban Center, we used to show it to the teachers. Well, the upshot of this movement--now, this is September came the sit-in at the board. Sal Castro was arrested along with twelve other people in June by an indictment that they were accused of creating a disturbance of the schools. See, if somebody disturbs a school, that's a misdemeanor, but if somebody convenes with other people to disturb the schools, that's a--
Espino
Felony?
Mardirosian
--felony. And so they were charged with a felony of conspiring, conspiring to disturb the schools, and as a result Sal Castro was taken off his job as a teacher--he was a history teacher--and sent to the central offices to do menial work, not teach, and this happened through the summer. Come September of '68, and the EICC goes to Lincoln Heights to demonstrate for the reinstallation of Sal Castro to his classroom. And the principal of Lincoln Heights, a man by name George Engles, como Engles, says, "Sal Castro will come back as a teacher here over my dead body." And then we said, "Well, we'll accommodate that."So we started demonstrating in front of the school all through September fifteen when the school started, all through the end of September. For two weeks we walked up and down, and you saw that, walking up and down, and they would turn on the faucets so that the sidewalk would be full of water, walking. After two weeks I sensed that the students--that the people were getting very angry, and the police were going around and around the block. I thought, this thing may result in some acts of violence and then things will go bad. I think what we will do is go to the board and have a sit-in at the Board of Education, and without telling anybody we went to the meeting of the board and we said, "We have come here to request that Sal Castro be reinstalled, reinstated in his classroom." We felt that he did nothing wrong. The students were back in classes and everything was peaceful. Now, remember, the original walkout was in March 1. Now this is September of that year. Everybody's in classes. Things are very normal except that Sal Castro is not in his classroom.And we said, "In my country when somebody does something good, we give him recognition. We reward him. If somebody does something bad, then we punish him. Now, Sal Castro was instrumental in bringing to this board some deficiencies of the school system, and you said that he did a good thing. 'He woke us up,' that's what the board said. Now, he did something good and you're punishing him. That doesn't make sense. So we're going to sit here--,"
Espino
Just a second. Your microphone fell off. I'm going to pause it.
Espino
Okay, sorry about that.
Mardirosian
That's fine. Now, we said, "You said that he did something good and you are punishing him, and that doesn't make any sense. So we're going to sit here until you change your mind." Those are the words. And I said, "Sientense." [laughs] And the board adjourned and went home.
Espino
About how many people were there with you?
Mardirosian
The place was full, about two, three hundred people. Well, of course, by seven o'clock there were about, oh, seventy-five who had decided that they were not going home, and I called Eunice [Mardirosian] and I said, "Come over, because we're going to sleep here." Now, the girls did not come. They stayed home, but Eunice came, and she was there. We stayed there seven nights. On Sunday we had a mass, and we had a priest with us, a priest who had fled Mexico because he got on the wrong side of the bishop there. His name is Cesar Gonzales. He's presently an instructor in Mesa Community College here in San Diego, Cesar Gonzales.At the same time, that September I was asked to form an organization, a nonprofit organization to have Head Start in L.A. County. They felt that the city Head Start was so large that it was not governable, could not be governed properly, and so they divided the Head Start in Los Angeles from the Head Start in the county, and they felt that the organization that I belonged to, the Southern California Baptist Convention, was a fairly well-established organization, and they asked me to take over the Head Start program. So I became the director of a Head Start. [laughs] So I was directing a Head Start in the daytime in the office, and at night I was sleeping in the board [office]. And the bishop for the Baptists, my boss, didn't know what to make of me, because I was very meek and mild at one place and very spouting flames on the other part.
Espino
Do you remember when you developed that anger? Was there a specific moment in time, or a situation?
Mardirosian
Well, I think that I was very, very, very offended when I heard, when I saw that the schools were messing up half of the young people that were in schools. I said, "How can the largest and the most richest country in the world mess up half of its young people and just goes along its way like if nothing happens, when all these young people end up in the street not knowing how to earn their own keep. They don't know how to do anything in a country that requires an education to have any kind of a meaningful job." And the Bible is very emphatic on the idea that there should be no distinction between people. And, of course, I never thought of calling the system racist or getting to names like that, but the idea that's fixing this thing, and you can see in the papers there every chance that I had on television and the newspapers, insisting that it's time for us to mend our ways and get our students, get our teachers to know how to teach children properly.And so I started the Hispanic Urban Center to teach teachers through a course approved by Occidental College. The syllabus of the course was written by Philipe Hernandez, Phil Hernandez, who was professor at Northridge, and so we had a course, and I got the school district to allow this course to be in the schools, taught by Mexican Ph.D.'s. So at the school site we would send an instructor who would give the course once a week for a semester. I think it was twelve weeks, and they would earn four graduate units from Occidental College, which will then translate in salary points. So more than nine thousand teachers took these courses, and the U.S. government was paying, giving us--we started a nonprofit--were paying us to teach these classes, and the teachers who took the course were given salary points for taking the course, and hopefully I felt, well, if one out of three of these teachers ends up these twelve weeks getting into head some idea that these children can be just as good as any other children, I've done something good.One of the things that made me very, very unhappy, very angry, was that I found that in one school a kindergarten class was given an I.Q. test and found that 23 percent of the children were mentally retarded. Well, doesn't make sense. Now, I followed that these children, this group of children three years later were in third grade and only 4 percent of them were deemed to be mentally retarded. So I said, "How can this be? Twenty-three percent is the wrong number here, ends up with the right number here; what's the difference?" Well, the test was given in English, and the children, many of them did not speak enough English to pass the test as normal children. I said, "How can Ph.D.'s or people who give this test are supposed to be at least the master's degree, not get through their head that they are finding these children to be mentally retarded simply because they don't speak the language?" I just couldn't believe that such a stupidity can exist in people with college degrees.You see the anger. It's there, and it's there for the most--I just could not, still cannot get into my head that we can decide to teach children, and already a teacher told me, "You know, Mr. Mardirosian, with one look of a child I can tell that that child is going to be a C student, a B student, or A student." That's what he tell me. Can't believe it.I read that children who sat in the right side of the teacher get better grades. Children who sit in the left side of the teacher get normal [average] grades. I learned that children who have easy names get better scores than children who have difficult names. I learned that children who have lighter skin did better than those who have darker skin, and all these things were done by people who have college degrees. It's all there. Read it. I read and I read all kinds of literature to know how to--and the idea of the Hispanic Urban Center was to train teachers.But I went to see the three--the week of the walkouts I went to see the chair of the faculty of the educational program, department of Cal State L.A., UCLA, and USC, southern California university.
Espino
USC.
Mardirosian
USC. The dean of the School of Education in Cal State told me, "Well, if you will find us money, we can make a study of how teachers teach Mexican children." I don't have any money. The USC dean threw me out of his office. "You are communist. Get out of here. I don't want to talk to you." UCLA was Dean John Goodlad. He immediately called a meeting of people from the psych department, sociology department, education department, and they started trying to figure out how they could help. And he became a good friend. I have letters from him, very nice letters explaining what needed to be done. He has written several books about education.
Espino
Would that be the Mexican American Studies Project? That was a questionnaire that was given out to families in East--
Mardirosian
Well, he was the dean of the School of Education. I don't know that there were several things going at that time. I was very sorry to see him move. He went back to Oregon or Washington. But I have a very long letter, about four or five pages of him describing how he sees a change happening.But in the course of this seven years that I was the director of the Hispanic Urban Center, I also started a movement to improve the reading results of the test in English for children, and created a program to improve the reading achievement that was later studied by the Rand Corporation, and they gave out a very good report stating several points. One is, if a teacher thinks that he can teach anybody, children do better than the teacher who says, "These are Mexican children; I do the best I can." If teachers speak to each other in a school, they share experiences with each other, scores go up. If schools at three o'clock the bell rings and everybody goes their way and they never talk to each other, scores go down. If parents are involved, the scores go up. If no parents are involved, the scores go down. The study is there.
Espino
Do you think that if it weren't for the walkouts or the students themselves taking on this issue that you would have been involved in this issue anyway?
Mardirosian
No, absolutely not. No, no. My two daughters went to school, public school in East L.A., in El Sereno Elementary School. I had no problem, and the children in my church did not have any problem, so I never would have--I did not know how the school system worked here. I did not know where the City Hall was. I was totally oblivious of political thinking, and to me children were children and unos vivos y otros tontos, pero todos comen, so beyond that I didn't know anything about anything. So the students who walked out created a new me, I guess, after that.Because I was very enamored of my own profession. I was a good pastor, and later I was a good director. I was helpful. I got a lot of pastors' benefits and everything was very nice in my life without ever getting anything going in a social context.
Espino
But you mentioned that what you liked about the Bible and about the Baptist religion is its emphasis on social justice.
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
Do you think that that prepared you for your study? Or do you think that you still needed something to learn about those issues when it came to helping the students?
Mardirosian
Well, of course every aspect in a person's life has an influence. For instance, I live here because when I was fifteen, I learned some ideas about money, and I never have made any money in salary, but I learned money management enough to be able to provide for my girls to have their schooling. I never got a dollar from any program of grants or loans. They went to school. I paid all of the expenses. Both of them graduated from college without costing anybody anything. I learned how to do--and I learned that from my boss when I went to work in Zapateria Tip Top in Tijuana. He had come to this country penniless, and he became a millionaire, and so I absorbed some of the ideas that he had so that I could later on be able to make ends meet and have enough of a knowledge to enable me to provide for our old age. It's pretty nice.
Espino
Very nice. It's like a hotel here, a fancy hotel in Baja or the Yucatan. But okay, so I asked you about your religion, and I want to talk a little bit about anybody--because I know, like you say, there's films out, there's books out on the topic, but anything that you can specifically remember about any person, any individual, any moment just adds to the history of it, just adds to the detail. And also, usually in the situation where this history is so important, like the walkouts, same people get highlighted over and over again. The same type of people get--who were the big leaders. But so any names you can remember or any specific situations that you can remember would be really useful. I'm wondering about that first meeting where the parents meet, which I believe it's the meeting that Jesus Treviño talks about, where the parents meet and you give a speech and some of the parents also talk, and Dr. Rudy Acuña was there. Do you remember that meeting?
Mardirosian
There were many meetings. We met at first almost every night, then later weekly, so, yes, those people are--you will encounter them, and the stories would be from their own--if you took some of those names and go and interview them, they would give you some of their slants of what was happening.
Espino
Could you talk to me a little bit about the dynamics of the group? And during that time, I think with any group, you find people that gather aren't always on the same page and have a different way to deal with the problem.
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, I do recall an interesting idea. After we'd been meeting on a weekly basis, all kinds of people started gathering with all kinds of agendas. At one time, at one meeting there was a lot of commotion, and somebody said, "Well, we should arm ourselves, because we are going to be persecuted and we should be able to defend ourselves." I was very much in the school of Martin Luther King [Jr.], nonviolent, but he was killed that year, so much for nonviolence. So I said, "Okay, we will arm ourselves. I'm going to pass the hat, and you're going to put money, and we're going to buy arms." About two hundred people passed the hat. We got fourteen dollars. [laughs] That was the last I heard about arming ourselves.You know, I was forty-five. See, I was born in '24. We're now in '68. Twenty-four to '68, that's forty-four years, right? And at forty-four you don't think like a twenty-one-year-old. I was lucky enough to have, at forty-four, two college-educated daughters. I am an avid reader, and from 1964 to '68 I was taking my master's degree in sociology, so I was equipped to become a knowledgeable leader, mature enough not to go in the deep end, street smart enough to know how to handle situations in the barrio, secure enough to be able to feel, because when I was in sixth grade a teacher told me, "Vahac, Oaxaca, tu debes ser presidente de Mexico. You should be president of Mexico." Sixth grade. I said, "Teacher, I can't be president of Mexico, because I'm not a Mexican-borne, and the Constitution says that you have to be a Mexican born in Mexico to be president." And the teacher says, "We'll change the Constitution." [laughs] I had a pretty good idea that I was somebody worth something. I was not a shrinking violet.All those things were gifts, gifts to me from people. You know, all the Armenians that came to Tijuana became rich, except my father. All of them. All of them. For some reason, my father Yeghia] became a realtor when he was thirty-some years, and he never had it to get wealthy. But he gave me an inheritance that I consider a very valuable inheritance. When I was in school, I thought that I was smart, and my father said, "Vahac, learn to make friends. Make friends." And I said, "Father, I'm so smart that I don't need anybody." He said, "Shut up. Learn to make friends." And throughout my life I've made friends.When I was fulminating against the Board of Education, the chairman of the board told me, "Vahac," he says, "you come there and you speak so harshly to us, but in your eye I see a ray of sympathy that you feel towards us. You don't hate us. You want to be our friends." I said, "Yes, [unclear], I want to be your friend. I want to help you to do the right thing." So much for my low esteem.
Espino
You mentioned before about the board, when I think I talked about Julian Nava and you said, "He was on the other side." Can you explain that statement, what you meant by that?
Mardirosian
Well, of course, he was a member of the board, and he has one vote in seven, and the seven voted against the students, so he was in that group. He may not have sympathized with what the board was doing, but he was in that group and he had been duly elected by the community, and he was an upholder of the law. He was directing the school district as a board member and whether he liked it or not, he was part of the system.
Espino
Did you know him personally?
Mardirosian
Well, we met quickly the same day of the walkouts, and since he was a family member of--
Espino
Tony Hernandez?
Mardirosian
--Tony, I immediately felt sympathy to him, and I knew that he had a rough job, being surrounded by people who were not very friendly towards Latinos, and we are good friends.
Espino
How did the community respond to him, to Julian Nava and his position?
Mardirosian
Well, he was elected three times.
Espino
Right. But I mean, as far as taking that position about the walkouts.
Mardirosian
Well, we used to use a word vendido in those days. Los vendidos meant people who were in the system. For whatever reason, he was part of that system. But I felt that he was a very honorable and very good person to do a job that was difficult to do, very difficult. And being one of seven doesn't give that much power, especially being one minority out of seven. In those days there was no awareness that Mexicans were anywhere near at par with Anglos in anything. This is forty-five years ago. [laughs] Women weren't very much thought of.
Espino
Right, that's so true. But you founded all these different organizations, and it doesn't look like they were in conjunction with the board, but it was with the L.A. Unified School District.
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
So who was supporting you on the side of the L.A. Unified School District?
Mardirosian
Well, the superintendent. The superintendent took me up on the reading and created a whole program in support of that, Superintendent William Johnston. And in 1977, after I was director of the Hispanic Urban Center, he hired me for two years to be--gave me a contract to be an assistant to him, working in the school district, and my job was to increase the number of Latinos in the teaching profession. So I worked in creating a curriculum to help high schoolers learn about the teaching profession so that they would become teachers, and I have this whole syllabus, and this course was taught in twelve of the high schools in the Los Angeles School District. I have that. I've invented things.
Espino
Yes. Well, I'm curious. What did you emphasize, and how successful was that class?
Mardirosian
It was--they named a director of it, and the program was taught as a course in various schools, and the number of--remember, in 1968 only 3 percent of the teachers of the school district were Latino, 3 percent. The number of teachers now, I suppose, hovers in the 20 to 30 percent, which is not at par but still ten times better than before.
Espino
Do you think that your program had something to do with jump starting--
Mardirosian
Oh, yes, yes. Yes.
Espino
--getting teachers into the--did you work with Cal State Los Angeles?
Mardirosian
I also started another program. It was to help teacher aides to become teachers, because many teacher aides were Mexican, and in the Hispanic Urban Center we set up a center to train teacher aides to become teachers, taking courses. And Sara McPherson became the director of this program. She still is. You can look her up. Sara McPherson, have you heard the name? She comes out in the movie there.
Espino
Sounds familiar, yes. Yes, maybe that's where I saw it. So then you had the Hispanic Urban Center, which was founded in 19--
Mardirosian
Seventy.
Espino
--70, and you're also founder of the Mexican American Education Commission.
Mardirosian
That's in '69, yes.
Espino
Yes. So you're doing these two things at the same time? Or how did they--
Mardirosian
One follows the other. This one was in '69, and the other was in '70.
Espino
Right. But is it not true that you were the founder of the--or the Mexican American Education Commission existed until '73? Or you were a member until '73?
Mardirosian
No, I was the chairman for the first two or three years, maybe longer.
Espino
Because it seems like they overlapped, then, with the--
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, yes. And that's not a paid position of anything. It was a community gathering of--we met monthly to respond to some complaints that people had about their kids. We had a secretary who was an employee of the commission but paid by the district.
Espino
And was this housed in the Board of Education?
Mardirosian
Yes. Yes.
Espino
You had an office there.
Mardirosian
Yes, we had an office there for many years.
Espino
And then you said you also met at--
Mardirosian
International House.
Espino
Yes, and what was that for?
Mardirosian
That was the EICC [Educational Issues Coordinating Committee] meeting place.
Espino
How did you balance all these different meetings and organizations and then your schooling and then your ministry? Or you were not--
Mardirosian
Well, my salary still came from the Baptists until '70. When I founded the Hispanic Urban Center, then I became an employee of the Baptist Denomination. They paid--they put up the money. They put up a hundred thousand dollars to create the Hispanic Urban Center, and then I wrote a proposal to the federal government to institute the program for teacher training and work with the president of the university to give credit, academic credit, to the teachers who took the course, so that the teachers would have an incentive to take the course. Became a politician.
Espino
Did you do any grant writing yourself?
Mardirosian
No. I'm a talker.
Espino
Well, maybe that's a good place to stop for now. It's been over an hour, unless you have time for one more question?
Mardirosian
No, no, no.
Espino
You're exhausted?
Mardirosian
Read something. Take those papers and--
Espino
Okay. Let me stop it right now.[End of interview]

1.3. Session 3 (May 13, 2010)

Espino
This is Virginia Espino and today is May 13th [2010]. I'm interviewing Mr. Vahac Mardirosian at his home in Carlsbad, California.Reverend, I wanted to start with the walkouts. We talked about that last time, but I wanted to ask you if you could maybe outline just one or two of the issues that you thought were the most important and the most relevant in the student demands.
Mardirosian
Well, they were demanding, in essence, an education that would resemble the education that students in West Los Angeles were receiving. They tell me about an occasion when Sal Castro took them to West Los Angeles, a group of students from his class, to see how the schools operated in West Los Angeles as opposed to East Los Angeles, and that was an eye opener to the students. They saw that the students there were learning about science, they were learning about technology, they were learning about history, geography. None of these things were taught in East Los Angeles. They were classes that dealt with the mechanics of auto repair and topics that the schools thought that would be useful to the students as they went on to the workforce. So the expectation, the lower expectation that the teachers had of the students in East Los Angeles was very much in evidence when the students saw the contrast.So I think that the students wanted better food in the cafeterias that reflected the diet that was prevalent in their homes. They wanted to stop corporal punishment, which was unheard of in West Los Angeles but was very much in evidence in East Los Angeles. They wanted to get courses that would prepare them to go to college, which, of course, the curriculum that they had in those schools simply would impede any attempt to enter college, because they were not prepared. They had not received the four years of English and three years of math and two years of social sciences and such required courses in high school that colleges demand before they even review an application.And the parents of these students felt that their children were shortchanged, and then this was very much in evidence to me and to the other adults. So when we took these demands of the students to the [Los Angeles] Board of Education, we expressed to them that the outlook of the schools needed to change. They would have to accept the responsibility of giving equal education to all our children, and it was so foreign to the mentality of the teachers and of the administrators and to the board. [Julian] Nava was the only Mexican in the Board of Education, and he was the first Mexican, the first Latino in the Board of Education for a hundred years, since California was part of Mexico. He was a voice in seven, and he was simply not capable of pushing an agenda.That's why when we went to charge the board on April 4, 1968 that they had shortchanged us, because in March they had said that they would review the demands of the students and give us a response to them, and there was no response. So we called it an April Fool's Day, and we had about a thousand people marching from La Placita to go to the Board of Education, surround the Board of Education marching with those people, mostly adults, while the room of the Board of Education that seats something like 250, the rest were marching around. And after we had said how dissatisfied we were, we started our march back to La Placita to have talks of the various parents in response, giving their impressions of what the event had meant to them.While we were marching, we were followed by media people from radio and the newspapers and television, and while we turned around from Temple to Main Street towards La Placita I noticed that reporters started putting their hands in their ears, hearing something that was being said to them from their headquarters, and all of a sudden the mood of the reporters changed. And I said, "Que pasa? What's happening?" And one of them said to me, "They've just shot Martin Luther King [Jr.]." [long pause]All continued to La Placita, and the people said, "Pastor, say a prayer." On the next night we were surrounding the courthouse in Los Angeles in mourning and asking people not to go and act violently in protest, because we heard that in other cities this was happening. And the Sunday--the meeting of the board was Thursday, the fourth. Sunday the seventh we had a meeting at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. [long pause]
Espino
Do you remember how you felt that day?
Mardirosian
Mayor then was--his name escapes me.
Espino
Was it [Sam] Yorty? Before that, Pat Brown?
Mardirosian
African American mayor.
Espino
Tom Bradley?
Mardirosian
Yes, Bradley.
Espino
He was mayor in--anyway, we can find out.
Mardirosian
Mayor Bradley. We became friends. I was named a member of the Urban Coalition, a group of people that met regularly to create an atmosphere of peaceful atmosphere in Los Angeles at that time. This was '68. The riots in Los Angeles were in '75. So for seven years we were able to maintain a good atmosphere.
Espino
Do you think the mood at that time--do you remember finding that people were angry, or were people sad?
Mardirosian
Well, mostly sad, because--and very angry, of course. The idea of second-class citizenship that was implicit in everything that the school system did to our people was evident in every way, in the teachers' declarations, the outlook of the schools, the curriculum of the schools, the way in which the students were looked at--you know, it is a look in their eyes that makes the greatest difference in the life of a child. And I've read research that says that if a child has one good teacher in twelve years, one teacher that conveys to the child [crying] respect and admiration for that child, that child will get a good education. So here are hundreds of thousands of children that never get that look from any teacher. And I'm not talking against teachers, because they have not been taught properly how to be teachers of poor children.Our school system--we have established a good working relationship with the chancellor of the California State University. California State University is the largest university in the United States. It has four hundred and forty thousand students. And I said to him just last month, "You produce the teachers that teach these children. When are you going to make sure that these teachers know how to teach these children?" And he just lowered his head. He says, "I've not been able to." A bureaucracy, a huge bureaucracy, this school system, this California State University system has one hundred thousand teachers and instructors, professors, and it's governed as a bureaucracy, and the idea that poor children need the stimulation and the skills of teachers so that they will become able to cope with life in this country in the twenty-first century simply is bypassed.And the only thing that I saw twenty years ago that could possibly make a dent is if we could create an army of a million parents who would demand that the school system change. That's the chore before us.
Espino
Well, 1968 was over forty years ago. Do you see some of those same issues from that time relevant today? Or are there some differences?
Mardirosian
Well, we have become more of a technological nation. In 1968 General Motors still had almost half of the market of the automobile industry. It now is reduced to 5 percent. President [Barack] Obama was quoted this week saying, "High school is no longer sufficient education for our children." And if anything, today the need to create the conditions that would produce the kind of educated workforce for the United States is even much greater than forty years ago. In California, one out of three Anglo students that finish high school will end up with a college degree, with a bachelor of arts degree. One out of three Californians receive a bachelor's degree. In Latinos, one out of ten would receive a bachelor's degree. Of the students that graduate from high school, one out of ten would receive a college degree. Half of them do not finish high school, but of the ones who finish.Now, California has twice as many Latino students as it has Anglo students. What will become of this state if we do not have the proper education for the population of the state to produce the kind of workers that will continue to have the leading position that California has had in the country? At some point, a couple, three, four years ago, California was the fifth or sixth economy in the world, so that this need is yelling at us, and we need to respond. And the cries of the students in 1968 woke us up to the fact that adults, educated adults in this country, in this state, should take a very, very serious look at what we're doing to our kids.
Espino
At that time there were things that don't exist anymore, like corporal punishment and then also textbooks that ignored the history of Mexicans and other people of color. But that doesn't seem to be as--
Mardirosian
It's window dressing. It's window dressing. It's simply P.R., because the core is in the heart of the teacher, in the eyes of the teacher. How teachers still look at poor children, at children of color is different from the way teachers look at the children of the middle class.
Espino
That's something that's been carried through over time, you're saying, that hasn't changed. One of the things, I guess, have you found a way to address that in your current organization?
Mardirosian
Well, we encourage parents to voice their desire for their children. One of the things that I say in starting this organization was simply to the teachers what my father told me. "Maestra," teacher, "Señora, vaya y llevele unos tamalitos a la maestro de su niño." Take some tamalitos to the teacher of your child and say to that teacher, "Teacher, I want to help you to help my child get a good education. What can I do to help?" Tell this to the teacher once a month. Show your face. The more times a teacher sees the face of a mother, the better that child will do in school, because if a teacher has thirty children or twenty children, and she never sees the faces of any of the mothers of these children, but she sees your face, your child will do better in that school. That teacher will do better with your child, because that teacher has seen your face.Now, we have five hundred thousand parents who are given the instructions to go and show their face to the teacher of their children. If they do it--some of them are still afraid of seeing their teacher. One of the parents I saw in the street would bring their child to school and stand about half a block away from the entrance. And I said, "Why are you doing that?" He said, "Tengo miedo que me vea la maestra." I'm afraid that the teacher will see me. The disassociation, the separation of the home and the school. The teacher--the mother says, "I don't have a third-grade education. What do I know about education? Mucho el ayuda que no estorba. I'll take my child to the teacher, who is a college-educated teacher. She knows all about education, and the farther I am from interfering with what the teacher does to my child, the better off my child will be."The teacher thinks, I've had this kid in my class now for six months, and the mother has never come to see me and ask me how my child is doing. Obviously, these parents are not interested in education, and if the parents are not interested in education, I'll do the best I can. Aver que pasa.See, and there's this disconnect is created by the society that separates the poor from the middle class. Middle class have their enclaves where they live, gated communities. The poor lives in the barrios, and never the twain shall meet. And this disassociation, this distance has created the biggest problem that faces our nation. And this is a chore that I've been at for more than forty years. Hopefully I've made some disciples. Hopefully some people at UCLA will take some notice of what I have to say. Hopefully the instructions that Dean [John I.] Goodlad gave me forty years ago can be instituted after all this time. He--I've given these instructions to all the superintendents in Los Angeles and San Diego. They have them and I have them somewhere too. There is a way of teaching poor children. Does not require rocket sciences. It requires people who believe that the ability of poor children statistically matches the ability of middle-class children, and if we will just find a way to reach to these children and pull out that potential, put it to work, we will create a better society for everybody.
Espino
Well, that's under the assumption that all children are at the same academic level, or the same--can you talk to me a little bit about your views of, say, special programs like the magnet program or the gifted program? What's your opinion of those?
Mardirosian
Well, when I say all children match, we're talking about the bell-shaped curve. In the bell-shaped curve, 58 percent or so fall in the middle, within 15 percentile from the center. Fifty-eight percent are the bulk of all the entire population, whether it's Anglo or Latino. Now, two standard deviations on both sides have children with I.Q.'s of over from 115 to 130, and some have I.Q.'s below eighty-five. But within eighty-five and 115 is the bulk of the population. And obviously--and I have made some drawings of this all over the place showing that the performance of these children are so different, because the estimation of--the single most important factor in the education of a child is teacher expectation, so that when teachers say, "These children belong to a community who's not interested in education," that seals the future of that child, and what we need to do is unseal.Como dicen en Mexico, "Bueno, unos vivos y otros tontos pero todos comen." We have an array. I don't think that the idea of bell-shaped curve is different from the Latino and the Anglo.
Espino
Well, see, for example, let me give you an example of something that I experience myself as a teacher, that you have in one class a child who cannot read, who's above reading-age level, so, say, second grade, and a child who is reading at the third or fourth grade level, so above grade level. In that kind of situation, is it just the teacher expectation that helps the child, or do you need something else?
Mardirosian
Well, you're a teacher. You know that some children are above 100 percent, a hundred I.Q., and some are below a hundred I.Q. Most of them are in the middle. The child who is less than 85 percent I.Q. requires twice as much time from you, so you have to find the ways and the means to help that child. And the child that is ahead, you are going to encourage that child to do more for himself and create a condition so that that child will require less of your time.When I was in second grade, I was reading Jules Verne and Walter Scott. So the teacher didn't pay very much attention to me, and she would pay more attention to the child who was struggling. And the child and the teacher will have to engineer her time to do that. Don't give up on the child that is slow. He needs a future too. But don't expect that child to do the work of another child. The bell-shaped curve is there in your class, and you have to learn.In school, now, I took my degree in education. In the entire four years that I was there, I never heard any instructor talk about how to be a good teacher, and I got a degree in education. You got a degree in education. Do you remember your instructors, your teachers in college telling you how to talk with children, how to communicate? Never. Why? Why do we prepare--now, in the medical profession they subject the students to cutting a cadaver and pulling all the bones out and the spleen and [laughs] I could never do that. But that's the subject matter is that body.
Espino
You're very animated when you talk, and your microphone keeps falling off. Now it's upside down. Okay, there.
Mardirosian
How do schools of education get away with that? How do we send a teacher to a school, and, of course, the younger students, the less-able students go to the poorest schools. The brighter students get a job with the better schools. Where the need is greatest, the interest is poorest.
Espino
Well, that's almost contradicting what you just said right now, because if it's really the person's, the way they look at the student, it doesn't matter if they're the brightest student or the less-bright student.
Mardirosian
No. When I say the look in your face has to do with respect of the individual child. It has nothing to do with the brain. So the teacher has the additional job of measuring the capacity of the child in a pragmatic manner and then proceed in her teacher plan to teach the child according to his needs. So the respect for the child is not based on his ability but in his humanness. The Bible says that God does not differentiate between people. Díos no hace acepción de personas, and we should not do that either. That doesn't mean that we then conclude that all children have the same I.Q. They don't.
Espino
Do you agree with the gifted program and the magnet program and testing and separating out?
Mardirosian
I agree with every effort to discover the fullest potential of every child. I agree with that, that the teacher should fan the child that is gifted to go as far as he can. That's why the teacher told me, "Vahac, I think you should be president of Mexico." And I said, "But teacher, according to the Constitution I cannot be, because I'm not born in Mexico." And she said, "We'll change the Constitution." If that didn't inflate my ego, I don't know what would.
Espino
Well, what about the criticism that I've heard recently about gifted programs, only accessible to those who are tested gifted, enrichment programs only accessible to those who are tested with a higher, I guess--I don't think they're using I.Q. tests, but they have a special test for ability, when these kinds of programs would benefit all children. What about that argument?
Mardirosian
Well, again, I feel that the wisdom of the teacher in creating an individualized program or plan for each child in his class, over the time allocated, 180 days, that within the first twenty or thirty school days that the teacher would be able to pull out of every child the capacity, full capacity that is there. Again, that is individualized teaching. The first teachers were parents. Parents treat each child a little bit differently. Although we parents keep insisting that we love them all the same, we have our expectation from each child according to our perception of that child.One of my daughters told me one of her daughters was brighter than the other one, and I said, "So you expect her to do this?" Well, I said, "Do you know the potential of your second child?" Second child got a master's degree. First child got a master's degree, in different fields. The second daughter is a hospice worker. Her father is a physician and his grandfather was a minister, so now she is a hospice.My father, my mother, wanted me to be a doctor, and I'd go, "Why?" She said, "So you can cure me for free." Well, I never became a doctor. I couldn't see all that blood. But I think I am a doctor of the souls.We need to develop each child. Each child is precious. The Parent Institute is based on the simple fact that every mother wants a future for her child. The greatest power on earth is the love of a mother for her own child, because if a mother sees her child in a hole, she will stop everything and pull her child up. If the mother knows that her child is going to hell because she's not getting the education that he or she needs, that mother should mobilize, and the Parent Institute is based on that notion, that it is the mobilization of parents who will change the school system, because nothing else will.
Espino
So it seems like there was a point when you had a choice between which groups you were going to work with, because you had the Hispanic Urban Center and that's where you were training teachers in cultural sensitivity and those kinds of things. So it seems like there was a point where you decided which group, the teachers or the parents, that you were going to work with.
Mardirosian
Well, I first picked the teachers. I went to Occidental College and asked the president if he would work with me in creating the Hispanic Urban Center to do the work with teachers.
Espino
Do you want me to pause it for a second?
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
So you're going to tell me which group you decided to work with in the beginning.
Mardirosian
Well, we made a proposal to the Board of Education of the American Baptist Convention, and in this proposal we wanted to have a center in Los Angeles to prepare young people for the ministry and also a dual job, to prepare Latino young people for the ministry for the Baptist churches, and to prepare teachers for teaching the children in the public schools. So it was a dual--and there was a preliminary plan for the teachers and for the ministers.
Espino
The Hispanic Urban Center was funded by the Baptist Convention?
Mardirosian
By the Baptist, yes, correct.
Espino
Did you apply for any other--it looks like this was also, well, maybe a little after the War on Poverty, but there were certainly other types of government funds or foundations.
Mardirosian
Yes, yes. We applied--well, we started with a hundred thousand dollars from the Baptists.
Espino
Wow. That's a lot of money.
Mardirosian
And half of it was for preparing ministers, and half of it was for better preparing the teachers. Here is a first evaluation report of the teachers.
Espino
So in the beginning when you first got involved with the walkouts, your perspective, it seems, was to look at the teachers.
Mardirosian
Correct. Correct.
Espino
What kind of teachers came to you? Did you recruit them, or did they come voluntarily?
Mardirosian
Teacher attitudes toward Mexican Americans change at the Hispanic Urban Center. This was my new project, new program.
Espino
Can you talk to me a little bit about this, why you thought that the attitudes needed to change and how you went about trying to change them?
Mardirosian
Well, one of the major purposes of the center which we started is to improve teacher effectiveness with Spanish-speaking children to a better understanding of the Mexican American culture. So we conducted these programs for teachers with the cooperation of the Los Angeles Unified School District and Occidental College, and it's funded by Model Cities Program in Los Angeles. During the five months of its beginning gave a one-semester course dedicating with Mexican American history and culture to 158 principals, coordinators and teachers from East Los Angeles in the Spanish-speaking community. After determining their perceptions toward the Mexican American community by a pre-test and giving them instructions, we gave them a post-test to see if any of their attitudes and beliefs have changed. As a result, we found that many of them now have a better understanding.Well, so we tested the idea and based on the tests given to the 158 who completed the first course, a few things they believe are more prevalent after completing the courses, that Mexican American parents have a high level of aspiration for their children's education. Second, relatively few teachers have the necessary skills to deal adequately with Mexican American children. The curriculum for Mexican American children is not relevant to their personal life and background, and counseling at the high school levels is inadequate for most Chicano students.These are the findings, and based on these findings of this original group of 158 people, then we created a course for all the teachers, and about nine thousand teachers from the school district took these courses over a period of seven years, and I retired from that in 1977 and went to work for Superintendent Bill Johnston as a special assistant to the superintendent, hopefully to do some work inside a system to create change. But after about a year or year and a half, what I was doing was to go to all the colleges and encouraging Latino young people who were about to graduate to go into teaching, because the number of Latino teachers in the school district was so low.So in 1978 or the end of '78, the bug got into my head that I should be a member of the Board of Education, and in '79 I ran for the Board of Education, quit my job from the district and was resoundingly defeated by the sitting board member, Richard Ferraro, who had the distinction of having been in the board representing Latinos because his name sounded more Latino, Ferraro, than Mardirosian. That ended my ministry in Los Angeles, because I felt that all the teachers that supported me in the campaign would be blackballed by Ferraro as a board member because they had not supported him, and I felt that if I moved out of Los Angeles, the teachers who supported me would fare better than if I hung around. That's what brought me to San Diego.
Espino
That's really sad. But I want to ask you, then, was it an angry race? Was it a tense race? Did you have hostility with Ferraro? Did you have debates?
Mardirosian
We had debates and you know what politicians do. They paint each other as devils. Ferraro accused me of being a communist, and I accused him of being totally incompetent, because he went to work for the Anaheim School District as an assistant superintendent and was fired within three months or two months, because he was totally incompetent for the job. I was very, very saddened by having lost the Board of Education.But I came in September of '79 to San Diego, and the first thing I did was to go to the school board to find out who were going to be the members, who were the members of the Board of Education in San Diego, and that article, well, that article in San Diego you need.
Espino
Let me pause it for a second.
Espino
Okay, we're just back from our break, and I want to get back to the idea of how to educate the poor. We talked a little bit about--or working class kids or low-income people. We talked about the gifted program as one option. There was something that came up in the seventies, late sixties, early seventies, and that is the busing program. People thought that that might, desegregation of the schools through busing, that might be one solution to help improve education. Do you have an opinion about that? Do you remember thinking one way or another about it?
Mardirosian
Well, at the time I was in favor of the busing program. I felt that everybody should be able to taste somebody else's soup, that the Latino children who were bused into Anglo schools would learn something about what they were missing, and the Anglo children who were bused to the Latino schools would learn something about how people in poverty areas lived and maybe reflect a little bit on their own situation in the light of what other people do not have.In my opinion, children can absorb such concepts that sometimes elude grownups, because they are more open. As we grow older, we become more set in our attitudes than when we're young. But the net result in the improvement of educational achievement has not been established as a fact. I know that hundreds or thousands of Latino children who went to better schools where they got some benefits from, maybe helped them raise their aspirations. The opposite is less able to ascertain.
Espino
Well, I want to bring up the point that you made earlier about the teachers having respect and regard for the culture and the language of the student. It seems if you were taking them out of--if you were putting them in a situation where there aren't very many Mexican Americans, how would that have impacted them?
Mardirosian
You mean--
Espino
Because they no longer have their peer group. They're leaving their home school, their neighborhood school, their peer group, predominantly Mexican American, say they were coming from East Los Angeles, going into the valley, so not only do they have teachers who are not like them, but then the students are not like them either.
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, from my recollection is that the busing would take a group of children, not individuals, so that they would have in the new school a point of reference of their peers, so they did not go by themselves. Evidently, the net result was not very measurable. I'm sure some children, individuals, may have profited by it, but statistically it was not proven to be a viable way to improve the achievement of children, and, of course, it was abandoned. The isolation of minority children is higher now than it was in the seventies, because they continue to live in poverty areas and there's no practical way to take large numbers of people and put them in a middle-class neighborhood when they cannot afford the housing and such.
Espino
Do you remember that parents were in favor of the busing? Was it a community--
Mardirosian
The Latinos were not happy with busing, because they did not feel that their children will profit much, and they felt that there were some additional risks for their children being in a foreign environment, and they were afraid of accidents in the busing, so they did not approve, as a community did not approve of busing. Some of them, the intellectuals, let's say, who were people who were more likely to identify with middle-class, would feel that this was a chance for their children to go to better schools. But by and large, this feeling was not shared by the majority.
Espino
And another related topic. You talked about how important it was for the teacher to understand or to have high expectations of all the students, despite their ethnic background.
Mardirosian
Yes, yes.
Espino
Can you talk to me a little bit about some of the stereotypes that prevailed at that time, and some of the misconceptions that you encountered among the teachers in your work?
Mardirosian
Well, my point of reference was my own schooling. I went to Tijuana, in Tijuana to a public school. I was the only Armenian in the class, and I did not speak Spanish. But within one year of being in that school, I had learned the language simply by communicating with my peers, and everything was done in Spanish, so there was no Armenian Mexican or Armenian Spanish programs of any kind.I had members of my congregation who had gone to work in Mexico. Their children were born in Mexico and after about ten years they returned to the United States. Their children were in third and fourth grade, did not speak English. Within one year they were able to speak English like anybody else, and they did not lose any time or were not put in any bilingual programs. They'd learn English by the ability to communicate with children and the way that they were treated in school.So this idea that in some schools, for instance, they kept children in bilingual classes, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, and they could not still speak English, was a reflection of the low expectation again of teachers or adults of the ability of children to learn a second language simply by having people believe that they could learn a second language quickly. So a lot of the retardation that our children suffer in schools is based on the low expectations that the system has of poor children and of children of color or children of a different language.That does not affect, for instance, Japanese children. The common knowledge is that Japanese children are very bright and can pick up things like nobody else.
Espino
Was that even the case back then? Because there were Japanese American students at Roosevelt High School even before '68, so was that the perception even back then, that you recall?
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, yes. And it's amazing. In UCLA--remember, the L.A. City School District, which encompasses all of the city of Los Angeles, all around UCLA, 70 to 75 percent of the children are Mexican or Latino. The enrollment of UCLA is less than 5 percent Latino. Japanese Americans in Los Angeles may be 4 or 5 percent of the population. The enrollment of Japanese in UCLA is over 20 percent. Again, teacher expectation creates a world of difference, and that's--UCLA is a high reputation of being one of the top schools in the country. But the way in which UCLA operates in terms of the population that surrounds UCLA is they're back in the ranch.
Espino
You're talking--
Mardirosian
I'm talking to someone from UCLA.
Espino
But I didn't attend UCLA. But when you say back in the ranch, you mean what?
Mardirosian
That the general population, including the leadership of our community, of our institutions of higher learning, the mentality still operates there, people who should know better.
Espino
Okay, so you have the arc of when you started being involved in educational activism, and initially the teachers were predominantly European ancestry, European American Anglo. I don't know how they would have defined themselves. But then you're bringing this up to the year 2000, where you have more college-educated teacher-trained people of different backgrounds. Do you find that those perceptions are the same, even among, say, even a Mexican American or a Chicano?
Mardirosian
Well, I've met some very wonderful teachers, Latino teachers and Anglo teachers, who take their profession as a calling and who continue to study and work. Recently there was an article about the difference that education makes by the teachers, that teaching properly is hard work, requires good preparation, not necessarily brilliant people, but people who are willing to work at their craft and work in the sense of doing the intellectual preparation to understand their environment and respond properly to their environment. And that's what it takes.I remember visiting a school. There were two third-grade classrooms opposite the hall. In one there was order, concentration on the subject matter of the class, participation of the students in an environment that was very productive, friendly, communicative. Across the street another class, it was shambles, everybody yelling, the teacher constantly pounding in the desk saying, "Shut up. Quiet, children. Quiet, children. Stay put. Don't move, don't--." Night and day. When I commented this to the principal, she said, "Well, she only has another five years and she's going to retire, so she's not going to--."
Espino
I can't believe that.
Mardirosian
That's exactly what happened. The other day I read that in New York City School District they had thirty thousand teachers in the district. One teacher was removed from her job for cause. Out of thirty thousand, one was deemed to be unfit to do the job, which means that the system is perfectly willing to accept anything that does not affect the well being of the children who have Jewish mothers, because a Jewish mother will not see someone fail her child. And that's a stereotype, right? And I thought, what a wonderful thing it would be for me to convert Mexican mothers into Jewish mothers, because that's what it takes.It takes the collaborative actions of parents and teachers working together congruently so that the child will get enforcement at the house and enforcement at the school, and this mutuality of the mother and the teacher working together is what it will take for changing the future of poor children.
Espino
Well, that brings me to another point and that is what we talked about earlier with your decision to work with teachers first, and then later on you changed your objective and started to organize parents. The perception of Mexican--I'm not sure if it's Mexican American or just Mexican immigrant moms is that there's apathy. Is that what you're saying?
Mardirosian
No. No. There is no apathy. There is a disconnect, no apathy. There is trust. The Mexican mother trusts, fears and responds and obeys authority. The school is an authority, and the poor mother respects that authority like the Mexican peasant respects the patrón, and in the school, the teacher is a patrón, and the mother respects her and turns her children to her in the hope that that teacher would educate her child to the full potential of her child. That's the expectation. That's the respect. That's the attitude towards authority of poor people. It's not complacency, it's not disregard, it's not low expectation. It is respect for authority, the belief that educated teachers will do a good job with their children.
Espino
Well, how about the argument that when you see your child is not succeeding, they're getting low grades, then do you step in, or do you continue to respect?
Mardirosian
You continue to respect, because the reaction is, well, mi hito no está tan vivo como debe ser, my child is not as intelligent as he should be, always blaming the victim, always saying it's your fault, because you are not incapable. The teacher has a college degree. She wants to teach you and you're not learning. It's your fault, y tómalo. She doesn't know the studies [laughs] that have been made by people from all over the place, which I know. And my job then is to make every mother an advocate for her child.
Espino
And when did you realize that, that was an important goal?
Mardirosian
Well, when I first went into the movimiento and heard the students and heard their woes, because up to that point, up to that day of the walkouts, I was a very complacent parent whose children had done very well in school, whose the children of the members of my church have done very well in school, and the schools must be doing a wonderful job. That was until I was forty-five years of age in 1968. I was not in '68 forty-five, maybe close to it.Because through my childhood in Tijuana and then my years in the ministry and my relationship with the schools as a minister have always been very friendly and very unknowing of the very differentiations that existed. I was totally in the belief that the schools in United States were as good as the schools in Mexico, that all children learn. My children learned. They never felt less than anybody else. I'm Armenian. My father and--my wife [Eunice Mardirosian] is Mexican. I don't know how the children were perceived in school, with a Mexican mother, I suppose, and Armenian father who, Armenians are very scarce anyway, so I don't know what kind of--my daughters tell me that they did feel less than the other children, because we used to buy three dresses for ten dollars every September for each one of the girls [laughs] and that was it. And, of course, the other children in Alhambra and Monterey Park had much more of a wardrobe. But they never communicated that to me and so we did what we could. Financially, I was not able to buy more than three dresses every September.So that my eyes were opened March 1 of 1968. I was asleep all the rest of all my life before that, and it was a new awakening. When I walked into Garfield High School, which was built for twenty-five hundred students, had forty-two hundred and a dropout rate of 68 percent, it was like a can of sardines. That's all I could think of walking in the hallways of that school. What school do you go through?
Espino
Franklin High School.
Mardirosian
Franklin.
Espino
Franklin, in Highland Park.
Mardirosian
I suppose this was not as crowded, but it was crowded.
Espino
Well, I went to school ten years later after 1968 I was there. Well, your eyes were opened to these statistics, all these alarming statistics. But then you talked about how you worked with teachers first, and then I'm kind of trying to find out when did you decide to develop this curriculum for parents and how did that evolve.
Mardirosian
Well, my working hypothesis was that if I could convert one teacher, that will affect thirty children, and it was easier to address one teacher than thirty parents, so economically I could advance more. But after seven years of doing that, and I was keeping score in the reading, because I was very instrumental in getting the school district starting a reading program in '73, and the achievement improved as a result of that program, but not enough to reach anywhere near parity with Anglo children. And the funding for that program lasted only ten years, so after 1980 there was no longer the financial support of the federal government for any kind of improving the capacity of teachers through these courses in the culture and history of minority students.And in 1979 when I ended up in San Diego and tried to ascertain just what was going to happen here, I followed the same pattern that I did in Los Angeles, formed an advisory board to the Board of Education. We had meetings with the superintendent monthly. Then we started with the Father Hidalgo Center, talking to parents in San Diego, and learned that the system was not going to change and the only way that we could get some good advancement for poor children was to get the parents.We started in Father Hidalgo Center with the program of CIEN, Community Involved in the Education of children, Niños, Commite Interesado en la Educacion de Niños. And then I learned--that my pension and Social Security at age sixty-two was higher than my salary from the church, I decided that it was time for me to retire. Then I had the free time to create something, do something positive about learning, addressing parents.
Espino
Well, your first involvement with CIEN, what kind of response did you get from the--how easy or how difficult was it for you to get parents involved at that point, in the very beginning?
Mardirosian
Well, what I did there--at that time I was assistant pastor in the--
Espino
Let me pause it for a second. Your microphone keeps falling off.
Espino
Okay, we're back.
Mardirosian
Went to see Father Hidalgo Center director, Sister Sarah Murrieta. And I was very taken aback for a Catholic community center being named Father Hidalgo, because Father Hidalgo was excommunicated by the Catholic Church and was executed during the Mexican War of Independence. How can you name a social center the name of an excommunicated priest? Because my understanding is that somebody who's excommunicated goes directly to hell. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred. And so I went to see Sarah Murrieta because in Los Angeles I had made friends with Father--quiero decir Morena, pero no era--a priest in Los Angeles who helped me during the campaign in '79, and when I told him that I was going to come to San Diego, he says, "Go and see Sarah Murrieta."So I came to see Sarah Murrieta, and I told her what I did, and I said, "How about getting some people and going house to house in Barrio Logan, asking them how they view their schools, how well their children were doing in school?" That was the question that we asked parents. And these thirty-two people that went door to door on a Saturday, we got to four hundred households in about six hours. And of these four hundred people, we sent them a letter inviting them to a meeting at the center to see what we could do to help children get better schooling. And we did a number of activities. We published a paper.At the same time, I was going to the Board of Education in San Diego, and one day we took a large group of parents and went to the board, and I did my thing that I used to do in Los Angeles, went to the board and give them hell and ask them to mend their ways and do a better schooling, better job.
Espino
Do you remember what the feedback was? Do you remember what the parents were saying?
Mardirosian
The parents--form a group, because they said, "Well, we want our children to have a future. If they're not at par with the children--," in San Diego it is south of [Highway] 8 and north of 8. In Los Angeles it's East L.A. and West L.A. In San Diego it's south of 8 and north of 8, and the freeway divides. And so children south of 8, down; children north of 8, up.
Espino
But were there any specific concerns that the parents had that you remember? I mean, I know that was a long time ago, but I'm curious about what they said to you, because this was the first time somebody had some knocking on their door to ask about how their kids were doing in school.
Mardirosian
CIEN [turns pages]. Well, I have a list of the fifty-four questions that parents had. We started the Parent Institute by asking questions from parents, what their ideas were, and I have those questions, those concerns that the parents have. [turns pages]
Espino
Do you want to talk to me about some of those concerns?
Mardirosian
I'm looking for the list.
Espino
Do you remember what they--
Mardirosian
I want to read some of the items, the questions that they raised.
Espino
Okay. Let me pause it just for a second until you find that.
Espino
Okay, we're back. So you were going to explain a few of the issues that the parents had in San Diego when you went door to door.
Mardirosian
Bueno, aqui esta, por ejemplo, algunas de las preguntas. Some of the questions that the parents raised in these meetings at the school where we started is, [reads] the relation between students, teachers and parents, to understand what role [unclear] have, what is the role of the parent, what role of the student, what role of the teacher. Como funciona, how does the school system work; the rights of parents; what are the values that are taught in the school; how to help the different cultures to flourish together; the interaction of the cultures in the community; the evolution and development of child; what are the stages that their children go through; why education is important; how to help children to learn; how to help parents to understand the goals of the classes they are taught in school; help parents understand the relationship between the environment in the home, the organization of the home, the cleanliness, orderliness, and the ability of the child then to learn; how to encourage parents to learn to raise the aspiration of their children; to help teachers and parents to understand each other; to establish goals for the education of the children that are well understood by parents and teachers; the parents' need to understand what they need to do in order to see the progress of their children with teachers and counselors; the parents of more than one child need to actually learn, meet the teacher of each one of their children.Parents had fifty-four very crucial questions, and then one of the professors of the Cal State College, Dr. Alberto Ochoa, put these questions, the items that the parents had raised in some order and came up with six main topics: how the school system works; working with the school, the child, the parent, and teachers; child growth and development; the rights of parents; teaching and funding learning process at home. So we went about in a systematic way to create an organization that could practically answer the questions in a way that it could be put to work. In other words, we wanted to get from the theory to the practice.And the Parent Institute then developed this curriculum, but then the implementation. We went to the principal and asked him for a list of all the parents with telephone numbers, and the school principal was willing to give this list to me. I learned that nowhere was any practice of any schools to give a list of households with telephone numbers to an outside source. But they trusted me enough to do it. So all right, so we have seven hundred names to call, about 97 percent of them Latino.Who's going to call them? Well, my wife [Eunice] thought that they should be very special calls, that she should establish a relationship with that lady who's answered the phone--most of the time women answer the phone. So we created the position of recruiter. A recruiter is a parent who had attended some of these meetings, knew what we were driving at, and could persuade the other parents. Later on we developed a plan to train recruiters, and my wife was then the one that wrote the syllabus to train recruiters. So we gave each recruiter a hundred names and paid them fifty dollars to make these hundred calls, fifty cents a call. A hundred calls, fifty dollars.Then on the day that the Parent Institute would start, we would pay each of the people who were there because a recruiter had called them, and we knew which recruiter had called which parents. We paid them two dollars for each body that shows up. So if the lady brought in fifteen parents, she would get thirty dollars plus fifty, eighty dollars. If she brought forty parents out of a hundred, she would get eighty dollars plus fifty dollars, a hundred and thirty dollars. So there was an incentive in the part of the recruiter to get the people there.Now, a school invites parents to their functions through an auto dialing program, and they make seven hundred calls automatically, and out of seven hundred, four people show up. We aim to reach 30 percent of households. In other words, if a school has six hundred households, we should get ninety bodies there, ninety parents, at least ninety parents. Our first graduation was ninety-eight parents completed the course. The principal of that school told me, "Vahac, you're going to quit, because you'll never reach ninety parents." But we reached ninety-five parents, and thirty-five of them expressed their opinions, and here they are.Then we ended up with hundreds of recruiters and trained recruiters, trained recruiters. The next idea was, who's going to teach these classes? Well, we thought we should teach these classes by people who have at least five qualifications. Besides being a teacher or other professional, they should first have been poor sometime in their life. That's the first qualification. If somebody had never been poor, we do not hire them. We want somebody who knows in his own flesh what it is to be poor. Number two, he must be a parent. He must have kids. I don't want a twenty-five-year-old college graduate who's never had a child tell parents how to raise children. Number three, they must know the school system so well that they can explain it plainly, because sometimes the principal comes to a group of our parents and tells them about the school system and, they don't learn a thing, because the legalese that school people have goes over the heads of the parent. They do not know how to explain it clearly.Number four, they must know how to shut up. I say to the instructor, "You have ninety minutes to give this class." We give him a syllabus, a topic all laid out, the lesson plan. Ninety minutes. Talk forty-five and listen forty-five. The more you listen, the better teacher you are. And number five, if I give you twenty-five parents, twenty of them should complete the course. Complete the course means that of the nine weeks, the first week is called planning session. We don't do anything other than ask parents to give topics, questions, problems, and put them all on the board. Everything that the parents say, you don't say a thing, just write, write, write.Then we have six lesson plans. Then we have a night with the principal as the eighth night, and the ninth week we have the graduation. So the six core classes are the core of the program, and in order to graduate, the parent must attend at least four of the six in order to graduate. If he comes three times, we'll not give him a certificate. He has to come at least four. Most of them come all six. But if the instructor has twenty-five parents--ah, classes are twenty-five to the instructor, and if twenty of them or more complete the course, we'll pay them $600 for teaching the class. But if only nineteen complete the course, they get $450. And if they get only half of them, they get $300 and a goodbye. So the idea is that these instructors, poor, parent, knows the system, shut up, and retains the parent.All these things were not the requirements of a college professor. You never have--that college professor would never have thought of asking parents to invite parents. She's over here, and parents are down here, and never the twain shall meet. But a preacher has knocked on doors in his whole career, talks to people, sees them every week. They are his bread and butter. They know how to get to the good side of these members, because we don't have a hierarchy. The Baptist minister is an employee of the congregation. The congregation selects him and calls him and can fire him at any time. There's no union of preachers. You can be fired for cause or no cause. And so the idea of the pastor relating to the member as somebody whose goodwill is needed to the welfare of the pastor creates a relationship of mutual need. The members of the church need the pastor to help them, to pray with them, to guide them. The pastor needs the offerings of the people, because that's what his salary comes from. See, this is the relationship that was built into the parent institute [Parent Institute for Quality Education, PIQE], where the instructor needs the parents for his well being, and the parents for their well being need the instructor.Worked in one school. At the end of the year I did not have a salary, because they could not raise enough money. At the end of the first semester they wanted to disband. My board wanted to disband. I said, "No. You don't have to pay me. You pay me next year." So the board was made up of nine members, a priest, a Catholic priest, a pastor, a businessman, a politician [laughs], a Japanese. The idea of creating trust--when we finished in that school and had the ninety-five graduates, I told Cecilia Estrada, who's the principal of that school, "Who are your three best friends who are principals? I want to call them and tell them to invite me." And she called three principals, and the next quarter we went to three schools.By then I had learned that I had to find some money somewheres, because the fifteen thousand that I got from the Baptists per year did not be enough to pay everybody. And we stumbled into someone from the gas company. The gas company gave me five thousand dollars but then invited somebody else who was from a foundation, and this lady heard my spiel and she was impressed, and she said, "Write me a proposal for a hundred thousand dollars." Hijola. With the first year we graduated one thousand parents.
Espino
Can I just interrupt you for a second? The first year with CIEN? Or the first year after you--
Mardirosian
CIEN lasted until the parent institute started.
Espino
Okay. You graduated one thousand parents.
Mardirosian
One thousand parents from October of--the first class was done on my birthday, October 22, 1987. By the end of four quarters, winter quarter, fall quarter, September to December, winter quarter, December to March, and there was summer school in L.A., so by the end of four quarters we had graduated a thousand parents from eleven schools. Every one of them gave me their list.Then I caught the eye of an organization called World Vision, which is a relief organization. They raise money from the government and from funders to do work in Africa and other places, and they thought that they should do something in this country, and they heard of me and said to me, "Write me a proposal." So I wrote a proposal to World Vision, and they finally gave me some money, gave me fifteen thousand dollars to do the work in 1989, in 1990. Then in 1992 they wanted me to come to Los Angeles. I said, "Well, I'll come to L.A., but you find the money. I'll do the program and you find the money." And we did a five-year contract that they would do the funding and I would do the program.So the first school in Los Angeles was in '92, and at that time the superintendent of schools, who had been an assistant superintendent when I was there in the seventies, told me, "Mi casa es su casa," and I had a free hand. And the head of World Vision after one year said, "Vahac, go to it." So I had now all the money that I needed to go to as many schools as I wanted to go, and the thing worked very good in '94. In '92, '93, '94 I went to Orange County to start the program there, in '95 went to San Jose, started the program there, and then Modesto and Fresno and expanded.
Espino
How did you manage all this? You must have had some--
Mardirosian
Well, I had a director, an executive director in each of these towns, but I did everything. I did the fundraising. I was the only--the staff now at the headquarters has about twenty people, but I did all that by myself. [laughs] And the last year that I was there we had forty thousand parents graduating in one year in southern California.
Espino
And this is all soft money. It's not--
Mardirosian
Yes, yes.
Espino
--because you get no funding from--
Mardirosian
By the middle of the--back in 1994 I thought that the schools should pay at least twenty--it cost me in 1992, when I went to Los Angeles, eighty-five dollars to graduate a parent. So the next year I said to the principal, "I think that the school should pay at least twenty dollars of the eighty-five." And all of them agreed. They had Title I funds and they would pay. The portion of the schools has gone up from nothing, because the first four years were free. Now the schools pay between 80 percent of the cost. The program last year cost six million dollars, and the corporate funds were one million. The schools paid the five million, the schools plus the federal government. So the funding for the parent institute now depends on the corporate funding amounts to about one-fifth or one-sixth of the total cost.
Espino
Well, this is just a logistical question. Once you are in a school, is that where you stay? Or do you move around to different schools.
Mardirosian
No. I have--in each school there is an executive director. For each executive director, his responsibility is to do six schools that quarter. Now, if there are twelve schools in that district who want the program, then we hire an associate director, and the associate director does six schools. The director goes to a school, starts the planning session and the first class. Then he turns it over to a coordinator. Then the director goes to start another six schools that quarter, stays there the first two weeks and turns it to a coordinator. The coordinator is not a full-time employee. The associate director is. So at the end of the quarter, the director has had the initial two weeks and the last two weeks, and in the five weeks in between we have a coordinator who is a part-time job. Coordinators make very little money, but they have only--they go to the school, set it up, keep the roll, keeps--every person that attends is registered, and we only charge the school for parents who graduate from the course. If a school has a hundred parents and only eighty graduate, we collect the money from eighty and not from the hundred. So the schools know that if we don't do the job, we don't get the money, and that's my rule.Now they want a standard fee from the school. I say no. You only collect from them per head. If the body is not there, the money is not there. And that's the kind of discipline that I had imposed on this thing to make it successful. The idea of now more than a thousand schools giving us their list of parents and pay 80 percent of the money is based on the kind of hard-nosed driving of a program that depends on the goodwill of the principal. If one principal says, "This thing stinks," all the other principals around that's not going to invite us. We cannot go to a school unless the principal invites us. Why would a principal invite us if we stink? So we have to be so disciplined. Now we have four hundred instructors teaching four hundred classes each quarter.
Espino
And you continue with that program where the teacher gets paid. I mean today the teachers who work for you who teach these programs get paid--
Mardirosian
Six hundred dollars.
Espino
Only if they graduate--
Mardirosian
That's correct.
Espino
--90 percent of--what was it?
Mardirosian
Eighty percent.
Espino
--80 percent of the students. That's interesting. [laughs] Because you assume that they're doing it out of the social responsibility, because that's where you're coming from. You didn't dedicate your life--
Mardirosian
Oh, I get--we had a staff meeting in Orange County in Sant Ana. We had an office in Santana and we had about--by that time about seven executive directors and about fifteen associate directors. We had about forty people in the room, and they started talking about burnout. [laughs] They told me, "They're driving us too hard. We're burning out." I said, "I'm not burned out. I drive myself harder than I drive you." [unclear] apologize.In order to do anything, you have to have determination, discipline, but you have to have a dream, and ever since the walkouts my dream was, how on earth am I going to do something that will help thousands of children get a future? I'm going to get them any way I can, finding ways to create something that will work after I'm dead. And I want you to meet my successor. His name is David Valladolid. Make an appointment to see him, because he has done a wonderful job following through. And I told you how I chose him, huh?
Espino
I'm not sure if you told me on tape or if you told me off tape.
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, David Valladolid was selected by the board to be my successor in 2001, and he had served as staff chief of Assemblyman Pete Chacon, who at his time had the Chacon Bill providing bilingual education in the schools in the state of California. But he also had worked as an organizer for Cesar Chavez, and he also was a veteran of the Korean War who had been wounded and had to stay blind in a hospital about for three months. His father died when he was five years old, and his mother never remarried and raised five kids, and he knew what pain was. And I was an orphan when I was six, and I know what pain was, a good teacher. See him. He'll do a good job. Well, he has a site, PIQE.
Espino
Yes, I've seen that. Well, I think we're going to stop now. It's been two hours and I'm going to turn off the tape.[End of interview]

1.4. Session 4 (May 27, 2010)

Espino
This is Virginia Espino and today is May 27, 2010. I'm interviewing Reverend Vahac Mardirosian at his home in Carlsbad, California.I did a little research over the last week and a half that we interviewed, and I found in the "Los Angeles Times" several articles about your run for the L.A. Board of Education in 1979, and I just wanted to ask you a few questions about that. One is, it seems that it got tense between you and [Richard] Ferraro, the candidate.
Mardirosian
Correct.
Espino
Can you tell me, describe the climate of the time and maybe some of the comments that he made about you and your response to those?
Mardirosian
Yes. At that time the matter of busing was very much in the minds of people in the area, and generally people in the Anglo community were very opposed to it. Latinos were ambivalent. On the one hand, they wanted their children to have better education. On the other hand, they were fearful about the busing, the possible accidents that may occur, the fact that their children will be in a strange environment.But the attacks from Ferraro had to do with the fact that I had been tagged as an activist, and he would accuse me of being a communist at some points. My accusations to him was that he was incompetent, because he had been hired by the Anaheim School District and fired within two months and that he was not properly equipped to deal with the problems of the children of the area that was predominantly Latino.The fact that the district that was created--prior to this election, the board was selected at large, so all of the people in Los Angeles voted for one or the other candidates. But at this particular election, seven districts were drawn and each candidate then would be running for a particular district. The district, District number 5, that was created for the Latino community, extended from Eagle Rock all the way to Southgate, and the vote that ended up at the end gave me 73 percent of the vote in the area that was predominantly Latino, but practically only 20, 22 percent in Southgate, which was at that time totally Anglo, Anglo working class.So the Latino voters were in the smaller proportion. Only about 19 percent of them voted. The Anglo vote was 22 percent. Twenty-two percent of the vote, the Anglo vote in Southgate still gave him plurality in the election. And although I was supported by the "L.A. Times," by KNX, by the "Herald Examiner," everybody in town supported me except that Southgate had the majority vote.
Espino
From reading the articles, I thought maybe the fact that you weren't Latino had an effect on the campaign, because he criticized you for not being--
Mardirosian
But I got the Latino vote. In the areas that were Latino, I got 75 percent of the vote. The people who voted against me were in Southgate. You can analyze the results and it shows exactly what the problem was.
Espino
That issue that you represented as an activist the Mexican American community, but not being biologically Mexican American, you don't think that had anything--
Mardirosian
I don't think so, no, no, no. It was more, the case was more ideological. I was a rabble rouser. I was someone who disrupted the schools, supported the disruption of the school system and therefore would not be good for the children in Southgate.
Espino
Can you talk to me a little bit about some of your supporters? Because, I mean, that sounds like a reason why you wouldn't get the endorsement of the "L.A. Times" or the "Herald Examiner."
Mardirosian
Yes. Well, the "Herald Examiner" support, endorsement, was very puzzling to me, because they were not liberal in their outlook at all, and I was, of course, a liberal by every measure. But they said in their editorial that regardless of all these possible problems that I had by being extra liberal, that they found that I had a better fit to be at the board than Ferraro.But in retrospect, I think that, you know, five hundred thousand parents have gone through the Parent Institute, which would never have happened, absolutely no possibly of such thing existing. It hasn't existed anywhere else, and so the fact that I lost the election--I would have been one in seven, and regardless of all the good ideas that I may have had, I don't think that I would have prevailed over six others who were of a different mindset. So that defeat, in effect, caused or resulted in my again rethinking of what I could do as one individual to improve the lot of thousands of children by creating something that would touch them more directly through their parents. Although I was a Sad Sack the year after the election; I was very, very saddened by the fact that I had lost. But it all resulted to the good.
Espino
I don't know how they ran campaigns at that time, how somebody who was running for the board managed his or her campaign. When I spoke with Dr. [Julian] Nava, he told me about all the different meetings he would go to and organizations that he would speak to. Can you describe to me a little bit about the process of what you did?
Mardirosian
Yes, yes. Well, I had a--Jack McGrath was my campaign manager. He was the campaign manager of Zev Yaroslovsky, so I became a friend of Zev, because Jack had been, and he was sure that before he accepted being my campaign manager, he had examined my record and he said, "I've talked every which--people in the whole town, and nobody has anything against you." So it seemed that he thought that he had a winner in his hands.At that time I was not aware that there were some, what do you call--well, they would ask a group of people for their--
Espino
Opinion? A poll?
Mardirosian
--opinion, a poll, yes. I was not aware that there were polls taken, and the polls showed that Ferraro would win, although I was never told. But Jack knew this. So he sent me every which way, and I talked to a lot of groups all over the place, in senior centers, in meetings of groups of parents. I had the support of the union, the teachers' union, although I had lambasted them. [laughs] Well, it was a quixotic enterprise, but that cured me from the notion that I should go into politics.
Espino
That's a very, very painful--when it doesn't turn out how you expected, I'm sure that must have been like you've described.
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, it was, yes, yes, because I had everybody's support in town.
Espino
Well, looking at Arizona today and S.B. 1070 and also their call to end all ethnic-studies curriculum in the classroom, do you think that because--I mean, I don't want to offend you or insult you, but the fact that you're obviously born in a different country, your accent is from a different country, do you think that when you talk to people in those areas like in Southgate that they might be uncomfortable with that?
Mardirosian
They may. Now that you raise the question, I've never thought of me being other than--I know that I have an accent, but so does Henry Kissinger has an accent. I learned the language in my adult years, and I would never be able to speak the language as a native. But people may have judged me on those bases. I have never felt a sense of being less than because I don't speak like other people. It doesn't hurt my self-awareness in any way. Even my daughters try to straighten me out in the pronunciation of "the," and I never have been able to pronounce "the." But I do the best I can, and if people don't understand me, they can ask me and I'll repeat.
Espino
I only ask because I'm trying to see if anybody made any comments to you or there were any remarks about that or any criticisms, because during politics people will bring out anything to insult and bring down the opponent.
Mardirosian
I'm not aware. I don't remember that. I remember being accused of a communist, and one day at the board meeting a Mexican woman who was very close to the principal of Garfield and took offense at my intervention at Garfield saying that the principal was wrong in bringing the troops of the Sheriff's Department against the students, she said, "Vahac is a communist sent by Argentina. He's from Argentina." And I said, "Excuse me, lady, I am from Armenia," [laughs] "not Argentina."Well, you know, humor is a defense, and I guess I have developed a sense of humor as a way of coping with some of the problems of everyday living. They tell me that the best medicine in the world is a good belly laugh.
Espino
That's what my son says all the time. "Mommy, you know you're going to live eight years longer. Every time you laugh you're going to live eight years longer." [laughter]
Mardirosian
Right.
Espino
Well, I just was surprised by some of these comments in the "L.A. Times" articles, but also impressed with how you were able to win the support of the Mexican American candidate, whose name was Palomo.
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
Can you talk to me a little bit about that, this person?
Mardirosian
He was in the primary, he was running against me, and, of course, he was very much a Republican.
Espino
He was a Republican?
Mardirosian
Oh, yes. Because at that time the primaries, you did not run by any given party. This was the board was not to be partisan, so a lot of people, both Republicans and--would be in the ballot. But since I won the primary--
Espino
"He was wooed by both." According to the article, he was wooed by both you and Ferraro.
Mardirosian
Insensitivity.
Espino
I'm going to pause it just for a second.
Espino
Okay, we're back.
Mardirosian
Yes. Palomo endorsed me, and he helped as he could. But again, the vote that defeated me was in Southgate. Now Southgate is totally Latino, mostly Cuban.
Espino
Interesting.
Mardirosian
A lot of people.
Espino
Well, this interests me because we're talking about a time when people were awaking to their identity as Mexican, as Chicano, as Chicana, as having roots other than European roots, and so you have two men running for a position that is held by a Mexican American, Dr. Julian Nava, and the decision on whether or not to vote, to support someone who's Mexican American from the community or somebody who's not, and you were able to get that support. Can you talk to me a little bit about what you think attracted people to your side or to your ideas and beliefs, versus his?
Mardirosian
Well, remember, my involvement with the community began in 1968 and now we're in 1979, so there is a ten-year history of my work all those years to improve education for all children, but specifically to improve the education of those children who had been left behind by a system that was insensitive to their needs and unaware of their competencies. And they simply--like a teacher said to me one time, he says, "I see a child for five minutes and I can tell you whether he's an A student, a B student, a C student, or an F student." That kind of an attitude that prejudges a child from looking at him for five minutes and deciding that these children simply did not have the capacity to do the work required for higher education, for instance, was so evident in their assessment. It goes against everything that the science and technology have determined.Being a minister, the idea that God is no respecter of people, that all people are equal in his sight, it's simply so ingrained in me that I just could not tolerate any prejudgment of that kind and expressed that way of thinking over eleven years, raising the issues at the Board of Education and then going from school to school to school and pushing the teachers and the principals and creating a program to make teachers aware of the history and culture and background of the Chicano community, all of that has to make a dent in the thinking of people.Well, you have interviewed Rudy Acuña, and, of course, I used his book as a textbook in the Hispanic Urban Center, and we went to several hundred schools, getting more than nine thousand teachers in a period of those years, to listen to a little bit of my way of thinking.
Espino
Can you describe a little bit your opponent's way of thinking? Was it similar, or different?
Mardirosian
Well, he was a traditional teacher who had not been able to go beyond what would be considered a normal Anglo view of the community and of the capacities of people according to their ethnicity. Prejudice means that you prejudge, so people would say, "Japanese children are very bright, because they do very well in school." "Latinos are very negligent. The Latino home is not interested in education." This is a pre-judgment, and most teachers subscribe to those things.For instance, when after working to reinstate Sal Castro to his teaching position, forty of the teachers wanted to get out of that school, or did get out of that school. He had been their colleague for many years and because he stood up and said, "You are shortchanging our children," he no longer was acceptable as a colleague. So I don't think name calling does anything good, but we have to accept that the nurture, the way in which a child is brought up pretty much will reflect the ideas of the community of which he's a part. And to this day, the way in which we will have parity in the schools will require a change in the thinking of those who teach in our schools.Recently, President [Barack] Obama has said that to be a good teacher is a lot of work, and working at the craft of teaching, maybe the idea that they are underpaid begins to make more sense to me, because if we underpay teachers to the degree that we do, would normally shoo away people who have more talent or more capacity. So it's a circular affair. You want brighter, intelligent, hard-working, intuitive, resourceful people, and you don't pay them, so you don't get them.
Espino
Can you talk to me a little bit about the largest barriers you encountered? Because you mentioned your successes and your achievements, but what were some of the barriers that you faced along the way, trying to achieve your goals for improving education?
Mardirosian
[laughs] I just described the mentality of the school system. That's a big, big barrier, and there are a whole lot more of them than there is of me. [laughs]
Espino
Was it ever one individual?
Mardirosian
I lost my mother Maritza Teboyan when I was six years old, and my father Yeghia Mardirosian during the depression was nowhere in sight, so I learned to be a very, very self-sustaining person. I think I can do anything, and I don't think that there are many things that I've been prevented to do that I really want to do. Other than losing the election, I don't know that I have failed in anything else. I've been married now sixty-four years, so my wife hasn't chased me out. My daughters love me, and I can find in them great joy. My grandchildren love me. My sons-in-law love me. I really don't know of things that I value that have been taken away from me.
Espino
I'm talking about obstacles, people possibly, ideas, a place where you go when you're bringing your new--like, for example, the Parent Institute, when you first came here to San Diego. Was it just open arms right away, or were there some struggles that you had along the way?
Mardirosian
Well, to start out a new organization with nothing, a strange idea, the very first principal that I went to said to me, "Vahac, you'll never get more than fifty people from this school to come and listen to you, no matter what you do." I said, "I'm going to get a hundred people to come listen to me." And then I said, "I want you to give me a list of all the households so that my wife will call every one of those mothers," and she gave me the list. And the Parent Institute has been in existence now twenty-two years, and we have gotten thousands of lists of thousands of schools, something that nobody ever does. So I find it hard for me to say that I cannot get something that I want. I don't want many things, but the ones I want I get.
Espino
Then maybe you can talk to me a little bit about some of the qualities that you see, and I'm looking at it as someone who might listen to this interview who might learn from your experience, some of the qualities that you see in achieving these large, major changes in the educational system.
Mardirosian
Well, I think I've made a list of those to people who want to be leaders. Did I show you that at some point?
Espino
I don't think you did.
Mardirosian
Can you stop?
Espino
Yes, I'll pause it.
Espino
Okay, we're back, and you were going to tell me a little bit about what you thought were--
Mardirosian
Yes. I think that at one time I wrote something about how to be a leader. There were ten steps, and I'll see if I can remember them. First is, choose a goal. Anybody who has more than two goals has no goals at all. So in order to achieve something, you have to concentrate in one thing, so you choose what you want to accomplish. Number two, read all you can about that subject. You have to be very, very knowledgeable about that goal from the perspective of everybody that you can think of, so you have to do a lot of research about the goal that you have chosen. Number three, find people who believe in your goal and make them partners with you in achieving that goal. In other words, raise an army. Get people involved in the goal that you have selected as your goal, because you're not going to do it alone. You're going to get a lot of people working with you to achieve that goal.Number four, be open to everybody's ideas so that you can have that goal looked at from the perspective of other people, so that it will not be something that will be an impossible thing, but that it has more than your own thinking. Then you have to be persistent. Once you have chosen that goal, you have to stick with it through thin and thick. You just cannot say, "Well, I have a better idea, something else." You have to persist and be prepared to pay a price for reaching that goal. You have made friends, you have heard their ideas, you have opened yourself up. Explain to your followers who you are so that they can see you from every point of view. You have to be totally transparent so that people will not suspect any hidden agendas. If you have a hidden agenda, you're dead. You have to be purer than Caesar's wife. And find joy in what you're doing. Fight the good fight and be happy about it, regardless of any opinions of anybody else.And then the goal should be one in which the objective is the welfare of other people, because to live and to serve are synonymous. He who lives and does not serve merely vegetates, and that is an insult to vegetables. So that this focusing on the objective that you want to achieve should be such strength, such force that nothing will persuade you to abandon it. Then you may be able to do some good. But the idea of serving is very, very crucial. If you think that you have a career, I have a career, I have a career doesn't say anything about serving others. The idea is, I, me, and not service to those who are in need.
Espino
Well, that brings up something for me and that is--and those are very important tips. But how would you define service? Do you define it--because some people do not--well, I'm sure you've heard of that saying, give somebody a fish and they'll eat for a day, and teach them how to fish and--so how would you define service? Is it something like making free lunches for people? Or is it, what?
Mardirosian
Well, we live in a society that has people at the top, people in the middle, and people in the bottom. The idea of service is looking at the people at the bottom and find an idea that will help them get out from that hole. So service is putting your life at the service of those who need the most. There is a passage of Jesus saying serve the little ones. The most insignificant people are the ones that deserve the most of your love and caring. And so when I looked at a thousand children in a school and nine hundred of them are going to be ending up in the streets killing each other, I want to do something about that. I want to reduce that number of people who are going to be victims of our societal arrangement.The least, the least, that's how I see the service, and it goes along with the idea of enablement, enabling people. One of the things that we do is tell mothers, "Go and show your face to the teacher, because the more times a teacher sees your face, the better your child will do in school." That's a very simple, straightforward piece of advice that science, research says that the child whose mother shows up gets better schooling, better education than the child whose mother doesn't show up. Help you child create a schedule. Child comes home from school and the mother says, "All right. It's now three o'clock. Between now and seven o'clock you are going to eat, you're going to watch television, you're going to do your homework. Choose what one hour you're going to do homework, when you're going to eat, when are you going to watch television, when are you going to play." Create order in the child's mind that he or she can manage his own time. Enable your child to have structure so that homework is part of his life.You have three children. Every week choose one of your three children and give him one hour, to that one child. If one hour is two long, make two half hours. But the week has 168 hours; give one hour to your child. In this one hour, show to your child what's inside of you, who you are, where you came from, what was the town like where you grew up. Tell that child--open up to your child so the child knows your story, so that child will have a notion of what his arrangement is in that family. So one child one hour one week. At the end of one year that child will have fifty-two hours of what you're doing to me here. Your child will grow up knowing a lot about you. The average father in the United States spends less than five minutes talking to a child, the average father, five minutes a week. They don't talk to their children. Their children get their self-image in the street, and the resource is there, but if you are not aware of who your mother is, who your father is, you're going to be lost.These are very simple things that we try to enable parents to understand, and I guess it goes back to my own history. I remember my mother. She died when I was seven, but I've had a lot of pleasure in being close to her. I would embrace her legs and be attached to her, and when she told me, "Vahac, I want you to be a doctor," and I asked why and she said, "Because you can cure me for free," I felt good. Children need that kind of relationship with their parents, and it's a very good part of education.For instance, my father used to get a newspaper from Syria in Armenian, and I would see him sit down and read the paper, so reading became something that I copied, and I found great, great pleasure in reading since I was in second grade.
Espino
I want to get back to one little thing that you mentioned, and this is, to me, a really important point of your work and what you do, and that is the enabling of parents. But I'm looking through some of your documents. It appears that there's a lot of women who go to the institute and also work and become recruiters for the institute. How easy or difficult was it to have men involved in the process?
Mardirosian
Well, every mother wants a future for her child. So when they come to the Parent Institute and take the classes, they become very hopeful and realize how important they are. Once a mother gets a sense, an awareness of her importance to her children, that expands. She wants to share the good news to other parents. So we have in any one semester, in our ten different cities in California, several hundred parents--well, in every one quarter we have ten thousand parents taking the course. Out of those ten thousand parents we select a thousand to become more involved by becoming recruiters of other parents. And so just like in, what do you call it, not Avon but the other one--
Espino
Mary Kay?
Mardirosian
No, the other.
Espino
Fuller Brush?
Mardirosian
Not Avon. Anyway--
Espino
Amway.
Mardirosian
Amway. Amway, Amway, right, right. You recruit other people to do what you're doing, because you'll gain, and in this case, of course, the gain is not monetary, but it is the future of your child, and that's a very important gain. So you want the other mother to have that good thing that you have, and the other mother will have the same feeling toward the others. It's amazing the power of love. The greatest power on earth is the love of a mother for her own child. That's the foundation of the parent institute. And love repeats itself. It grows. That's how we're doing it.
Espino
Well, then, what about the men? How do they fit in? Or the fathers?
Mardirosian
Well, in any self-respecting household, the wife is going to convince her husband of certain things that are important, and she wins over the husband. So now about 40 percent of the people within the classes are men, and the men are not going to be calling other men, but once they show up they may become friends. One of the things we do in a school, when we go and we have a hundred or two hundred parents, we ask, "How many of you are from Michoacan, and how many of you are from Jalisco?" And they begin to form acquaintanceships of people from the same part of the country where they come from. It creates a sense of community, and that's part of the work of the Parent Institute is to create around the school a community of parents who have this one thing in common, which is the future of their children.Part of it is my background as a pastor. A pastor creates a community. The people that come to church relate to one another as fellow communicants. Communicants communicate. They communicate. They commune, eat together. So the Parent Institute's roots are based on my experience as a pastor, but expanded beyond the religion, beyond the church, but because the community around the school, those people around that school having their children in the same school sort of belong together.
Espino
It sounds like from what you describe, you're transforming the way the parent relates, the mother primarily relates to the child, the way the child relates to the school, the way the mother relates to the school. But then you're also affecting, I'm thinking, but you can explain if this is true or not, that there are some changes within the family itself, between the man and the wife, if there's a nuclear family, if there's a traditional, typical, husband-wife.
Mardirosian
Yes, yes, of course.
Espino
Did you see any of those kinds of changes?
Mardirosian
Yes, of course, of course, of course.
Espino
Can you maybe describe a little bit of what you witnessed?
Mardirosian
Well, one father says, "The Parent Institute taught me to talk to my children. I used to bark at them. Now we talk." And that affects the relationship of the husband and the wife. The idea of a man relating to his family is very, very important to the welfare of the child, and gaining an awareness of the importance of the child to the father is part of the understanding of the education of that child, because education goes beyond learning the ABCs and the numbers. Education has to do with the kind of person you become. It goes beyond academic awareness or academic learning. It becomes a way of being.And my idea is one thing that I want to accomplish is to make the school the center of that community where the parents and the teacher of that community relate to each other in a constructive, positive way, so that the child will have a good foundation. And again, this is the pastoral and the academic merging. That's why I don't think that a pure academic person would have invented the institute. They had their chance.
Espino
Well, reflecting back or looking towards the future, what is your hope, then, for the Parent Institute, now that you've handed it over to another capable person? Say you could have anything. Money was not an issue and agreement by school districts was not an issue. What would you envision?
Mardirosian
A good education for every child. In California right now, one of every three Anglo students who finish high school will get a B.A. In California right now, one out of ten Latino children will get a B.A. I want that if--in the next twenty years the population of California will be majority Latino, and California will need one out of three of those students to have a B.A. Our society is a technological society. We need to prepare for the future of the state, and we need the kind of people who have been trained to take a role in this technological society, so educating children for the kind of jobs that will be available to them in the future is very important to everybody.
Espino
Do you see the Parent Institute fitting into that achievement?
Mardirosian
Of course. Of course. We have reached one half a million parents have heard my speech or some simile of it over the last--because we have about four hundred instructors teaching these classes all over the place. We have several hundred recruiters recruiting all over the place, and you take hundreds that becomes thousands and thousands that become millions, we are creating a new society. I want to die in peace.
Espino
Are you satisfied today with what you've done, what you've achieved?
Mardirosian
I'm pretty satisfied. For an orphan from Armenia to be a Mexican. When I was elected to the EICC [Educational Issues Coordinating Committee], the guy who was running against me was working for the mayor in Los Angeles at that time. Como se llama [What's his name]?
Espino
Aragon?
Mardirosian
No. No, he was not a--
Espino
Deputy?
Mardirosian
--deputy mayor. Well, it will be in the [unclear]. He ran against me for chairman of EICC. [Educational Issues Coordinating Committee]
Espino
In '68?
Mardirosian
In '68.
Espino
We can find his name.
Mardirosian
But I was elected and the meetings were every week, two hundred people, three hundred people all clamoring for attention, all clamoring to straighten the crooked ways of society. I said, "One thing I do--." You had some other questions?
Espino
This is just going to be my final wrap-up question, and that would be any final thoughts, anything you want to talk about before we end today, any comments, reflections?
Mardirosian
Well, I don't know if I should read my ethical will.
Espino
Your ethical will?
Mardirosian
Yes.
Espino
Okay, let me pause it for a second if you want to get it.
Espino
You wanted to read something to me?
Mardirosian
Yes. On my eightieth birthday, somebody suggested that I should write a will, and I said, "Well, I don't have any money, so what's a will for?" He said, "No, no. I want you to write an ethical will." So I said, "Okay, I'll write it." In those eighty years I've learned a few things that I want to include in my will. [reads] "First: I've learned to love and cherish my family above all earthly things. Number two: I've learned to make friends. They are the most satisfying experience in life. Three: Next to family and friends come books. I started reading books in second grade and I have yet to stop. Four: I've learned that laughter is the best medicine to live a healthy life. Five: I've learned that to live and to give are synonymous. Six: I've learned that the greatest tools one can use in life are, one, to be a learner, to be patient, to be forgiving, to be persistent, to accept myself with all my foibles, and to accept others with all of theirs. Seven: I've learned to give myself to a cause that fills my day with great satisfaction. Eight: I've learned to be grateful for the things I have received, because gratitude enhances life. Nine: I've learned to give advice sparingly, because it's very hard to know what are the burdens that others carry. And ten: I've learned that the highest goal in life is to do justice, love mercy, and humble myself to walk with God."
Espino
That's beautiful.
Mardirosian
And that's the end of Vahac Mardirosian.
Espino
Thank you so much for giving me your time.
Mardirosian
Take a second [unclear].
Espino
Okay, I'm going to turn it off now.[End of interview]


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