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]