Through the Eyes of Children

By Melissa Ludtke

JOHN DAVID GUTIERREZ LIVES in a comfortable house on a treelined street in Austin. His billowy black hair, olive skin and dark eyes proclaim the Mexican blood that came north with his grandparents. His American-born mother and father, fluent in Spanish and English, consider themselves Mexican Americans. John David, who speaks only English, is not quite sure what he is. "I don't know," he says, "I guess I'm a Tex Mex. If my mom brings over a bunch of friends who talk Spanish, I would shake hands and try to say hi. That is all I probably could say to them. I guess I would just call myself an American."

John David has sought his identity through sports. He has a blessed combination of quick reflexes, good speed and a lean, trim build. At 5 ft. 4 in., he is still growing. In basketball, John David plays center for a community team; in baseball, catcher; in soccer, goalie; and in football, defensive end. The television room in the one-story wood-and-stone Gutierrez house contains dozens of trophies, team pictures, championship caps and gold- plated plaques from the competitive dream of becoming a pro baseball player. Or being a soccer player in the World Cup. Or playing baseball in the Olympics for the U.S. In my dreams, I try to be the best I can."

John David is young enough to believe still in the potential of childhood dreams. But he has seen dreams fail. He has two older brothers, Abelardo, 23, and Xavier, 19, who during adolescence lost their way. "They had a chance, and they didn't do it," says John David. "Abel, he was a good pitcher, and he had a chance maybe to go to college. And Xavi, he could have made it too. He told me, 'Try not to mess up like I did.' "

Abel, named after his father, is the eldest of four sons. He once pitched a no-hitter on the way to the Babe Ruth World Series quarterfinals. But in his junior year of high school, Abel inexplicably quit baseball. His parents could not persuade him to stick with it. "When he was 13 or 14, he got involved with kids who didn't give a damn," says his father, a solicitous, gentle man who at 52 works in the auto-parts department at a General Motors dealership and devotes his spare time to coaching his kids in their various sporting activities. Along with his wife Mary Louise, 48, a small woman with an optimistic nature, he attends every game their sons play. "Abel believed more in what those kids had to offer than what we had to say," recalls his father sadly. Now Abel works as a systems operator at a local management company.

As a youngster, Xavi had spinal meningitis, and school was always difficult for him. But he worked hard, set money aside and sent out applications to junior colleges. Two months after Xavi graduated from high school last year, however, his girlfriend Laurie, who had just turned 16, gave birth to their son Robert Isaac Gutierrez. Two weeks later, they were married. Laurie has returned to high school, where day care is available for Robert. Xavi works at several minimum-wage jobs, the only ones he can find.

From his brothers, John David has learned how difficult it is for young people to take on adult responsibilities. "I don't want to have a family like my brother has now, at an early age," John David says. "Not that soon."

His mother has worked full time at the state department of human services, where she processes vouchers, since before her first child was born. "Nowadays, once you start depending on that second paycheck, there's no turning back," she reports.

"I have been staying home by myself until my mom gets home since I was in kindergarten," says John David, who usually entertains himself with television. "I'm not really scared, because we have friends around here if anything happens."

Recently he has been playing with Nintendo, the video game that is the Hula-Hoop of the 1980s. Nintendo draws millions of children into the high- tech, button-pressing world that may be their workaday future. Sometimes John David plays alone, but when his five-year-old brother Christopher is home, the two of them compete against each other. The boys sit together in an armchair pushed close to the television set, their fingers moving expertly across the buttons on a palm-size control panel. They are mesmerized.

Their father regards Nintendo as a symbol of the struggle that Hispanics have with the Anglo world. "I still believe we are Mexican-American people," Abel says. "When John David and Chris and some of the other kids play the Nintendo games, it is to be competitors with the Anglo people by having what they have."

John David has a different perspective. His parents, who grew up in southeastern Texas, were kept out of the Anglo world as children. John David has not grown up as a outsider. "The kids haven't experienced prejudice," says Mary Louise. "We experienced it from the Anglos from the day we were real little, when we couldn't go swimming in Austin's public pools. When we talk to the children about it, they say, 'Oh, Mom. That couldn't have happened. Not here.' "

When the elder Abel was growing up, he and his eight siblings picked cotton until the harvest ended each autumn. The elementary schools they went to were segregated. John David has always attended integrated schools and plays on integrated teams with blacks, Anglos and other Hispanics. "I have friends from different races -- blacks, whites, Mexicans," says John David.

Sometimes in America a strange obliviousness becomes the price of assimilation. John David tries to piece together his heritage. "I guess it's like you come from another country. That's a country, isn't it? Mexico?" He asks in all seriousness, "Isn't it a country?" On television John David sees news reports of people with olive skin and thick black hair like his crawling through holes in a barbed-wire fence that separates Mexico from the U.S. Is this how his parents' families came to America? He does not know. "Freedom. I guess that's why they came," John David concludes. "I don't know if they had money."

His grandparents were poor and powerless, but they were rich in the hope that life in America would be better for their children. "My daddy believed in us helping in the cotton fields, but he didn't want us to be what he was," says the elder Abel. "He wanted something more for us." That wish came true. Abel and Mary Louise provide four sons with the comforts and opportunities of a middle-class upbringing. But they worry about the hurdles their third son must now clear, barriers that seem even higher than when Abel and Xavi were in school: the increased prevalence of drugs and alcohol, the growing temptations of early sex. They worry about a terrible undertow that drags children down, that somehow robs them of hope or motivation.

After a 7 a.m. breakfast of bacon rolled in a singed tortilla, John David is ready to leave for school. Dressed stylishly in a blue-striped button-down shirt, blue sweater, wide-pocket gray jeans and Nike sneakers, the sixth- grader hops up into the cab of his father's pickup truck for the ten-minute ride to Bedichek Middle School, where a majority of the 1,040 students are Anglo. After school, John David takes a city bus home.

By the time the morning's announcements start, John David is at his desk preparing for math and science. The voice over the loudspeaker reads a poem. "Accept me for me./ Even though I am not the image of your fantasy,/ I am striving to be the best I can be./ Please accept me for me." Despite the fidgeting, the students seem attentive.

The poem is aimed at children with a profound and growing problem: for varying reasons, they have simply quit trying. Many students actually brag when they receive an F, as if it were a flag of proud defiance. Kids who wave it see no reason for caring how well they do. Life is pretty good right now, they conclude. Won't it always be this way? They seem immune to external motivation from parents or teachers. These children languish, blankly passing time behind their desks until a lure like drugs or gangs or other trouble leads them away.

"I think the idea of the American Dream has vanished from these kids' minds," says Suzie Doerr, a teacher at Bedichek. "These kids think life is fancy-free." Hermelinda Garza Perez, a second-generation Mexican American, teaches eighth-graders. "Their goal is to get by, not to get better," says Perez. As a child, she went with her mother to her job as a maid. "My mother always said to me, 'I don't want you cleaning someone else's commode.' "

Commodes and cotton fields were powerful motivators. But there was more. When John David's parents were growing up, society passed along the message that there was reward for striving. And many people, like Abel and Mary Louise Gutierrez, did succeed. These days the message needed to motivate kids seems more confused and tougher to deliver.

"We gave our kids what we didn't have," says Mary Louise. "We gave them material things, which maybe in a way wasn't good." Two steady paychecks enable the Gutierrezes to provide their children with middle-class paraphernalia: video games, three television sets, a stereo in John David's room, a VCR in the family den, trendy clothes. Their life-style is far from extravagant, but, as Mary Louise admits, "the children are really not wanting for anything. A family needs two paychecks to make it, to give kids what we didn't have. Maybe that's not good. We had love as kids, and we had nonmaterial things. We had intangibles, like we had Mother at home with a little snack when we came in. These kids don't have that because their mommy's out there working."

John David's biggest uncertainty involves drugs. Will he succumb to pressures to take drugs? At Bedichek, there is a club called B.A.D. (Bobcats Against Drugs) and T shirts proclaiming the club's message: I'M HAPPY TO BE S.A.D. (Students Against Drugs).

Sometimes, though, John David imagines a group of older kids trying to force drugs on him. "I might try to run where there is a bunch of people. But if I ran, they would just gang up and beat me up. They might carry knives, and they would stab me. They would probably leave the knife in and run off," he says. "The other option is just to take the drugs, but I don't know if with just one, you'd get addicted to it. Just depends on what kind of drug they put in it. Those are the only two options I can think of right now."

John David's parents prepare once again for a son's imminent departure from childhood. They know the pressures on him will be intense, as they are for so many millions of children today, but they hope John David will find the strength in today and the belief in tomorrow to carry him safely through. "Children need a sense of security," says Mary Louise. "If they don't have that, if they go out there and feel they can't turn to us, then they are lost."