Annotations for Subject-headings: Students

Esperanza, or hope. It's said, that's one thing young people living in this day and age, often lack. But in San Antonio, Texas, a group of teenagers is creating theater that expresses a measure of hope for the future. Even amidst a reality of drugs, gangs, identity questions, and homelessness. Along with Lucy Edwards Latino USA's, Maria Martin prepared this report.

[Natural sounds, theater] Grupo Animo

It's the Friday afternoon at Fox Technical High School in San Antonio. The young members of the acting troupe El Grupo Animo, ages 13 to 18, have come together to start rehearsing their new production. The group's name derives from the Spanish word meaning spirit, energy, and a desire to inspire and the drama they're preparing is written and performed by the kids themselves.

[Natural sounds, theater] All the young women in the piece, over here.

Identity. [Natural sounds, theater]

The drama in production is called, "I Have Hopes, Hopes I Keep Sacred in My Soul." It's a series of vignettes, tales of young people, much like the members of El Grupo Animo, facing life's challenges and learning to cope.

It's about a young girl who gets pregnant and she has to tell her parents because both of us know so many girls who have already gotten pregnant and it's not looking better or anything.

I'm 17 years old, and I wrote about the homeless. So much we can learn from our people. They've gone through rough times, and by that, a lot of them are on the streets, and we don't even care about them.

I decided to bring up the issue of teenage homosexuality, because Hispanic, Mexican American families, it's harder for them to deal with it. There's a lot of tradition, and a lot of the tradition is built around the male role model and female role model, you know?

14-year-old Michaela Diaz, along with Guadalupe Covera and Victoria Rivera, are among the nine playwrights who make up El Grupo Animo. 16 year old Priscilla Valle wrote about a young gang member.

He's dealing with the pressures of being tied to his gang, but then wanting to get out and be free and lead the life that he wants to lead, that the gang doesn't allow him to.

You don't understand, what if they come after me? Babe, they know where I live.

They're tearing you apart. They mess around with people's lives like it's nothing. You can't be afraid to be who you are. Don't keep it down forever. I hate them!

It's really a lot of what's going on in their minds and in their lives, but they never have a place to talk about it.

Director George Emilio Sanchez of New York is working with the young playwrights and actors of El Grupo Animo.

It takes a lot of courage to be a young person. It takes a hell of a lot of courage to say, "Yeah, I'm young. I don't know everything, and I want to be alive." Boom. That to me is like heroic. I think individually, if you read the things they write, no, I don't think they have a lot of hope.

But still, say the kids, their stories do express hope as the title of their collective work indicates.

Even though we are, we're sad and depressed about it. I think there's always that bright side and that hope that we have, and that's just what the whole play is about.

That's why I think that the name of it, "I Have Hopes, Hopes I Keep Sacred in My Soul", is what we're using. They're not all happy plays with happy endings, but we're not trying to say that the whole world is terrible. You know, that everything's terrible, that there's no hope for anything. Even though we know what reality is, we still feel that there can be a change, that there will be a change, and if anybody, we'll be the ones who will do that. And that's our message, basically.

El Grupo Animo’s production of "I Have Hopes, Hopes I Keep Sacred in My Soul," runs through July 17th at San Antonio's Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. The Center's theater director, Jorge Pina, calls the troupe the next generation of Chicano Teatristas.For Latino USA with Lucy Edwards in San Antonio, I'm Maria Martin.

I'm Maria Hinojosa. November 2nd is election day in many places throughout the country. In California, voters will decide on a controversial initiative known as Proposition 174, a school voucher proposal, which advocates say is right in step with parents fed up with the state's troubled public schools, but which opponents call, a thinly veiled attempt to bankrupt the public education system, in which 36% of the students are Latino. Isabel Alegria has this report.

Proposition 174 would give each student $2,600 in state education funds, to use toward tuition at participating private or religious schools. Advocate Sean Walsh says, "Simply put, the voucher initiative would give parents, especially those stuck in inner city schools, the power to ensure their children get a good education."

It says, okay, here is $2,600. Walk into your principal's office with this $2,600 and say, "Mr. Principal, either you do a better job of educating my child, or I'm going to go to a school that will." And if the school does not improve, then you can say, "I'm out of here."

Opponents of the measure say, if it were that simple, Californians would be embracing Prop 174 wholeheartedly. But recent polls show they're not. Rick Ruiz is a spokesperson for the No on 174 campaign. He says one of the measure's main problems is that it would give all students a voucher, including 500,000 already enrolled in private schools. That means a drain of more than a billion dollars in public education funds to private schools over three years. Ruiz says advocates of the voucher plan are unconcerned about the effect on public schools.

They seem to be more interested in punishing the public schools than in reforming them.

Prop 174 has been rejected by many Hispanic civil rights groups, including MALDEF, LULAC and the Latino Issues Forum. Ruiz says there's no question that voters in California, especially Latinos and African Americans, want to see education reform, but not at the expense of public schools. In interviews outside Lazear Elementary School in Oakland, parents, most of them Latinos, express this same sentiment. But there is another concern over Prop 174, says Edgardo Franco, who was at Lazear to pick up his little sister and says he'll vote no on the measure.

I don't think we should be giving them money for they want to open their own school without a license. And then someone, the government probably, is going to give them money to do it. So I don’t think that's right. I think they should give the money to the public schools better.

Franco is expressing a widespread concern about the voucher plan that opponents say may result in the measure's defeat. Polls show most voters don't want public money to go to private schools that aren't required to hold to state standards on academic safety or teacher training. Rick Ruiz of the No on 174 campaign says even if parents did believe that private schools were better, most of them would be hard-pressed to send their kids to the private schools of their choice.

The really top quality private schools that are enjoyed by the wealthy charge anywhere from $7,000 to $15,000 a year and more. A $2,600 voucher is not going to provide anybody access to that kind of education.

Proponents of Prop 174 say these negative arguments are based on false information. Advocate Sean Walsh says surveys show most private schools, like parochial schools, would be accessible with a voucher. As for state supervision of schools, Walsh says it has hardly resulted in a top-notch public system. But Walsh says, what will influence voters the most to support the voucher plan is their disillusionment at the pace of school reform.

And again, we feel confident that when those parents go into that voting booth and they pull that little lever, that they're going to stand there before they do and say, "You know something? I can't afford to have my child go another 10 years without any sort of educational reform, that my child will be out of school by then and my child will have lost his or her future."

Opponents of Prop 174 are convinced voters will reject the measure, but they're not as quick to say that a no vote on November 2nd should be considered the final word on the idea of school vouchers. For Latino USA, I'm Isabel Alegria in San Francisco.