Mundelein High School - Voices Magazine - 2020

V o i c e s 2 0 2 0 | 46
Breaking Barriers
Jacky Morales
This might be a compelling story all in itself. A little Mexican American girl learns
the importance of education. She spent her time inside the two bedroom apartment on
the couch reading Rainbow Fish to The Immortal Rules while the other kids pulled out
their Star Wars lightsabers. If she’d forget about education and continued living as a
poor Mexican, she would’ve been considered a good future house wife. But she is living
in a two bedroom apartment with six other people and considered an outcast who
couldn’t be as successful and assertive as any male no matter how much she yearned for
the end of her poverty and the start of a good education. Asking questions and being
curious made others think she was foolish, as if she should’ve known everything. This
filled her with doubt and insecurity for which now she alludes to herself in third-person.
A smart Hispanic woman was considered a daydreamer, generally shamed,
dismissed and reminded she belonged nowhere else but at home doing chores and
cooking to find a future husband after completing high school. I participated in my
classes every day, breaking the Hispanic women stereotype. Hispanic girls feared to
have a voice. They, the girls who feared to have a voice, wanted me to remember my
place in our society when my teachers wanted to get to know each one of us or when
they expected us to participate to show we can do it too. We were expected to be quiet,
get pregnant, or dropout. Most Hispanic women lived up to fulfilling those standards.
They did plan on dropping out because it was too difficult for them to keep up with but
never planned on not satisfying those typical Hispanic women stereotypes. They found
themselves pregnant and fell into drugs but never put the same yearning for something
priceless, their education. They claimed to be independent even though they knew their
parents and society were setting them up to be dependent, fulfilling those stereotypes.
As Hispanic girls, we were expected to be unintelligent and fail. Those who failed their
education were welcomed to a low minimum wage job, a two bedroom apartment with
6 people, and a family who believed you couldn’t be more. Was there a way out?
I refused to be led to a path of stereotypes, specifically made for housewives. I
was resilient. I was stubborn. I was smart enough to pass. I stayed up late at night
finishing homework. I stayed after school to get help from teachers. I stayed after school
to get involved in clubs like Temas Latinos, Robotics club, and tutoring. I spent days and
nights studying for tests and finished homework after working 6 hour shifts at Subway
and cleaning offices with my mother after school every day except for Wednesday’s. I
asked my teachers “How can I improve on my grade for this class?”. I asked my teachers
“How does this lesson relate to life or benefit mine?” I constantly threw questions to all
my teachers to get further into depth of the topics I learned in their classes. I took my