Mole is more than a basic ingredient of Mexican cuisine for a bunch of kids from the Oaxacan community in Los Angeles.
It's also MOLE, or Moving Toward Oaxacan Learning Through Education, a program intended to help children who are themselves immigrants from Oaxaca or whose parents came to Los Angeles from the southern Mexican state.
The large number of immigrants from Oaxaca in the region has led to the formation of various community organizations throughout Southern California, including an after-school basketball team whose members recently received sharp new uniforms for to wear on the court.
The uniforms are part of MOLE's efforts to encourage the children to stay in school, no small feat given the drop-out rate for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which saw one-third of high school students leave school last year, with the numbers even higher for Latinos.
According to reports, Latinos have one of highest drop-out rates of any ethnic group among LAUSD students, totaling 30%. The number is slightly better than the 40% rate for Afro-American students, but is in some ways even more troubling because of sheer volume, since Latinos account for more than 72% of the entire LAUSD student body.
The 26 young basketball players attend different schools and range in age from 8 to 15. They squads to compete at various levels under the team name "Thunders."
It's not all basketball for the group. The kids have spent the summer months studying reading, writing and arithmetic to go with rebounds. The MOLE program keeps sports and academic close — literally. Study sessions are held outdoors, near the basketball courts at Venice High School. The classes last from two to three hours before basketball coach Zeus Garcia takes over.
Gabriel Cruz, president of the Oaxaquena Business Association (AON), said that the organization's members hope that supporting children with uniforms and other sports equipment will help keep them off the streets and out of the gang culture that thrives in many of their neighborhoods.
"We do not want to see more Oaxacans fall into gangs or drugs," Cruz says. "That is why we support them. The sports, the culture and education — can help form healthy communities."
The challenge of graduating high school is well-known in the Oaxacan community in general, and particularly familiar to Jasmine Aquino, who was recently promoted to the 6th grade at Grand View School in Los Angeles.
Aquino's mother, Lucia, wasn't sure her daughter would go on to the 6th grade. The elder Aquino, a native Zapotec speaker who came to the U.S. from Santa Ana of the Valley in Oaxaca, at first heard from a vice principal at the school that her daugther's mathematics and reading were too low to merit promotion to the 6th grade. That's when the academia side of the MOLE program stepped in, providing tutor Rafael Gutierrez Garcia, anthropologist Kanae Omura, and teachers Yuriana Velasco, Pablo Idelfonso, Fernando Garcia and Joel Lopez Garcia to help Aquino get back on track with her studies and test scores.
President Obama has recently outlined an agenda for education reform. But Felipe Lopez, a member of the faculty at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) and a founder of the MOLE program, says that he thinks that getting parents involved in the education of their children is likely more important than anything an education policy can offer.
"I have been involved in education programs since 1996, and what I have seen is that it is necessary to look for mechanisms of involvement for the parents in order to change the culture they had in Mexico, where education was left to the teachers," Lopez says. "Here [in the U.S.] it quite the opposite. The parents must participate, because a good program does not make the difference when parents do not participate"
Lopez said that parents who serve as teachers' aides in the classroom or as playground guardians after school "really makes the difference."
"We cannot leave the education of the children into the hands of a program or the teachers if we really want them to go to college," Lopez adds.
The view is different for Velasco, one of the teachers who volunteered to help young Jasmine Aquino with her studies. Velasco teaches Spanish at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. She says more schools and teachers are needed in order to provide a quality education and proper oversight for students.
"In my class I am going to have 40 students," Velasco says. "I believe that I cannot give the same attention to all the students.
Velasco says she is proud to work as a volunteer with the MOLE program, even as she worries about overcrowded conditions in her classroom being made worse by funding cuts that might accompany the state budget, which remained pending when she spoke.
"This program surely is going to help these children who are trilingual — speaking English, Spanish and Zapotec, go to college," she says. "I believe that all they need is knowledge and learning. And if we don't have the resources to provide knowledge and learning, how will they ever get to college?"
Photos by Impulso
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