The Boundary Between Us: Prep Seniors Visit the La Fe Community in El Paso BY MARK BIXBY
El Segundo Barrio, El Paso, TX 79901, is the third poorest zip code in the United
States.The median household income in the bar- rio (population 6,500) is $11,0671 (compared to $37,030 in El Paso). More than 50% of the residents of this neigh- borhood, which straddles the Mexican border, are foreign born. Not surpris- ingly, almost 50% of the population speaks little to no English. About 80% of El Segundo’s residents claim to have a “less than a high school” education; 8% have a high school diploma or GED; fewer than 2% have a college degree; 0.3% have graduate-level degrees. While these numbers paint a bleak
picture of an historic neighborhood that has been called the “Cradle of the Chicano Movement,”2
grassroots
activism based around the barrio’s Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe is revi- talizing this iconic El Paso community. La Fe got its start in a single-room apartment within one of the barrio’s poorest tenements in 1967. It was organized by a group of mothers who wanted to offer local health and human resources assistance to the his- torically underserved community. Now, almost 50 years later, La Fe com- prises a network of health and human services in El Segundo Barrio. From dental/medical care, to citizenship and English classes, to technology tutorials and afterschool programs, La Fe is doing its best to offer advancement opportunities within walking distance of all neighborhood residents. In 2005, La Fe CEO Salvador Bal-
corta decided that the La Fe complex was missing one important compo- nent: a community school. His vision for a local charter school took him to Prep alumna Amy Sanders-O’Rourke ’99. After studying psychology and Spanish at Williams, Amy moved to Guatemala City in 2003 where she taught kindergarten at the Colegio Americano de Guatemala. In August, 2004, she moved to her parents’ home- town, El Paso, where she taught sec- ond grade for a year until a tour of the La Fe community sparked her interest in helping Mr. Balcorta realize his
vision. He asked her to submit a plan for the development of a charter school at La Fe. He liked what he saw, and he entrusted Amy with crafting a curriculum and opening the school. After two years of planning and navigating the state’s educa- tion credentials process, La Fe Preparatory School opened in August of 2007 with Amy Sanders-O’Rourke as its head of school. She has crafted a dual-lan- guage, service-oriented, small-class- focused school that currently serves pre-K—4th grade. The hope is to con- tinue adding grades all the way through high school. The expectation is that El Segundo Barrio will finally have a school to send its graduates onto college and help break the cycle of poverty endemic to the community. I first met Amy this year when my
Senior English Elective—La Linea, the Boundary Between Us and Them— decided that our border literature/cur- rent events class would be best served by a trip to the region we were read- ing about and discussing each day in seminars. My Prep colleagues sug- gested that I reach out to Amy. I sent her an email describing my course and intentions to bring a group to El Paso, and she responded by helping me cre- ate an experience that my students and I will never forget. Fourteen students joined me and
Prep faculty member Mike Multari to travel south this past March for four days of border immersion. On our first morning in El Paso, three agents from ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) came to our hotel to explain their role
28 SANTA FE PREPARATORY SCHOOL MAGAZINE 2011
The group at the Border Protection Office.
in combating the weapons-smuggling that fuels Mexico’s drug war. One of the agents then gave us a driving tour of the border’s conflict zones and led us out to the Border Patrol Field Office, where we heard a synopsis (and received a recruiting pitch) of El Paso Sector’s operations. From there, we journeyed to El Paso poet Bobby Byrd’s press—Cinco Puntos—and received an “underground” tour of El Paso’s past and present from a man who has built his reputation on pub- lishing new, lost or forgotten voices of Latin America. The following day we journeyed to
El Segundo Barrio to spend a day with Amy. She set up a tour of the La Fe Health and Human Services facilities led by Estela Reyes López, who gave us one of the most passionately inspired 90- minute presentations on La Fe imaginable. Amy then took us to her school, where she presented the his- tory and mission of La Fe Prep before letting us venture into the classrooms to spend time with the kids. Amy took us to lunch, and then we went back to La Fe for a presentation on gender vio- lence in Juarez, by University of Texas- El Paso professor Kathleen Staudt. Amy saw my class syllabus, which included a novel about disappearing women in Juarez, and she reached out to Profes- sor Staudt (an expert in the field) to share her work with us. The day was capped off by a presentation by Amy’s husband, City Councilman Beto O’Rourke, who spoke about his
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