Around this time I moved from South Chicago into an apartment by myself in Bridgeport. I had gambled on Chicago. Now I found myself pretty much alone and missing the family feeling that had nurtured me both as a boy in Waukegan and in the movement. My friend, Tom Dubois, helped my get a part time job teaching English as a Second Language to Mexican immigrants in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. A small elementary school field house at 53rd and Hermitage became the setting for a new chapter in my life – a chance to learn the Mexican experience in Chicago. Most importantly, I found yet another of the support systems that I had sought out wherever I landed in my odyssey.
The ESL class was mostly women. They would check their kids in at an impromptu day care center that we had set up. I called the ladies “my morning garden of flowers.” Back and forth we all went – necessary English phrases, grammar, pronunciation, and spelling. I was “El Maestro”. Their respect helped carry me through those times of defeat and loneliness. I learned about places and customs in their enchanting and complex reality. Worried that I was holding my students back by always practicing my Spanish, I recruited a couple more ESL teachers. Then I taught high school equivalency in Spanish. I went from book knowledge of Spanish to semi-fluency. I showed them through my example that mistakes are the only way to learn.
I always said, “They teach me more than I teach them.” Once I was doing an exercise with a student, “What did you have for breakfast?” He turned to a friend and said, “Como se dice corn fleis en inglés?” I figured that he had woken up to corn flakes. Only years later did I realize that corn fleis in Mexican Spanish really means any cold cereal.
These were the days when Harold Washington was running for mayor of Chicago. A cherished friend of mine from many political causes, Marc Zalkin, had alerted me early to Harold’s plans. I knew him from Madison. Marc later became a speech writer for the mayor in city hall. Marc was a part of Slim Coleman’s political operation in Uptown. He was known at the guy with a thousand ideas. Anytime I saw him twirling strands of curly hair above his right ear, I knew some new, creative thought would soon come out his mouth. He tried to get a job for me in the Chicago Public Library. He died of complications of multiple sclerosis in 1998.
Harold’s candidacy blossomed into a crusade – stirring the aspirations of Mexicans as well as African Americans. I remember canvassing door to door in the Back of the Yards. A small parade of immigrant children would follow us to show that they were on the bandwagon. Rudy Lozano, one of Harold’s main Latino supporters, spoke about the campaign in our small school. That was the only time I would meet that passionate, gracious, and humble man. He would be assassinated in his own home a several months later just as he was stepping into major political prominence.