The Interview
Gil Conchas
By John Koch, Boston Globe
As a boy, what were your dreams?
I didn't want to be like my father, meaning I did not want to go through the same hardships. He worked the entire Southwest picking strawberries, tomatoes, grapes. He had a tough time. The last 23 years of his life, he worked in a mushroom plant in Ventura, California. Every day, he'd come home and I'd see his hands scarred, dirty. My mother worked there, too. I didn't want that.
When did you get interested in the kind of work you do?
At age 5. My mother had to go through the court system to pursue a workers' comp claim and had no one to speak English. I took that role as the interpreter, so I knew that perhaps I could do something different than working in the fields. A lot of family members came to Ventura, and I was the one they turned to to go through the social service agencies. "Where's Gil?" they would say. I loved the role.
What's original about your research on minority youth?
I'm not looking at racial minority failure. Too much research has been conducted on why low-income urban kids fail, and we haven't done much about it. So let's look at how and why they are succeeding, and perhaps policy makers can listen. What works? They need a community within a school where it's caring, where they have a rigorous and relevant curriculum. Another need is having a professional mentor in the field who kids see in their work environment. A lot of my work talks about social scaffolding: It's not so much about perseverance or resiliency but more about how certain structures help or impede minority youth.
Why is your brother in prison?
Jesse Conchas is my little brother. He just turned 25. In high school, he was close to a 4.0, and his passion was to go to college. But at 17, he was charged with second-degree murder of another young Mexican-American male. It's not clear that he committed the crime. There were at least 20 youths involved in the gang fight, but Jesse took the blame. He's serving a 16-year-to-life sentence. I keep in daily contact with him.
Why did you succeed and not Jesse?
It has to be explained through generational differences in gang involvement. When I grew up in Ventura, there were just kids doing kid things - cliques but not gangs. But Jesse grew up with the sons and daughters of hard-core gangers who went through the prison system. I grew up in the same neighborhood, but my peer group was not involved in that environment. We still had the recreational center, where every day in the summer they had a function for us, and they would provide lunch. When Jesse was growing up, one of the first things [President] Reagan cut was all those special programs.
What are Jesse's dreams?
He's eligible for parole after he serves his 10th year, but in California, the parole system is very difficult. He graduated from high school in prison. Now, he's enrolled in a University of Missouri prisoner correspondence program, training to be a paralegal. He exhausted the prison resources: He became a VCR repairman, an upholsterer. He had this strong expectation he was going to do well and get his parole and come out and live with me and go back to school. I would love him to live with me.
How does he feel as the subject of your study?
At first, an academic publisher was interested in it, and he laughed. He said: "I want to do the project so no kids will do this, and I will be the example. But you know what? I don't want one of those books that no one's going to read, that stuff you write. I want something that's going to impact kids in high school." He said he'd do it if that's the case. It will be told through his experiences and his voice. The point is for a kid to pick this up and say, "This is me, this is what I'm going through, and perhaps I can take a different path."
Do you have anything like survivor's guilt?
At times, I do. I sit here in this office and say to myself, what did I do differently that I'm able to enjoy the work that I'm doing? I have this beautiful view of Radcliffe Yard, and I think, what is Jesse going through locked up behind bars? Here I am enjoying all of this. But then I think, you know, it's what my parents intended, it's why they worked so hard: I'm in a position to understand structures that both promote and impede success and to write about that.
Is your mom clear about what you do for a living?
No [laughing]. I talk to her almost every day, because my father passed away last April. He died also not knowing exactly what it was. He said, "I give up; I don't know if you're a sociologist or a psychologist. I can't pronounce it. All I know is, so long as you're doing good for other people, that's what's going to make me happy." My father had a third-grade Mexican education, and my mother had a fourth-grade education. To this day, my mom doesn't understand why I couldn't be out in one of the California schools and doesn't realize the significance of a Mexican-American here at Harvard as his first job. She says, "You could be teaching in Santa Barbara, and I can fix up the garage for you." I thought that was really sweet.
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