We moved around a lot when I was a teen. Downsizing. Outrunning evictions. My family was what you might call downwardly mobile, locked in a financial spiral precipitated by a layoff, a terminal cancer diagnosis, and a nasty case of alcoholism that left us deep in debt and unable to claw our way up to prosperity. It’s a quintessentially American story, made all the more so by the fact that my mother immigrated from Bolivia; married a white man she thought would be good to her; and had me, the mixed-race child she hoped would live the American Dream. It went so well, right up until it all fell apart.
By junior year of high school, I was living with my sister and sharing a room rented from my aunt, who helped look after us. I had enrolled at what would be my fourth and final high school, which is now called Justice but was still named after a confederate general when I attended in the 2000s. This was in Northern Virginia, the part of the state that likes not to think of itself as the South yet named its public schools after confederates, slavers, and Civil War battles. Luckily for me, Fairfax County had some of the best-rated public schools in the nation at that time, and despite bouncing in and out of the county I landed at a high school with a rigorous International Baccalaureate (IB) program. That’s where I was introduced to what would go on to be a foundational film for me: Ramón Menéndez’s Stand and Deliver (1988).
Based on the true story of Jaime Escalante, a charismatic math teacher who started an AP Calculus program at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Stand and Deliver opens on Escalante’s first day as a teacher. He arrives at the school as the front office is in some disarray after an act of vandalism, and tries several times to explain to the office manager that he was supposed to be teaching computer science before the beleaguered head of the math department explains that they still don’t have any computers. “We were supposed to get computers last year and the year before, and there’s no funding for them again this year,” she says, hands outstretched in a gesture like, What can you do? Story of our lives, right? Garfield is an underfunded school serving underprivileged students in the barrios of East Los Angeles. In later staff meetings with this department head, she will point out, fairly, that the school doesn’t have the resources to deal with high school kids who arrive with barely a seventh grade education. Some of them are illiterate. Many of their teachers, such as the math instructor who applied to teach physical education, barely know more about the subject than the students. The message is clear: Don’t expect to get anywhere with these kids. They’re undereducated, we’re under-resourced, and the odds are stacked against us all.
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When Escalante first enters the classroom, the students are goofing off, unsupervised; they immediately start to poke at him, the way bored teens anywhere would do. One boy massages the girl sitting in his lap as he quips, “Let’s put our desks in a circle and talk about our feelings,” in a tone meant to mock a certain kind of teacher. Escalante responds only by saying, “One body to a desk.” The girl dutifully stands up, but tries to push Escalante’s buttons again by asking, “Can we talk about sex?” Here the film unveils one of the keys of Escalante’s teacher charisma: his quirky and often subversive sense of humor. Edward James Olmos nails this aspect of the character and delivers the outrageous line, “If we discuss sex, I have to give sex for homework,” with a totally straight face—to the delight of the students. It’s the type of comment that could absolutely get a teacher fired (as one student points out), but it’s also perfectly attuned to its audience: the kind of canny high school kids who’ve been written off as “troubled” or “difficult” by teachers who have tried and failed to connect with them because the teachers have no idea who the kids are, where they come from, or what they’re going through outside of class.
One of the things that endeared Stand and Deliver to me was how it represented the difficult lives of Latin students like myself—something I hadn’t seen depicted in film before (and have only rarely seen since). Most of the kids have to work to help their families make ends meet, either in paying jobs or as unpaid labor, cleaning the house and caring for younger siblings while their exhausted parents struggle to keep up with grueling work schedules. Some are pressured to quit school and join the family business. Others are in gangs, like Angel (Lou Diamond Phillips), the “cholo” with the greased-back hair, crisp white t-shirt, and pants he refuses to get wet at the beach. Angel is the most complex character among the students—the gang member too proud to be seen with textbooks but too clever not to find a workaround (he asks Escalante for extra copies, one to keep at home and one to use in class, and Escalante throws in a third for his locker). Angel challenges Escalante, calling him out for being a rigid hard-ass who doesn’t give the kids any slack, but he’s also the one who takes Escalante’s teachings most to heart. Early on, Escalante teases the boys who like to act tough. “Tough guys don’t do math. Tough guys deep fry chicken for a living,” he jokes, and the words hit Angel right in the ego.
Without explicitly saying so, Escalante positions math as a way out of the barrio. He asks one car-obsessed kid if he wants to fix engines or design them. He tells another student’s father, a restaurant owner, that if he lets his daughter go to college, she can come back and teach him how to run the business. It’s arrogant stuff—the kind of pick yourself up by the bootstraps rhetoric that fueled the dark heart of the American Dream for generations and fooled entire demographics into thinking that if you don’t make it, then you only have yourself to blame—which makes it all the more annoying that it’s still true: for a lot of people, especially immigrants and their children, the best way to improve your socioeconomic position is by going to college. That’s the conclusion I came to as a child, when school was the only real source of stability in a fraying family life. For years, I poured myself into my studies, getting top grades in all my classes, doing homework by candlelight when we fell behind on the utility payments and the electricity was cut off for about a month one fall. I was good enough at math to know I wasn’t a prodigy. When a teacher screened Stand and Deliver for us my senior year, I was taking IB Math Higher Level (think AP Calculus with a little group theory thrown in), and recognized in myself that same dogged determination to get ahead that Escalante inspires. Instead of an engineer or computer scientist, I dreamed of being a writer, and clung to that goal like a life raft.
Looking back on the film now, as a published author and teaching artist, I identify almost as much with Escalante as the students. You see: he’s also Bolivian. He was born in La Paz (and his wife’s family is from Cochabamba, my mother’s hometown). His heritage is identified early on, when Angel and the other members of his gang, some of whom are not even enrolled in this class, show up late. Escalante tells them, “I’m El Cyclone from Bolivia. One-man gang. And this is my domain,” but the word “Bolivia” never appears again. The only other reference to his heritage comes during a dinner scene at Christmas, when he wonders aloud why his wife didn’t cook lomo montado or pique a lo macho (also called pique macho), two uniquely Bolivian dishes. The former is a variant of the perhaps more familiar lomo saltado, a beef and tomato stir-fry from Peru, while the latter is a hearty mix of beef, onion, tomato, bell pepper, French fries, and (at least in my neighborhood) sliced hot dogs. Pique macho was a staple on the menu at Luzmila’s, the Bolivian restaurant I went to as a kid. Only after I left for college did I realize how rare a place like Luzmila’s was. How few Bolivian restaurants there are in the United States. A decade would pass before I visited another.
In that decade, another question formed in my mind: where are all the Bolivians in movies and books and other representative media available in the United States? I can count on one hand the number of Bolivian Americans publishing fiction in this country today. If we add in Bolivian fiction writers whose work has been translated into English in my lifetime, that number is still in the single digits. Even when our stories do make it to the American public, they’re rarely told by Bolivians. Jaime Escalante was the first Bolivian I ever saw onscreen, but was played—brilliantly and to deserving acclaim—by Edward James Olmos, a Mexican-American actor. In Scarface (1983), the primary villain is positioned as a Bolivian drug lord, but he’s played by Paul Shehar, an actor of mixed Polish and Slovene descent. In Quantum of Solace (2008), the Bond Girl is a Bolivian national played by Olga Kurylenko, an actress of Eastern European descent. And how many of you knew that Raquel Welch, the Golden Globe-winning actress and sex symbol, was half-Bolivian? Her father was born in La Paz, like Jaime Escalante, and one of her cousins, Lidia Gueiler, was Bolivia’s first female president, albeit on an interim basis.
Perhaps it was naïve of me to assume, after I saw Stand and Deliver in high school, that it wouldn’t be long before I saw another Bolivian character in a big Hollywood movie. As a child, I regularly saw other Bolivians at Luzmila’s or the bodega, and I thought that this was normal, that our stories were everywhere. This was a time when a lot of Latin people thought Hollywood was finally catching on, partly because of the successes of movies like Stand and Deliver, La Bamba (1987), and Selena (1997), which came out when I was six and catapulted Jennifer Lopez into superstardom. By the time I graduated high school, however, those films were a decade or two old, and Hollywood had not made much else for the Latin market in particular—certainly not uplifting movies where a Latin character is portrayed as a hero or a star. Instead, the cameras turned to gritty dramas about immigration, drug trafficking, and crime, as in the show Narcos. Two notable exceptions came to us from Disney: Coco (2017) and Encanto (2021), both gorgeous films in their own right that tell uniquely Latin stories and feature brilliant work from both Latin and Spanish voice actors. Note, however, that they’re both animated films, fantastical in nature, and take place outside the United States, thus removing any possibility of American audiences watching the films and seeing Latin characters succeed in this country.
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Why is it so hard to bring Latin stories to screen? One answer is offered by the film itself, when Escalante tells his students they already have two strikes against them. He doesn’t say what exactly those strikes are, because for them it’s simply understood: they’re brown, and they’re poor. Most people of color in this country know what it’s like to work twice as hard to get half as far. That’s why it’s so infuriating—and so utterly typical—that when Escalante’s students all pass the AP Calculus test, their scores are questioned. All of them receive the same letter that summer, after they’ve already graduated and celebrated their success. “It’s standard procedure to grade the test with the identity of the student concealed,” the letter says. “Only after the irregularities were found was it determined that the students in question were all from Garfield.”
In other words, the Educational Testing Service (E.T.S.) is accusing them of cheating because they all arrived at the same wrong answers. The E.T.S. sends two investigators, a black man and a Latin man, the latter portrayed by Andy Garcia. Both investigators are polite, insisting on the purely procedural nature of the investigation, but they don’t admit mistake, even when there is no evidence of cheating. In a tense scene, they question the students, pushing one to walk out, insulted by the implication of wrongdoing. “Yo vengo de este barrio,” Andy Garcia’s character whispers to one girl, who looks sad and frustrated, afraid of getting accused of something she didn’t do. “I know that sometimes we’re tempted to take shortcuts.” Infuriated, Angel fake confesses, cooking up some story about getting the answers from a mailman, then killing him. “I strangled him. His body’s decomposing in my locker,” Angel jokes, as the room breaks out in mocking laughter.
At no point do Escalante and his students react to the accusations as if they’re part of some inconceivable injustice. Their body language in the meeting is dejected and resigned, but never truly surprised. This is America, after all. What did they expect? Every success—every hard-won victory and government-issued proof of citizenship—can just be taken away from you, if that’s what the authorities want. It’s racism, pure and simple, and Escalante says as much when he goes to visit the E.T.S. investigators. Andy Garcia plays the scene with restraint, laying out his position like an academic, “thorough to the point of being boring,” until eventually he snaps, “No one can accuse me of racism!” He and his partner think they’re just doing the job they worked so hard to get, but to me they read like the kind of people of color who climb the ladder, then pull it up behind them, as if no one else is good enough—smart enough—to achieve something they can’t. When the students agree to retest, the investigators proctor the exam themselves, watching the students like hawks. About halfway through the exam, they share an uncomfortable look: no one is cheating. In the end, all the students pass, and the original scores are reinstated.
As a teacher, there’s no better feeling than watching my students succeed. I teach creative writing, not math, but the feelings of care and attention are the same. I want my students to make it in the industry. I want them to beat the odds. And as a teacher I know how hard the work is and how much of your time it demands. Escalante puts in 60-hour weeks, teaching the students late each day and on the weekends and over the summer to get them ready for the test. In the film, the whole process takes two years, but in reality he had been teaching for four years before he added AP Calculus to Garfield’s curriculum, and it took several more years for the class to consistently produce passing scores on the AP test. He works himself sick (suffering a heart attack in the film but gallbladder inflammation in real life), and when he eventually leaves Garfield, scores start to drop. The system cannot sustain itself without him.
Critics of the film point to the overwork and score collapse as examples of bad pedagogy, but as an educator I say: what public school teacher isn’t overworked? What underfunded school doesn’t rely on underpaid and charismatic teachers to generate student interest in a system they all know is failing? Many of my friends teach or have taught in public schools, and the system is no better today than it was back then. In many ways, it is much, much worse, as the administration destroys the Department of Education, strips funding from public schools, and shunts federal money into voucher programs designed by segregationist Christians. Every year, it seems like the odds get harder, the stakes get higher, and the success stories more difficult to wrestle out of the system. And yet, day after day, teachers walk into their classrooms and put in the work.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of public school teachers in this country right now just as charismatic and innovative as Jaime Escalante. Each one of them has their success stories: the troubled kids who turned their lives around after meeting the right teacher at the right time, the C student who could be coaxed up into an A with a little extra studying and tutoring, the girl who moved around so much she went to four different high schools but maintained the grades to go to the Ivy League. It is still possible to beat the odds and defy expectations. In the final shot of Stand and Deliver, Escalante walks down a long hallway after hearing the results of the retest. The camera remains static, watching his silhouette recede into the bright L.A. sun as text appears onscreen: in 1982, 18 students at Garfield passed the A.P. exam. In 1983, 31 passed. The number grew every year until 1987, the year before the film was released, when 87 students passed. The audience knows all this, but Escalante doesn’t, not yet. He’s still there, in 1982. He pumps his fist, elated, vindicated, because they did it. They all passed. He will have to teach a new batch of students the next year—and the year after that and the year after that—but in that moment, the summer stretched out before him, and there was nothing to do but celebrate.