Denver Westword (Colorado)

Four high school students in military uniforms were horsing around in a cinderblock corridor deep inside Coors Field. It was fifteen minutes before the Rockies would take on the Phillies, and two decades into the latest surge of immigration into the United States. One of the students was named Pablo. He had pale skin, short dark-brown hair, ears that stuck out a little, and a long face. A ribbon pinned to his green uniform indicated that he was an expert marksman, and another revealed that he was the commander of a company of Junior ROTC students back at West High. Dressed up like a soldier, Pablo looked like a young man who was willing to die for his country.

“One minute to showtime, troops!” barked Sergeant First Class Joseph Damon, a balding Vietnam veteran turned ROTC instructor.

Pablo dove into the women’s bathroom, where Sergeant Damon had stashed the cadets’ equipment, and emerged with the American flag against his shoulder. The four teens then marched down the long hallway and out onto the vast, emerald expanse of the baseball field. They halted in shortstop territory, where the Wilmot Elementary School chorus was waiting for them. As the pint-sized singers filled the stadium with a warbly, high-pitched version of the national anthem, the student who was carrying the Colorado flag tilted it downward. Pablo, however, continued to hold the American flag absolutely upright. A sudden breeze made the flags snap sharply; the only other movement in the frozen tableau came from Wilmot’s chorus leader, who conducted with admirable vigor. When the song ended, the stadium was silent for a moment, and then the fans roared in unison.

It was an American crowd, cheering for what looked like a quintessentially American spectacle. Would the crowd have cheered as loudly if they knew the full story of the teenager holding the American flag? Pablo didn’t think so, which was why he typically kept quiet about his past. Nine years earlier, when he was a third-grader living in Chihuahua, Mexico, his parents had applied for tourist visas that would allow them to visit the U.S. temporarily, and they’d driven the family across the border in their dilapidated sedan. They’d never gone back. After spending a lonesome year in Joplin, Missouri, the family moved to Denver, where they had kin. They arrived just in time to help their new home town achieve the status of a “gateway city,” in the terminology of the Brookings Institute. Thanks to the torrent of immigrants flowing here over the last decade, the number of foreign-born people living in the metro area increased 178 percent during the 1990s — a rate exceeded by only a handful of other metropolitan areas in the United States.

When his mother walked him over to his new elementary school, Pablo became one of the thousands of undocumented students flooding into Denver Public Schools. In 1996 there were 13,911 Spanish-speakers in DPS schools; by 2003 that number had doubled, to 27,002. For the most part, these students had been born in Mexico, or their parents had been. It was impossible to say exactly how many of them were undocumented, because nobody tracked the statistic; a Supreme Court decision prohibited school officials from asking students to reveal their immigration status for fear of scaring undocumented families into keeping their children at home. However, knowledgeable principals at several elementary schools with large numbers of Latino students recently estimated that those schools were probably as high as 40 or 50 percent undocumented. Overall, agreed several members of the DPS board, it was reasonable to assume that at least 20 percent of the students the district now served lacked papers — and a few boardmembers thought that figure too conservative. (Up in the mountains, where ski resorts attracted even higher concentrations of illegals, more than 50 percent of the students in some rural school districts were probably undocumented.)

Not on the periphery of the country, in other words, but somewhere much closer to the heart of it, we were raising an entire generation of young people who would not be deemed American when they came of age, even though they had grown up here. A small but impressive fraction of these students turned out to be like Pablo — the stars of their high schools, the students adored by all of the teachers. They were graduation speakers at North and they were valedictorians at Manual and they were cheerleaders at West.

Pablo allowed others to mistake him for American whenever possible. Now that he was on the verge of becoming an adult, though, he was finding it harder and harder to avoid the sorts of questions that would reveal his illegal status. He had been treated just like any other American kid in elementary and middle school, and for the first two years of high school as well. But in his junior year, all sorts of people started asking for his Social Security number — the priest who wanted to hire him for a part-time job, the administrator who hoped to admit him to a prestigious internship program, the college counselor who urged him to compete for full-ride scholarships offered by places like the Daniels Fund — and, of course, he didn’t have one to give. All of a sudden, everywhere he turned, he faced this confounding matter of lacking a nine-digit number that every adult in the United States needs in order to become a fully productive member of society.

One day last spring, Pablo took a seat in the front row of his AP calculus class just as a girl named Maria strolled by wearing a hot-pink T-shirt and a pair of skintight, white denim hip-huggers.

“I want some pants like that,” Pablo called out.

“You always want my pants!” Maria scolded happily. “You said that about the ones with the flowers on them, too!”

It was the end of the school day, and everybody else seemed weary. As Ms. Shore, the calculus teacher, slogged through a review of derivatives, many of the students drifted off into their own conversations. Above the blackboard, somebody had hung a large foam hand that pointed upward and bore the slogan “Build a better nation — get an education.” As more and more of the kids abandoned any attempt to follow her, Ms. Shore stoically launched into a problem in which the students were supposed to find the volume of a pool, then figure out how long it would take to fill it with water. To illustrate it, Ms. Shore drew a lopsided trapezoid on the blackboard. “Miss, you’re very artistic!” Pablo sang out. Ms. Shore shot him a look of mock exasperation that did not conceal her delight.

“I got 144 for the volume of the pool,” announced Pablo.

“Let me check,” said Ms. Shore, turning to the back of her book. “Yes, that’s right.”

Pablo had been living in the United States for close to a decade by now, and he’d become an almost-all-American kid. He ranked fifth in his class, and his teachers adored him; besides being smart, he had a mischievous sense of humor that helped alleviate the tedium of the classroom. “He’s a good bad kid,” teacher Jennifer Portillo said fondly.

An enormous banner in the school’s main lobby exhorted students to “THINK COLLEGE,” and Pablo did. Most of his classes were advanced-placement courses, and he spent the spring of his junior year preparing for the ACT exam. Pablo’s best subjects were physics and calculus. “If you have an x and a y, what famous mathematician comes to mind?” asked Mr. Pomponio, his physics teacher, one morning. “Pythagoras,” replied Pablo. During the subsequent review for the AP test, Pablo supplied so many answers to Mr. Pomponio’s questions that the teacher finally had to egg on the other students, crying out, “I’m only hearing one voice here!”

Back when he was a promising middle school student, Pablo had been recruited to join West’s prestigious magnet program, the Center for International Studies, which emphasized the importance of understanding other cultures. At the last annual CIS fundraiser, director Dan Lutz described how school-sponsored trips to other countries transformed the CIS students. “The experience has changed their lives, ” Lutz preached. “Not just because they encountered a different language, a different currency. They’re learning how to listen, with the understanding that other people may be seeing the world in a different way.” Then Lutz showed a snappy, upbeat video that spoke of the necessity of creating “globally minded students” who could become the leaders of tomorrow’s “global society.”

Pablo was pretty global-minded already. He soaked up information about other parts of the world, primarily through television. He was especially partial to the Discovery Channel, and each morning when he arrived at school, Pablo laced his conversation with bulletins about what he’d learned from the Discovery Channel the night before. “The I.T. capital of India is this place called Bangalore,” Pablo announced one day. “It’s creating a lot of problems in India, because the place is Westernizing so quickly. There are people celebrating Valentine’s Day there now.” But Pablo was never so preoccupied with world affairs that he failed to pay attention to the people around him. He never passed a handicapped student in the hallway without greeting that student by name.

Pablo belonged to an extremely close-knit circle of friends who had known each other since middle school. When we walked into his third-year Japanese class one morning, Pablo took a seat in the front row, turned around and told me, “This is my posse.” Andrew and Miguel looked like grown men, and barely fit into their school desks; Uriel and Sergio were still as slight as Pablo. Uriel had blond hair, blue eyes and a narrow, angular face. Sergio had an extraordinary mop of dark curls that he wore in a densely overgrown Afro. The five teenagers frequently snickered together for inexplicable reasons — all of their jokes were inside jokes, all of their memories shared. When they passed each other in the hall, they slapped hands or reached over to fondle Sergio’s wobbly hair. Everybody else in the posse was an American citizen, however, which made Pablo’s predicament a lonely one.

When Pablo was not with his posse, he could often be found in the company of a vivacious, stylish student named Blanca. Blanca sometimes appeared at West in outfits like her fetching Chinese silk-blouse-and-trousers ensemble, complete with a pair of chopsticks stuck in her hair; she often looked like she could go straight from school to a cocktail party. Pablo maintained that he and Blanca were just friends, and while their interest in each other never quite seemed to qualify as romantic, other girls often had crushes on Pablo — and then got confused because he spent all of his time with Blanca.

One morning, Pablo and Blanca and I were having pancakes with strawberry topping and whipped cream at the Denver Diner, not far from where Pablo lives. Pablo was talking about his decision to testify before the Colorado Legislature on a matter of deep importance to him. It took me a while to realize that every time I looked down to write in my notebook, he was flicking spitballs into Blanca’s right ear.

Pablo, Blanca and various members of the posse liked to perform in plays. As sophomores, they’d won a national competition for the best History Day skit in the American public school system for an original script about the Sand Creek massacre. This year, they’d decided to perform a scene from Two Gentlemen of Verona in the school district’s annual Shakespeare Festival. On the day of the performance, Blanca looked radiant in a pink frilly gown, while Pablo looked faintly ridiculous in a floppy woman’s hat, a gold-embroidered vest, green velvet bloomers, black dress socks and black dress shoes. It was impossible to understand the inaudible comic asides that Andrew and Sergio made to the audience, but Pablo enunciated his lines clearly as he knelt before Blanca and spent himself in an impassioned plea for her affection. Blanca responded with a fiery diatribe about how lacking she found his suit. “Hie you home to bed!” she ordered, full of disdain. Off-stage, however, Blanca could be just as fiery in expressing her admiration for Pablo. She cited his talent on the stage as proof that he wasn’t just another unlettered peasant, that he didn’t fit the stereotypical image of an illegal alien. “He’s not just somebody who’s ignorant!” she fumed.

Blanca was a fervent student activist with leftist leanings who viewed the Junior ROTC as an insidious arm of the military-industrial complex. Pablo, on the other hand, viewed Junior ROTC as a vehicle through which he could learn important skills such as leadership. By his junior year, he was serving as commander of a company of other students, mostly fractious freshmen and sophomores. “Stop flirting!” he instructed members of his unruly company one afternoon in the ROTC building. “Flirt after class!” After leading the group in the Pledge of Allegiance, Pablo pulled a yellow pencil from behind his ear and took roll call. As he called out the names of various cadets, one after another responded, “Here, captain!” Pablo loved the Junior ROTC program and spent all of his spare time in the building. Less patriotic students enjoyed ridiculing those who wore the dress greens. “They call us Å’pickles,’” Pablo confessed. He shrugged off the slur; in the chaos of a large public school like West, he found the ROTC program to be an oasis of discipline.

Sergeant Damon was laired up in a tiny cave of an office at the back of the building. He had served 23 years and eleven months in the U.S. Army before joining the faculty at West and had a manner that was equal parts drill sergeant and mother hen. His tour of the facility included a wall-sized display of the chain of command, topped by a grinning, amiable photograph of President George W. Bush. The Junior ROTC motto was painted on another wall: “To motivate young people to become better citizens.”

Sergeant Damon said that the staff had known about Pablo’s immigration status when they’d picked him to be part of the color guard — because Pablo himself had volunteered the information. When they asked him to carry the American flag, Pablo reminded them that he wasn’t a legal resident, wanting to make sure it was really okay for somebody like him to be the flag-bearer. Sergeant Damon thought it was. “We understand that this country is built on immigrants,” he said, “so I have no hangups, so to speak.”

Inside the walls of Pablo’s school, this accepting attitude was typical. Outside of school, things were different. Pablo’s family lived in a cramped brick house that was painted a dull red. A chain-link fence outlined the tiny front yard, which consisted of neatly swept dirt. The first time I visited, Pablo seemed too big a character to fit into such diminished surroundings. Pablo’s father, a short, barrel-chested man with a thick mop of black hair, was sitting in the tidy living room before the television set, which was tuned to the Discovery Channel. Pablo’s two-year-old brother, who was born in this country (making the family partly legal and partly illegal), kept appearing and disappearing from other rooms. When Pablo’s mother arrived home, she just waved and retreated into the kitchen.

The reason for my visit was to discuss with Pablo’s parents how I would identify their son; because of virulent anti-immigrant sentiments around the state, my story could put the whole family at risk. Pablo’s father looked at his son and said only, “Que tu quieres.” He left the decision up to his sixteen-year-old.
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