Dot Pretty Brainy

For Two ’Tween Girls, Self-Esteem Came from a Life that Required Them to Step Up and Think for Themselves

Nelda Molina remains in my heart a star among strong, self-confident girls. So does her friend Sylvia, who was my classmate for about 3 weeks in 1973 in the 5th grade. She was 13. She came to school in the spring when her family migrated to the Ohio Valley for seasonal work with a local vegetable grower. Their migrant house sat on the edge of a muck field they would work, if they stayed through the season, until the ground froze and the damp air seemed frozen around our mouths. Hector, another schoolmate whose family stayed late in the season, would sit on the school bus with his hands between his knees, trying to be warm.

So Nelda, Nora Chopa and her mean brother and other school friends—David, Hector and others—were our classmates in spring and fall. If their families made the seasonal migration from El Paso or homes in Mexico. If these children came back to school. Sylvia didn’t stick it out past her 3-week, 5th-grade trial, and if she deliberately chose not to return, at age 10, I understood why. Sylvia took on our teacher, Mrs. Moss, in an exchange that unfurled Sylvia’s complete self-confidence and righteousness in the face of rules and authority that had not been questioned, never mind challenged. She posed one question that set off the teacher and erupted into an emotional event that superseded the afternoon’s science lesson:

“Teacher, when do we go home?”

Sylvia was tall and articulate. She didn’t care to know or use the teacher’s name, a challenge itself, and she expected accountability. She wasn’t getting anything out of the class. She was done for the day. When Marion Moss verbally flailed, unprepared to field even an entry-level challenge to authority, Sylvia went on to say that really she did not need school and her brother and sister would teach her what she needed to know to get on in the world.

“Teacher” sputtered more loudly, but the real point-counter-point was over, and Sylvia had won.

That was her last day at New Haven Elementary.

And 5th grade was the last year we saw Nelda, who the day of the Sylvia-Mrs. Moss showdown, was the translator who helped Sylvia understand American idiom and innuendo. Because racism was a part of the schoolroom environment.

Nelda’s family had been migrating to Ohio to work the fields for enough years for several of her older sisters, then married and having babies, to have been through New Haven Elementary, and she had been our classmate since 1st grade. And then in 6th grade Nelda did not come back to school. Years later I realized the most likely reason Nelda had not returned was because she had started to work the fields. Out in the muck with the rattlesnakes tending celery and onions.

Just the year before, she had been one of the kids on the playground. She was among the quickest, most agile athletes. At kickball she would jump over the mean throws of older boys who struck out little kids by smacking the ball at their feet, tripping and impairing them from gaining the next base.

She put up with none of that.

She and Sylvia moved with self-confidence and know-how because they had experienced a larger slice of life thanks to their families’ culture and migrations. They were prepared beyond their years, beyond the “practical” activities designed to build confidence in ’tween and teen girls that I was taking part in. Their ’tween self-esteem was rooted in a life that required them to step up. And they were strong.

It is July, and in the dog days I remember my classmates whose working lives began in the fields when they were young. And then I think of the colleague who related that last week when she got together with other mothers and children for a play date, the boys made up games and ran and enacted scenes while the girls quietly sat at a table coloring.

And I’m happy to remember Nelda.