Conference:Gente

At the conference hotel, I caught up with a former mentor at the poolside bar. We met a Puerto Rican business man. He found out I was working on my dissertation, stopped trying to hit on us and shared instead about his three daughters. The oldest one is being courted by Duke University, she is gifted. I shared with him that Latino's make up less than 10% of students enrolled in gifted high school programs. He said to my mentor, "You do not know this, but in our culture we want to make our parents proud. I know she is making her parents very proud. She makes me proud."

Still I am Latino deprived, I have not met one other Latino conference attendee. Hope to see my friend from Miami today, we bonded over this same issue three years ago.

The server at the restaurant brought me my lunch and I tried to eat it with a fork and finally had to ask if they had tortillas. "Flour our corn?" corn I replied. She new where I was going with my potato tofu scramble and offered me some salsa. "How is the salsa?" oh, I think I will stick to ketchup, "It is not very good," she smiled and took it away.

I was in my room when the cleaning person came by. At the door she asked if she should come back. Switching to Spanish I asked her to please just straighten up the bathroom. She asked me what I was there for. Told her about the conference. She said I was the only one she had met that spoke Spanish. I smiled and said I know. She asked where I was from. I asked her if she had kids, how were they doing in school? Told me she works long days and commutes from Tijuana and sometimes her kids don't put forth the effort in school. I said you tell them you work hard so they can do better, if they have no interest in school then they will be working as hard or harder for the rest of their lives. Her name was Guadalupe, I wanted to give her a hug, but handed her a thoughtful propina instead.