Payments to the Past
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union PAYMENTS TO THE PAST BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers that exists again in us, but all sorts of dead ideas and all kinds of dead...
...We haven't the least objection to the name...
...There was no place for Chicanos to go that spoke their language...
...Within two weeks of the name change, he notes, hud announced the start of foreclosure proceedings against the Benedictine Sisters (technically still the mortgagees...
...But the situation is more complicated...
...The sisters grew discouraged...
...Whatever Washington's original motives, authorities currently appear to be looking for a face-saving compromise...
...hud officials have been at pains to deny the charge, even as they have moved to close the school...
...In the interim it generated more than $3 billion in dormitory loans to 3,249 colleges...
...The little fight is becoming a large embarrassment...
...This was hardly a radical agenda, yet sufficiently "ethnic" to raise some eyebrows among the locals...
...Yet in this era of enemies lists and taped Presidential oaths of vengeance, who can be sure Lopez' suspicions are irrational...
...Angel was swarming with hippies...
...It is a Chicano phoenix struggling to rise from the wreckage of a much older institution, Mt...
...Julian B. McKay Director of Housing Programs, Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud) I took up a newspaper recently and read that hud was threatening to shut down a new school in Mt...
...They now regret the decision...
...That's ridiculous...
...Let me ask you as a taxpayer: Do you think the Federal government really wants to own a convent...
...So the old ghosts continue to creep between the lines—the shades of indentures past, of injuries remembered...
...He meant it both figuratively and literally...
...No one has yet suggested forgiveness, though it is probably the only solution and one that should appeal to the Benedictine Sisters...
...We're a different color than what they have been used to dealing with," he says...
...Henrik Ibsen The college housing law is known here as a dead program...
...Q.E.D...
...Angel, Oregon, the Cesar Chavez College, organized last year by one Ernesto Lopez...
...Frankly speaking, I've done everything I could for them...
...Angel College of the Benedictine Sisters...
...So far McKay is underwhelmed...
...Therefore, the Nixon Administration is an enemy of the Cesar Chavez college...
...snapped Julian B. McKay when I suggested that the college's name had precipitated the foreclosure actions...
...The curriculum focused on three areas: Chicano studies, early childhood development and bicultural teacher training...
...When the boys arrived, many of them were wearing beards, sandals and Indian necklaces...
...As a supporter of the new college said to me, "Chavez is an enemy of the Teamsters...
...It was then that Lopez, a vice president of the college, stepped in and persuaded the sisters to let him convert the school into a Chicano institution...
...Because a large portion of those loans is still owing, McKay and his tiny staff have become little more than collection agents, nagging and dunning colleges afflicted with large mortgages and small incomes...
...The Teamsters are friends of the Nixon Administration...
...States of the Union PAYMENTS TO THE PAST BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers that exists again in us, but all sorts of dead ideas and all kinds of dead beliefs...
...The government could forgive the sisters and the Chicanos their debts, and they could forgive the government its trespasses...
...The evidence pointing toward collusion between hud and the growers is thin and circumstantial, to say the least...
...Meanwhile, the Chicanos have collected $14,000 in donations, and friends of the college have announced they will unleash Joan Baez, a rock group known as the Tower of Power and "practically every major Chicano band in the United States" in a series of fund-raising assaults...
...Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines...
...It's becoming very serious and I think it will get worse...
...But in a situation of this kind there has to be a lot of give-and-take, and with these people it's been all take...
...Oregon growers have long worried that creeping Chavezism, spreading northward from California's San Joaquin Valley, would eventually engulf them, and Lopez believes the growers, fearful that the school was fronting for the United Farm Workers, sicced Federal officials on him...
...The Chicanos have filed a civil suit against the Department alleging discrimination, and more than 50 senators and congressmen have fired off letters to hud Secretary James T. Lynn demanding to know why he is picking on nuns and Mexican-Americans...
...And then they'll have to show us they have some way of regularly meeting future payments...
...Angel College to Collegjo Cesar Chavez...
...In particular, those farm-owners who relied on Chicano labor to harvest their orchards felt they had jumped out of the hippie frying pan and into the Chicano fire...
...Lopez recruited for his fragile new college a small bilingual faculty and 105 students, 80 per cent of whom were Mexican-Americans...
...I even flew out to Oregon and paid for their breakfast one morning, and I couldn't get reimbursed for it either...
...When they decided to foreclose, they didn't bother to write us...
...By last summer the Benedictines were ready to call it quits...
...To handle the male invasion, they obtained an $800,000, low-interest, 40-year mortgage from hud for the construction of new dormitories...
...Thereby hangs a tale...
...The nuns founded their college in 1887, and for 70 years it flourished as a Catholic girls' school for future teachers...
...We're getting more and more requests for payment postponements," McKay says...
...We had to read about it in the newspaper...
...But in the early '60s, enrollment took a nose dive, and the worried sisters, bowing to current fashion, decided to go coeducational...
...Ultimately, then, it may turn out that the Chicanos are merely in the vanguard of a long parade of colleges marching toward hud foreclosures—victims regardless of race, curriculum or name...
...Suddenly, or so it seemed to the nuns and the townspeople, Mt...
...The undergraduates referred to their campus as "the Antioch of the West"—an ominous label considering that "the Antioch of the East" was skidding toward bankruptcy and had of late been engaged in a serious internal debate about the course of its progressive educational policies...
...In rebuttal Lopez claims that hud officials seldom answer his letters, and when they do, it is to offer vaguely worded rejections of specific Chicano proposals for a settlement...
...In December, Lopez' new board of directors officially changed the school's name from Mt...
...It will take a lot more than that," he says, "just to get current...
...But there was no single institution that answered Chicano needs," he told me in a telephone interview...
...They allowed enrollment to decline once again, and when their accreditation with the Western Association of Colleges lapsed, they did not attempt to renew it...
...It is not an enviable job...
...Worse, they stopped making payments on the hud mortgage...
...According to an account in the weekly Chronicle of Higher Education, "Male and female students were occasionally seen strolling together unclothed along the city's main street . . . and rumors of dope parties in dormitories were rampant in 1970...
...The College Housing Act was passed in 1950 and scrapped in the late '60s...
...We're the untouchables...
...Lopez, 35, had grown up in Denver and had spent the previous 11 years in Oregon working for various educational programs, most of them having to do with Chicano migrant farmworkers...
...We want the college to continue...
Vol. 57 • August 1974 • No. 16
