Ignorance and poverty are true forms of oppression

Editor,

I’d like to know exactly what circumstances in Laura Valdez’s life constitute “oppression.” She is employed at a university filled with upwardly mobile, educated and diverse Hispanic students. She has a job and a guaranteed right to free speech and liberty.

If she is wondering why underrepresented groups suffer from internal bickering, it is because the “cause” they fight for is as vague and perplexing as the ethnic boundaries they try to establish amongst themselves.

I work a few hundred yards away from the strawberry fields where my stepfather toiled for years on California’s central coast. He didn’t need LULAC to tell him not to let the “man” get him down. And I don’t need someone to tell me what my place in line is for a job without regard to my abilities or desire.

The problems facing underrepresented Hispanic groups are a gestalt of socio-economic issues topped with heaping servings of ignorance, which was on full display in Valdez’s column.

What we need is for our youth to understand the values our parents demonstrated in those fields — hard work and perseverance — and to temper those values with an understanding of the value of education.

Our “oppressors” are ignorance and poverty, and neither of those requires an ethnic agenda in order to be addressed. It requires a social and economic agenda, the framework for which already exists in the form of Pell Grants, tuition tax credits and low interest student loans. It requires something LULAC hasn’t done well; it requires us to tell young people about the opportunities that exist for them in universities.

And we are both remiss, content to complain and argue about the circumstances of our “oppression” instead.

David Rubio

UNM alumnus