As humans we are constantly shaped by the environment in which we are in and our

decisions. These choices could result in life changing experiences, or they could just be new

habits that we pick up. However, the decision for me to go to Cristo Rey for high school resulted

in the former happening to me. There were two main aspects about myself that changed as a

result of me going to Cristo Rey: My confidence and pride in who I am, and my sense of

responsibility to help others through my work and to be more considerate of other people.

Before I begin, it is important for me to note that coming into high school I had very low

confidence and self esteem. Personally, I could not find a place where I belonged and I felt that I

connections or that I could be a part of. In an attempt to fit in in middle school, I had left a lot of

my Mexican identity behind. Gloria Anzaldúa talked about this idea of leaving one's culture

behind when she talked about how people described themselves in relation to their culture. She

shows this in “How to tame a Wild Tongue” when she says, “We call ourselves

Mexican-American to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun

“American” than the adjective “Mexican”(Anzaldúa). When she says this, she is presenting the

idea that people describe themselves as American in that they are from there, however they use

the term Mexican to say one aspect of themselves that separates them from everybody else but

not necessarily because they are from there. This idea of trying to create a separation between

who you are is something that I did a lot. In addition, the idea of using the term to show you do

not fit the adjective of “Mexican” to separate yourself is something that I myself did in order to

try and show others that I wasn’t really Mexican and more so American even if that wasn’t true.

However these feelings changed for me when I started my Spanish class freshman year.
 Starting that first year, I thought the class would be like any other class where we focused

on that one subject, but this class ended up being quite different. While we still learned Spanish,

we also learned about all the different countries and cultures that made up Latin America and the

similar and different traditions within it. For me finally being able to see traditions that I also did

and parts of life similar to my own gave me a sense of belonging. Before I felt that I couldn’t be

both cultures but I realized, as I learned and met many friends who were like me, that I could be

from both cultures and that I should be proud. Anzaldúa wrote a lot on how people connected

themselves to their culture even if they were away from the “homeland”. Anzaldúa wrote the

idea that, “Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which

country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul” (Anzaldúa). This idea of not having to be

from someplace but still holding it as part of your identity became a central idea for me and gave

me peace. Once I felt that I had a place that I belonged, I felt a lot more confident in who I was

and felt that I could do things like hang out with friends and talk more in class because I was

finally somebody with something.

In addition to being able to learn more about my culture and finding a place in the world,

attending Cristo Rey helped me to find a purpose that I want to do with my life. Before I

attended high school, school was a boring place for me where I was never really thinking much.

The teachers were all monotonous and while they were passionate about teaching us, school was

a place where, as Paulo Freire put it, “Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a

hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity” (Freire). This quote exemplifies a lot of what my

experience with education had been up to that point in that the teachers told the students what to

do and the basic process of how things worked. However, after that, the students only role was to
be able to replicate those results with other examples, regardless of whether or not they

understood. This led to classrooms being a boring place for me due to me not having the

opportunity to see the consequences of what I was learning and to understand their importance.

Freire represented this idea with his analogy of the education system being like banking where

teachers do nothing more than “make deposits” into students minds without making them think

critically about their work. He states, “It follows logically from the banking notion of

consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the

students… by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true

knowledge” (Freire). By not allowing students to think critically about what they are doing,

teachers are essentially creating beings that only process information in order to complete tasks.

At Cristo Rey however, I learned differently. I did not just learn the skills I needed to do

well, I also learned how to apply those skills in analysis of the world around me. When a teacher

had us do readings they would routinely have the students be the one guiding the class

discussions as it related to what we were learning and sharing our opinions. This strategy is

similar to what Freire recommended in an ideal education system when he stated, “Through

dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new

term emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers… People teach each other” (Freire). In this

ideal system, no one knows everything, and everyone can teach each other based off of their own

perspectives. While in my school the teachers were still the ones with the most knowledge and

were there to teach students, they never dismissed a student and their ideas and opinions. In the

relationship, the student could still teach the teacher new perspectives which may give the

teacher a new avenue of teaching the students. By having the students give their thoughts, my
confidence built up, but also because what we were learning was tied to the world around me, I

realized that I wanted to keep doing things in order to make the world better and examining

problems.

In summary, attending Cristo Rey was a major experience for me in building my

confidence because it helped me to find who I was culturally and a place where I belonged. In

addition, it helped me to realize that I did not want to be ignorant of the world around me and

wanted to do work that would make it a better place.

 Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.”​Ways of Reading,​edited by David

Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky, Stacey Waite, Bedford Martin’s, 2014, pg.26-34

Freire, Paulo. ​Pedagogy of the Oppressed​. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.