An Ugly Duckling:

A TALE THAT SHINES TRUTH ON ETHNIC MYTHS

By Jorge Luis Romeu

The Post-Standard: Thursday, April 22, 1999

   

I looked up at the huge stone structure that rises over the road in a narrow gorge of the 
Venezuelan hill country. "La Puerta del Llano," it read. The Threshold to the Plains.

Then I read the inscription on the monument.

It explained how, during Venezuela's War of Independence, two key battles with the Spaniards 
took place at this important pass - barely wide enough for a small river and a two-lane 
road - to the Orinoco Plains.

The road leads into San Juan de los Morros, a small city where I go to conduct faculty 
development workshops under a Venezuelan government program.

The name of the institution is Universidad Romulo Gallegos, chosen in honor of the author 
of a famous novel depicting life on these plains early in the 20th century.

These trips aren't the first I have taken south of the Rio Bravo to work with my Latin 
American colleagues.

I have traveled several times to Mexico, where I maintain an active faculty exchange 
project, especially with universities in its provinces.

These hemispheric projects have never been considered part of my job as a member of a 
faculty of a U.S. university.

Hence, I have to hustle to find the money to support scholarships for my Mexican colleagues
to come to our technology conference every year.

But this is the activity I enjoy most in my work. I carry it out for three very important 
reasons: the faculty, the students and myself.

The first reason embraces both my mainstream and my Latin American faculty colleagues. In 
my many years of college teaching, I have found that there is still a sense of devaluation 
of things academic that occur south of the Rio Grande. This must be addressed.

For example, during my Fulbright Senior Lecturer award stage in Mexico City, I taught at a 
highly respected university, considered the best in its field in Mexico, and possibly the 
second best in all of Latin America. When I returned to my home institution, I presented 
my glowing student and supervisor's teaching evaluations. To my chagrin, they were not 
considered at par with those of our four-year, liberal arts college evaluations.

I keep the evaluation letter at my home institution prepared in response. It states, 
"... as cultures are different, so are the standards for effective teaching."

This experience constituted a watershed in my life. Now, by bringing bilingual, well-prepared
Latin American faculty to our academic meetings to present papers, I believe I am helping 
to dissipate such erroneous and prejudiced ideas - perhaps to keep my experience from 
happening to others.

Through contact with these Mexican scholars, hundreds of my mainstream U.S. colleagues have
the opportunity to verify for themselves that in Latin America, strong institutions and 
high quality faculty also exist. The work done there may well be at least as good as work 
done here. That possibility should not be dismissed without further investigation.

My second reason concerns students. I sometimes overhear students belittle the scholastic 
aptitude of Hispanic and African-American students, and even of non-white faculty. It doesn't
surprise me. Don't younger people tend to imitate the older ones?

That's one reason why I encourage mainstream students to go to Latin American universities 
on exchange or study-abroad programs. I want them to work jointly with bright, darker-skinned,
Hispanic faculty and students. In this way, I help dispel many myths and misconceptions.

U.S. Hispanic students who participate in these exchanges can verify how there is nothing 
inherent in their ethnic or cultural makeup to prevent them from achieving as much as their 
peers. After all, in Latin American institutions, presidents, deans, chairs, and the top 
teachers and researchers look just like they do.

Sometimes the lack of such positive reinforcement is all that holds our students of color 
back. Sometimes the best thing that can be done for them is to provide them with a semester 
abroad in a country where their ethnic group constitutes a majority.

Finally, I do it for myself. As a refugee from Cuba, I have lived in this blessed democracy 
for 18 years now. I have worked hard and done well. I want to use some of my time, first, 
to pay back the United States for the many opportunities it continues to offer me. I also 
want to do something for those who might otherwise be left behind.

In that way, I can accomplish two beautiful objectives: contribute to the world I came from 
and the world where I have inserted myself. I can help each understand the other a little 
better.

The ethnic and cultural characteristics that require me to prove myself again and again here 
in the United States - that make me have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good-
are the same characteristics that make me effective and appreciated in Latin America. They 
allow me to be taken for what I am, not for what someone else may think I should be.

On the door of my office at the New York university where I teach, I have a poster of the 
Ugly Duckling, from the famous Hans Christian Andersen story. It puzzles many of my students 
and colleagues. But it's a riddle readily understood by others like me.


ILLUSTRATION: ARTWORK

THIS UGLY DUCKLING poster was on the office door of Jorge Luis Romeu at SUNY-Cortland. He 
says it represented for him the reality of how ethnicity negatively and unjustly influences 
many people's perceptions.

==========================================================================
  
      Jorge Luis Romeu is an Emeritus Associate Professor in the Department
      of Mathematics, State University of New York-Cortland, and a Fellow of
      the Royal Statistical Society. He took early retirement in Dec. 1998.
                                      
     _________________________________________________________________
     _________________________________________________________________