by Daniel Acosta, Jr.

It was during my zero-period class in my senior year (that started at 7:30, rather than the usual 8:30 time for most of the students) with my English teacher, Mrs. Briggs, that I truly accepted my Mexican identity. My zero-period class had several exceptional students; I guess I was one of them. My white classmates saw that I was just another Mexican boy, but with one difference: I was usually the one with the highest grades in the class. I was a favorite of my teachers. They wanted this smart Mexican kid to succeed.

Mrs. Briggs was old-school, and everyone had to sit in alphabetical order, like in grade school. I sat in the first row, near the window that looked out onto Memphis Street, which happened to be where my oldest sister had lived when she first married.

Mrs. Briggs often started the class with some offhanded thought or observation she had. Smiling directly at me, she asked the student right behind me: “Richard, which name do you like best — Daniel or David?”

I knew Dickie and David, who sat behind him. I had played eighth-grade football with both of them.

Putting Dickie on the spot, he paused for a moment and said, “Daniel.”

“Oh, like Daniel in the lion’s den and not David and Goliath?” she teasingly said.

Mrs. Briggs was the chair of the English Department, and I guess it was fitting that she taught the most demanding English course in the curriculum, ranging from Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Milton’s Paradise Lost, to Pepys’ Diary, Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, the English essays of Addison and Steele, and several of Shakespeare’s plays. She encouraged us to read the full versions of the ones found in excerpts in our bulky English textbook. I took her advice and read some of Hardy’s and Conrad’s novels. I started The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith, just because I liked the title. I never finished it.

“Danny, what do you want to do after you finish college?” Mrs. Briggs asked.

Trying to impress her, I said, “I’d like to work for the US Foreign Service.”

But I knew that was a phony answer. What I wanted was to find a job, a career, something, that got me out of El Paso. I really wanted to make money and not have to worry about the poverty that I was leaving behind. By the time I graduated from high school my family had lived in three rental houses. My father was a carpenter and sometimes was out of a job. I worked as a paperboy to save money for college. I knew that a college degree led to a good-paying job.

I didn’t know why Mrs. Briggs took an interest in me. Was it just my imagination? I needed something to grab onto and figure out what I wanted to do after high school—maybe go to medical school, pharmacy school, or some other high-paying profession. At least, that was what I was thinking about when I was in her class.

On another morning she asked, “Class, who saw the beautiful sunrise this morning?” with a twinkle in her eye.

I slowly raised my hand; she gave me a quizzical look. Because of my morning paper route, I arose at 5:30 a.m. and often saw the sunrise. It hardly rained in the desert town of El Paso, and most of the days were sunny. She went on and told the class that sunrises and sunsets can be some of the more magical times in our lives; they are the stuff that we find in great writings through the centuries.

Homer’s Odyssey came to mind, the rosy-fingered dawn. Throughout high school I read voraciously: Aristotle, Plato, the Greek playwrights, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Hugo, London, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, and other writers that were mentioned in class by my teachers. I read in no particular order. But my increasing interest in literature started to clash with my desires to be practical; I knew in my heart that a job as an English teacher did not pay well. A solid background in the sciences—like biology, chemistry, and math—was my ticket to leave the poverty and discrimination that I experienced as a boy in El Paso.

One morning she challenged me openly in class to enter a local essay contest; she said that Mrs. Hill, my junior-year English teacher, told her that I was a good essayist. I recall that she liked one of my essays on the influence of television in our lives. She said it was concise with a beginning, middle, and ending, all in four or five paragraphs. Mrs. Hill used my essay as a model for her other students. Was my decision to not enter the contest because the subject matter, “Patriotism in America,” did not appeal to me?

Or was it because of my Mexican heritage and of my growing up in city that was half white and half Mexican? My mother emigrated from Mexico with her parents around the time of the Mexican Revolution, and my father was born in Valentine, Texas, soon after his parents had emigrated from Mexico. My parents never completed high school.

I was born in El Paso just across the Mexican-American border, learning later I was a Chicano or first-generation Mexican American. The white kids at school were called Anglos, gabachos, or gringos by my parents, Nana Cuca, Tía Babe (my mother’s younger sister), and her son Louie, who I considered to be my carnal or brother. Some of these white kids called me a dirty Mexican or wetback.

As I was nearing graduation, I wasn’t thinking about America and patriotism; I wasn’t ready to enter that essay contest. It is now that I am 80 years old that I can reflect back on my family, my Mexican heritage, and my career. When I was in high school, perhaps I was too bitter to write that essay; no, America was not yet a major part of my life to write a glowing essay on American patriotism. That came later when I had my own life with a wife and three daughters.

There was one comment Mrs. Briggs made that I continue to think about to this day. “Class, think about the word mediocrity and what it means. One should never strive to be just average or mediocre,” she declared one sunny morning.

“Say it out loud, med io cri ty,” as she purposely dragged out the word.  “Doesn’t it sound terrible?”

She was right. Even the sound of it reeks of something bad.

It turned out that several of my zero-period classmates did not have mediocre careers; they had remarkable careers. David founded his own construction company in the Chicago area. Stan became one of the best maritime attorneys on the West Coast. John owned a New York art gallery, which highlighted upcoming new artists. Carlos went on to become a noted and respected author of Chicano border literature.

And then there was me. I like to think I was not mediocre, but I know I failed many times in my life to live up to her advice.

When the top 2% of the graduating class at Austin High School was announced, there were six whites and one Mexican boy—me.

“Danny, you are one of the top graduates in our class; you got it made,” several of my classmates told me in May of 1963.

I tried to smile and said, “I hope so”.

The funny thing was that none of my teachers reached out to congratulate me. I guess they assumed I’d go on and do well in college. I received no advice on which college to select, how to apply for scholarship support, nothing. I was on my own.

At that time in my life, all I wanted was a degree that led to a good-paying job. I didn’t like medicine; I chose pharmacy instead. It turned out later I did something else with my career. It was not until that I was well into my career as a professor and scientist that I realized how much Austin High prepared me to handle the rigors and challenges of an academic life. Competing in a society as a professor, scientist, and administrator who favored whites over people of color was an everyday occurrence for me.

When I completed my doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology in 1974 at the University of Kansas, I applied for several positions in the US and abroad. The Swedish Medical Foundation offered me a postdoctoral fellowship (as part of the Fulbright program) to study at the elite Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Patti, whom I had married a year earlier, and I were facing a critical moment in our lives. Our decision, in hindsight, was a seminal event that has affected us to this day. Patti and I still think about how our lives would have been changed if we’d taken the Swedish offer.

Patti had studied a year abroad in Germany before I met her. She really liked Europe and had traveled to Europe after high school, visiting such countries as France, Italy, Germany, England, and Ireland. Her junior year at the University of Bonn gave her more opportunity to learn about Europe and its people. She loved Europe! Was our decision now a fait accompli?

We were about to accept the Swedish offer when I was asked to interview for an assistant professor position at my alma mater, the University of Texas College of Pharmacy. There was no guarantee that I’d be offered the Texas position after the interview, but hours after I returned to Kansas from my two days of meetings with faculty and administrators, I received an offer over the phone to come back to Texas. We took it.

Why did we choose Texas over Sweden? Like many things in life, it came down to pragmatism and finances. If we’d elected to go to Sweden, it meant that the position was only a two-year research position, while the Texas offer was a chance to get tenure at a major university in the country. In addition, trying to find a job back in the US from Sweden meant corresponding to possible universities or pharmaceutical companies by postal mail and long-distance phone calls; the internet was not yet invented.

And possibly more important for employers was that traveling from Sweden to the US for interviews was quite expensive. All of these factors made our decision easier to make, but still some sadness and regret lingered about our decision to turn down the opportunity to study in Sweden.

I was now back in Texas, six years after leaving it for a life that I thought would not include a return to my home state. Twenty-two years later in 1996, Patti and I left Texas and its discrimination and racism. That is another decision to write about.