Easing the Culture Shock for Chicanos at Harvard

He is the first of his family to go to college. The son of an immigrant worker from Mexico, he says he came to Harvard for the challenge.

But it's not the academic challenge that Raul Perez '90, a minority activist and a member of the steering committee of the Chicano student organization RAZA, has in mind. It's the challenge of being a member of an underrepresented ethnic group at a school with a reputation for stasis.

"If you're from California, you've got Stanford in your backyard with Chicano faculty and a Chicano studies program," Perez says. "Why go to Harvard where you don't know what it's like?" He says many minority students, himself included, are afraid of Harvard because it seems so different from their own culture.

The Fresno, California, native says when he stepped out of the taxi and met his roommates, he was more than an a little apprehensive. "I didn't know what I was getting myself into," he says of his two roommates, one a child of a wealthy alumnus and the other a prep school graduate.

Adjusting to Harvard

Although Perez says his freshman year turned out to be a good experience, he worries that other minority students might not adjust to their new environment as well as he did. But he is working hard to see that they do.

Perez says he decided to attend Harvard because "at Harvard I would be able to make more of a contribution." During his time in Cambridge he has worked to aid understanding between people of different races, cultures and classes. One way of achieving this goal is to recruit more minorities, and Perez will be helping the admissions office do just that next year by trying to allay Chicano students' fears of the 352-year-old institution.

He says Harvard is moving in the right direction in terms of getting minority students to attend the school, saying it is the only college to send minority recruitment representatives around the country.

And Perez hopes that Harvard will take notice of what other Ivy League schools, such as Princeton, have done to make minority students more comfortable. The government concentrator says Harvard should consider having minority counselors in every house and adding a few extra days to Freshman Week for minority students.

programs like the Harvard Foundation--he is co-chairman of its student advisory committee--serve an important role in promoting cooperation and understanding among the members of Harvard's diverse population.

Minority Hiring

But student programs are not enough, says Perez, adding that more needs to be done both to hire minority faculty members and to entice minority students to enter academia. Perez is a member of the Minority Students Alliance, which earlier this year produced a study calling for a reevaluation of Harvard's minority hiring goals. He says that Chicanos and other minorities on campus have no role models in the faculty.

Unaware Students

Often Harvard's minority students are unaware of the condition of most American minorities because they come from middle class backgrounds, not ghettos or working-class families, Perez says. For this reason, many minorities become involved in Phillips Brooks House, which has programs for inner-city youth and housing projects.

But what Perez says he seeks above all is dialogue--among students and faculty and administrators, among students of different backgrounds and between Harvard and the outside community. Only this dialogue can make Harvard a truly enlightened community where people work for "the common life."