Voice of experience
Wearing a black trench coat, dark glasses and a red do-rag wrapped around his head, Richard Santana walked into Mountain View Middle School on Friday oozing trouble.
Standing in front of a group of students in grades five through eight, the former third-generation California gang member slowly began peeling off his clothes.
“This rag is nothing but a symbol of hate,” Santana said as he took off the bandanna on his head. “And I don’t want to be a part of that any more.”
When he was finished, Santana stood in front of the students in a suit and tie, no longer a symbol of hatred and violence, but a successful individual who went on to earn a master’s degree from Harvard University.
Santana, a diversity speaker who travels the country using his own personal gang-life experiences to educate youth, visited three East Valley schools Friday.
The “transformation” is part of Santana’s presentation, in which he described a previous life of drugs and crime and how he was finally able to break free.
The assemblies were the culmination of diversity week in the district, following the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
“A foolish person is one who learns from his or her mistakes,” Santana told the students. “A wise person is one who learns from the mistakes of others.”
His mistakes, Santana said, were a product of his environment.
In his thick Latino accent, Santana described his life as a “product of the system,” bouncing from foster home to foster home, eventually being sucked into a life of violence as a California street gang member.
“When I was growing up, I was being told I was supposed to hate everyone who was different from me,” Santana told the students. “My goals were about getting killed or getting locked up. That was what I suppose to do.”
Santana also talked to the students about stereotypes, and the dangers of labeling people or bullying.
He asked the students if they had ever been bullied or picked on, or if they had picked on someone else to make themselves feel better.
“I think everybody has, it’s pretty normal,” said Jake Copeland, 13. “I think it’s pretty cool how he walked us through his life. I mean, I thought he was a dropout or something at first.”
Santana wrote four categories on an overhead projector – Asian, African American, Latino and Caucasian – and asked students to tell him the first words that came to mind.
For Latinos, he wrote down lazy.
As a high school student, Santana said, it was a teacher who helped him achieve success and break out of those societal stereotypes.
“I was lucky that somebody believed in the dream and accepted me for who I was,” Santana said. “If it wasn’t for that teacher, coming into my life and empowering me … I don’t know where I would be. So I beg you, be wise instead of foolish, learn from my mistakes.”