My elementary school teachers often told the class that any one of us kids could grow up and become president of the United States. They would invoke Harry Truman, the Everyman from Missouri. And of course Abraham Lincoln, his log cabin and all those miles he walked to school.
I was in second grade the year the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, and from then on I was suspicious of the anyone-can-be-president cliche. But it wasn't done with me.
I was often the only "minority" student in a classroom, owing to the uncommon demographic space my family occupied -- brown and upwardly mobile. There wasn't much of a Latino middle class in Los Angeles all those years ago. My young, liberal teachers hovered over me with platitudes about the great things I would achieve. Their desire probably said more about them than about me; most of them assumed I was a hardship case, rising up against the odds. It placed two burdens on me -- of carrying the weight of difference, and of great expectations.
I loved and loathed the attention. I remember being intensely aware of the heat on my face. And of a sensation that I find terribly difficult to put into words even today: of not fitting inside my own body, that my skin could barely hold back my blood, like the skin of a sausage.
So I needed to succeed because I was a minority -- which meant there was no failure like success, what with the doubt and resentment that shadow one's accomplishments. (Was it because of affirmative action?) This was the unintended consequence of the liberal agenda on race. In this context, King's dream of a just and equal society was unachievable because the vision itself seemed to emphasize difference. I was doomed to always be aware of the color of the hand I held in mine.
Accepting the spotlight my teachers had focused on me, I ran for student body president in the eighth grade at Thomas Starr King Middle School in Silver Lake. I ran as an intellectual, because that was the language I'd learned in the "gifted" classes (where I was, of course, the lone "Mexican"). My stump speech emphasized lofty ideals about education, while my competitors offered cliches about getting better food in the cafeteria. This was around the time that Jerry Brown became governor of California. That a former Jesuit seminarian with long hair and sideburns who dated a rock 'n' roll goddess could lead the Golden State seemed to augur well for my own electoral chances. But I lost.
