Live to See the Day, page 1
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Ryan, Corem, and Giancarlos
Never say never whenever I thought my life was stable
I came home to doors boarded and my life on the doorstep
yet still I said Amen.
—Corem Coreano
CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS
RYAN RIVERA
Rayni: mother
Ildefonso: father
George: stepfather
Avry: brother
Julia: half sister
Tino: half brother
Armando: half brother
Bianca: girlfriend and mother of his first son
Yamilet: girlfriend and mother of his second son
Marc: first son
Emilio: grandfather
Laura: grandmother
EMMANUEL/COREM COREANO
Ivette: mother
Ivan: father
Michael: brother
Joaquin: brother
Freddie: boyfriend of Ivette
GIANCARLOS RODRIGUEZ
Marta: mother
Wilfredo: father
Frank: brother
Isabelesse: sister
Luna: grandmother
Vincente: grandfather
Leo: uncle
Jennifer: girlfriend and mother of his son
Note: Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the individuals’ privacy.
Introduction
Ryan almost made it to spring break without a hitch. On the Friday before the break, Ryan and his friend Andres decided to ditch class and hang out in the hallways on the third floor of Grover Washington Jr., an underachieving public middle school, named after the famed jazz saxophonist, in Olney, a working-class neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Built less than a decade earlier, the building had a baby blue exterior with sunny yellow accents; it was in better condition than many of the decrepit school buildings in the city.1 Ryan was twelve years old, a month shy of becoming a teenager. As the two seventh graders zoomed down the stairs, they collided with three boys who were also cutting class. This chance meeting provided the perfect opportunity for Caleb, Luis, and Javier to derive some pleasure from intimidating the two denizens of the bottom of the social food chain. Caleb had spied Andres getting high before school and prodded him for his lighter. Andres dug it out of his pocket, expecting to light a cigarette or give the lighter up. But Caleb challenged him to set some paper on fire. Andres immediately complied, ripping a few sheets from his notebook and setting them alight. When the pages, curling with flame, landed on the floor, Andres snuffed them out with his sneaker. Then Caleb upped the ante, proposing they light a trash can on fire.
Now down on the first floor near the atrium, Andres tore another sheet of paper from his notebook, lit it, and then tossed it into the can, where it quickly ignited. Ryan threw in a second burning sheet. The boys were riled up with their amateur pyrotechnics until Ryan had a sudden change of heart. He lowered his arm into the can and put out the flame with the garbage bag lining the can. His conscience had temporarily kicked in. He knew that fire was no laughing matter. Nearly seven years earlier, Ryan, his twin brother, Avry, and their mother had nearly perished when their row home caught fire. When Ryan and Andres caught up with the other boys, who had wandered away from the trash can, they were roundly mocked: “Why y’all do that?” “You scared?” Today was not the day that Ryan could muster the courage to stand up to the bullies, even as he understood the danger of the fire spreading. So he let Andres light another paper and leave it burning.
* * *
AS THE BUSTLING 47 uptown bus leaves Society Hill, tree-lined cobblestone streets give way to Kensington’s blocks of aging row homes broken up by derelict shells of factories, copious needle-strewn lots, and papi stores. Babies born in North Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood are expected to live to seventy-one, seventeen years less than the babies no more than four miles away in Society Hill—a life span on par with countries such as Egypt, Bhutan, and Uzbekistan.2 Philadelphia is the poorest large city in the nation, a hypersegregated metropolis where one third of children are “smother[ed] in an airtight cage of poverty” in the most affluent land on the planet, as Martin Luther King Jr. once put it.3 These conditions may not be what come to mind when people think of Philadelphia, known as the birthplace of the American democratic experiment, as the stage of the classic Rocky films, and the home of mouth-melting cheesesteaks at Reading Terminal Market.
Kensington is poor and working-class, predominantly Latino and African American, and suffers from toxic pollution while housing a billion-dollar open-air drug market; Society Hill is rich, mostly white, leafy, with eye-popping real estate values.4 In one neighborhood, children attend underfunded, overcrowded schools where they drink from lead-laced water fountains, play in gymnasiums caked with asbestos, and fall ill in classrooms with no heating. In the other, the children study in modern, safe schools that prepare them for the Ivy League with small class sizes, well-paid teachers, counselors, psychologists, and librarians. In Kensington, children live in broken-down housing with mold and mice droppings but without hot water and endure sudden evictions with less than twenty-four hours to pack up their clothes, toys, and belongings and move into a homeless shelter or a relative’s dwelling. In Society Hill, they live in decent, secure housing with running water, heat, air-conditioning, and high-speed broadband.
Live to See the Day follows three Puerto Rican children growing up in North Philadelphia, a city that embodies the awesome inequalities at the heart of the American body politic. Across the nation, too many are “denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life,” as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described economic deprivation in his second inaugural address.5 Today nearly forty million languish in poverty, more than half of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, tens of thousands die prematurely due to lack of health care each year, and millions are housing insecure.6
This was not our destiny. Amid the wreckage of the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal put starving and jobless Americans to work building roads, parks, schools, libraries, post offices, and other infrastructure, established social insurance for the elderly, unemployed, and single mothers, and provided collective bargaining rights to workers. He restored their faith in the power of democratic government to relieve suffering and protect against the accidents of life. A few decades later, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society renewed this vision when he razed the Jim Crow caste system, guaranteed health care to seniors and the poor, and expanded social security. Wages were climbing, trade unions were formidable, and income and wealth inequality had sunk to historic lows. Straggling decades behind their Western European allies, Americans were finally laying the planks of a multiracial social democracy. But over the past half century, the New Deal order ruptured, and the country reversed course with the gutting of public goods and the social safety net, the hegemony of market fundamentalism, and the rise of hyper-incarceration. One of the seminal moments in this shift was the passage of welfare reform legislation in 1996; for the first time in decades, low-income families were no longer entitled to cash assistance to stave off hardship.7 Today, the level of American child poverty is one of the highest in the industrialized world. In 2019, a fifth of children in the United States were poor compared to a mere 4 to 5 percent of children in Finland and Denmark.8
Ryan Rivera, Emmanuel Coreano, and Giancarlos Rodriguez—the three children at the heart of Live to See the Day—came of age in the new neoliberal era. With everything stacked against them, they strive to do the impossible: to jettison the scarlet letter of “dropout” and become high school graduates. Each would enroll in an alternative “last chance” high school called El Centro de Estudiantes. Although they overlapped at times, they didn’t cross paths or know each other well. The book also follows their mothers, Rayni, Ivette, and Marta, in the process tracing the history of Puerto Rican migration, deindustrialization, the war on drugs, and the end of welfare as we know it, revealing how American society punishes low-income single parents and makes it almost impossible to raise children with their self-worth intact. Together, they chronicle a tale of a metropolis and the nation from the bottom up.
The landscape for these children is one of cash-starved public schools that blunt curiosity with humdrum pedagogies and criminalize and push out students through the use of metal detectors, school resource officers, repressive discipline, and rigid administrators. Their families struggle for dignity amid crushing economic insecurity, chronic joblessness, crime, hunger, an opioid epidemic, domestic violence, and the habitual peril of incarceration. Their story is one of survival, where eighteenth-birthday celebrations are not rites of p
* * *
BEFORE LONG, A cafeteria worker discovered the burning trash can and extinguished the blaze. A crowd of curious students had quickly formed, but by then, the boys had fled the scene. Everyone thought the surveillance cameras were busted, but Ryan wasn’t taking any chances. He bolted to his locker and put on a blue button-down to make himself harder to identify. It was the kind of move he’d picked up from his obsession with crime shows and movies such as The Wire, The Sopranos, and Scarface.
Food fights had a habit of flaring up in the cafeteria, so at lunchtime, the students had to wait in the adjacent auditorium in rows, each row escorted in at staggered intervals. Ryan’s row was called up, but before he could enter the cafeteria, he saw Javier and another student accompanied by the principal, the dean, and the school resource officer. The dean approached him. “Mr. Rivera, can you come with us?” He thought, Oh shit. They got me. It was a familiar feeling. A wrecking ball in the classroom, he had racked up more than twenty disciplinary slips at Grover Washington, so he knew the drill. A call home followed by his vexed mother picking him up, capped with some punishment. Only this time would be much worse.
1
• • •
The Fireman
Ryan, Javier, and two African American boys who had played no part in the fire incident were hauled into an office, where two resource officers, who were assigned to the school by law enforcement, were watching the security monitors. They were seated around a conference table. The principal, Jordan Thompson, directed Officer Taylor Bailey to roll a videotape. The boys were shown some grainy surveillance footage of the minutes before the fire. As the tape progressed, Ryan’s lean five-foot frame slumped in his chair. As soon as I get home, he thought, my mom’s going to beat my ass.
Thompson asked to pause the tape. “Who’s this kid with the white shirt?” Silence. Ryan’s and Andres’s faces weren’t recognizable on the tape, but the administrators matched their complexions and hauled in Ryan and Javier. They were among the few Puerto Ricans in the school and were considered troublemakers by the administration.
Bailey and the dean, Christopher Anderson, towered over the four boys. Thompson, fatherly at first, now turned threatening: “I hope you guys know that we already called the police, and y’all are going to jail.” The prospect of getting locked up had never crossed Ryan’s mind. It was just a stupid prank. But Thompson kept hounding them, and after fifteen minutes Ryan was trembling and on the verge of tears. He had grown claustrophobic in the cramped room. As a boy, he had been locked in bedroom closets by an older cousin when they visited their grandmother’s house. He still had nightmares of dying in his sleep and awakening in a tightly shut coffin from which he couldn’t escape.
Desperate to conclude the ordeal, he finally stood up and pushed his chair back. “I’m the kid with the white T-shirt. I’m right here.” He unbuttoned his blue shirt to show them. He was sure Thompson was bluffing about calling the police.
“Who is the kid next to you?” Thompson asked. Ryan kept mum for a while but eventually caved to repeated interrogation. “It was Andres!” he blurted out. The other boys shot him dirty looks. He had violated the most basic rule: never snitch. Andres wasn’t on the administration’s radar. He was a mostly rule-abiding student and had kept a low profile at Grover Washington. Now Anderson brought him in.
Up until two officers from the Philadelphia Police Department walked in the door, Ryan still had hope that he would worm his way out of this mess with no more than the usual consequences. The school officials showed the police the tape, and Ryan and Andres admitted their part in the fire. Javier was suspended for three days for his presence at the scene while the two African American boys were dismissed. Had it really been necessary to involve the police? No one had been hurt. Surely the school administrators could have handled the situation internally? But they had made their fateful decision, and there was no turning back. They had washed their hands of the problem, even as they knew what the criminal justice system did to boys who looked like Ryan and Andres.
Anderson scanned Ryan’s socks—purple with Tinker Bell patterns, borrowed from his mother. “They’re going to love those socks in the Youth Study Center,” he taunted, referring to the city’s juvenile detention center. Reality finally started to sink in. Ryan’s mother had warned him once that if he ever got arrested, she wouldn’t come to pick him up. He knew his mother didn’t make idle threats, so when the officers said his mother could retrieve him at the station, he started spiraling. “Y’all don’t get it; my mom already told me that she’s not coming to get me,” he protested. The officers weren’t interested. They handcuffed Andres and Ryan and paraded them through the building to their lockers. When Ryan started showing signs of resistance, one of the police, Officer James King, grabbed fistfuls of his collar and pants to keep him in line.
Kids pressed their faces to the narrow windows in the classroom doors to catch a glimpse of the duo’s walk of shame. A few of them darted into the hallway only for their teachers to corral them inside. “Ryan’s getting locked up,” they singsonged. He was the man. But a cocky swagger masked the fact that he was actually scared witless. He had watched countless arrests in his neighborhood, but this was the first time he was on the other end. This was real. With no playbook to ease his panic, a torrent of questions filled his mind, each escalating in severity: Will I be allowed to return to Grover Washington? How long will they keep me in custody? When am I going to see my mom again? Will someone try to rape me in jail? Ryan no longer felt autonomy over his body.
On the way downstairs, they passed the stairwell where Andres had first lit up the scraps of paper. Ryan stopped and spun around to glare at Anderson. “Can you stop dragging my fucking hoodie on the floor?”
“Watch your mouth,” Officer King countered. “Don’t talk to him like that.”
“Can’t you see he’s dragging my shit on the floor?” Ryan snapped.
Anderson told him to shut it and keep walking. Only days earlier, Ryan had written in a short essay, “Next week will be spring break I really hope it is fun for me and my family This is so because we haven’t done anything fun in a long time.” Near the front entrance, Ryan’s gym teacher, who was fond of him, witnessed the grim scene as he was heading out of the gymnasium. He shook his head in disappointment.
* * *
SINCE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, Ryan’s teachers had repeatedly called his mother to complain about his antics. Ryan interrupted instruction, refused to do work or obey rules, constantly got out of his seat, threw chairs, flipped tables, took ill-timed naps, kicked walls, slammed doors, and ridiculed other students. He had endless energy and desired only to run around, play, and dish out wisecracks. Rayni, a Puerto Rican– Nicaraguan woman with long straight black hair and light skin, couldn’t believe the shenanigans Ryan got up to at school. At home, he was largely well behaved. He said his prayers. He washed the dishes. He went to bed on time. She thought he was two-faced: Dr. Jekyll at home and Mr. Hyde at school. Suspensions piled up. His disciplinary woes came at the expense of his academic performance. He scored in the lowest brackets on the annual state standardized tests and chalked up dozens of absences.
School administrators initially ignored Rayni’s attempts to obtain a psychological evaluation for Ryan. Developing an Individualized Education Program and providing high-quality special education was not cheap, requiring sums of money that the federal government consistently failed to appropriate. The lack of funds for special education created a decades-long crisis that persisted in chronically money-starved school districts like Philadelphia.1
Frustrated by the runaround, Rayni had confronted the principal at James R. Lowell Elementary School. “Do you think I’m here because I want to collect a check for my son? Do you really think I want to label my child?” Her request was finally granted. If Ryan hadn’t had a mother who was savvy enough to soldier through a byzantine bureaucracy until she was satisfied, would anyone have looked out for him? Ryan was given a diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Further testing placed his verbal and nonverbal reasoning skills in the average range. It wasn’t easy getting him through the arduous examination. “He proved to be impulsive, manipulative, oppositional, and even somewhat sassy, mimicking the examiner,” noted the report. “However, he sat for almost three hours and with firm but kind redirection, completed the testing.”
