Raul Ortiz grew up in public housing in Uptown. With the help and advice of a local priest, he attended Saint Benedict’s and then the University of Illinois at Chicago. At UIC he overcame his upwardly mobile Republican tendencies and even joked about being “too radical” for the campus Society of Hispanic Engineers. Instead he became president of the Confederation of Latin American Students (CLAS). He organized volunteers for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, a Central America awareness week, and an outreach program linking UIC Latino students with their high school counterparts–all while studying engineering and working part-time.
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Accordingly, Loeb was not thrilled when he checked back with Raul Ortiz two years after he first interviewed him. Still at UIC and working as a courier for Federal Express, Ortiz was no longer a leftist or activist. He didn’t object to the CIA’s recruiting on campus, nor to UIC’s pushing out Maxwell Street market. He didn’t even complain about the university raising its admission standards, even though the change had forced his brother to attend a community college instead. He told Loeb he went to CLAS meetings only rarely, and then “mostly to argue with all these liberals.” He added, “They say that this university was for…the sons and daughters of the Mexicans and Italians that they displaced, and that now it isn’t. They have an attitude that the university owes them something. I don’t think it does. It’s ludicrous to say a university should have a mission. If I wanted a cheeseburger, fries, and pop that was three-fifty at McDonald’s and I only had two and a half dollars, I wouldn’t ask them to give it to me for less. I’d go to White Castle and order something else, or work harder and earn more.”
Still, he told Loeb, all of his old convictions hadn’t changed. “I still vote Democratic out of guilt for the poor people of the world….[And I] like people who challenge. I like Jesse Jackson. I like the underdog. I’m always going to be a die-hard Cubs fan. Maybe I’ll come around and maybe I won’t.”
The first sign of trouble is that he seems to portray all causes that his student activists undertake as equally virtuous. The movement to keep public college tuition affordable is lumped with the movement at the University of Nebraska to protect the family farm. But should it be? Isn’t it possible that low tuition is in the public interest (because it promotes social mobility and equal opportunity), but that asking the government to inflate food prices to keep small farmers on the land is not? For that matter, is it true, as Loeb states, that the needs students identify can be met by simply redistributing the nation’s wealth?
Loeb can get away with this partly because we in his activist-boomer audience tend to think back to what we remember as simple choices–between lynch mobs and black would-be voters, between lying Constitution-bashers and Vietnamese revolutionaries. We believe the choices back then really were that simple and that today’s choices are no more difficult–even though it’s clear that few of the choices of any generation are simple. Where, for instance, are the simple choices when trying to decide where to stand on the issue of racially gerrymandered legislative districts or a congressionally authorized war against Iraq?
Generation at the Crossroads might have been helpful if it had offered more than a 1970-ish laundry list of progressive pieties and the equally dated assertion that every need can be satisfied by sharing the wealth. The reader can only fall back on unhelpful common sense: There’s more than one way to be “active.” Sometimes activism is good and necessary. Sometimes apathy is OK. The problem of course has always been how to figure out which times are which.
