DACA is not a new problem

The problem of undocumented young people has been festering for many years. I began my teaching career in 1949 in a small Southern California district. Since I was teaching in the middle grades, I suppose most of what I’m relating qualifies as teacher’s lunchroom gossip and not firsthand knowledge.

In that long ago era, most of the Mexican kids did not attend kindergarten and began school in the first grade. This was because they were “undocumented.” According to the first grade teachers, starting school in the first grade without kindergarten was a definite handicap for these 6-year-old kids who usually arrived at school speaking only Spanish.

These kids were not immigrants! They came from insular little communities that dotted Southern California and the Central Valley and probably dated from the era when California was part of Mexico. Mexican Spanish was their language and these kids would have had little or no prior contact with the English-speaking world outside of their tight little communities.

In the immediate postwar World War II era, women were just entering the workforce. The system for taking care of young preschool children was still being developed. Consequently mothers were attempting to enter ever younger children into kindergarten. Sometime in this era, the state Department of Education decreed that the entry age for kindergarten was to be a hard and fast 4 years, 9 months. As I remember, this was causing the principal more than a little grief. Four years, eight months and 30 days— wait a year! I heard the State Department of Education was rigidly enforcing this standard. As a result, the school district was requiring a birth certificate for entry into kindergarten.

Most Mexican kids had been born at home with a Spanishspeaking midwife in attendance, and never registered for a birth certificate. Thus, they were “undocumented.” Incidentally, home birthing was not an unusual occurrence during the 1920s and ’30s in many parts of the rural United States. The problem for young undocumented Americans is not new. If it it’s a matter of law, the DACCA solution lies with Congress. It should not be a problem for the president and the Supreme Court! Isn’t it about time our diddling Congress started working on important problems?