Next Up at Fenway: A Story of High School, Hope and Lindos Suenos

By Steve Marantz

Marcos Baez had many loves.

First was his mother.

Next came baseball.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Marantz
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087909684

Book preview

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Contents

Crossroads

Wanda and Marcos

Dorchester to Mission Main

The Family in Fenway

Where Latinos Succeed

Do the Right Thing

This Strength of Mine

Foundations of Literacy

Conquering Your Fear

Lindos Sueños

Teammates

Injustice

Priorities in My Life

The Great Recession

The Person I Am

Nerdboy and Jerk Girls

A Better Man

The Adult Life

Acknowledgments

Copyright

To Boston, you’re my home

Marcos Baez had many loves.

First was his mother.

Next came baseball.

Reggaeton and bachata.

A girl stole his heart.

Then he realized a love greater still.

Learning.

Prologue

Crossroads

Public education is a good thing, most Americans agree. The details tend to be quarrelsome, but the notion that our democracy is built on an informed electorate, and our economy on educated workers, h as consensus.

What about public education next to an iconic major league ballpark? Even better, if you were a teenager, Marcos Baez, at Fenway High. His high school was next to Fenway Park in Boston, which meant that his education was in the shadow of the American Pastime. Both inspired him.

I attended a high school, Omaha Central, with a majestic perch above downtown. As a student the location seemed exciting and important, and helped me see beyond my upbringing in a tidy suburb. As a researcher for the ESPN E:60 show, I wondered about Fenway High – an innovative school next to a shrine – and took my curiosity to headmaster Peggy Kemp.

She welcomed me in. She introduced me to students who shared their papers and thoughts. She introduced me to teachers who opened their classrooms and minds and hearts. I was privileged to observe what made the school tick.

When I met Marcos he had started his senior year. He had struggled for education. Born to a mother of Puerto Rican descent, and an absent Dominican father, he attended three different elementary schools in three years, and repeated second grade. In sixth grade, when classmates took the test for Boston’s three elite ‘exam’ schools, his mother held off. In eighth grade he took the test and came up short.

At that point the odds lengthened on Marcos being the first in his family to obtain a college degree. In 2008-09 Latino students had the highest rates of poverty, mobility, chronic absence, and grade retention in Boston Public Schools. They also had high rates of disability, suspension, and limited English proficiency compared to students of other races. Of Fenway’s 290 students – 41 percent Latino – nearly 70 percent lived at or below the poverty line.

Marcos needed a high school that could help him beat the odds. He and Fenway found one another. It had a location he fancied, as a baseball player and fan, and it was well regarded in the Latino community. In May 2008, the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy, at University of Massachusetts-Boston, recognized Fenway High as one of five Boston schools where Latinos succeed. Its success was not due to creaming of top students, as the exam schools do.

As a senior Marcos was as comfortable at Fenway High as in his living room at home. He was a young man at a crossroads. In a few months college admission and financial aid would reveal his future.

This is the story of Marcos, who came to Fenway High determined to make something of his life – his mother insisted. It’s also about a school whose mission was to guide him. As Marcos came to realize, it wasn’t the location next to the ballpark that mattered most. It was the one between his ears.

Chapter 1

Wanda and Marcos

Wanda Aviles’ Latina Dream wasn’t the usual stuff of upward mobility – it was horizontal. She dreamed of an afternoon siesta, or a good night’s sleep. So fraught was her life that rest was the most seductive comfort she dared imagine.

Wanda worked in billing for Boston Children’s Hospital, at about $810 a week, plus overtime, which she could not afford to pass up. She paid $1,200 to Boston Housing Authority for a three-bedroom townhouse in the Mission Main project, where gunshots serenaded the night at no extra charge.

She fed and clothed three children, and funded and chaperoned their sports and social activities. Her own aged and eccentric mother needed attention. She paid $342 a month on a Honda CR-V, and another $150 for insurance and $80 for parking at work. When she could she took her family out for Chinese food. Jose Matos was supposed to pay her $80 a week in child support, but she could not count on it, nor could she count on his heroin trade to fund her visits to her family in Puerto Rico, as in the past. At the last of the month dollars were scarce and she had no savings. Wanda still was an attractive woman, with a bountiful figure and silken dark hair, but she was worn from drudgery and stress, and despaired that life would yield her another romance.

In late winter 2007, when the economy went south, Wanda was 38. Her best hope of upward mobility had vanished when she dropped out of college, after one year, to support her first son, born in her junior year of high school. Now he was grown and gone, in the military because there had been no money for college. Her attention turned to her youngest three, and especially her second son, Marcos Baez, who was 15 and in the eighth grade. He was a good kid, and for him Wanda wanted nothing less than more. College. Graduate school. Work fulfillment, wife and children, a nice home in a safe neighborhood, and financial security.

You will have it all, Marquito, she told him. I insist.

© Marcos Baez

Marcos Baez, in eighth grade, opted for Fenway High. His mother, Wanda Aviles, hoped Fenway would prepare him for college. Marcos hoped it would lead to a life in baseball.

Ma, I have to get through high school first.

He was right, first things first. He needed to choose a high school. Marcos had taken the test for Boston’s elite exam schools – Boston Latin, Latin Academy, and O’Bryant School of Math and Science – but had scored too low. His test performance threw Wanda into a panic, because the exam schools were the surest route to college, and more critically, financial aid. Even an exam school degree did not guarantee adequate financial aid, as had been the case with her oldest son, Johnny Guante, a 2004 graduate of O’Bryant.

Wanda was not about to let Marcos’ future be limited by one test in the eighth grade – one stinking test! She was determined he get a high school education worthy of her ambition. But the rest of Boston’s 33 high schools were unknown to her.

One of Marcos’s teachers at his K-8 school, Young Achievers Science and Math in Jamaica Plain, made a suggestion.

Fenway High, said Sarah Jane Quessa.

The ballpark?

Not Fenway Park. Behind the ballpark. Fenway High.

Quessa was a 1998 graduate of Fenway High.

I’m listening.

It’s small. About 300 students. Nobody gets lost in the crowd. Each class of 75 is divided into three groups of 25. Each group of 25 is like a family. They do everything together as freshmen, sophomores and juniors.

That’s a good thing. Marcos is so shy.

Have you heard of an Essential School?

Wanda had not.

An Essential School is where teachers don’t lecture so much as they coach. The kids are taught to take charge of their own learning. They learn how to think critically. It’s not so much knowing the answer to every question, but knowing how to ask the right questions, and how to evaluate information. How to explain and present your thinking to others.

Wanda bit. She wanted Marcos to know how to think. What mother wouldn’t?

The school mission is to create a socially committed and morally responsible community of learners, which values its students as individuals, Quessa went on. I didn’t just make that up. That really is the school mission.

Marcos went to mass at St. Patrick’s Church every Sunday. He was an altar boy. Wanda liked the sound of socially committed and morally responsible, and she guessed that Father Carlos would.

Another thing about Fenway, Quessa said, is that the city is its classroom. It partners with Museum of Science, Emmanuel College, Gardner Museum, Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The kids get out of the building.

Quessa added a few more details about Fenway’s graduation rate (99%) and success in college admissions. Not to the elite schools, she explained, because Fenway students, for whatever reason, tended to tank the SAT exam. But local schools – Wheaton, Wheelock, UMass-Boston, UMass-Dartmouth, Wentworth, Pine Manor – welcomed Fenway students.

All good, except for the SAT glitch, Wanda thought. Yet another test to thwart her son.

What about the neighborhood? she asked.

Not a problem. No trouble around the ballpark.

© Steve Marantz

Fenway High shared a 1930s-era building with Boston Arts Academy.

Wanda swallowed. A day later she and Marcos drove to 174 Ipswich Street, behind the ballpark. The building, of 1930s vintage, was shaped like an ocean liner, with a curved bow and squared stern, of pale brick, three stories, except at the midpoint, where a fourth-floor studio garret rose above the stairwell. The sign above the entrance indicated that Fenway High shared the building with Boston Arts Academy, the high school for performing and visual arts. Across the street were Gate B and the statue of Ted Williams and the little boy with cancer.

What do you think, Marquito?

Does it have R.O.T.C.?

He wanted no part of R.O.T.C., which he suspected would push him into the military, as it had his older half-brother.

No.

I like it.

He kept to himself, as he looked toward the ballpark, what he most liked about it.

They applied and were invited back a couple of weeks later. At his interview disguised as an information session, Marcos was shy and polite. Wanda impressed the admissions panel with her questions.

What if I want to talk with his teachers? she asked.

She was told that teachers provide e-mail and cell phone numbers to students and parents.

I can call?

Whenever you want.

Marcos had to submit an essay; he wrote about his affection for the Young Achievers School.

Out of about 500 applicants, Marcos was one of 75 chosen for the class of 2011. Wanda and Marcos were excited, for different reasons. Wanda saw Fenway High as Marcos’s best opportunity to go to college and get the degree she never got. She told him so at least once a day.

Marcos was enthused about something he dared not voice. He loved baseball. He played for his neighborhood team, and harbored a larger ambition. Baseball, Marcos believed, might solve the needs of his family. He liked the idea of high school next to a ballpark. The high school had a baseball team. He was 15. Where better to launch a baseball life than Fenway High?

Chapter 2

Dorchester to Mission Main

Wanda’s parents, Domingo Aviles and Isabel Lugo, worked at a factory that made automobile seat-covers, on Brookline Avenue near Fenway Park. When they met, in 1962, they were among 2,100 Puerto Ricans in Boston. Domingo had come with his family in the early 1950s to New Bedford, Mass., a factory and fishing town. Isabel had come with her first husband, an African-American serviceman, to Washington, D.C. in 1959, but the marriage had broken apart, and she had moved to Boston. Domingo and Isabel fell in love, rented an apartment on Norfolk Avenue in Dorchester, and waited for the Catholic Church to annul her marriage.

Their first child, Ricardo, was born in 1965. Then the annulment came through, and Isabel and Domingo married. Another boy, Reinaldo, came along in 1966.

Wanda was born in 1968 and started school in 1974. Wanda’s parents enrolled her in St. Patrick’s elementary in Dorchester, as they had her two older brothers, to avoid the danger and stress of busing. St. Patrick’s, wrote J. Anthony Lukas in Common Ground, was an escape route for Puerto Rican and black students where they were required to recite the catechism every day, attend Mass every Friday, and wear neat black-and-white uniforms. Half a year after Wanda started school, Domingo and Isabel purchased a triple-decker on Corona Street, in Dorchester, moved into the bottom unit, and rented out the top two.

Family life on Corona Street was traditional, dinners together, housecleaning on Saturday, St. Patrick’s Church on Sunday. Education was stressed – homework before television. Domingo bought a set of encyclopedias. He spoke English at home, and Isabel Spanish, but Isabel went to night school to learn English. The children spoke English with their father, Spanish with their mother. For fun, Domingo danced salsa with his children.

Domingo doted on Wanda, helped with her studies, and brought her up as a daddy’s girl. That changed when Wanda was 11. He began a torrid affair with Isabel’s best friend, and moved with the other woman to Puerto Rico. Distraught, Wanda followed him to Puerto Rico to live with her mother’s family, and to attend seventh grade. Her aunts told her of the affair, and prepared her to help Isabel upon her return to Dorchester.

Domingo’s defection demoralized Isabel. When she was a child, her mother had fled, a victim of domestic abuse, and left Isabel and