Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Dagoberto Gilb’s personal essay looks back on his youth in Los Angeles, where he grew up in a working-class neighborhood and knew few people with a college education. He had never seen a college campus, and even though he lived in LA, had never seen the campuses of UCLA or USC: “Nobody I knew went to a college like that. Actually, any college at all” (286). Everyone he knew was employed as a laborer. Gilb began working in his teens, and most of his high school classmates stayed in their neighborhood and went to work right after graduation. Neither he nor his friends realized that by the time high school concluded, the course of their lives was largely predetermined by their backgrounds.

Nevertheless, Gilb earned an undergraduate degree and then a master’s degree. No one in his life encouraged him to pursue his college diploma; he had no idea what was required to be admitted and was an average student at the community college he attended. He writes, “Well intentioned, I wasn’t close to a high-level student then, but, given information, I was someone who could take what I knew I could do and figure out what came next” (288).