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The two also share the bond of their heritage: they’re both “100 percent Native American,” they say in tandem. “We share the love and pride of our heritage and culture,” MoNique says.
Whether it’s going to powwows, reading history on their culture or telling creation stories, both girls are deeply invested in their ethnic identity. “I think heritage is important because it is the backbone to who you are,” MoNique says.
It’s been harder for the girls to stay in touch with their roots since moving from New Mexico to Oregon after their parents’ 2004 divorce. But they call their father, who speaks Navajo fluently, when they want to know how to say a Navajo word or phrase. He still lives on the reservation where MoNique and Monica grew up, working in construction.
Their mother has remarried and she and her new husband work at Intel as an administrator and a safety engineer. The family has lived in Cornelius for five years, but the twins still remember how difficult it was to transfer to a new school district.
“We hated it,” Monica recalls, “but we finally stepped up to the plate.”
Next year, the twins will face one of the hardest situations in their young lives: they have to part ways. MoNique will attend Portland State University, where she plans to pursue her love of art and English.
Monica applied to college but didn’t get in. “It put me down,” she admits, “but [it]… was my fault for not doing so hot in school.” This summer Monica will go to boot camp, and then become a part of the National Guard, where she plans to go into ROTC for nursing.
After that, she wants to go to PCC and PSU to train as an obstetrics nurse, a calling she discovered after she witnessed the births of her baby brother and sister.
MoNique doesn’t know what kind of work she’ll do yet. “I know I want to contribute to a better future for the up-and-coming youth,” she said. “I want my voice to be heard.”
The twins look forward to next year with a mix of emotions. They are sad to split, but they know it will come with benefits.
“We know that day will come soon,” Monica says, “and we will welcome it with open arms. We need to develop our own personal identity without each other — we are going to be adults soon.”
MoNique says she will miss being able to share so much with her twin, but she knows they have to follow their own paths.
“We are completely different people,” MoNique says.
I’m set to meet Jaime Olaez in a hallway at Forest Grove High. “I’m the short Mexican guy with the yellow shirt,” Jaime says.
Walking down the hall, I feel like I’m on a blind date, scanning the crowd, but eventually we find each other. We duck into a computer lab and he says, “I hear you go to Catlin Gabel.” I nod, and he sits down at the computer and pulls up a window in Firefox that already displays the school’s home page.
“Do you know it costs $22,700 to go to your school?”
When I hide my face he laughs amiably, and asks if I see first-graders in the hall since it’s a K-12 school. To Jaime’s right, a friend of his — a fellow senior — designs a T-shirt for an upcoming game of Frisbee golf. He introduces himself as Justin Seitz.
Jaime’s parents moved to the U.S. a few years before he was born. Jaime has two brothers and a sister, but he’s the baby by seven years.
He was born in Portland and his family moved to Forest Grove shortly thereafter. His mother got a job at Intel and his father took a managerial position at Gonzales Harvesting in Cornelius.
Jaime has been involved in student government since his freshman year, so becoming student body president wasn’t “extremely different” for him, though he admits this time the title’s more memorable. For the most part Jaime enjoys his position and the respect he has from his teachers and peers.
When I ask Jaime what his biggest challenge has been so far, he tells me he’s lived a pretty sheltered life.
Jaime admits that his biggest challenge may be “being Mexican and you know, trying to find myself when most of my friends are white and you aren’t.”
“You’re always the oddball; always the odd one out,” Jaime notes. He says he’s the only Mexican in most of his extracurricular activities and in student government. “It’s hard being different all the time,” he observes.
That sense of difference extends to his home life. Unlike his siblings, Jaime thinks of English as his first language. Spanish is another story.
“I can get around with my Spanish,” he tells me, but it’s not “highly educated” Spanish, so it limits “what I can tell my parents, and convey.”
Once a year, his parents visit Mexico, but Jaime hasn’t gone there for six years.
“I don’t see much of a necessity to go,” he tells me. “I’ve grown up here … my immediate family is here.”
Next year Jaime will attend Pepperdine University in California. He was excited when he got in, but “I never really considered going there for sure because of the money.”
After his mother got laid off in 2008, Jaime, like many seniors, decided to look at schools in terms of money. But Pepperdine and various other scholarship organizations stepped forward with help.Now Jaime is heading there in the fall and only has to come up with $4,000 of the tuition cost.
What comes after Pepperdine? Jaime says he wants to pursue his goal of becoming a stand-up comic. What if the comedy doesn’t stand up?
Maybe then he’ll be a writer. “As long as it’s something to do with comedy.”
Tradition times two
I accidentally wake Wyatt Gallinger up an hour early on his senior skip day. It’s raining outside, I’ve been walking for 15 minutes searching for his house and I have two very large, very painful blisters on my right foot.
Like the good sport he is, Wyatt gets up and greets me at their red door. He and his brother are boyishly handsome, and thankfully, he doesn’t look at all cranky after the early morning call.
Wyatt and his brother Ryley are identical twins who have lived in Cornelius all their lives. Their mother works in the mortgage department at Wells Fargo Bank, and their father, like so many others in the economic downturn, is currently unemployed.
They have one older brother who owns a landscaping business, where Wyatt works.
“It’s hard work, but at the end of the day you feel like you’ve accomplished something,” Wyatt says. “That’s the kind of work I like.”
Ryley, on the other hand, has a job at McDonald’s. Wyatt says Ryley gets frustrated with “special order” customers and can’t wait until the building gets torn down in the summer, when it’s scheduled to be replaced with a brand-new McDonald’s.
Even if their work experience differs, the two boys share a lot in common.
From kindergarten to the fourth-grade they had many of the same teachers, and for the most part, Wyatt tells me, “his friends are my friends, and my friends are his.”
When I ask if people tend to think of them as a unit, he says they’re usually perceived “as individuals that travel together.”
As for career plans, both boys plan on joining the Navy, something Wyatt has wanted to do all his life.
“Military was a must for me,” he says. “It’s kind of a family tradition.”
His grandfather was a gunnery sergeant during World War II. He survived an attack by a Kamikaze plane that crashed into his vessel and severely damaged it.
Though their father didn’t follow in his dad’s footsteps, the Gallinger twins plan to — Ryley as a corpsman and Wyatt as a rescue swimmer.
Why a rescue swimmer?
“When I joined I figured I might as well be the best,” Wyatt explains. He chose that specialty because he could not become a Navy Seal with his bad eyesight.
Ryley wanted to be a firefighter when he was little, but he decided to become a corpsman. At some point, Wyatt says, Ryley intends to become a firefighter for the Navy.
Training has already started for the two teens. After school on Thursdays, they go to physical training, where they learn what the Navy requires of them.
Basic training starts on Aug. 10. “I’m excited,” Wyatt tells me. “I can’t wait.”
Ryley is excited, too, Wyatt adds. “He loves it — he wants to go sooner than that.”
The first diploma
Mark Castro is one of the easiest students to pick out at FGHS, for reasons of race and fashion. He’s one of the few African-American students at the school, and he wears some of the baggiest pants I’ve ever seen.
Despite his visibility, barely anyone I talk to knows his name. He’s just “the black guy,” and a lot of people express fear: the tattoos, the clothes, the ever-present posse of girls.
It’s easy to see where they’re coming from. Mark demands respect.
Since the age of two, Mark has lived in Forest Grove with his adoptive family. His mother is a teaching assistant at Gales Creek Elementary, and he misses his father, who is currently incarcerated.
“It’s harder for the person out of jail,” Mark tells me.
Mark only knows bits and pieces about his biological family. He knows he has one sister and two brothers, one of whom is named Isaac. He doesn’t know the names of his parents — or anything about his mother.
Someday he hopes to meet them because he likes the idea of having siblings.
In a town where whites and Hispanics make up 98 percent of the population, Mark says he is “always getting in fights over race,” and that people sling racial slurs at him on occasion.
“They’re mostly doing it just to be funny” or they’re “just trying to start problems,” he notes.
Even though most of it happens outside of school, Mark admits that at Forest Grove High, race is “a problem.” Some of the students, he tells me, “think I’m not like them.” However, according to him, things have improved since the last class graduated.
Mark has ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), and perhaps that’s why he tells me, “I’ve been tired of this school since my freshman year.” He says he finds going to class boring. When I ask why he stays at FGHS, he tells me he wants to be the first person in his family to graduate from high school.
Mark admits he’s had some trouble with the law. But he looks towards the future with hope. He plans to steer clear of drugs and find a job. He wants to become a music producer.
“I’ve been around music my whole life, and [I’ve] really gotten into it,” he says.
One day, Mark wants to have a family.
“I want to be a good father,” he tells me. If he has a son, he says, “I don’t want him to end up like me.”
The Forest Grove High School Class of 2010 is one of the largest in the school’s history, according to staff members. Here are some other tidbits about the group of students who graduated Tuesday night.
Mascot: Forest Grove Vikings
Sports league: 6A Pacific Conference
School colors: Maroon and gold
Total number of class members: 412
Males: 175
Females: 237
Valedictorians: 23
Salutatorians: 1
Amount of scholarship and award money earned by class members: $4.5 million
Most popular two-year college choice: Portland Community College
Most popular four-year college choice: Oregon State University
Class motto:
“What lies behind us, and what lies ahead of us, are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
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