I wrote the personal essay to my college applications about the Wu-Tang Clan’s song “C.R.E.A.M.”
It’s a song about growing up in rough neighborhoods, dealing with gang violence and drugs and thinking that money is the only way out.
That song summed up the way many of the kids in my high school seemed to think. But I wanted something different. I wanted to get an education and change the world.
“I want to be a writer so I can come back to kids like me and tell them that there’s another way,” I wrote.
In my application to the Daily Bruin, I mirrored that thought.
“I want to tell the stories about people like me,” I remember saying in my nerve-wracking interview for an intern position on the paper.
I’ve worked at The Bruin for four years now, and I don’t think I can comfortably say that I have told those stories.
I can point to places here and there where this paper, which I had the pleasure of running for an entire year, has told those stories, but there are not many and that makes me feel like I’ve failed a little.
So I wanted to take the last thing I’ll ever write for this paper and dedicate it to the people who are like me and made me the person I am today – the wonderful people of the city of Pomona, Calif.
This is for the kids trying to go to college even though their teachers tell them they’re not good enough.
This is for second-grade teachers telling a kid from a minority background that his dream to be the president of the United States is completely plausible because this is the United States.
This is for Barack Obama, for proving that true.
This is for my brothers in community college because they didn’t have money to afford to go directly to a four-year university.
This is for my sisters who couldn’t go to college to pursue their dreams because their patriarchal society told them that a woman’s place is at home taking care of the family.
This is for those who made it to college – that ivory tower where they were promised they would encounter enlightened people – but only encountered the same discrimination they experienced back home.
This is for the DREAMers who have to sit around doing nothing with their college diplomas because they are missing one little piece of paper that our society says gives them right to be here.
This is for my friends who are too afraid to come out because their parents won’t accept the person they love.
This is for the mothers and fathers working two or three jobs to make ends meet, and not being able to see their kids because otherwise there would be no food on the table.
This is for the kids who feel neglected because their parents are not around.
This is for the older brothers and sisters stepping up to take care of their younger siblings because their parents are not there.
This is for our brothers and sisters fighting in the military to keep this country safe.
This is for anybody who’s ever been locked up – it’s never too late to change.
I haven’t written about these people nearly enough, and that’s one of my biggest regrets.
But I accomplished at least one of the goals I set out in my intern application when I was a wide-eyed freshman – I’m a writer and that is a step in the right direction.
I don’t know where I’ll end up working after I finish my internship at the Austin American-Statesman this summer, but wherever I go I’ll take the stories of these folks with me.
And maybe this is just the beginning. Hopefully, I am just a voice shouting in the wilderness to prepare the way for much better storytellers who come where I come from.
If that turns out to be the case, I’ll have to thank all the wonderful and understanding people I met and worked with here at The Bruin for helping me get the ball rolling.
I can’t imagine what life would have been like at UCLA these four years if I had not worked here.
This is for the Daily Bruin, thank you.
Barragan was editor-in-chief from 2012-2013, assistant news editor from 2011-2012 and a news and video reporter from 2010-2011.