Mayoral duty No. 1: Teach history

"A lot of these kids aren't exposed to reading. For them to read, it has to be a story that talks to them, he says. Unlike Salcido, whose grandparents immigrated here from Torreon, Mexico, almost a century ago, El Rancho students are more likely to be first- or second-generation Americans who speak English and Spanish interchangeably.

It wasn't long ago that Salcido favored tossing a football over picking up a book. He credits his father, a steelworker who reads several newspapers a day, for his 1996 graduation from nearby Whittier College, alma mater of former President Richard Nixon.

"My father came home from work dirty and tired, and if I wasn't doing my homework, he'd get mad," he says. "He would always tell me: 'Don't use your body, use your brain.' "

With a history degree in hand, Salcido knew he wanted to teach and he knew there was only one place he wanted to do it. El Rancho hired him a few months after graduation.

He married a fellow El Rancho High graduate and settled into a house three blocks from the high school. His run for Congress was grass roots all the way – a $30,000 campaign with family members passing out flyers and "Salcido for Congress" T-shirts (a hot-ticket item around El Rancho's campus in the days before the election). He won a respectable 36 percent of the vote against incumbent Grace Napolitano and says he'll probably try again in 2004. He sums up his political platform in the same straightforward way he teaches: "This community created me, and now I want to take a bigger role in it ... give me a shot."

Salcido has instilled that sense of community devotion in many of his students, says El Rancho High graduate Alex Santana, now a second-year political science major at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

"All my life I had heard people tell me to study hard and do well and I would be rewarded with a better lifestyle than the one I had in Pico Rivera," Mr. Santana says. "[They] had given me the attitude that by going off to Notre Dame I was gaining the opportunity to escape from where I am from. Mr. Salcido was the first person to challenge that."

Instead, Santana says, "he taught me to embrace my community for what it is and what it could be."

I'm a firm believer in the classics – like "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Hamlet" – and they get that in English class. What I try do is get them reading and talking about a book that I would consider more relevant to their lives as California high school students in 2002."

You can't just say, 'this is my teaching style, take it or leave it.' If I have to be Bozo the Clown to get them to learn, I'll be Bozo the Clown."

I rarely use textbooks. They don't need to see a picture of [German Chancellor] Baron von Bismarck to learn about history."

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