Calixto at a Crossroads

On Monday, Calixto will enter Gaithersburg High -- a red-brick, 1950s-era school in a town that Money magazine just named America's 17th best place to live. But to many Latino parents in this community 10 miles northwest of the Beltway, Gaithersburg High is better known as the "gang factory."

It's a school with 2,200 students. One-fourth are part of Montgomery County's burgeoning Latino population: In the past 10 years, the number of Latinos in the schools has doubled to 27,041.

Many of these kids are painfully isolated and marginalized -- both academically and socially. For many, it's the fights that earn status, a sad reality highlighted earlier this month by the stabbings at a Silver Spring high school and the Target in Wheaton attributed to the MS-13 gang. Six Latino teenagers were sent to the hospital, and 12 more young men and teenagers were arrested. Eleven were charged with attempted first-degree murder.

Calixto was born in Rockville 14 years ago, but the vowels of his English sometimes slant long, as in Spanish. His parents are from San Miguel, in eastern El Salvador. His mother cooked on a wood-burning stove. They give advice, then tell him not to see them as role models. "You don't want a life like ours," they warn in Spanish, referring to their jobs here cleaning floors and toilets. "Be someone important." Although everyone in Calixto's family is now American -- his parents became citizens in the 1990s -- he, like many of his Latino friends, sometimes uses "Americans" as a synonym for "the white people."

For the past five months, with Calixto's and his parents' permission, The Washington Post has been following him at school and in church, at home and on the soccer fields, on the Ride-On public bus and into the nursing home where he volunteers -- all to chronicle the fault lines Calixto must negotiate as he, like thousands of others like him across the Washington region, enters ninth grade. The year of make or break.

The Retreat

His family calls him by his middle name, 'Tonio, because his dad's name is Calixto, too.

But outside of the Salgados' brown brick townhouse in Gaithersburg, this tall and slender kid, with dark fuzz on his upper lip and razored sideburns down his cheeks, is Calixto.

He is a kid who shears his hair short, like the velvet nap of a new tennis ball, and is prone to deciding, early in the school day, that his jeans are all wrong and must be fixed immediately. So he ties them into his shoelaces. When he made his confirmation at St. Martin's Catholic church, he chose for his gift a pendant of Jesus and a praying child. Nearly everyone else in his class received a crucifix. "A crucifixion isn't original," he says. "And I didn't want to be like everybody else."

"Calixto!" two girls call to him now. "We need your hand! Calixto ."

Here in classroom D226, at Gaithersburg's Forest Oak Middle School, it's May and they're painting team flags, preparing for a weekend retreat. Calixto's Blue Team -- el Equipo azul -- has centered theirs with proud, ebullient letters, "L4L: LATINOS 4 LIFE," encircled by duets of handprints. Calixto adds his, and they're off, 19 seventh- and eighth- graders heading east on a yellow school bus. Destination: a camp on Anne Arundel County's West River, near the Chesapeake Bay.

It's part of an after-school course run by Identity, a seven-year-old Montgomery County nonprofit that works with middle and high school Latinos -- kids deemed "at risk" of tripping into achingly familiar pitfalls: joining gangs, dropping out of school, getting pregnant, doing drugs.

"The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round," Calixto starts, joking around, and soon the others are singing, too: From "SpongeBob" -- "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Sponge! Bob! Square! Pants!" -- to Eminem. "Get a beat!" Calixto yells. "Someone get a beat," and they rap until Lourdes Valle turns somber. "Hey," she shouts over the din, "everybody pray."