Scraping together an American dream

Building services worker Marisol Cortez had almost finished her senior year of high school in El Salvador when her results for a career path test came back. Her friends jumped, clapped and cheered as she told them the test's recommendations for her: journalism and law enforcement.

Eight years later, Cortez, 26, is still following the same dream. After going to college in El Salvador, she immigrated to Maryland in 2000 and got her job at Blair. She has taken night classes at Montgomery College for the past two and a half years.

Every day of sweeping, scrubbing and stuffing trash cans helps her make ends meet, cover next semester's tuition costs and pay medical bills for her father in El Salvador, who battles cancer. And, slowly but surely, every night of classes brings her closer to her time-tested goal of becoming a law enforcement officer.

"My dream is to get to be FBI or be a judge," says Cortez. She has already decided the next steps in her career path: graduating from Montgomery College in two years and getting a degree in criminal justice at the University of Maryland.

But for now, Cortez must deal with the rigors of her 8-to-4:30 job. Every day, she sweeps five hallways and tidies up half of the third floor after school. She has the formidable task of cleaning the bathrooms in the 160s hallway, the "worst bathrooms in the building" because students leave them a mess after lunch, says Building Services Manager Quentin Middleton.

Four nights a week, Cortez puts a long day of maintenance at Blair behind her and heads to Rockville for class. She takes an English and a reading course, both for non-native speakers.

Right now though, she's on her 5A lunch duty shift, doing litter patrol. She determinedly strides over to the nearest trash can, grasps its handle in a latex-gloved hand and wheels it to a table. Into the garbage go newspapers, chocolate pudding, a Snickers wrapper and pink marshmallows. A student looks up, surprised to see Cortez snatch and trash his orange peels.

Dealing with grimy garbage is a necessary part of a necessary job that provides Cortez with the money to help pay for her father's doctor and medicine. She and her four siblings support him financially and emotionally, calling once or twice a week.

Before Cortez moved to Maryland, her father lived in the U.S. with her sister, and Cortez came up to visit several times before deciding that she belonged here. "I'm the type of person that likes to always have something new, something different. So one day I told my mom I'm going to stay [in the U.S.]," says Cortez.

Cortez still misses her hometown, Nueva San Salvador, for the year-round temperatures between 80 and 100 degrees and the lack of humidity. Every Friday during her college years, she went to the beach La Libertad, a mere 20-minute trip away. Unsurprisingly, when Cortez moved to the U.S., weather was one of the two most difficult changes for her.

The other was English. The English classes she took in El Salvador did not prepare her for the strange pronunciation, convoluted grammar rules and confusing idioms she would encounter in the U.S. She had difficulty navigating the roads, finding a job and expressing herself.

Although Cortez feels she has made significant progress, she realizes that her speech still belies her foreignness. "I will never pretend to speak like an American speaker," she says. Cortez takes opportunities to improve her English, looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary and reading in her free time.

In El Salvador, her mother was her main motivation, "always pushing" her. Now, she relies on self-motivation to propel herself toward her goals. "You give yourself your opportunity," she says.

She is in control of her own education. On her to-do list are learning a third language and improving her computer skills. Only lack of time and money prevent her from taking more courses each semester.

Because Montgomery College does not accept credits from her college in El Salvador, Cortez needed to spend extra time retaking math classes. Yet her outlook on her future remains positive. "Doing it again is a pain. It's like you repeat a year in high school. But that's okay; I'm not frustrated. I'm taking my time," she says. "Life is like that."