Members of Hispanic Boy Scout Troop 911(girls included) at St. Michael’s Church in Paterson wearing military fatigues

Harvy Lipman at North Jersey.com

The kids in Troop 911 can’t wear traditional Boy Scout uniforms to their meetings at St. Michael the Archangel Church in Paterson. So they wear combat fatigues instead.

"When I first started, I had a Boy Scout uniform, but the kids would make fun of us," said Angel Fernandez. Members would even get beat up, added Daniel Vergara, the troop’s scoutmaster. "These kids live in this neighborhood, and they’d say to me, ‘Mr. V, I’m scared to walk to the meeting.’ "

Other, more sinister forces complicate the efforts of regional leaders to increase Scouting’s presence among Hispanics in North Jersey’s cities.

"There was a guy two blocks away who would sit out on the street recruiting for the Junior Latin Kings," Vergara noted. "Basically, I’m competing with the gangs."

Not every Latino neighborhood in North Jersey is as rough as the streets of Paterson. But Troop 911’s experience offers some useful lessons for the Northern New Jersey Boy Scouts Council as it seeks to recruit members from the burgeoning Latino population.

Scouting’s nationwide "Hispanic Initiative" is both an effort to serve more kids and a matter of survival for the Boy Scouts. Its membership as of the end of last year stood at 2.8 million children, only about half of what it was at the organization’s peak in the early 1970s and a drop of nearly 100,000 since 2005.

That’s a problem of which the Oakland-based council is well aware.

Douglas Dillow, who took over last year as the council’s CEO, acknowledged the Boy Scouts haven’t been very successful at expanding beyond the organization’s traditional white, suburban roots. He noted that the four counties the council covers — Bergen, Passaic, Hudson and Essex — have become far more ethnically diverse, with burgeoning Hispanic, Middle Eastern and East Asian communities.

"Look at our market penetration," Dillow said. "In the traditional suburbs we’re serving upwards of 30 percent of the children who would be eligible to join the Boy Scouts. In those communities that are more ethnically diverse, it’s less than 10 percent."

Penetrating those communities is going to take ingenuity and persistence.

"There’s not one simple answer nationwide," said Lorenzo Martorella, the Boy Scouts’ associate national director who has been touring councils across the country helping them put together local strategies to implement the initiative. "There’s not one simple answer in Paterson, and the answers in Paterson are not the same as they would be in Union City."

Cultural obstacles

One answer for Vergara came from a senior Boy Scout a few years ago: Rather than the Scouts having to fight their way to and from meetings, he told the scoutmaster, he knew where the troop could get camouflage fatigues. The military garb went over much better.

"I’ve walked down the street and even had people salute us," smiled Fernandez, a wiry 16-year-old who credits his participation in the Boy Scouts with keeping him off the path to trouble on Paterson’s streets.

Back then, Vergara said, it took some effort to persuade the Northern New Jersey Boy Scouts Council to approve the idea, but he did.

Now the Oakland-based council is eagerly looking for ideas to attract Hispanic kids — whether it takes giving out military fatigues or setting up a troop focused on soccer.

One step: The council has hired two Latino senior district executives — Jose Chelo Mercado heads the Southern Valley district, covering southern Passaic County and parts of Bergen County, and Alex Leonard heads the Hudson Liberty district, encompassing Hudson County.

But hiring Hispanic leaders is only the beginning.

"The second part is recognizing that in the cultures that many of these families come from, they have no experience with the Boy Scouts, or their experience tells them that they’re not eligible," Dillow said. "In Mexico, for instance, you’re only eligible for the Scouting program if you come from the elite. We’ve had situations where we say to a boy, here take a flier. He’ll take it home and show it to his parents and they’ll say, ‘No, that’s for the rich.’ "

Good role models

Scout leaders looking to reach out to the Hispanic community can also take some lessons from Vergara, a deputy commissioner of the Paterson Department of Public Works and former school board member. Eight years ago, after being a Scout leader most of his adult life, Vergara was on the verge of quitting. He had tried setting up a new troop for his then 8-year-old son, but could only find five boys who wanted to join.

"I said to my son, I’m going to shut it down because the kids just aren’t interested, or they’re scared of being in Scouting in their neighborhoods," he recalled.

"I told him if you shut it down, most of these kids have nothing and they’ll be back on the streets," said his son, Daniel Vergara Jr. "I promise I’ll stick with you."

"Within a month of getting the fatigues, we were up to 90 members," the senior Vergara said. But the uniforms were only part of the problem. "Most of these boys don’t have a father figure. Their older brothers are selling drugs, they’ve dropped out of school. Their parents are not educated, and they don’t enforce educational and family values."

Heading off trouble

The size of the troop has waxed and waned over the years, but Vergara has managed to keep it alive. Troop 911 now has about 30 members — mostly boys and a handful of girls. If recruiting or holding onto a Scout means going to kids’ homes or meeting with their teachers, that’s what Vergara does.

That’s how he recruited David Guerrero, who’s been in and out of the troop — and in and out of trouble — for much of his 16 years.

"I used to get in a lot of trouble in school, getting into fights, hanging out on the streets, disrespecting my parents," Guerrero said. "I grew up in the Dominican Republic, and there you had to fight for anything. I brought that here with me."

In desperation, his father went to David’s school principal for help, and the principal referred him to Vergara. Though there have been fits and starts — Guerrero dropped out of Scouting for awhile and got in trouble a couple of times – he says things have changed. His grades have improved, and he hopes to become an accountant or a businessman. "My father’s very proud of me," he said. "If I would’ve never met Mr. V, my future would be jail."

"The change was extraordinary," his father, Cervano Guerrero, said.

Troop 911 could use a little more support from the council, local businesses or anyone else looking to offer a hand. They have no tents to use on camping trips and only a few pots and pans. Even getting parents to pay a couple of bucks for an activity is a challenge, Vergara said.

Vergara’s contingent is one of only two remaining Scout troops in Paterson — a city that a decade or so ago had more than a dozen, recalled Linda Hodgson, scoutmaster of Troop 37, based in St. George Church. This summer, her troop was down to four Boy Scouts and four Cub Scouts.

"There have been tough times the past two years," said Hodgson, who has been a scoutmaster for 10 years. A couple of years ago, about 15 boys joined up, but they didn’t seem interested in following any rules.

"There were a lot of boys who hang out on the street and some came into the troop," she said. "They thought it was just a social group, but it’s not. They didn’t want the discipline. I’d hold a meeting and invite the parents, and they didn’t come."

With the troop on the verge of disappearing, Hodgson said, Mercado stepped in to help. "He sent a Spanish-speaking scoutmaster in September to speak at the church’s two Spanish-language Masses. We got three new Boy Scouts and two new Cub Scouts."

After-school activity

But, as Mercado noted, the council’s Hispanic Initiative has a long way to go, especially in Bergen and Passaic counties. Calls to religious and community groups around Bergen and Passaic counties that serve Hispanic youth found that almost none have had much recent contact with the Boy Scouts.

Mercado acknowledged that the initiative is in its infancy in the two counties. Last month he met with Andre Sayegh, executive director of the Paterson Alliance and the councilman for the city’s 6th Ward, to plot a strategy for reaching out to the city’s Hispanic population.

"He asked me to help recruit businessmen, educators and representatives of the non-profit community," said Sayegh. The alliance is a coalition of more than 50 non-profits serving the city. "Here in Paterson we can never get enough after-school activities."

The effort is somewhat further along in Hudson County, where Boy Scout recruiting brochures written in Spanish are even being handed out in some of the schools.

Mercado said the council looks for any innovation that will reach kids. It’s set up relationships with youth groups with different focuses, including a break dancing group and a drum corps.

"The goal is to spark some interest in the youth," he said. "If they’re involved in another program that does character building, that’s fine by us. We’d like to work hand-in-hand with youth group leaders interested in developing those same values. We don’t want to dilute their program to where the kids lose interest. It would be a Scouting unit, yes. Would it be a traditional Scouting unit? Not necessarily."

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You can take the garbage out of Latin America, but you can’t instill hard work, personal responsibility, and dignity into the garbage. It’s garbage and it can’t be recycled to be made into something better. There is a reason that Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, Guatemala, etc. are shitholes: understand it’s not the land, it’s the people. When these Hispanic illegal aliens invade America they are still the same shit they’ve always been and all they can do is destroy the place (or institution) they’ve invaded. That may be harsh, but that’s a fact.

 

There is absolutely no reason for these kids to be abusing the Boy Scouts name. They’re not Boy Scouts in any sense of the word; they’re ingrate Hispanic illegal aliens in military fatigues. And that’s all they are.