Waiting at Currier House to meet Remigio Cruz '86, one cannot help but wonder what to expect. There are the publicized incidents with Harvard police, who repeatedly stopped Cruz because he says he did not fit the Harvard student image. On the other hand, there is his well-praised work with Puerto Rican youth in Boston.

He arrives 10 minutes late, wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket and ragged tennis shoes; his exterior fits the stereotype of a stree-wise youth. But his piercing brown eyes reveal a side left out of the newspaper articles and Phillips Brooks House reports.

Cruz speaks slowly, guardedly, as if he weighs each word before sharing part of himself. His style seems at once tough and sensitive. The toughness perhaps stems from growing up in a Trenton ghetto. Perhaps the sensitivity comes from having weathered four years at Harvard without submerging himself.

"I felt like I didn't belong, as if Harvard were a club for rich, smart people. The language was different--people didn't understand my language," Cruz says of his reaction to Harvard in the fall of 1982.

Cruz's case was one of bonafide culture shock. He was closed out of a social life he had no experience in. "I did not know how to skate or swim, nor had I been to a movie theater or beach."

He had little in common with middle and upper class suburbanites who made up the bulk of his Harvard classmates.

"I was used to seeing teenage mothers, drug traffic, prostitution, illegal gambling, and robbery. I've never seen a rape--I guess I'm lucky."

One of Cruz's freshman roommates hailed from Beverly Hills. He remembers learning that "he was from the poor section of Beverly Hills, because his dad made only $40,000. I thought he was joking--anybody who makes over $20,000 I thought was rich. But for Harvard, he's not rich."

"At home we have a color T.V., a blender, cable, but I came here and students' parents make $80,000 yearly. I say, man, and I wonder what they do with all that money."

Cruz's initial reaction to the Harvard environment was to try to conform. "I started listening to white music, like Men at Work, and tried to make white friends to conform. I wanted to be like the others, but it just didn't work."

Cruz's courtship of middle class white culture was temporary. After he made the decision not to assimilate, he often felt as though he were part of "Harvard's liberal education."

Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanity Robert Coles '50, who supervised Cruz's independent research in the Sociology Department, says that Cruz has helped educate Harvard students. "Remy gave Harvard and example of someone who wants to offer a personal, individual, and moral example to lots of kids who need it and to other Harvard students," Coles says.

But Cruz's determination to resist assimilation at Harvard has not been easy. "Remy is his own person. He isn't like other students who have assimilated into the cultural mainstream. He held back and that has caused personal difficulties," explains Coles.

One of the most public of these personal problems has been Cruz's encounters with University police. By spring of his junior year, Cruz alleged that he had been stopped six times by the police, "because I didn't fit their image of a Harvard student."

After the fifth incident, Cruz filed a formal complaint with officers of the University--including President Bok--and the police. In addition, Cruz and representatives of the Black Students Association pushed the University to investigate police harassment of minority students and consider implementing racial and cultural "sensitivity training" for officers.