perspectives on the immigrant experience and nativismperspectives on the immigrant experience and...

SECTION THREE

Perspectives on the ImmigrantExperience and Nativism

“We are all wanderers on this earth. Our hearts are full ofwonder, and our souls are deep with dreams.”

Gypsy Proverb

As the Gypsy proverb notes, human beings

have always wandered from place to place

looking to find new homes and achieve

new dreams. Because of its ongoing history of

immigration, the United States has been called a

“nation of immigrants,” but this term is inaccu-

rate since it neglects millions of indigenous peo-

ple who had probably made their journey

centuries earlier and were well established on the

North American continent at the time the first

European immigrants arrived. (Estimates of na-

tive populations at that time range from a total of

over two million to eighteen million.) Yet it is fair

to say that immigration has been a driving force

not only for our nation’s growth and prosperity

but also for its ever expanding diversity.

Some immigration has been temporary or

cyclic as certain immigrants returned to their

native country after achieving some economic

success, and there were migrants (primarily from

Mexico) who came for seasonal work and went

home when the work was done. Yet the majority

of immigrants intended to stay permanently, and

historically, most of them settled in urban areas.

Two major changes in recent immigration trends

are that the majority of immigrants are people of

color and that they are more likely to be located

in small cities and towns where people of color

have had little or no presence in the past. Such

communities now find themselves changed not

just because of the new ethnic diversity but also

by linguistic diversity in schools and religious

diversity in churches. The presence of these new

immigrants has renewed the ongoing, often bitter

debate among American citizens about how

many immigrants should be permitted to settle

here. It is a curious debate whose dynamics John

Steinbeck described in America and Americans, a

book written and published almost 50 years ago:

To all these (immigrants) we gave disparagingnames: Micks, Sheenies, Krauts, Dagos, Wops,Ragheads, Yellowbellies, and so forth. The turnagainst each group continued until it becamesound, solvent, self-defensive, and economicallyanonymous – whereupon each group joined the

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older boys and charged down on the newestones. . . . Having suffered, one would havethought they might have pity on the newer come,but they did not.1 (p. 15)

Despite the hostility, there is ample evidence

that the United States, historically and currently,

has enjoyed enormous benefits from the talents

that immigrants have brought to this nation. For

example, in the late 1800s Charles Steinmetz

immigrated to America and became an excep-

tional electrical engineer, working mainly for

General Electric. After he retired, he got a call

from G.E. managers, who begged him to come to

a factory where their best experts could not lo-

cate the cause of a breakdown among some com-

plicated machinery. Steinmetz walked around

the equipment, testing one part and then an-

other. At last, he took some chalk from his

pocket and marked an “X” on one of the ma-

chines. After the machine was disassembled the

experts examined parts from behind the place

that Steinmetz had marked and discovered the

defect that had eluded them. Later, when Stein-

metz asked for $10,000 compensation for his

work, G.E. insisted that he submit an itemized

bill justifying such a large amount. Steinmetz

sent a note that said: “Making one chalk mark =

$1.00. Knowing where to place it = $9,999.”2

Like Steinmetz, many immigrants today come

with professional training and degrees, or they

receive their education here and go on to distin-

guish themselves in an array of occupations. On

the other end of the spectrum are the laborers

who take menial jobs for minimal compensation.

All of them contribute to the American economy,

to their families, and to their communities. For

the many laborers who immigrate here, the issue

that ought to receive more attention is not sim-

ply their contributions to our society but whether

they are exploited and inadequately compen-

sated for what they do. Yet many Americans

insist that we are letting too many immigrants

into the United States and that these immigrants

aren’t contributing to the country, thus perpetu-

ating myths and misperceptions of immigrants

and strengthening anti-immigrant attitudes.

The selections for this section begin with a

well-established pattern of migration–that of

Mexicans and Mexican Americans who join the

migrant stream primarily into the Midwest to

harvest crops such as tomatoes or beets. Elva

Treviño Hart was a small child that summer

when she first went with her family to

Minnesota and Wisconsin, and she provides a

detailed portrait of the migrant experience from a

child’s point of view. Much has been written

about this ongoing migration pattern and many

statistics have been gathered and reported, but

Hart’s essay offers a very personal and human

perspective describing the experiences of one

migrant family.

Immigrants have always had different reasons

for coming to the United States. For some it was

to seek their dreams; for others it was to escape

from a nightmare. After the Vietnam War when

“What the people want is very simple. They want an America asgood as its promise.”

Barbara Jordan (1936–1996)

S E C T I O N 3 Perspectives on the Immigrant Experience and Nativism 55


56 S E C T I O N 3 Perspectives on the Immigrant Experience and Nativism

the communists took over South Vietnam, thou-

sands of Southeast Asians immigrated to Amer-

ica, not only Vietnamese but also Laotians and

the Hmong. These refugees have encountered

significant cultural and linguistic challenges, and

Sonia Nieto captures some of their difficulty in

this excerpt from her “Case Study: Hoang Vinh.”

After a brief introduction to her subject, Nieto

lets Hoang Vinh tell his own story. He describes

the enormous amount of information he has to

master. Developing English skills and a vocabu-

lary adequate to function in everyday life is diffi-

cult enough, but Hoang must achieve enough

fluency in the language to be able to attend col-

lege because a college education is required to

gain access to economic opportunity. In addition,

Hoang must understand the nuances of the dom-

inant culture while also learning about the di-

verse racial and ethnic groups that he interacts

with in his urban community. Hoang’s story re-

flects the experience of many refugees, but espe-

cially those from Southeast Asia.

Refugees are a unique category of immigrants

because the injustice they have faced has caused

them to flee from violence, persecution, or sim-

ply chaos in their native lands. In the past,

refugees were usually placed in large urban areas

on the east or west coasts, but in recent years

they have been sent to smaller cities and commu-

nities across the nation. In “Arrival Stories and

Acculturation,” Mary Pipher describes the lives of

refugees who have settled in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Unlike other immigrants, refugees do not tend to

be fluent in English when they arrive, so they

must immediately enroll in English classes as

they look for employment. Pipher describes some

misconceptions Americans have of the refugees,

but also some misconceptions that refugees have

about America. Part of their adjustment to living

in the United States requires the refugees to

adapt to a reality that is quite different from what

they expected. Despite the difficulties, refugees

work hard, learn what they must, and usually

embrace the traditional vision of the American

Dream, a Dream that that they believe is possible

for them to achieve. What they want from Amer-

ica is what every American wants.

The most emotional immigration issue today

concerns undocumented workers, typically re-

ferred to as “illegal aliens,” mostly Latinos and

primarily from Mexico. Although Americans

seem to tolerate refugees, the condemnation of

undocumented or illegal immigrants has caused

many Americans to insist that we secure the

Mexican border to keep undocumented workers

out of the United States. In response, Congress

approved funds for a proposal from George W.

Bush’s administration to erect a fence along a

portion of the Mexican border, but as Michael

Scherer reports in “Scrimmage on the Border,”

this issue is far too complicated to be resolved by

such simplistic solutions. Scherer describes the

efforts of the Border Patrol and the so-called

“Minuteman” groups of volunteers patrolling the

border. In interviews with these volunteers,

Scherer discovers the racism and prejudice that

fuels their efforts to prevent undocumented

Mexicans (and other Latinos) from coming to the

United States. Although he presents the anti-

immigrant perspective of Tom Tancredo, the Con-

gressman from Colorado who was a candidate for

President in the 2008 Republican primaries,

Scherer also interviewed Americans who under-

stand how the United States is benefiting from

the cheap labor of undocumented workers. Al-

though the battle of the border is likely to con-

tinue, Scherer’s essay provides us with the

context in which it is being fought.


S E C T I O N 3 Perspectives on the Immigrant Experience and Nativism 57

After exploring the concerns facing refugees,

migrants, and undocumented workers, Section

Three appropriately concludes with a literary

memoir written by a Haitian immigrant. In

“Dyaspora,” Joanne Hyppolite describes the im-

migrant experience of leaving her native land to

live in another culture. As she was growing up,

her Haitian family maintained their language,

their favorite foods and music, and even furni-

ture that reminded them of “home.” But since

she was a child, she had to go to school and try

to understand the new culture outside their

home. Because of ongoing racial segregation, the

neighborhood where the Haitian family lives is

populated by African American families. Hyppo-

lite’s childhood memories include encounters

with prejudicial attitudes that her family had

never experienced in Haiti, but these experiences

are well understood by African Americans. Al-

though they share a similar skin color, the black

families in her neighborhood do not share the

same heritage as the Haitian immigrants, so the

diaspora child is largely on her own to sort out

the complexities of her situation: to understand

who she is, where she fits in, and to find a voice

that will allow her to tell her story.

Notes1Steinbeck, John, E Pluribus Unum, America and

Americans, New York, The Viking Press, p. 15.

2Anecdote adapted from: Clifton Fadiman, Party of

One: The selected writings of Clifton Fadiman, (Cleveland:

World Publishing, 1955).


E L V A T R E V I Ñ O H A R T

Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

The author grew up in Texas, and in this excerpt, an experienced migrant worker hasoffered her family a chance to come with him to the Midwest to work on farms there.Although the family experiences economic gains, the author describes the hardships ofmigrant life, especially for the children. Today, many of the migrants working in the fieldstravel illegally from Mexico, which makes their lives even more difficult.

When my father (Apá) had told us we weregoing to Minnesota with El Indio to work inthe beet fields, all the kids had different re-

sponses – all silent and internal – we never saidanything. He was taking a bunch of children toMinnesota, but he didn’t see it that way. My fatherknew nothing about children. He treated us all likeadults, expecting adult responses from us. We werea team going to work.

Delia was in her first year of high school. It wasthe first of May. She would have to leave the newboy who smiled at her in a secret way in the hall.Her friend Chayo liked him, too. Would the newboy remember Delia when she came back in Sep-tember or would Chayo have prevailed?

Delmira looked around her eighth-grade class,full of adolescent juices. She would miss her eighth-grade graduation. She didn’t know how she couldever tell them that she was being taken out ofschool to go in the back of a canvas-covered truck

to work in the fields. She knew their responseswould be cruel. She decided to face the problem atthe end of the summer. So she told no one – justwalked out of school at the end of the day with afake smile and said, “See you tomorrow!” and didn’treturn until September.

Luis, in the sixth grade, was not so mortified. Sohe bragged to his friends that he would be doing aman’s job that summer. But in his heart of hearts hewas afraid. He had worked in the peanut fields foryears, but he suspected the beet fields would bemuch crueler and Apá a harder taskmaster.

Diamantina, in the fifth grade, was terrified. Sheworried about everything anyway, and she wantedto do well. Would they make her work all day?Would they make her go to a new school? Wouldthere be gringos there? Or would it be a Mexicanschool for the migrants? She hoped so. She didn’tlike the gringos – they made her feel ashamed towear her hand-me-down clothes. She bit her nailsuntil they bled, and then she bit the inside of herlip. At night, she couldn’t go to sleep for the pain atthe ends of her fingers.

Rudy, in the fourth grade, didn’t care about any-thing. He didn’t care to tell anyone, but he didn’tconsider it an ugly secret either – he would just do

From Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child (Tempe, AZ:Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe). Copyright © 1999 byElva Treviño Hart. Reprinted by permission of BilingualPress/Editorial Bilingüe at Arizona State University.

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E LV A T R E V I Ñ O H A R T Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child 59

what was needed. He was the one who respondedbest to my father’s need to have all of us be adults,albeit short ones.

The gringo who owned the farm and the mayor-domo came to see Apá the day after we got there totalk about the kids’ schooling. All the school-agechildren at the migrant camp had to attend schooluntil the end of the school year or the gringo wouldget in trouble.

This was a new development my father hadn’texpected. But actually, he was glad. His dream wasfor all of us to finish high school and to have betterlives than he had. So he told my mother to geteveryone ready for school.

Amá, already overwhelmed with the new chal-lenges, exploded, “I didn’t know they would haveto go to school! You told me to pack light! Webrought mostly work clothes! The girls only broughta couple of dresses to wear in case there was an oc-casional day off! How can you expect me to dressfive children for a month in a gringo school whenwe didn’t bring anything! I’ll have to wash clothesdaily after being in the fields all day! ¡Esto es el colmo!”

My father looked distressed as he always didwhen my mother yelled at him with a legitimatepoint. He mumbled something about having tomake do and went outside to sharpen the hoes.

When he left, my mother started to cry. Wewatched, helpless. Delia said, “Amá, Delmira and Iwill wash the clothes when we get home fromschool – for everyone. It’s only for a month. We cando it, Amá. You won’t have to wash clothes atall.”. . .

The next morning, everyone except me preparedto go to school. . . . Rudy was the first one to seethe bus, a yellow speck on the featureless hori-zon. . . . I stood there watching the bus drive away.My brothers and sisters would do what they had todo; they always did. I felt forlorn and abandoned.We had been together, all of us, for days. When Iturned around to go back to my parents, I saw ablack Ford pull up next to the migrant camp. Threenuns in black habits got out. . . .

I burst through the door and told my mother wehad company. When she came out, the nuns askedher how the children would be cared for while theparents worked in the fields. It was the first time mymother had been on the migrant circuit with sixchildren. She said she didn’t know.

They offered to take the littlest ones with themfor the summer. It would cost only what we couldafford – a dollar a week, they said. It was a charitythe church offered for the migrants.

My mother felt she had no choice but to send methere. Leaving me at the edge of the field while theyworked was dangerous since the rows of beets werehalf a mile long and I was only three. My eleven-year-old sister, Diamantina, was too young to work.The child labor laws said you had to be twelve towork in the fields. So Diamantina would go withme and be schooled there. . . .

They took the two of us on Sunday. Apá bor-rowed a car and everyone went. Amá cried quietlyand sighed despairingly all the way. Everyone elsewas silent. . . . When we got there, Apá gave useach a little money. He said they would come tovisit us the next time it rained and the fields wereunworkable, if he could borrow a car.

The school was huge, with an asphalt play-ground and a tall, wrought-iron fence surroundingeverything. When it was time, Diamantina and Iclutched the bars of the fence and pushed our facesthrough to say goodbye. We were overwhelmedwith abandonment and sadness. And it was stilldaytime.

When nighttime came, then I really knew whatit was to feel abandoned. They took us to a reallybig room, a gymnasium, with a long row of cots.This was where all the children lay down together.Thanks to God, they gave me a cot next to my sis-ter. I covered myself with the sheet while the tearsleaked out. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to bestrong, as my father liked for me to be, but the tearswouldn’t obey me . . . and they kept wetting thesmall pillow.

“Diamantina,” I said to my sister very quietly,“would you hold my hand? I’m afraid and I feel verysad. I want my mother . . . I don’t want to be here.”

“Shhh, be quiet. Don’t be afraid. Give me yourhand. I’ll take care of you. Don’t be afraid.”

The nuns walked up and down the rows of cots.I didn’t want them to see me cry. I didn’t want themeven to see me. I closed my eyes very hard to keepthe tears in and to make my heart hard. But thelump in my throat wouldn’t go away and I feltmore alone and sad.

I squeezed my sister’s hand tightly . . . it was myonly link to the life that I had known up until that



time. She squeezed it back. Then I felt less alone.And the lump in my throat got smaller. The tearsdried on my cheeks. . . .

The next morning, the nuns made us bow ourheads and pray to thank God for breakfast. I prayedfor rain.

During recess a vendor sold popsicles throughthe bars of the fence. My sister took our money outof her sock and bought us each one. They were yel-low and deliciously cool in the summer heat of theasphalt playground. The next day we only got oneand shared, to conserve our money.

“Do you think they’re coming back to get us?” Iasked Diamantina as we took turns with the popsi-cle.

“Of course they are, silly!” she said. But then hereyes got a sad, faraway look.

I imagined them hoeing the beets and wonderedif they were thinking about us as they hoed. MaybeApá wished he had given us more money in case itdidn’t rain for a while. Maybe Amá missed my lay-ing my head on her lap after dinner when all thework was done. I missed it too. Her apron was softfrom being washed a thousand times. It smelled liketortillas and dinner and soap. She rubbed my headwith her fingers.

Maybe Amá felt like crying as she hoed, as I didat the school.

When Amá wrote a letter, I made Diamantinaread it over and over. Especially the part that said“Your amá, who loves and appreciates you.” She letme sleep with it under my pillow. I put it in mysock during the day. The sweat of the playgroundmade it get wet and the letters blurred, but it didn’tmatter. I couldn’t read, anyway.

One night, a clap of thunder woke me from adead sleep. My eyes were round by the next flash oflightning.

I looked over and Diamantina was awake too.The thunder had awakened some of the little onesand they were crying. I had never been afraid ofweather. I loved the wildness of thunder, lightning,and driving rain. My wild nature reveled in it.

“Do you think they’ll be here tomorrow? I askedher.”

“It may not be raining where they are. It mightonly be raining here,” she answered.

When it continued to rain all night and into themorning, we started to feel hopeful. The rainstopped around mid-morning. We waited all day

with our hearts in our throats. Every car that droveby took our full attention.

After dinner, neither of us spoke. Words would-n’t help, anyway. Our heads were swimming withdisappointment. We were becoming older too fast.A part of our childhood was dying.

In bed, I stared at the high gymnasium ceiling.My eyes would fill and empty as the sad thoughtscame in waves. Diamantina was crying too.

The next morning, I was in the playroom, feelingterribly lonely. . . . I looked at the nuns and ran outof the room, down the hall, out of the building,and across the asphalt school yard, the nunsscreaming and chasing me.

I was determined and hell-bent to be with mysister since I couldn’t be with my family. I struggledwith the big church door and ran down the aisle,headlong into Diamantina, who was practicing forher first communion. I wrapped myself around herlegs, sobbing now, and screaming. The nuns cameup to us out of breath. “She ran out. Not supposedto be here,” they gasped. They tried to take myhand, but it just dug deeper into my sister’s leg. Em-barrassed, she tried to talk sense into me. Senseless,I couldn’t listen. I just screamed louder, my littlesoul feeling as if it were going to fly apart. Pande-monium in front of the altar now, the priest comingout of the sacristy to see.

I couldn’t tell them what was going on inside ofme. How could I? Maybe if I screamed louder theywould know. My wild screams would tell them.Diamantina could see. She saw into my eyes andknew.

And the conflict started for her. All these adultswanting us to make nice. And my screams and im-ploring eyes saying that I couldn’t leave her, beg-ging her to help me. She couldn’t do it. She was toosmall and only eleven and my father had taught hertoo well to mind.

“What happened?” she asked. I just screamedand shook my head wildly. I couldn’t say the words,not here, in front of all these people. . . .

“Shhh, ya. You have to go back with them,” shesaid quietly.

“NOOOO! NOOO!” I begged, but I knew I couldn’tfight this crowd. They would do what they wantedto with me.

They peeled me off her, still screaming, but onlyhopeless screams now, knowing that there was nohelp for me.


E LV A T R E V I Ñ O H A R T Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child 61

She watched them carry me off, but I forgaveher. She couldn’t do more; I knew that.

Later, we found out that my father hadn’t beenable to borrow a car. Naturally, on the first rainy dayoff, all the migrants wanted to use their cars to go totown – to grocery shop, to buy supplies that theyhad forgotten to bring with them. . . .

The whole family had wanted to visit us, but hecouldn’t make it work. His powerless feeling hadmade my father crazy. So he had talked to the may-ordomo about helping him get a used car. It hadbecome obvious to the mayordomo and to thegringo that our family was hard working and reli-able. Together, Apá and the mayordomo went tothe gringo and he agreed to advance my father themoney for a used car if he promised to come back tothis farm next year. Half the amount would be duethis year and half the next. The money would betaken out of his paycheck at the end of the season.

The next time it rained, they arrived bright andearly in a gray and white Chevy. It felt like Christ-mas. I could love the rain again even though it haddisappointed me so badly last time. My brothers andsisters were glad to see us, thrilled to have a holiday,and ecstatic about our car. My father proudly droveus around town.

We stopped at a grocery store and got snacks fora picnic. We ate at a picnic table in the park with thegrass glistening all around in the sunlight after therain. I had never been happier.

When they left us later in the afternoon, it wasnot so sad. We would miss them. But now we knewthey had missed us too. We had a car, whereas be-fore we had nothing. Things were looking up. . . .

After leaving us with the nuns for three months,the whole family came to get us at the end of July.The beet thinning and weeding season was over.Beet topping and harvest season wouldn’t startuntil mid-September. All the migrants packed upand went elsewhere to work for a month and a half.Apá said we would follow El Indio’s truck to Wis-consin. . . .

We were heading to the farm where El Indio’sfamily had gone the previous year. He had warnedus that Wisconsin was not like Minnesota in thatnothing was certain there. If the fields were ready,then there would be work. If there were no fieldsready to be picked, then either you went on to thenext farm or you went to the lake and fished. Also,in Wisconsin, the season was short and there were

no contracts with the migrants, so people went todifferent farms every year.

The farm we went to that first year had plenty ofwork, but no place for us to stay right away. Thehouse where we could stay was rented and the oc-cupants wouldn’t be out for several days. Thefarmer really wanted his fields picked, though, sohe said we could stay in the barn until the housebecame vacant.

The barn? Everyone looked at Apá, alarmed. Thebarn was for pigs and cows.

“Sí, bueno,” he said. The barn was fine with himas long as there was work. The accommodationsdidn’t matter; we were there to work and makemoney. No one could argue. But everyone, evenRudy this time, seemed upset and ashamed. Thebarn was no longer used to house animals, but itwas full of rusty old equipment that we had tomove out of the way before we had room to livethere for a few days.

The work in Wisconsin was to pick green beans,cucumbers, and occasionally tomatoes. . . . Therows were short, so our car was nearby. I keptwatching for nuns, but none came. In Wisconsin,even Diamantina worked, as it didn’t require muchskill just to get the fruit off the plant. All the kidswere used to this kind of work. . . . Being used to itdidn’t mean they liked it, though. In fact, theyhated it more than the beet fields.

In Minnesota, they worked standing up, touch-ing only the hoe. Except for the days after a rain,they could stay fairly clean. Not so in Wisconsin. Topick the green beans and cucumbers, you had toput your hands right into the plant, soaked withdew early in the morning. In half an hour yourwork gloves and shirt were soaked up to the elbow.After they dried in the sun, the prickles from theplants started to make your skin itch. At first, peo-ple couldn’t decide whether it was better to workbent over at the waist, and have the lower backhurt, or to squat down, and have the knees hurt.Most people started bent over at the waist, but afterthe first day or two they would go for knee pain in-stead. At least knee pain stayed localized. The backpain made you feel bad all over. . . .

That year the crops were plentiful and workwas continuous, seven days a week for severalweeks. . . . By early September, we could feel achill in the air and smell the coming of winter. Thesycamores were already dropping their leaves.



There came a day, finally, when there were nofields that were ready to be picked. The farmerwanted to wait two more days, and then do thefinal picking of the season. . . .

Four days later we left for Texas. Many of the mi-grants, including El Indio’s family, went back toMinnesota to work on “el tapeo,” the beet toppingand harvest. The Minnesota farmer wanted us to

come back, but Apa insisted on getting his childrenback into their regular school. His dream was for allof us to graduate from high school. The kidswouldn’t quite make the beginning of the schoolyear, but they wouldn’t miss by much. So he de-cided to forego the money that he could have madeby staying another month.


63

C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 63S O N I A N I E T O

Case Study: Hoang VinhAlthough Hoang Vinh’s parents couldn’t leave Vietnam, they sent him and his four sib-lings to the United States in the hope that they would have a better future than they couldhave in their communist-controlled nation. He was a high school senior at the time of thisinterview, and in this story he describes many of the difficulties that other immigrants,especially refugees, encounter after arriving in America.

“For Vietnamese people, [culture] is very impor-tant. . . . If we want to get something, we have toget it. Vietnamese culture is like that. . . . We workhard, and we get something we want.”

Hoang Vinh’s1 hands move in quick gestures ashe tries to illustrate what he has to say, almostas if wishing that they would speak for him.

Vinh2 is very conscious of not knowing English wellenough to express himself how he would like andhe keeps apologizing, “My English is not good.”Nevertheless, his English skills are quite advancedfor someone who has been in the United States forjust a short time.

Vinh is 18 years old. He was born in the XuanLoc province of Dong Nai, about 80 kilometers fromSaigon. At the time he was interviewed, he hadbeen in the United States for three years and livedwith his uncle, two sisters, and two brothers in amidsize New England town. They first lived in Vir-ginia, but moved here after a year and a half. Vinhand his family live in a modest house in a residen-tial neighborhood of a pleasant, mostly middle-classcollege town. The family’s Catholicism is evidenced

by the statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in theliving room. Everyone in the family has chores andcontributes to keeping the house clean and makingthe meals. In addition, the older members makesure that the younger children keep in touch withtheir Vietnamese language and culture. They haveweekly sessions in which they write to their par-ents; they allow only Vietnamese to be spoken athome and they cook Vietnamese food, somethingthat even the youngest is learning to do. When theyreceived letters from their parents, they sit down toread them together. Their uncle reinforces their na-tive literacy by telling them many stories. Vinh alsoplays what he calls “music from my Vietnam,” towhich they all listen.

Because Vinh’s father was in the military before1975 and worked for the U.S. government, he wasconsidered an American sympathizer and educa-tional opportunities for his family were limited afterthe war. Vinh and his brothers and sisters were sentto the United States by their parents, who could notleave Vietnam, but wanted their children to havethe opportunity for a better education and a moresecure future. Vinh and his family came in whathas been called the “second wave” of immigrationfrom Indochina,3 that is, they came after the hugeexodus in 1975. Although Vinh and his family camedirectly from Vietnam, most of the second-waveimmigrants came from refugee camps in Thailand,

From Nieto, Sonia. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Contextof Multicultural Education, 4e. Published by Allyn and Bacon/Merrill Education, Boston, MA. Copyright 2004 by PearsonEducation. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.



Malaysia, and elsewhere. This second wave hasgenerally been characterized by greater heterogene-ity in social class and ethnicity, less formal educa-tion, fewer marketable skills, and poorer healththan previous immigrants. During the 1980s, whenVinh and his family came to the United States, theschool-age Asian and Pacific Islander population be-tween the ages of 5 and 19 grew by an astounding90 percent. About half of the 800,000 Asianrefugees who arrived between 1975 and 1990 wereunder 18 years of age.4 The Asian population hasgrown dramatically since that time. The 2000 cen-sus reported that there are currently 10.2 millionAsian and Asian Americans in the United States; ofthese, 1.1 million are Vietnamese.5

Vinh’s uncle works in town and supports all thechildren. He takes his role of surrogate father veryseriously and tries to help the children in whateverway he can. He discusses many things with them;Vinh speaks with gratitude of the lengthy conversa-tions they have. Mostly, he wants to make sure thatall the children benefit from their education. Heconstantly motivates them to do better.

Vinh’s older brother makes dried flower arrange-ments in the basement and sells them in town. Dur-ing the summers, Vinh works to contribute to hisfamily here and in Vietnam, but during the schoolyear he is not allowed to work because he needs tofocus on his studies (“I just go to school, and, afterschool, I go home to study,” he explains). He usesthe money he makes in the summer to support hisfamily because, he says, “We are very poor.” Theyrarely go to the movies, and they spend little onthemselves.

Vinh will be starting his senior year in highschool. Because the number of Vietnamese speakersin the schools he has attended has never been high,Vinh has not been in a bilingual program. He doesquite well in school, but he also enjoys the opportu-nity to speak his native language and would nodoubt have profited from a bilingual education. Heis currently in an ESL class at the high school witha small number of other Vietnamese students andother students whose first language is not English.Some teachers encourage Vinh and his Vietnameseclassmates to speak Vietnamese during the ESL classto improve their understanding of the curriculumcontent, but other teachers discourage the use oftheir native language. All of Vinh’s other classes are

in the “mainstream program” for college-boundstudents: physics, calculus, French, music, and law.Vinh’s favorite subject is history because he says hewants to learn about this country. He is also inter-ested in psychology.

Homework and studying take up many hours ofVinh’s time. He places great value on what he calls“becoming educated people.” His parents and uncleconstantly stress the importance of an educationand place great demands on Vinh and his brothersand sisters. He also enjoys playing volleyball andbadminton and being with his friends in the gym.Because he loves school, Vinh does not enjoy stay-ing home. He is a good student and wants desper-ately to go to college, but, even at this late date, hehad not received any help or information about dif-ferent colleges, how to apply, how to get financialaid, and admission requirements. He says he doesnot want to bother anyone to ask for this informa-tion. Added to his reluctance to ask for assistance isthe economic barrier he sees to getting a college ed-ucation. Because he wants to make certain that hisbrothers and sisters are well cared for, housed, andfed, he may have to work full time after graduatingfrom high school. . . .

On Becoming “Educated People”

In Vietnam, we go to school because we want tobecome educated people. But in the United States,most people, they say, “Oh, we go to school becausewe want to get a good job.” But my idea, I don’tthink so. I say, if we go to school, we want a goodjob also, but we want to become a good person.

[In Vietnam] we go to school, we have to re-member every single word. . . . We don’t havetextbooks, so my teacher write on the blackboard.So we have to copy and go home. . . . So, they say,“You have to remember all the things, like all thewords. . . .” But in the United States, they don’tneed for you to remember all the words. They justneed you to understand. . . . But two differentschool systems. They have different things. I thinkin my Vietnamese school, they are good. But I alsothink the United States school system is good.They’re not the same. . . . They are good, but goodin different ways.

When I go to school [in Vietnam], sometimes Idon’t know how to do something, so I ask myteachers. She can spend all the time to help me,


S O N I A N I E T O Case Study: Hoang Vinh 65

anything I want. So, they are very nice. . . . Myteacher, she was very nice. When I asked her every-thing, she would answer me, teach me something.That’s why I remember. . . . But some of my teach-ers, they always punished me.

[Grades] are not important to me. Important tome is education. . . . I [am] not concerned about[test scores] very much. I just need enough for meto go to college. . . . Sometimes, I never care about[grades]. I just know I do my exam very good. But Idon’t need to know I got A or B. I have to learnmore and more.

Sometimes, I got C but I learned very much. Ilearned a lot, and I feel very sorry, “Why I got onlyC?” But sometimes, if I got B, that’s enough, I don’tneed A.

Some people, they got a good education. Theygo to school, they got master’s, they got doctorate,but they’re just helping themselves. So that’s notgood. . . . If I got a good education, I get a good job,not helping only myself. I like to help otherpeople. . . . I want to help other people who don’thave money, who don’t have a house. . . . The firstthing is money. If people live without money, theycannot do nothing. So even if I want to help otherpeople, I have to get a good job. I have the money,so that way I can help them.

In class, sometimes [students] speak Vietnamesebecause we don’t know the words in English. . . .Our English is not good, so that’s why we have tospeak Vietnamese.

In school, if we get good and better and better,we have to work in groups, like four people. Andwe discuss some projects, like that. And differentpeople have different ideas, so after that we choosesome best idea. I like work in groups.

Sometimes, the English teacher, they don’t un-derstand about us. Because something we not dogood, like my English is not good. And she say,“Oh, your English is great!” But that’s the way theAmerican culture is. But my culture is not likethat. . . . If my English is not good, she has to say,“Your English is not good. So you have to go homeand study.” And she tell me what to study and howto study to get better. But some Americans, youknow, they don’t understand about myself. So theyjust say, “Oh! You’re doing a good job! You’re doinggreat! Everything is great!” Teachers talk like that,but my culture is different. . . . They say, “You have

to do better. . . .” So, sometimes when I do some-thing not good, and my teachers say, “Oh, you didgreat!” I don’t like it. . . . I want the truth better.

Some teachers, they never concerned to thestudents. So, they just do something that they haveto do. But they don’t really do something to helpthe people, the students. Some teachers, they justgo inside and go to the blackboard. . . . They don’tcare. So that I don’t like.

I have a good teacher, Ms. Brown. She’s verysensitive. She understands the students, year toyear, year after year. . . . She understands a lot. Sowhen I had her class, we discussed some thingsvery interesting about America. And sometimes shetells us about something very interesting aboutanother culture. But Ms. Mitchell, she just knowshow to teach for the children, like 10 years old oryounger. So some people don’t like her. Like me, Idon’t like her. I like to discuss something. Not justhow to write “A,” “you have to write like this.” So Idon’t like that. . . . She wants me to write perfectly.So that is not a good way because we learn anotherlanguage. Because when we learn another language,we learn to discuss, we learn to understand theword’s meaning, not about how to write the word.

I want to go to college, of course. Right now, Idon’t know what will happen for the future. . . . If Ithink of my future, I have to learn more aboutpsychology. If I have a family, I want a perfect fam-ily, not really perfect, but I want a very good family.So that’s why I go to school, I have good educationto teach them. So, Vietnamese want their childrento grow up and be polite and go to school, just like Iam right now. . . . I just want they will be a goodperson.

I don’t care much about money. So, I just wantto have a normal job that I can take care of myselfand my family. So that’s enough. I don’t want toclimb up compared to other people, because, youknow, different people have different ideas abouthow to live. So I don’t think money is important tome. I just need enough money for my life.

Demanding Standards

I’m not really good, but I’m trying.In Vietnam, I am a good student. But at the

United States, my English is not good sometimes. Icannot say very nice things to some Americans,because my English is not perfect.



Sometimes the people, they don’t think I’mpolite because they don’t understand my Englishexactly. . . . I always say my English is not good,because all the people, they can speak better thanme. So, I say, “Why some people, they came herethe same year with me, but they can learn better?”So I have to try.

When I lived in Vietnam, so I go to school and Igot very good credit [grades], but right now becausemy English is not good, sometimes I feel very sorryfor myself.

[My uncle] never told me, ‘Oh, you do good,’ or“Oh, you do bad.” Because every time I go home, Igive him my report card, like from C to A, he don’tsay nothing. He say, “Next time, you should dobetter.” If I got A, okay, he just say, “Oh, next time,do better than A! . . .” He doesn’t need anythingfrom me. But he wants me to be a good person, andhelpful. . . . So he wants me to go to school, sosomeday I have a good job and so I don’t need fromhim anymore.

He encourages me. He talks about why you haveto learn and what important things you will do inthe future if you learn. . . . I like him to be involvedabout my school. . . . I like him to be concernedabout my credits.

Some people need help, but some people don’t.Like me, sometimes I need help. I want to knowhow to . . . apply for college and what will I do toget into college. So that is my problem.

I have a counselor, but I never talk to him. Be-cause I don’t want them to be concerned aboutmyself because they have a lot of people to talkwith. So, sometimes, I just go home and I talk withmy brother and my uncle.

If I need my counselor every time I got trouble,I’m not going to solve that problem. . . . So, Iwant to do it by myself. I have to sit down andthink, “Why did the trouble start? And how canwe solve the problem? . . .” Sometimes, I say, Idon’t want them to [be] concerned with my prob-lem.

Most American people are very helpful. Butbecause I don’t want them to spend time aboutmyself, to help me, so that’s why I don’t come tothem. One other time, I talked with my uncle. Hecan tell me whatever I want. But my English is notgood, so that’s why I don’t want to talk with Ameri-can people.

I may need my counselor’s help. When I go tocollege, I have to understand the college system andhow to go get into college. . . . The first thing I haveto know is the college system, and what’s the differ-ence between this school and other schools, andhow they compare. . . . I already know how tomake applications and how to meet counselors, andhow to take a test also.

Sometimes I do better than other people, but Istill think it’s not good. Because if you learn, youcan be more than that. So that’s why I keep learn-ing. Because I think, everything you can do, youlearn. If you don’t learn, you can’t do nothing.

Right now, I cannot say [anything good] aboutmyself because if I talk about myself, it’s not right.Another person who lives with me, like my brother,he can say something about me better than what Isay about myself. . . . Nobody can understandthemselves better than other people.

I don’t know [if I’m successful] because thatbelongs to the future. . . . I mean successful formyself [means] that I have a good family; I have agood job; I have respect from other people.

Trying to Understand Other Cultures

Some [Black] people very good. . . . Most Blackpeople in [this town], they talk very nice. . . . Likein my country, some people very good and somepeople very bad.

I am very different from other people who arethe same age. Some people who are the same age,they like to go dancing, they like to smoke, theywant to have more fun. But not me. . . . Becauseright now, all the girls, they like more fun [things]than sit down and think about psychology, thinkabout family. . . . I think it’s very difficult to find [agirlfriend] right now. . . . If I find a girlfriend whonot agree with any of my ideas, it would not be agood girlfriend. . . . I don’t need [her to be] verymuch like me, but some . . . we would have a littlein common. . . . It is not about their color or theirlanguage, but their character. I like their characterbetter.

I think it’s an important point, because if youunderstand another language or another culture,it’s very good for you. So I keep learning, othercultures, other languages, other customs.

I have Chinese, I have Japanese, I have Ameri-can, I have Cambodian [friends]. Every kind of


S O N I A N I E T O Case Study: Hoang Vinh 67

people. Because I care about character, not aboutcolor.

Strength from Culture and Family

Sometimes I think about [marrying] a Vietnamesegirl, because my son or my daughter, in the future,they will speak Vietnamese. So, if I have an Ameri-can girlfriend, my children cannot speakVietnamese. Because I saw other families who havean American wife or an American husband, theirchildren cannot speak Vietnamese. It is very hard tolearn a language. . . . In the United States, theyhave TV, they have radio, every kind of thing, wehave to do English. So, that why I don’t think mychildren can learn Vietnamese.

When I sleep, I like to think a little bit about mycountry. And I feel very good. I always thinkabout . . . my family . . . what gifts they get mebefore, how they were with me when I wasyoung. . . . Those are very good things toremember . . .

I’ve been here for three years, but the first twoyears I didn’t learn anything. I got sick, mental. Igot mental. Because when I came to the UnitedStates, I missed my father, my family, and myfriends, and my Vietnam.

So, every time I go to sleep, I cannot sleep, Idon’t want to eat anything. So I become sick.

I am a very sad person. Sometimes, I just wantto be alone to think about myself. I feel sorry aboutwhat I do wrong with someone. Whatever I dowrong in the past, I just think and I feel sorry formyself.

I never have a good time. I go to the mall, but Idon’t feel good. . . . I just sit there. I don’t knowwhat to do.

Before I got mental, okay, I feel very good aboutmyself, like I am smart, I learn a lot of things. . . .But after I got mental, I don’t get anyenjoyment. . . . I’m not smart anymore.

After I got mental, I don’t enjoy anything. Be-fore that, I enjoy lots. Like I listen to music, I go toschool and talk to my friends. . . . But now I don’tfeel I enjoy anything. Just talk with my friends,that’s enough, that’s my enjoyment.

My culture is my country. We love my country;we love our people; we love the way theVietnamese, like they talk very nice and they arevery polite to all the people.

For Vietnamese, [culture] is very important. . . .I think my country is a great country. The people isvery courageous. They never scared to doanything. . . . If we want to get something, we haveto get it. Vietnamese culture is like that. . . . Wework hard, and we get something we want.

If I have children, I have to teach them from[when] they grow up to when they get older. So,when they get older, I don’t have to teach them,but they listen to me. Because that’s education, notonly myself, but all Vietnamese, from a long timeago to now. That’s the custom. So that’s why I likemy customs and my culture.

Every culture . . . they have good things andthey have bad things. And my culture is the same.But sometimes they’re different because they comefrom different countries. . . . America is so different.

[My teachers] understand some things, just notall Vietnamese culture. Like they just understandsome things outside. . . . But they cannot under-stand something inside our hearts.

[Teachers should] understand the students. LikeMs. Mitchell, she just say, “Oh, you have to do itthis way.” “You have to do that way.” But somepeople, they came from different countries. Theyhave different ideas, so they might think aboutschool in different ways. So maybe she has to knowwhy they think in that way. . . . Because differentcultures, they have different meanings about educa-tion. So she has to learn about that culture.

I think they just think that they understand ourculture. . . . But it is very hard to tell them, becausethat’s our feelings.

When I came to United States, I heard English soI say, “Oh, very funny sound.” Very strange to me.But I think they feel the same like when we speakVietnamese. So they hear and they say, “What astrange language.” Some people like to listen. Butsome people don’t like to listen. So, if I talk withAmericans, I never talk Vietnamese.

Some teachers don’t understand about the lan-guage. So sometimes, my language, they say itsounds funny. And sometimes, all the languagessound funny. Sometimes, [the teacher] doesn’t letus speak Vietnamese, or some people speak Cambo-dian. Sometimes, she already knows some Spanish,so she lets Spanish speak. But because she doesn’tknow about Vietnamese language, so she doesn’t letVietnamese speak.



[Teachers] have to know about our culture. Andthey have to help the people learn whatever theywant. From the second language, it is very difficultfor me and for other people.

I want to learn something good from my cultureand something good from American culture. And Iwant to take both cultures and select somethinggood. . . . If we live in the United States, we have tolearn something about new people.

[To keep reading and writing Vietnamese] is veryimportant. . . . So, I like to learn English, but I liketo learn my language too. Because different lan-guages, they have different things, special. [Myyounger sisters] are very good. They don’t need myhelp. They already know. They write to my parentsand they keep reading Vietnamese books. . . .Sometimes they forget to pronounce the words, butI help them.

At home, we eat Vietnamese food. . . . Theimportant thing is rice. Everybody eats rice, andvegetables, and meat. They make different kinds offood. . . . The way I grew up, I had to learn, I hadto know it. By looking at other people – when mymother cooked, and I just see it, and so I know it.

Right now, I like to listen to my music, and I liketo listen to American music. . . . And I like to listento other music from other countries.

We tell [our parents] about what we do at schooland what we do at home and how nice the peoplearound us, and what we will do better in the futureto make them happy. Something not good, wedon’t write.

They miss us and they want ourselves to livetogether. . . . They teach me how to live withoutthem.

[Note: After discussing the goals and difficultiesjust described by Hoang Vinh in this interview, theauthor concludes this case study with the followingcomments.]

Schools are expected to take the major responsi-bility for helping children confront these difficult is-sues, but often they do not. Given the changing U.S.demographics and the large influx of new immi-grants, the rivalry and negative relationships amongdifferent groups of immigrants and native-bornstudents will likely be felt even more. Interethnic

hostility needs to be confronted directly throughchanges in curriculum and other school policies andpractices. Students such as Vinh clearly need thiskind of leadership to help them make sense of theirnew world.

Hoang Vinh is obviously on a long and difficultroad to adaptation, not only in cultural and linguis-tic terms, but also, and probably not coincidentally,in terms of his mental health. Many of his issues arebased on the traumas he has endured as an immi-grant. Whether or not his school is able to help himsolve these problems is certain to have an impact onhis future.

Notes1I am grateful to Haydée Font for the interviews andtranscripts for this case study. When she did these in-terviews, Haydée was a graduate student in multicul-tural education at the University of Massachusetts.2The Vietnamese use family names first, given namessecond. The given name is used for identification. Inthis case, Vinh is the given name and Hoang is thefamily name. According to A Manual for IndochineseRefugee Education, 1976-1977 (Arlington, VA: NationalIndochinese Clearinghouse, Center for Applied Lin-guistics, 1976), whereas in the U.S. society JohnJones would be known formally as Mr. Jones and in-formally as John, in Vietnam, Hoang Vinh would beknown both formally and informally as Mr. Vinh orVinh.3See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a different shore: Ahistory of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books,1989); “The biculturalism of the Vietnamese stu-dent.” Digest (Newsletter of the ERIC Clearinghouseon Urban Education), no.152 (March 2000).4Peter N. Kiang and Vivian Wai-Fun Lee, “Exclusionor Contribution? Education K-12 Policy.” In The stateof Asian Pacific America: Policy issues to the year 2020 (LosAngeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public PolicyInstitute and the UCLA Asian American studies Cen-ter, 1993): 25-48; Digest, 1990.5U.S. Bureau of the Census, Profile of selected socialcharacteristics: 2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govern-ment Printing Office, 2000).


69

C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 69M A R Y P I P H E R

Arrival Stories and AcculturationAlthough immigrants to America have to satisfy certain criteria that demonstrate theirreadiness to be self-sustaining when they arrive, refugees are those immigrants who facepersecution in their home countries and are admitted even though they may not have jobskills or speak English. The author worked with refugees who were placed in the Midwestand describes the difficulties they encountered.

Arrival Stories

Most of the refugees who arrive in Lincoln (Ne-braska) didn’t choose to come to our city. Theywere handed a plane ticket to Lincoln by INS offi-cials when they got off a plane in New York or LosAngeles. They may know nothing about the Mid-west and they may have been separated from theirclosest friends by the assignment process. They mayhave bodies adapted to tropical climates or skillssuch as deep-sea fishing that they cannot use in theMidwest. They may be moving into a town whereno one speaks their language or even knows wheretheir country is.

Most newcomers arrive broke. In fact, I havenever met a rich refugee. All arrive worried aboutjobs and housing, as well as about their legal statusin the United States. Especially if they have beentortured or lost family members, they are not atpeak mental efficiency. In many cases, refugeesdon’t speak English and have never lived in a devel-oped country. They have been warned not to truststrangers, yet everyone is a stranger. They have no

way to sort out whether people are kind and help-ful or psychopaths. All of us look alike to them.They fear robbers, harassment, getting lost, or beinghit by a car.

Here in Lincoln, most refugees are met at the air-port by people from their homeland and by some-one from church services. An interesting thinghappens at the airports. When the newcomers andtheir hosts meet, they all burst into tears. The mo-ment of arrival has an intensity and poignancy thatsweeps everyone away. From the airport, refugeesare driven to a furnished apartment stocked withfood and used furniture. Their first day in townthey get their social security cards and their immu-nizations. They enroll their kids in school, and, ifneeded, they receive emergency doctors’ appoint-ments. Sometimes refugees get off the plane withlife-threatening illnesses and go directly to a hospi-tal.

Each adult is given fifty dollars per week, plusfood, rent, and temporary medical insurance. Theygo through an orientation that explains everythingfrom how to use the city bus and library to marriagelaws and taxes. Adults are encouraged to get jobsquickly. The goal of our resettlement agencies isself-sufficiency in four months. In fact, within a fewweeks, refugees are often working. In addition totheir other financial burdens, all refugees mustrepay their airfares from the country they fled.

From The middle of everywhere (New York: Harcourt, Inc.),copyright © 2002 by Mary Pipher, reprinted by permissionof Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.



A woman from Kazakhstan arrived in Lincolnwith her father. She waited three hours at the air-port for her sponsor who was at a party and hadforgotten her. Later that night her father had aheart attack from the stress of the journey. Fromtelevision, she knew she could call 911. Yet evenwhen the translation service finally kicked in, shecould give no address. Amazingly, her father livedthrough this attack.

Zainab arrived at JFK Airport in New York City.Before arriving she and her husband had spentyears in a camp in the Saudi Arabian desert. Theyhad two children in the camp and Zainab was againpregnant. She walked off the plane, looked at allthe electric lights and the people who were walkingfast and talking loudly, and she said to her husband,“Let’s go back to the camp. At least there we hadfriends and family.” He said, “I don’t own the plane.I don’t own anything.”

Telling me this later, Zainab laughed. She said,“All he had was money for a Pepsi, so he bought meone. Drinking that cheered me up.”

Zainab and her husband had hoped they wouldbe assigned Lincoln, where they knew a few fami-lies, but an official sent them to Fargo, NorthDakota. They boarded another plane and arrived inFargo late at night. They were picked up and takento a hotel room. Too tired to clean up or eat, theyfell into deep sleep. In the morning they awoke andlooked out the window. They saw green trees, grass,a squirrel, and two dogs. Zainab said, “We had spentyears in a place with no plants or animals. My hus-band asked me if we were in heaven.”

They had never seen people in shorts or withdyed green hair. They didn’t know how to use aphone. A homeless guy gave them thirty-five centsand dialed for them.

Soon they managed to move to Lincoln. Zainabhad troubles with our foods. In Iraq there were notmany kinds of vegetables, mostly just tomatoes andcucumbers, but they were fresh and delicious.Zainab said Nebraskans had a huge variety, butnothing tasted flavorful.

Zainab came from an area where men andwomen did not touch each other except in families.The American handshake was a problem. When aman held out his hand to her, she had to explainthat Iraqi women do not shake hands. She learned

to hug American women and say, “Hug your hus-band for me.”

When I was in college, I remember reading abouta tribe in Central America who thought that Amer-icans never got sick or died. All the Americansthey’d seen were healthy anthropologists, tall andwell-nourished. They’d never seen Americans die.

Modern refugees often come here equally naïveabout us. Some have Nebraska and Alaska confusedand expect mountains, ice, and grizzlies. Somethink of Nebraska as a western state with cowboys,and they are ill-prepared for our factories, suburbs,and shopping malls. Many newcomers have neverseen . . . escalators or elevators. Inventions such asduct tape, clothes hangers, aluminum foil, or mi-crowaves often befuddle new arrivals.

Someone once said, “Every day in a foreigncountry is like final exam week.” It’s a good meta-phor. Everything is a test, whether of one’s knowl-edge of the language, the culture, or of the layout ofthe city. Politics, laws, and personal boundaries aredifferent. Relations between parents and children,the genders, and the social classes are structureddifferently here. The simplest task – buying a bottleof orange juice or finding medicine for a headache –can take hours and require every conceivable skill.

Some refugees believe they will be given a newcar and a house when they arrive. Some people askgovernment workers, “Where is my color TV? Myfree computer?” Others have seen Dallas or WhoWants to Marry a Millionaire? and think they willsoon get rich.

This belief that it’s easy to get rich in America isexploited by con artists. An Azerbaijani man re-ceived a Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes notice inform-ing him he was a millionaire. He fell to his kneesand thanked Allah for his riches. A Vietnamesefamily called relatives in Ho Chi Minh City to tellthem the great news that they had won the Pub-lisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes. A Siberian cou-ple laughed and danced around their kitchen,already spending their expected pickle card win-nings on a new car, a dishwasher, and a swimmingpool for the kids. Later, when it became clear theyhadn’t won, they weren’t so happy.

Some newcomers don’t know the number ofweeks in a year or what the seasons are. Others arewell-educated but have gaps. Once when I was


M A R Y P I P H E R Arrival Stories and Acculturation 71

talking to a well-educated Croatian woman aboutour history, I brought up the sixties. I said, “It was ahard time with war and so many assassinations,those of John and Bobby Kennedy and MartinLuther King.” She asked in amazement, “You meanMartin Luther King is dead?” When I said yes, shebegan to cry.

Our casual ways of dealing with the opposite sexare without precedent in some cultures. Our re-laxed interactions between men and women can bealarming to some people from the Middle East.Some traditional women are suspicious of Ameri-can women; it seems to them as if the Americanwomen are trying to steal their husbands becausethey speak to them at work or in stores.

An Iraqi high school student told of arriving inthis country on a summer day. As she and her fa-ther drove through Lincoln, there were manywomen on the streets in shorts and tank tops. Herfather kept saying to her, “Cover your eyes; coveryour eyes.” Neither of them had ever seen womenin public without a head covering.

There are two common refugee beliefs aboutAmerica – one is that it is sin city; the other is thatit is paradise. I met a Cuban mother whose sixteen-year-old daughter got pregnant in Nebraska. Sheblamed herself for bringing the girl to our sinfultown, weeping as she told me the story. And sheshowed me a picture of the daughter, all dressed inwhite. A Mexican father told me that his oldest sonwas now in a gang. He talked about Americanmovies and the violent television, music, and videogames. He said, “My son wears a black T-shirt hebought at a concert. It has dripping red letters thatread, ‘More Fucking Blood.”’ He looked at mequizzically. “America is the best country in theworld, the richest and the freest. Why do you makethings like this for children?”

On the other hand, some refugees idealize ourcountry. They talk endlessly of the mountains offood in buffets, the endless supply of clean water,the shining cars, and the electricity. Flying into acity such as New York or Seattle, many refugees ex-perience their first vision of America and are over-whelmed by the shining stars of light on theground, more light than they had ever seen. Onerefugee from Romania captured both ideas whenhe said, “America is the beauty and the beast.”

When I ask refugees what America means tothem, many say, “Freedom.” This may mean manythings. To the Kurdish sisters (Nasreen and Zeenat)it is the freedom to wear stylish American clothesand walk about freely. It’s the freedom to go swim-ming and shopping and make a living. To many ofthe poor and disenfranchised, it is the radical mes-sage that everyone has rights, even though at firstmany refugees do not know what their rights are.

America means a system of laws, a house, a job,and a school for every child. In America people canstrive for happiness, not even a concept in someparts of the world. They are free to become who-ever they want to become. Refugees learn they canspeak their minds, write, and travel. They shed theconstraints of more traditional cultures. As one Bul-garian woman put it to me, “In America, the wivesdo not have to get up and make the husbands’breakfasts.”

People from all over the world want to comehere. They want a chance at the American dream.They come because they want to survive and besafe and anywhere is better than where they were.However, the process of adjusting is incredibly trau-matic. The Kurdish sisters were in culture shock forabout six months. After a year, they are still deeplyin debt, lonely, haunted by the past, and strugglingto master our language and our culture. They areoverwhelmed every time their bills arrive. Nasreenand Zeenat still dream nightly of their homeland.

It is difficult to describe or even imagine the chal-lenges of getting started in a new country. Imagineyourself dropped in downtown Rio de Janeiro orKhartoum with no money, no friends, and no un-derstanding of how that culture works. Imagineyou have six months to learn the language andeverything you need to know to support your fam-ily. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison becauseyou know . . . what a bank is, and how to drive acar. And you have most likely not been tortured orseen family members killed within the last fewmonths.

Picture yourself dropped in the Sudanese grass-lands with no tools or knowledge about how to sur-vive and no ways to communicate with the locals orask for advice. Imagine yourself wondering wherethe clean water is, where and what food is, andwhat you should do about the bites on your feet,



In Legacies, Portes and Rumbaut report that mostimmigrants move into the middle-class mainstreamin one or two generations. That is the good news.The bad news is that if they don’t make it quicklyinto the middle class, they won’t make it at all. Withthe passage of time, drive diminishes, and by thethird generation, assimilation stops. If two genera-tions fail to make it into the middle class, the fol-lowing generations are likely to be stuck at thebottom.

Failure to succeed will drive refugee familiesaway from mainstream culture into what Portescalls “reactive ethnicity.” Newcomers will revert toenclaves and see failure as inevitable, thus, in manycases, dooming their children to fail.

Portes’s research obviously has implications forsocial policy. We need to help refugees and immi-grants early with job training, education, language,and business loans. It’s hard to study physics whenone is sick and hungry, or to attend GED classeswhen one has worked all night at a factory. If wemiss our chance to help them, we miss our chanceto create well-adjusted, well-educated citizens.

. . . I want to tell another archetypal successstory. The family arrived here badly traumatizedafter wandering across many countries looking fora home. But they were a strong family with manyattributes of resilience. In Nebraska, their com-munity helped them survive and their hard workenabled them to build a life for themselves. Thirty-seven million people watched the last episode ofthe (original) TV show Survivor. This family’s storyand the stories of most refugees are much morecompelling than any contrived reality-televisionprogram could ever show.

I interviewed Kareem and Mirzana at their highschool. Mirzana was small and blond. Kareem washeartbreakingly handsome, with thick eyebrowsand black hair. But he was shy and let his older sis-ter do most of the talking.

The family had lived in a village in northernBosnia. Their father was an engineer, and theirmother worked in a store. They were a hardwork-ing middle-class family. Mirzana said she and Ka-reem had an easy life, consisting mainly of schooland play. Their grandparents lived nearby. Kareemsaid, “We had everything we wanted. We werenever lonely.”

and your sunburn. . . . Unless a kind and generousSudanese takes you in and helps you adjust, youwould be a goner.

Acculturation

In their first stage after arrival newcomers brieflyexperience relief and euphoria. They are here andthey are safe.

In the second stage reality sets in. Refugees havelost their routines, their institutions, their language,their families and friends, their homes, their workand incomes. They have lost their traditions, theirclothes, pictures, heirlooms, and pets. They arewithout props in a new and alien environment.

They experience cultural bereavement. The oldcountry may have been a terrible place, but it washome. It was the repository of all their stories,memories, and meanings. Many times newcomers’bodies are in America, but their hearts remain intheir homeland.

Ideally, the third stage is the beginning of recov-ery. Newcomers begin to grasp how America works.In the fourth stage, also ideally, newcomers are bi-cultural and bilingual. They can choose to partici-pate in many aspects of the culture.

In general, there are four reactions refugees’families have to the new culture – fight it because itis threatening; avoid it because it’s overwhelming;assimilate as fast as possible by making all Americanchoices; or tolerate discomfort and confusion whileslowly making intentional choices about what toaccept and reject. Alejandro Portes and RubénRumbaut published the results of long-term studieson newcomer adaptation in a book called Legacies.1

They found that this last reaction, which they called“selective acculturation,” was best for refugees.

They described two other less-adaptive ways ofadjusting. Dissonant acculturation is when the kidsin the family outstrip the parents. This can undercutparental authority and put the kids at risk. Conso-nant acculturation is when members of the familyall move together toward being American. At onetime this rapid acceptance of American ways wasconsidered ideal, but now it appears that this makesfamilies too vulnerable to the downside of America.


M A R Y P I P H E R Arrival Stories and Acculturation 73

Nearby there was a war in Croatia, but their par-ents didn’t think the war would come to Bosnia.One day the Serbs came and put their father and allthe men in their village into a concentration camp.The siblings and their mother fled to Croatia.

Mirzana told me about her father’s camp. Shesaid, “Many men were in a small, empty room.They had nothing to eat, no papers, and no money.”

Their father developed a lung infection. Still, hewas lucky – he was only there for a month and nottoo badly beaten. He suffered most hearing the painof others when the soldiers took them out and beatthem. He listened to men scream for hours.

Their father saw many bad things, most of whichhe didn’t tell them. He did tell of a drunken soldierwho came into their cell and shouted, “Run to thecorner. The last one there will be shot.” One mandidn’t run and was killed by this soldier. Mirzanashook her head sadly as she said, “This man wasdeaf.”

Eventually their father was released. Before hecould escape the country, he was ordered to fightthe Serbs. He didn’t even have a weapon and, asMirzana put it, “He was there to be shot.” After awhile, he managed to run away and find his familyin Croatia. When he came to their door, none ofthem recognized him. In the two months he hadbeen away, he’d aged ten years.

The family lived in Croatia for two years. Even-tually a friend helped them get into Germany. Theyspoke no German and lived in one small room,which Kareem didn’t like. He said no one couldever be alone and there were fights about space andsharing.

Mirzana and Kareem learned German, but theirfamily couldn’t become German citizens and theyhad no hope of improving their situation. In 1998the Germans kicked them out and they came to theUnited States.

They were optimistic on the plane here, butwhen they arrived in Lincoln they were taken to asmall dirty apartment. They were exhausted fromthe thirty-hour flight, but they couldn’t sleep. Theirmother was in shock. She cried, “I want to go back.”The father said, “You forget, we have no choices.We have no country to return to.”

They had no car and they didn’t know anyone.No one in the family spoke English. But after five

days they moved into their own apartment andthey discovered next door a family that the fatherhad known as a child. The two families cried withjoy to be reunited. Now the family knows all of theBosnian community. Bosnians in Lincoln sharemeals and throw parties. The men help each otherfind jobs and the women help each other learn Eng-lish and shop for bargains.

When I met them, Kareem and Mirzana hadbeen here only three months, but already they werespeaking pretty good English, their fourth language.They laughed as they talked about early experiencesin Nebraska. A neighbor gave them bananas, butthey thought they tasted like soap and threw themaway. They missed European bakeries. In Americaeverything supposed to be sweet was salty and viceversa. Here herring was sweet and butter was salty.

Kareem and Mirzana like it here. Mirzana ismaking A’s and, after school, she is a stocker at a su-permarket. Mirzana laughed as she explained. “Thestaff teaches me a new word each day.” Kareem istoo young to work, so he cleans the house, doeslaundry, and studies after school. Both Kareem andMirzana want to go to college and get good jobs.They want to care for their parents.

Their parents are ambitious, too. They have dif-ficult factory jobs because their English is still poor.They work from two until ten. But in the morningthey study English. Mirzana said, “In a year or twothey will have better jobs.”

This family is lucky. They have each other and asupportive community. Everyone has many of theattributes of resilience. The family carries with thema great deal of human capital. The external environ-ment has been pretty harsh, but most likely, theywill eventually transcend it.

Sometimes Mirzana wishes that her life theselast few years were just a dream and she wouldwake up in Bosnia in their old house. Her grand-mother would be calling her to come work in thegarden. There would be no war. Kareem disagrees.He is filled with newcomer zest. He said, “I couldsmell freedom in America.”

Notes1Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Legacies(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).


M I C H A E L S C H E R E R

Scrimmage on the BorderThe author addresses the hotly debated issue of “illegal immigration.” Unlike manypoliticians pandering to get votes, his essay demonstrates why there are no simple solu-tions to this complex problem.

At its southern border, where the United Statesof America ends in a tangle of barbed wire andmanzanita bushes, the red dirt desert fills each

night with thousands of men and women trudgingnorth from Mexico. This is the new Ellis Island, theport of entry for more than a million people everyyear. They come because immigration helps driveour prosperity, and because, as George W. Bushsays, there are jobs that U.S. citizens won’t do, andbecause the president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, hasmade their migration – and gainful employment inEl Norte – a linchpin of his nation’s economy. Theycome because American companies have an un-quenchable desire for more strawberry pickers andmeatpackers and dishwashers, and because few willcheck to see if their Social Security cards are real.They come alone or as families, cradling babies intheir arms, braving freezing nights and swelteringdays, border bandits and mesquite trees with thornslike knives. They pay guides thousands of dollarsfor the privilege of walking 5 or 10 or 20 miles tohide by the side of a desolate road, hoping their rideto Phoenix or Las Vegas or Los Angeles shows up.Every year, hundreds die along the way. Those whodo make it are greeted as criminals. In the brokenlogic of the nation’s current immigration policy,they are enticed and needed, but illegal.

On the first Sunday in April, five migrant menhuddled in the shade under a cement culvert thatpassed beneath Arizona’s Route 92 in the bordertown of Hereford. Though it was the middle of theday, with temperatures approaching 80 degrees,they were dressed like New England schoolkids inheavy jackets and wool caps, clothing that had keptthem warm as they hiked through the HuachucaMountains and down into the San Pedro River val-ley. . . . They were heading north, and might havemade it to Phoenix, to a new job and another life,but for a group of citizen soldiers, a ragtag bunch ofmen and women armed with walkie-talkies, binoc-ulars, and not a few pistols, who were lying in wait.These self-described patriots had chosen this Sun-day to do what their president and Congress wouldnot . . . to stop what they called the “illegal inva-sion of America.”

“We found them and called Border Patrol,” saidMarc Johannes, a 40-year-old auto mechanic fromTucson, who had been manning a post along theroad. The five migrants solemnly lowered theirheads as they climbed into the back of the patroltruck, saying not a word. “I’m fed up,” Johannessaid. “This whole country is being over-run.”Johannes stands well over 6 feet tall . . . woredesert camouflage pants, and in his bag he had aRussian-made, first-generation infrared scope, thebetter to see immigrants at night. He didn’t want tobe mistaken for a racist. “I consider myself a scien-tist,” he continued. “And I know that all people onthe planet are the same. If I were living in a Third

From Mother Jones, July/August, 2005, 30(4). Copyright ©2005, Foundation for National Progress.

74


M I C H A E L S C H E R E R Scrimmage on the Border 75

World cesspool, I would probably look for anotherjob too. But the entire Third World is moving northon a global scale.” One of Johannes’ friends’ vehi-cles had been stolen and recovered in Mexico. Aneighbor had recently moved away so his daughterwould not have to attend a largely Latino school.“I’ve been denied jobs because I don’t speak Span-ish,” he said. “I’m more affected by this than any-body else.”

A few days earlier, Johannes had traveled toTombstone, Arizona, for the first day of what wasbilled as “The Minuteman Project,” a month-longprotest against illegal immigration. The idea, to re-cruit American citizens for border patrols, was notnew. In recent years, a half-dozen groups, includingfully armed paramilitary militias and local ranch-ers, have walked the desert searching for migrants,defying federal officials who warn against civilianbravado. But those groups have largely worked inthe shadows. The Minuteman Project was designedas a national coming-out party, less an effort to cap-ture Mexicans crossing the border than to captureairtime on the cable news channels.

“We are done writing letters and sending emailsand showing up at town hall meetings,” said one ofthe project’s organizers, Chris Simcox, before abank of television cameras at Tombstone’s MasonicHall. He stood next to Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.),the House’s leading opponent of illegal immigra-tion. . . . Tancredo wore black cowboy boots and apin that read “Undocumented Border PatrolAgent.” In his shirt pocket he kept a fresh cigar.“For the first time in seven years,” he told thepress, “I can actually tell our friends and supportersthat we are on the offensive.”

Tombstone is a tourist town, a place of reenact-ment, simulation. Acting troupes stage Old Westgunfights every hour or two, and the stores sell pe-riod costumes and posters of Doc Holliday. It is, inmany ways, the perfect backdrop for a televisedpassion play. Minutemen with handlebar mus-taches and minutewomen in hip holsters and Wran-gler shirts posed before satellite relay trucks. They’darrived by the hundreds from every corner of thecountry, with a common sense of outrage andsimilar sets of talking points – working people andretired people, many of whose parents or grandpar-ents had come from Europe. They’d spent their life-times framing houses or driving trucks or digging

wells or trimming trees. Now they felt their countrywas changing around them. The government wasallowing a trampling of the law, a dilution of Amer-ican culture, and a burgeoning of the welfare state.It was turning a blind eye to a gateway for terrorists.America was being lost. And nobody was stoppingit, not the U.S. Border Patrol, not Congress, not thepresident.

Weeks earlier, appearing at a press conferencewith Mexico’s President Fox, President Bush hadsaid, “I’m against vigilantes in the United States ofAmerica.” He was dismissing not just the citizen sol-diers in the desert but a growing movement withinhis own Republican Party, for the backlash againstimmigration in America involves more than thefringe right. Even as the Minutemen gathered, poll-sters for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal foundthat 48 percent of Americans believed that immi-gration “detracts from our character and weakensthe United States.” In a nation of immigrants, only41 percent said immigration betters the repub-lic. . . . California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger declared in an April speech that the UnitedStates needs to “close the borders.” Though thegovernor apologized for the remarks, a week laterhe praised the Minutemen on a Southern Califor-nia radio show.

Outside the Minutemen’s Tombstone headquar-ters, Don Wooley, a retired pawnbroker with a chis-eled jaw and bright eyes, was making his stand.Wooley was proud to have fought in Vietnam be-cause “I don’t think it’s ever dishonorable to go killcommunists.” He’d driven down from Lawton,Oklahoma, in December to make sure the Minute-man organizers were not racists or hucksters. Nowhe was back to do his part. “If you and your kids aregoing to speak English and live the lifestyle you livetoday, somebody is going to have to pay the price,”he told me. He didn’t live near many Spanish-speaking people, but he had heard of the problems.“There are government offices where all the clerksdon’t speak English,” he said. “I wouldn’t speakSpanish on a bet. I speak English.” He certainlyspoke with determination. “Nothing happens inWashington unless there is a crowd with pitchforksand torches.”

Representative Tancredo’s press secretary, CarlosEspinosa, has one of the toughest jobs in Washing-ton. “Damage control,” he called it – constantly



parrying and rebutting charges that his boss is abigot. But if media exposure is the measure of apress secretary’s success, Espinosa ranked amongthe best. In early April, Tancredo was booking atleast 30 radio, newspaper, and television interviewsa week. “We were sitting in the office yesterday,”Tancredo told me, once we settled at a corner tablein a deserted cafeteria. “. . . Think about where wewere just a few short years ago. And how amazingit is to now be on the cusp of a major shift in pub-lic policy.”’

When Tancredo arrived in Congress in 1999, noone seemed to care about Mexican migration. TheImmigration Reform Caucus he founded attractedonly 16 members, all Republicans, and just aboutthe only Americans who ever heard him speakwere late-night C-SPAN viewers. “I really didn’tknow what else to do,” he said. “Then 9/11 hap-pened and everything changed. We got 60 membersovernight.”

Tancredo turned illegal immigration into a na-tional-security issue. He spread word that Islamicprayer rugs and a diary written in Arabic had beenfound in the border scrubland. “Can anybody ex-plain to me why we shouldn’t be paranoid?” heasked a reporter for Fox News. He began appearingregularly on conservative talk radio, and with LouDobbs on CNN. He complained about open bordersto the Washington Times editorial board, and said that“the blood of the people killed” by a second terror-ist attack would be on the hands of President Bushand Congress. That prompted a phone call fromBush adviser Karl Rove, one so rife with vulgarityand vitriol that Tancredo, who was driving to workat the time, had to pull his car to the side of theroad. Rove called him a “traitor to the president”and told him never to “darken the doorstep of thisWhite House.” Unbowed, Tancredo went on to raisemoney last year to defeat several House Republi-cans he considered soft on immigration, earning theire of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. “I willnever be a chairman of any committee aroundhere,” Tancredo said, cracking a smile. “I will neverbe in the ‘in’ crowd.”

But Tancredo did not come to Washington toclimb the rungs of power. He came to draw the bat-tle lines in a clash of cultures. “You have to under-stand there is a bigger issue here. . . . Who are we?Do we have an understanding of what it means tobe an American, even if we are Hispanic or Italian

or Jewish or black or white or Hungarian by ances-try? Is there something we can all hang on to? Arethere things that will bind us together as Ameri-cans?” He continued into a monologue about theidentity crisis in America, the “cult of multicultur-alism,” schoolkids ashamed to love their country,and textbooks that say Christopher Columbus “de-stroyed paradise.” Tancredo believes that many im-migrants today, unlike his grandparents, who cameover from Italy, no longer feel the need to assimi-late. “You have, at least, divided loyalties,” hesaid. . . .

Tancredo led a coterie of insurgent Republicansin a revolt against the White House. They delayedpassage of the intelligence reform bill because itfailed to include a provision called Real ID, whichwould make it far more difficult for illegal immi-grants to get state driver’s licenses. In February,nearly two-thirds of the House, including 42Democrats, voted for the Real ID measure, whichwas later endorsed by the Senate and signed by thepresident. This is only the beginning of what Tan-credo hopes will be a series of legislative victoriesthis year. He plans to derail a bipartisan effort, sup-ported by the president, that would allow illegal im-migrants to find legal employment in the U.S. He’sreintroducing a bill that would suspend legal workvisas, increase fines for employers who hire illegalimmigrants, and deploy the military to protect theborders. He is also helping groups in seven statespush new initiatives or laws that would deny gov-ernment services to illegal immigrants. Last fall Ari-zona voters approved Proposition 200, a ballotinitiative nicknamed “Protect Arizona Now,” whichrequires government workers to report undocu-mented residents who seek out government aid.The law garnered 56 percent of the vote, including,according to one exit poll, more than 40 percent ofthe state’s Latino voters. . . .

The minutemen set up their operational head-quarters in the run-down dormitories of the Mira-cle Valley Bible College, a faded compound nearHereford built in the late 1950s by the ReverendAsa Alonzo Allen, a faith healer famous for exorcis-ing demons before tent crowds of 20,000 until hedied of alcoholism at the age of 59. At the frontgate, an armed guard screened cars. Inside was acommunications center, equipped with ham radiosand topographic maps of well-known immigrationtrails. For security, all registered Minutemen wore



orange badges. The men slept four to a room. A sur-plus of American flags festooned the front lawn.

Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, a retired ac-countant, seemed thrilled by the layout and its trap-pings. He’d served as a Marine outside of Khe Sanhduring Vietnam, and took easily to the role of com-manding general, always talking up the enemy andwarning of possible ambushes. He leaked rumors tothe conservative press, claiming that a Latin Amer-ican gang called Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, wasplanning to attack his volunteers. During a desertpatrol one day, he received a tip from an informanthe would not identify suggesting an imminentarmed assault from across the wire. “Do whateveryou want with that,” he told a skeptical Los AngelesTimes reporter between drags of a cigarette. “I didn’tpersonally gather this info. . . .” He wore a crum-pled straw cowboy hat, and what appeared to be abrand-new military equipment belt, to which heaffixed his cellular phone and water bottles. Whenvolunteers came to him with concerns that theirwalkie-talkies were being intentionally jammed byhuman smugglers across the border, he an-nounced, with some elation, “This has been like areal war.”

Like many Minuteman volunteers, Gilchrist hailsfrom Southern California, a land adrift in a demo-graphic sea change. Between 2000 and 2020, thenumber of Latino residents there is set to increaseby nearly two-thirds, and the number of Asian res-idents will increase by 40 percent. Once-lily-whitesuburbs in Orange County, where Gilchrist lives,will soon count whites as a minority. He says hedoesn’t mind the diversity of races, but he cannottolerate the diversity of cultures. “I saw the countrychange literally overnight into a foreign country,”he told me over a hamburger at the Trading PostDiner on Route 92. “The Fourth of July was notbeing celebrated, but Cinco de Mayo was. All thebillboards would be in foreign languages. It’s notjust Spanish. It’s Korean. I saw the nation being seg-regated.”

Gilchrist’s co-organizer, Chris Simcox, worked asan elementary school teacher in Los Angeles until2001, when he moved to Tombstone and foundedan armed border patrol called Civil Homeland De-fense. “Where are all these gangs coming from, whodon’t speak English?” he remembered thinkingafter he took a job teaching in South Central in thelate 1990s. “We have people that came to this coun-

try saying, Your laws mean nothing, your citizen-ship means nothing.” Around the same time, for-mer Southern California resident Glenn Spencer, aformer radio talk show host, founded AmericanBorder Patrol at the base of the Huachuca Moun-tains, where he launched regular patrols, some ofwhich he broadcast in infrared video on the Inter-net. Another Los Angeles native, Casey Nethercott,recently bought a ranch that abuts the border andfounded the Arizona Guard, a militia that he says isprepared to fight the Mexican army if the U.S. gov-ernment is not. They came to Arizona because ithas all the action. . . .

Many locals take the torrent in stride. They sleepwith their screen doors locked and their front doorsopen, and if someone comes knocking late at night,searching for food, water, or a telephone, they try tohelp out. “I got to the point where I was buyingextra bread and peanut butter for those people,”said Eric Nelson. Crime against locals is extremelyrare, though in January 2004, three illegal immi-grants attacked Hereford resident Sandy Graham asshe warmed up her Chevy Suburban to drive her14-year-old daughter to school. The men, who hadbeen hiding in the mesquite, stabbed Sandy with apen, kicked her daughter, and sped away in the car.They were promptly caught and arrested, but atleast one resident, Cindy Kolb, began strapping a.38 to her ankle before driving her seven-year-oldto the bus stop.

Local newspaper columnist Jim Dwyer calls theanti-immigrant activists “crusading carpetbaggers,”and the governments of Douglas, Tombstone, andCochise County have passed resolutions condemn-ing civilian patrols. Undaunted, Simcox workedwithout sleep for much of the first week of the Min-uteman Project, cautioning his volunteers to act re-sponsibly on the border, to phone Border Patrol,and to not engage the migrants. He wore a bullet-proof vest and kept an armed guard at his side. Be-cause he was on probation for carrying a pistol intoa nearby national park, he can no longer pack hisown weapon. “My family is very concerned withme taking on a multimillion-dollar crime syndi-cate,” Simcox said after finishing breakfast onemorning. . . . “It’s the government of Mexico in bedwith the government of the United States that hascreated a subculture of human smuggling and drugsmuggling and gangsters, and it’s a mess. This bor-der is worth a billion dollars of business at least.”



Since he began his work, he said, his group hasalerted Border Patrol to nearly 5,000 illegal mi-grants in the desert, and rescued 158 people inneed of food or water. Later that day, he had an in-terview scheduled on The O’Reilly Factor, whichwould be broadcast from a relay truck parked onthe border.

Locals like Herb Linn would just as soon Simcoxstay in Los Angeles. At Johnny Ringo’s, a biker barnamed after the gunfighter who shot a man in 1879for refusing a shot of whiskey, Linn stopped pouringdrinks when I mentioned Simcox. “He’s a self-serving son of a bitch who wants his 15 minutes offame,” said the barkeep, a former city councilor. “Ifthe Minutemen succeed in sealing the border, arethey going to spend as much time picking thecrops? I don’t want to pay five bucks for a can ofstring beans.”

James “Butch” Peri, owner of one of the largestonion farms in Nevada, knows all about the costsand benefits of migrant labor. He pays legal immi-grants around $8 an hour to shovel onions into 90-pound burlap bags, a job for which he says there areno U.S.-born applicants. At a meeting of Tancredo’sImmigration Reform Caucus on Capitol Hill, Peristood before congressional staffers making the casethat U.S. agriculture depends on Mexico. Ameri-cans, he said, have become spoiled. “It belittlesthem to pull weeds in a lawn. Kids don’t wash carsanymore. They don’t mow lawns.”. . .

Immigration as an issue, it turns out, can be greatfor radio ratings, creating all the impassioned bina-ries that keep listeners from turning the dial. It pitsthe working man against the lawbreaker, the com-mon voter against the elite politician, the radio hostagainst the mainstream media. “Our language isbeing destroyed by George Bush and Bill Clinton topay off their buddies who put them in power,”ranted nationally syndicated Michael Savage over asouthern Arizona station broadcast one day duringthe Minuteman protest. “Our culture is being de-stroyed to the point where there is no culture. Wehave no common culture. They want us to becomea culture of the international. That’s why I tell youthat civil upheaval in this country might also not bemore than a few years off, sparked by this flood ofillegal aliens that both the Democrats and Republi-cans are foisting upon this nation.”

John Stone thought he saw something move inthe brambles. . . . He held binoculars up to his face.

“No, it’s just a bush. I’ve been looking at this land-scape so long that every bush looks like a personand every person looks like a bush.” The Minute-men had spaced themselves out over two miles ona stretch of dust called Border Road. . . . Their taskwas mercilessly boring. They sat on chairs or intheir trucks, gazing over a wide desert plain thatpassed five or six miles into Mexico to a distanthighway where the migrants would, on a normalday, be dropped off for the long walk to the UnitedStates. No one was coming now. The Mexican gov-ernment, wary of gun-toting vigilantes, hadmounted its own patrols. Every few hours, on theother side of the short barbed-wire fence, youcould see another group of migrants get roustedfrom the bush, loaded into the back of a Mexicangovernment truck, and driven back into the coun-try’s interior.

In the absence of action, the Minutemen bidedtheir time with the steady stream of internationalmedia who showed up to interview them. Behindthem, up on a hill, sat a group of volunteers fromthe ACLU and the American Friends Service Com-mittee, mostly students from Stanford Law Schooland Prescott College. . . . They wore T-shirts thatread “observadores legales.” They videotaped theMinutemen, and the Minutemen videotaped them.Mexican television stations came to shoot picturesof the spectacle, only to find elderly men andwomen sitting in lawn chairs aiming their owncamcorders. It wasn’t exactly the sort of borderstandoff most participants had expected. . . .

A few miles down the road, Casey Nethercott,the militant leader of the Arizona Guard, keptwatch over his border property, a place he calls“Warrior Ranch.” It holds about 100 acres of dirtand tumbleweed, a few buildings, and a windmillwith no blades. He keeps a 120-pound rottweilertrained to tackle grown men, and two black sportutility vehicles reinforced with steel plates to stopbullets when his militia patrols the desert.

“Migration from Mexico is the catalyst that isstarting the demise of America,” he told me, sittingin his cramped office, which was decorated with di-agrams of military attack formations. “It’s beingflooded with illegals, people that are substandardhumans. They don’t educate themselves. Theydon’t care about themselves. And if you think that’sracist, I’m sorry, you’re wrong. If a black man witha white wife and two adopted Mexican and



Chinese children moved in next door to me, firstthing I’d do is take over a bottle of wine and saywelcome to the damned neighborhood. And if hewas in the Army I would hit him up to join the or-ganization. But these are illegals. They are illegal.”

Nethercott . . . had just been released after serv-ing six months in prison, the result of a disputewith the local Border Patrol. Federal officers hadtried to pull him over, but he drove onto his ranchand shut the gate . . . and a standoff ensued untillocal sheriffs arrived. A few weeks later, the FBItried to serve Nethercott and his fellow militiamember, Kalen Riddle, a warrant for threateningfederal officers. The FBI said Riddle refused anorder to stop moving in a Safeway parking lot, andan agent shot and injured him. Nethercott was ac-quitted of all charges, but he still faces a 2003 ag-gravated assault charge in Texas (that he)pistol-whipped an illegal Salvadoran migrant hefound sneaking into the country during a patrol in2003, a charge Nethercott denies. . . .

Back at the Bible College in Miracle Valley,Gilchrist arrived at the communications center to

prepare for another radio interview. . . . Outside onthe front lawn, Mike Bird, a 22-year-old volunteerfrom Georgia, was pacing around, awaiting instruc-tions for his night patrol up along Route 92.Bird . . . planned to spend the full month in Ari-zona. “You’ll never hear it from any of these guys,”he confided between drags of a Dunhill, “but I havetoo big a gun.” A .44 Magnum, the sort of cannotmade famous by Dirty Harry, stretched down hisright thigh. Bird was unemployed, but he hoped toget a job back home sampling air quality at thelocal coal plant. . . .

Word had filtered down from Gilchrist about thesuccess that the Minutemen were having, about thewaiting migrants backed up like cars in a traffic jamon the other side of the border. Mike was ready.“Tonight is the night,” he told me, imagining themin the wilderness. “Think about it. They are hungry.They have been waiting two days. They are going torush the line.”


J O A N N E H Y P P O L I T E

DyasporaThis first-person narrative describes the life of immigrants from Haiti living in Boston. Italso captures the feelings shared by many immigrant children and youth as they try tomaintain their native culture, but struggle to be accepted by their peers, even those peerswho are from the same racial group.

When you are in Haiti they call you Dyaspora.This word, which connotes both connectionand disconnection, accurately describes

your condition as a Haitian American. Disconnectedfrom the physical landscape of the homeland, youdon’t grow up with a mango tree in your yard, youdon’t suck kenèps in the summer, or sit in the darklistening to stories of Konpè Bouki and Malis. Thebleat of vaksins or the beating of a Yanvalou on Radadrums are neither in the background or the fore-ground of your life. Your French is non-existent.Haiti is not where you live.

Your house in Boston is your island. As the onlyHaitian family on the hillside street you grow up on,it represents Haiti to you. It was where your granmèrefused to learn English, where goods like ripemangoes, plantains, djondjon, and hard white blobsof mints come to you in boxes through the mail. Atyour communion and birthday parties, all of BostonHaiti seems together in your house to eat griyo andsip kremas. It takes forever for you to kiss everycheek, some of them heavy with face powder, someof them damp with perspiration, some of them withscratchy face hair, and some of them giving you a

perfume head-rush as you swoop in. You are grate-ful for every smooth, dry cheek you encounter. Inyour house, the dreaded matinèt which your parentsimported from Haiti just to keep you, your brother,and your sister in line sits threateningly on top ofthe wardrobe. It is where your mother’s andeyòKreyòl accent and your father’s lavil French accentmake sometimes beautiful, sometimes terriblemusic together.

On Sundays in your house, “Dominika-anik-anik”floats from the speakers of the record player early inthe morning and you are made to put on one ofyour frilly dresses, your matching lace-edged socks,and black shoes. Your mother ties long ribbons intoa bow at the root of each braid. She warns you,your brother and your sister to “respect; yourheads” as you drive to St. Angela’s, never missing aSunday service in fourteen years. In your islandhouse, everyone has two names. The name theywere given and the nickname they have beengranted so that your mother is Gisou, your father isPopo, your brother is Claudy, your sister is Tinou,you are Jojo, and your grandmother is Manchoun.Every day your mother serves rice and beans andyou methodically pick out all the beans because youdon’t like pwa. You think they are ugly and whydoes all the rice have to have beans anyway? Evenwith the white rice or the mayi moulen, your mothermakes sòs pwa – bean sauce. You develop the ideathat Haitians are obsessed with beans. In your

From E. Danticat (Ed.) The butterfly’s way: Voices from theHaitian dyaspora in the United States, (New York: Soho Press,2001). Reprinted by permission of the author.

80


J O A N N E H Y P P O L I T E Dyaspora 81

house there is a mortar and a pestle as well as fivepictures of Jesus, your parents drink Café Busteloevery morning, your father wears gwayabèl shirtsand smokes cigarettes, and you are beaten whenyou don’t get good grades at school. You learnabout the infidelities of husbands from conversa-tions your aunts have. You are dragged to Haitianplays, Haitian bals, and Haitian concerts where inspite of yourself konpa rhythms make you sway.You know the names of Haitian presidents and mil-itary leaders because political discussions inevitablyerupt whenever there are more than three Haitianmen together in the same place.

Every time you are sick, your mother rubs youdown with a foul-smelling liquid that she keeps inan old Barbancourt rum bottle under her bed. Yousplash yourself with Bien-être after every bath.Your parents speak to you in Kreyòl, you respond inEnglish, and somehow this works and feels natural.But when your mother speaks English, things seemto go wrong. She makes no distinction between heand she, and you become the pronoun police.Every day you get a visit from some matant ormonnonk or kouzen who is also a marenn or parenn ofsomeone in the house. In your house, your grand-mother has a porcelain kivèt she keeps under herbed to relieve herself at night. You pore over photo-graph albums where there are pictures of you goingto school in Haiti, in the yard in Haiti, under thewhite Christmas tree in Haiti, and you marvel be-cause you do not remember anything that you see.You do not remember Haiti because you left theretoo young but it does not matter because it is as ifHaiti has lassoed your house with an invisible rope.

Outside of your house, you are forced to sink orswim in American waters. For you this means anIrish-Catholic school and a Black-American neigh-borhood. The school is a choice made by your par-ents who strongly believe in a private Catholiceducation anyway, not paying any mind to the bus-ing crisis that is raging in the city. The choice ofneighborhood is a condition of the reality of livinghere in this city with its racially segregated neigh-borhoods. Before you lived here, white peopleowned this hillside street. After you and others wholooked like you came, they gradually disappeared toother places, leaving you this place and calling itbad because you and others like you live there now.As any dyaspora child knows, Haitian parents are

not familiar with these waters. They say things toyou like, “In Haiti we never treated white peoplebadly.” They don’t know about racism. They don’tknow about the latest styles and fashions and giveyour brother hell every time he sneaks out to afriend’s house and gets his hair cut into a shag, ahigh-top, a fade. They don’t know that the ribbonsin your hair, the gold loops in your ears, and thelace that edges your socks alert other children toyour difference. So you wait until you get to schoolbefore taking them all off and out and you put themback on at the end of your street where the busdrops you off. Outside your house, things are blackand white. You are black and white. Especially inyour school where neither you nor any of the fewother Haitian girls in your class are invited to thebirthday parties of the white kids in your class. Youcleave to these other Haitian girls out of somethingthat begins as solidarity but becomes a lifetime offriendship. You make green hats in art class everySt. Patrick’s Day and watch Irish step-dancingshows year after year after year. You discover booksand reading and this is what you do when you takethe bus home, just you and your white school-mates. You lose your accent. You study about theIndians in social studies but you do not study aboutBlack Americans except in music class where youare forced to sing Negro spirituals as a concession toyour presence. They don’t know anything aboutToussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

In your neighborhood when you tell people youare from Haiti, they ask politely, “Where’s that?”You explain and because you seem okay to them,Haiti is okay to them. They shout, “Hi, Grunny!”whenever they see your grandmother on the stoopand sometimes you translate a sentence or two be-tween them. In their houses, you eat sweet potatopie and nod because you have that too, it’s made alittle different and you call it pen patat but it’s thesame taste after all. From the girls on the street youlearn to jump double-dutch, you learn to dance thepuppet and the white boy. You see a womanpreacher for the first time in your life at theirchurch. You wonder where down South is becausethat is where most of the boys and girls on yourblock go for vacations. You learn about boys andsex through these girls because these two subjectsare not allowed in your island/house. You keepyour street friends separate from your school



friends and this is how it works and you are used toit. You get so you can jump between worlds withthe same ease that you slide on your nightgown inthe evening.

Then when you get to high school, thingschange. People in your high school and your neigh-borhood look at you and say, “You are Haitian?”and from the surprise in their voice you realize thatthey know where Haiti is now. They think theyknow what Haiti is now. Haiti is the boat people onthe news every night. Haiti is where people havetuberculosis. Haiti is where people eat cats. You donot represent Haiti at all to them anymore. You arean aberration because you look like them and youtalk like them. They do not see you. They do not seethe worlds that have made you. You want to say tothem that you are Haiti, too. Your house is Haiti,

too, and what does that do to their perceptions?You have the choice of passing but you don’t. Youclaim your dyaspora status hoping it will force themto expand their image of what Haiti is but it doesn’t.Your sister who is younger and very sensitive beginsto deny that she is Haitian. She is American, shesays. American.

You turn to books to lose yourself. You read sto-ries about people from other places. You read storiesabout people from here. You read stories about peo-ple from other places who now live here. You de-cide you will become a writer. Through yourwriting they will see you, dyaspora child, the con-nections and disconnections that have made themosaic that you are. They will see where you arefrom and the worlds that have made you. They willsee you.


83

C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 83SECTION FOUR

Challenges for Linguisticallyand Culturally Diverse People

“True (education), unlike assimilation, is a two-way street. It involves cultural sharing, a genuine respect and

interest in difference, not cultural submergence by one party to please another.”

Clarence Page (1947– )

Unfortunately, American schools have been

more likely to provide examples that con-

tradict journalist Clarence Page’s insight

rather than illustrate it. One of the most dramatic

examples is the historic experience of American

Indian children who have attended schools that

emphasize competition and individual achieve-

ment. Culturally, children from most American

Indian communities would only want to excel if

their achievement would enhance the regard

given to their peers or their community. If an

individual student’s achievements in school could

be viewed as creating a derogatory perception of

his or her peers or community, the student might

feel an obligation to conceal his or her talent.

In the early 1960s, anthropologists who were

fluent in the Lakota language were engaged in

research observing Indian children and white

teachers in schools on the Pine Ridge Reserva-

tion. The researchers saw numerous instances

where teachers called on a student who did not

know an answer, and then called upon a more

academically gifted student to get the right an-

swer so they could proceed with the lesson. And

often, before the student could answer, his or her

peers would make comments in Lakota such as:

Go ahead, show the teacher how smart you are. Make

the rest of us look bad. The teachers did not under-

stand Lakota, so they did not understand why

the bright student would suddenly appear con-

fused and unable to respond. Frustrated teachers

just assumed that the other students were having

a bad influence on the bright students.1

Most native cultures emphasize a concern for

collaboration and for the collective good. Yet

even when these cultural beliefs could have been

used to help Indian students succeed in schools,

teachers did not respond appropriately. As part of

his doctoral research, Harry Wolcott taught in a

one-room Indian school. Wolcott lived in the

community for a year and became well

acquainted with the children and the adults, but


84 S E C T I O N 4 Challenges for Linguistically and Culturally Diverse People

he felt uncertain about how much his pupils

were learning because no matter what sort of an

assignment he gave them, the children would

always work with others. Nothing he could say

or do would persuade them to do their home-

work individually.2 Times have changed, and

such stories from the past have motivated multi-

cultural educators today to advocate for creating

culturally responsive classrooms, especially with

the evolving yet continuous cultural and linguis-

tic diversity of students in America’s schools.

In the first essay, Dennis Baron provides the

history of linguistic diversity in the United States.

Immigrants came speaking German, Italian, Pol-

ish, Spanish, Dutch, and other languages. Most

of them lost their language in two or three gen-

erations, but the efforts of German immigrants

to maintain their native tongue led to the first

English-Only legislation. Today Spanish-speaking

immigrants are trying to preserve their first lan-

guage, and once again there is opposition from

Americans who insist that English is the only

acceptable language. Baron describes the historic

and current activities of English-Only proponents

in schools and society, and concludes that the

history of this movement has more to do with

nativist animosity toward immigrants than with a

sincere desire for immigrants to achieve linguistic

competence in English.

How best to attain competence in English is

the focus of Earl Shorris’s essay, but “Late Entry,

Early Exit” also describes some dilemmas stem-

ming from inadequate responses in U.S. schools

to the needs of bilingual children. For too many

children, entry into programs that could help

them be successful in school and in their careers

comes too late (if ever), which leads to an early

exit – a reference to the high Latino drop out

rate. Shorris discusses programs such as submer-

sion, immersion, teaching English as a second

language, and bilingual education, and he pro-

vides examples of outcomes from some specific

school programs. Although Shorris does not ad-

vocate for any particular approach, he does af-

firm the value of people being both bilingual and

bicultural, and argues that U.S. schools have a

special responsibility to promote diversity. Shorris

would applaud this comment by the American

educator Rosa Guerrero about the diversity of the

American people:

We are all Americans who, because of our culturalheritage, contribute something unique to the fabricof American life. We are like the notes in a chord ofmusic – if all the notes were the same, there wouldbe no harmony, no real beauty, because harmony isbased on differences, not similarities.

In “Maintaining Bilingualism and Cultural

Awareness,” Irene Villanueva reinforces Shorris’s

perspective by describing the actions of seven

Latino families who want their children to be

both bilingual and bicultural. She incorporates

interviews with the parents (in a bilingual for-

mat) from her research that explain why these

parents place so much importance on their chil-

dren maintaining fluency in Spanish, from sim-

ply being able to communicate with grandparents

(and other family members) to the positive influ-

ence it can have on their children’s sense of iden-

tity. Villanueva’s research with these families

reveals the difficulties of finding good bilingual

programs in U.S. schools, forcing one family to

stay temporarily in Mexico so the children could


S E C T I O N 4 Challenges for Linguistically and Culturally Diverse People 85

attend Mexican schools to strengthen their

Spanish-speaking skills before returning to the

United States. All of these parents believe that

their children do not have to reject their native

language and culture in order to become fluent

speakers of English.

Shirley Brice Heath discusses language fluency

in the context of race and class in her essay on

“Oral Traditions.” Based on many years of ethno-

graphic research in the Piedmont Plateau region

of South Carolina, Heath and her research team

recorded how black and white children from two

segregated low-income communities in the rural

South developed different types of language skills

and different communication styles. In compar-

ing their language development with that of the

black and white children of middle class profes-

sionals, Heath and her researchers provide some

disturbing but compelling insights on the impact

that differences in learning how to communicate

have on the children’s performance and acade-

mic success in school. Even though the differ-

ences in language development can create

problems for children, there are many teachers

who have been able to work effectively with

linguistically diverse students.

Aurora Cedillo is a gifted teacher who

describes some of the reasons for her success in

the interview entitled “Working with Latino and

Latina Students.” As a bilingual educator, Cedillo

knows the value of having fluency in two lan-

guages. Knowing certain cultural characteristics

shared by many Latinos has enabled her to work

effectively with Latino/a students. She discusses

the need for teachers of Latino/a students to

address the history of Latino countries, the rea-

sons for Latino immigration to the United States,

and the contributions Latinos/as have made to

American society. Cedillo reinforces Shorris’s

concern about Latinos leaving school by noting

that children of Latino immigrants as well as first

and second generation Latino youth are the two

main groups responsible for producing one of the

highest dropout rates among all ethnic groups.

Because cultural differences can result in educa-

tors misinterpreting Latino students’ behaviors,

Cedillo describes some specific instructional

strategies to use and explains why they have

been successful for her.

Sometimes viewing diversity experiences in

other cultures may help us to understand diver-

sity issues in our own country. The final selection

is an excerpt from the short story “Human Math-

ematics” by Ghanian author Mamle Kabu, about

a British boarding school where cultural and

linguistic diversity were not accommodated. The

narrator is Claudia, a Ghanian student who has

attended this boarding school for several years

and has assimilated to British culture. With the

arrival of a new Ghanian student named Folake,

Claudia is reminded of her own struggle to be

accepted when she first came to the school, espe-

cially the difficulties she encountered during her

first year, which primarily stemmed from linguis-

tic differences. In talking with Folake, Claudia

finds herself switching in and out of her Ghanian

accent, which reminds her of what she has given

up in order to be accepted by others. When a

cultural misunderstanding leads to physical con-

frontation between Folake and a British girl,

Claudia is forced to make a choice between

being neutral or supporting Folake. It is a choice



without enough options, but the lack of options

in the past has been a problem not only in Great

Britain but also in the United States. As Andrew

Young has said, accepting and promoting diver-

sity must be one of the options being offered to

children and adults living in a diverse society:

We can embrace our diversity, find strength in it,and prosper together, or we can focus on our differ-ences and try to restrict access to resources bymembers of ethnic and racial groups different fromours and limit prosperity for all.

Notes1Murray L. Wax & Rosalie H. Wax, Great Tradition,

little tradition, and formal education. In Anthropo-

logical Perspectives on Education, M.L. Wax, S. Dia-

mond, & F.O. Gearing, (Eds.). (New York: Basic

Books, 1971)

2Harry, F. Wolcott, Handle with care: Necessary pre-

cautions in the anthropology of schools. In Anthro-

pological Perspectives on Education, M.L. Wax, S.

Diamond, & F.O. Gearing, (Eds.). (New York: Basic

Books, 1971)


87

C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 87D E N N I S B A R O N

English in a Multicultural AmericaThe author explains the linguistic history of the United States and its implications for thecurrent linguistic concerns of people in the English-Only Movement or those demanding aConstitutional Amendment making English the official language of the United States.

The protection of the Constitution extends to all, –to those who speak other languages as well as tothose born with English on the tongue. Perhaps itwould be highly advantageous if all had readyunderstanding of our ordinary speech, but thiscannot be coerced by methods which conflict withthe Constitution, – a desirable end cannot be pro-moted by prohibited means.

Associate Supreme Court JusticeJames Clark McReynoldsMeyer v. Nebraska, 1923

In the United States today there is a growing fearthat the English language may be on its way outas the American lingua franca, that English is

losing ground to Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese,Korean, and the other languages used by newcom-ers to our shores.

However, while the United States has alwaysbeen a multilingual as well as a multicultural na-tion, English has always been its unofficial officiallanguage. Today, a greater percentage of Americansspeak English than ever before, and the descen-dants of nonanglophones or bilingual speakers stilltend to learn English – and become monolingual

English speakers – as quickly as their German, Jew-ish, Irish, or Italian predecessors did in the past.

Assimilated immigrants, those who after severalgenerations no longer consider themselves “hy-phenated Americans,” look upon more recentwaves of newcomers with suspicion. Similarly, eachgeneration tends to see the language crisis as new inits time. But reactions to language and ethnicity arecyclical, and the new immigrants from Asia andLatin America have had essentially the same expe-rience as their European predecessors, with similarresults.

As early as the 18th century, British colonists inPennsylvania, remarking that as many as one-thirdof the area’s residents spoke German, attacked Ger-mans in terms strikingly familiar to those heardnowadays against newer immigrants. BenjaminFranklin considered the Pennsylvania Germans tobe a “swarthy” racial group distinct from the Eng-lish majority in the colony. In 1751 he complained,

Why should (Germans) be suffered to swarm intoour Settlements, and by herding together establishtheir Language and manners to the exclusion ofours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by theEnglish, become a Colony of Aliens, who willshortly be so numerous as to Germanize us insteadof our Anglifying them, and will never adopt ourLanguage or Customs, any more than they canacquire our Complexion?From Social Policy Magazine, 1991, spring.



The Germans were accused by other 18th-century Anglos of laziness, illiteracy, clannishness, areluctance to assimilate, excessive fertility, andCatholicism (although a significant number of themwere Protestant). In some instances they were evenblamed for the severe Pennsylvania winters.

Resistance to German, long the major minoritylanguage in the country, continued throughout the19th century, although it was long since clear that,despite community efforts to preserve their lan-guage, young Germans were adopting English andabandoning German at a rate that should have im-pressed the rest of the English-speaking population.

After the US entered World War I, most statesquickly banned German – and, in some extremecases, all foreign languages – from school curriculain a wave of jingoistic patriotism. In 1918, for ex-ample, Iowa Governor William Harding forbade theuse of foreign languages in schools, on trains, inpublic places, and over the telephone (a more pub-lic instrument then than it is now), even going sofar as to recommend that those who insisted onconducting religious services in a language otherthan English do so not in churches or synagoguesbut in the privacy of their own homes.

Similarly, in 1919 the state of Nebraska passed abroad English-only law prohibiting the use of for-eign languages at public meetings and proscribingthe teaching of foreign languages to any studentbelow the ninth grade. Robert T. Meyer, a teacher inthe Lutheran-run Zion Parochial School, was finedtwenty-five dollars because, as the complaint read,“between the hour of 1 and 1:30 on May 25, 1920,”he taught German to ten-year-old Raymond Papart,who had not yet passed the eighth grade.

Upholding Meyer’s conviction, the NebraskaSupreme Court found that most parents “havenever deemed it of importance to teach their chil-dren foreign languages.” It agreed as well that theteaching of a foreign language was harmful to thehealth of the young child, whose “daily capacity forlearning is comparatively small.” Such an argumentwas consistent with the educational theory of theday, which held as late as the 1950s that bilingual-ism led to confusion and academic failure, and washarmful to the psychological well-being of the child.Indeed, one psychologist claimed in 1926 that theuse of a foreign language in the home was a leadingcause of mental retardation. . . .

The US Supreme Court reversed Meyer’s convic-tion in a landmark decision in 1923. But the deci-sion in Meyer v. Nebraska was to some extent anempty victory for language teachers: while theircalling could no longer be restricted, the ranks ofGerman classes had been devastated by the instantlinguistic assimilation that World War I forced onGerman Americans. In 1915 close to 25 percent ofthe student population studied German in Ameri-can high schools. Seven years later only 0.6 percent– fewer than 14,000 high school students – weretaking German.

Like German in the Midwest, Spanish was theobject of vilification in the American Southwest.This negative attitude toward Spanish delayedstatehood for New Mexico for over 60 years. In1902, in one of New Mexico’s many tries for state-hood, a congressional subcommittee held hearingsin the territory, led by Indiana Senator Albert Jere-miah Beveridge, a “progressive” Republican whobelieved in “America first! Not only America first,but America only.” Witness after witness before theBeveridge subcommittee was forced to admit that inNew Mexico, ballots and political speeches wereeither bilingual or entirely in Spanish; that censustakers conducted their surveys in Spanish; that jus-tices of the peace kept records in Spanish; that thecourts required translators so that judges andlawyers could understand the many Hispanic wit-nesses; that juries deliberated in Spanish as much asin English; and that children, who might or mightnot learn English in schools, as required by law, “relapsed” into Spanish on the playground, athome, and after graduation.

One committee witness suggested that the mi-nority language situation in New Mexico resembledthat in Senator Beveridge’s home state of Indiana:“Spanish is taught as a side issue, as German wouldbe in any State in the Union. . . . This younger gen-eration understands English as well as I do.” And asympathetic senator reminded his audience, “Thesepeople who speak the Spanish language are notforeigners; they are natives, are they not?”

As Franklin did the Germans in Pennsylvania,Senator Beveridge categorized the “Mexicans” ofthe American Southwest as non-natives, “Unlike usin race, language, and social customs,” and con-cluded that statehood must be contingent on assim-ilation. He recommended that admission to the


D E N N I S B A R O N English in a Multicultural America 89

Union be delayed until a time “when the mass ofthe people, or even a majority of them, shall, in theusages and employment of their daily life, have be-come identical in language and customs with thegreat body of the American people; when the immi-gration of English-speaking people who have beencitizens of other States does its modifying work withthe ‘Mexican’ element.” Although New Mexico fi-nally achieved its goal of statehood, and managed towrite protection of Spanish into its constitution,schools throughout the Southwest forbade the useof Spanish among students. Well into the presentcentury, children were routinely ridiculed and pun-ished for using Spanish both in class and on theplayground.

As the New Mexican experience suggests, the in-sistence on English has never been benign. The no-tion of a national language sometimes wears theguise of inclusion: we must all speak English to par-ticipate meaningfully in the democratic process.Sometimes it argues unity: we must speak one lan-guage to understand one another and share bothculture and country. Those who insist on Englishoften equate bilingualism with lack of patriotism.Their intention to legislate official English oftenmasks racism and certainly fails to appreciate cul-tural difference: it is a thinly-veiled measure to dis-enfranchise anyone not like “us” (with notions of“us,” the real Americans, changing over the yearsfrom those of English ancestry to northwestern Eu-ropean to “white” monolingual English speakers).

American culture assumes monolingual compe-tence in English. The ability to speak another lan-guage is more generally regarded as a liability thana refinement, a curse of ethnicity and a bar to ad-vancement rather than an economic or educationaladvantage.

In another response to non-English speakingAmerican citizens, during the nineteenth century,states began instituting English literacy require-ments for voting to replace older property require-ments. These literacy laws generally pretended todemocratize the voting process, though their hid-den goal was often to prevent specific groups fromvoting. The first such statutes in Connecticut andMassachusetts were aimed at the Irish population ofthose states. Southern literacy tests instituted afterthe Civil War were anti-Black. California’s test(1892) was aimed at Hispanics and Asians. Alaska’s

in 1926 sought to disenfranchise its Native Ameri-cans. Wyoming’s (1897) was anti-Finn and Wash-ington state’s (1889) was anti-Chinese.

The literacy law proposed for New York State in1915, whose surface aim was to ensure a well-informed electorate, targeted a number of thestate’s minorities. It was seen both as a calculatedattempt to prevent New York’s one million Yiddishspeakers from voting and as a means of stoppingthe state’s German Americans from furthering theirnefarious war aims. When it was finally enacted in1921, supporters of the literacy test saw it as a toolto enforce Americanization, while opponentscharged the test would keep large numbers of thestate’s newly enfranchised immigrant women fromvoting. Later, the law, which was not repealed untilthe Voting Rights Act of 1965, effectively disenfran-chised New York’s Puerto Rican community.

Although many Americans simply assume Eng-lish is the official language of the United States, it isnot. Nowhere in the US Constitution is Englishprivileged over other languages, and while a fewsubsequent federal laws require the use of Englishfor special, limited purposes – air traffic control,product labels, service on federal juries – no law es-tablishes English as the language of the land.

In the xenophobic period following World War I,several moves were made to establish English at thefederal level, but none succeeded. On the otherhand, many states at that time adopted some formof English-only legislation. This included regula-tions designating English as the language of statelegislatures, courts, and schools, making English arequirement for entrance into such professions asattorney, barber, physician, private detective, or un-dertaker, and in some states even preventingnonanglophones from obtaining hunting and fish-ing licenses.

More recently, official language questions havebeen the subject of state and local debate onceagain. An English Language Amendment to the USConstitution (the ELA) has been before the Con-gress every year since 1981. In 1987, the year inwhich more than 74 percent of California’s votersindicated their support for English as the state’sofficial language, thirty-seven states discussed theofficial English issue. The next year, official lan-guage laws were passed in Colorado, Florida, andArizona. New Mexico and Michigan have taken a



stand in favor of English Plus, recommending thateveryone have a knowledge of English plus anotherlanguage. . . .

Official American policy has swung wildly be-tween toleration of languages other than Englishand their complete eradication. But neither legalprotection nor community-based efforts has beenable to prevent the decline of minority languages orto slow the adoption of English, particularly amongthe young. Conversely, neither legislation makingEnglish the official language of a state nor the ef-forts of the schools has done much to enforce theuse of English: Americans exhibit a high degree oflinguistic anxiety but continue to resist interferencewith their language use on the part of legislators orteachers.

A number of states have adopted official English.Illinois, for example, in the rush of post-war isola-tionism and anti-British sentiment, made Americanits official language in 1923; this was quietlychanged to English in 1969. Official English in Illi-nois has been purely symbolic; it is a statute with noteeth and no discernible range or effect. In contrast,Arizona’s law . . . required all government officialsand employees – from the governor down to themunicipal dog catcher – to use English and onlyEnglish during the performance of governmentbusiness.

Arizona’s law was challenged by Maria-KelleyYniguez, a state insurance claims administrator flu-ent in Spanish and English, who had often usedSpanish with clients. Yniguez feared that, since shewas sworn to uphold the state constitution, speak-ing Spanish to clients of her agency who knew noother language might put her in legal jeopardy. [In1990] Arizona’s law was ruled unconstitutional bythe US District Court for the District of Arizona.

Judge Paul G. Rosenblatt, of the US DistrictCourt for the District of Arizona, found that theEnglish-only article 28 of the Arizona constitutionviolated the First Amendment of the US Constitu-tion protecting free speech. The ruling voiding theArizona law will not affect the status of other stateofficial English laws. However, it is clear that othercourts may take the Arizona decision into consider-ation.

Perhaps the most sensitive area of minority-language use in the US has been in the schools. Mi-nority-language schools have existed in NorthAmerica since the 18th century. In the 19th century

bilingual education was common in the Midwest –St. Louis and a number of Ohio cities had activeEnglish-German public schools – as well as inparochial schools in other areas with large nonan-glophone populations. More commonly, though,the schools ignored non-English speaking childrenaltogether, making no curricular or pedagogicalconcessions to their presence in class. Indeed, newlyinstituted classroom speech requirements in theearly part of this century ensured that anglophonestudents with foreign accents would be sent topathologists for corrective action. And professionallicensing requirements that included speech certifi-cation tests were used to keep Chinese in Californiaand Jews in New York out of the teaching corps.

The great American school myth has us believethat the schools Americanized generations of immi-grants, giving them English and, in consequence,the ability to succeed. In fact, in allowing nonanglo-phone children to sink or swim, the schools ensuredthat most of them would fail: dropout rates for non-English speakers were extraordinarily high andEnglish was more commonly acquired on the streetand playgrounds or on the job than in the class-room.

We tend to think past generations of immigrantssucceeded at assimilation while the present genera-tion has (for reasons liberals are willing to explainaway) failed. In fact, today’s Hispanics are acquiringEnglish and assimilating in much the same way andat the same pace as Germans or Jews or Italians ofearlier generations did.

California presented an extreme model for ex-cluding children with no English: it segregated Chi-nese students into separate “oriental” English-onlyschools until well into the 20th century. The endingof segregation did little to improve the linguistic for-tunes of California’s Chinese-speakers, who contin-ued to be ignored by the schools. They wereeventually forced to appeal to the Supreme Court toforce state authorities to provide for their educa-tional needs. The decision that resulted in the land-mark case of Lau v. Nichols (1974) did not, however,guarantee minority-language rights, nor did it re-quire bilingual education, as many opponents ofbilingual education commonly argue. Instead theSupreme Court ordered schools to provide educa-tion for all students whether or not they spoke Eng-lish, a task our schools are still struggling to carryout.


D E N N I S B A R O N English in a Multicultural America 91

Confusion over language in the schools seems amajor factor behind official language concerns.Bilingual education is a prime target of English-onlylobbying groups, who fear it is a device for minoritylanguage maintenance rather than for an orderlytransition to English. Troubling to teachers as well isthe fact that bilingual programs are often poorly de-fined, underfunded, and inadequately staffed, whileparents and students frequently regard bilingual asa euphemism for remedial. In its defense, we cansay that second language education did not comeinto its own in this country until after World War II.Bilingual education, along with other programs de-signed to teach English as a second language, arereally the first attempts by American schools inmore than two centuries to deal directly with theproblem of non-English speaking children. Theyrepresent the first attempts to revise language edu-cation in an effort to keep children in school; tokeep them from repeating the depressing andwasteful pattern of failure experienced by earliergenerations of immigrants and nonanglophone na-tives; to get them to respect rather than revile bothEnglish (frequently perceived as the language of op-pression) and their native tongue (all too often re-jected as the language of poverty and failure).

Despite resistance to bilingual education andproblems with its implementation, the theory be-hind it remains sound. Children who learn reading,arithmetic, and other subjects in their native lan-guage while they are being taught English will notbe as likely to fall behind their anglophone peers,and will have little difficulty transferring their sub-ject-matter knowledge to English as their Englishproficiency increases. On the other hand, whennonanglophone children or those with very limitedEnglish are immersed in English-only classroomsand left to sink or swim, as they were for genera-tions, they will continue to fail at unacceptable rates.

Those Americans who fear that unless English ismade the official language of the United States bymeans of federal and state constitutional amend-ments they are about to be swamped by new wavesof non-English speakers should realize that evenwithout restrictive legislation, minority languagesin the US have always been marginal. Researchshows that Hispanics, who now constitute the na-tion’s largest minority-language group, are adoptingEnglish in the second and third generation in the

same way that speakers of German, Italian, Yiddish,Russian, Polish, Chinese or Japanese have done inthe past. However, as the experience of Hispanics insouthern California suggests, simply acquiring Eng-lish is not bringing the educational and economicsuccesses promised by the melting-pot myth. Lin-guistic assimilation may simply not be enough toovercome more deep-seated prejudices againstHispanics.

Nonetheless, there are many minority-languagespeakers in the US, and with continued immigra-tion they will continue to make their presencefelt. . . . Even if the courts do not strike downEnglish-only laws, it would be difficult to legislateminority languages out of existence because wesimply have no mechanisms in this country tocarry out language policy of any kind (schools,which are under local and state control, have beenremarkably erratic in the area of language educa-tion). On the other hand, even in the absence ofrestrictive language legislation, American societyenforces its own irresistible pressure to keep theUnited States an English-speaking nation. TheCensus also reports that 97 percent of Americansidentify themselves as speaking English well orvery well. English may not be official, but it is def-initely here to stay.

. . . English-only legislation, past and present,no matter how idealistic or patriotic its claims, issupported by a long history of nativism, racism,and religious bigotry. While an English LanguageAmendment to the US Constitution might ulti-mately prove no more symbolic than the selectionof an official bird or flower or fossil, it is possiblethat the ELA could become a tool for linguistic re-pression. Those who point to Canada or Belgium orIndia or the Soviet Union as instances where mul-tilingualism produces civil strife would do well toremember that such strife invariably occurs whenminority-language rights are suppressed. In anycase, such examples have little in common withthe situation in the United States.

The main danger of an ELA, as I see it, would beto alienate minority-language speakers, sabotagingtheir chances for education and distancing themfurther from the American mainstream, at the sametime hindering rather than facilitating the linguisticassimilation that has occurred so efficiently up tonow in the absence of legal prodding.


E A R L S H O R R I S

Late Entry, Early ExitThe author supports the idea of enabling people to be bilingual and bicultural, but he isnot certain that bilingual education has proven to be the best way to achieve that goal. Hediscusses some issues related to how we determine bilingual competence, and concludeswith an example of a school that succeeded in achieving this goal.

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When I went to the first grade,” AwildaOrta said, “I had a vision that the roomwas split. There were no lights on my side

of the room. I sat in darkness. Many years later, Iwent back to visit the nuns, and I saw the roomagain. On the side where I sat, there were floor-to-ceiling windows; the room was bathed in light. I re-alize then that I felt myself in darkness, because Ispoke no English.”

Sylvia Sasson (Shorris), who entered schoolspeaking some English, was the only child with aSpanish surname in her class. “I remember thesound of the other children’s names,” she said. “Iwas so different. The lunches my grandmotherfixed for me were an embarrassment. I never gotpeanut butter and jelly like the other kids. For awhile, I wanted to be anything but Spanish; at onetime I thought of telling people I was Eston-ian.” . . . Every morning, before going to school,she was sick.

Submersion, the method of learning a languageendured by Sylvia, has generally been the Ameri-can experience. At various times during the historyof immigration, the submersion method has beenreplaced by a less traumatic variant known as theimmersion method. In both methods classroom in-

struction is entirely in English, but in the immersionmethod all of the children come to class speakingonly a foreign language.

Immersion uses the coercive value of the peergroup; submersion depends on shame. In the sub-mersion method children learn to devalue their cul-ture as well as their language. Sylvia wanted only tobe named O’Brien or Goldberg or Perini, like theother children in her class. Awilda Orta prayed to bein the light. Richard Rodriguez, whose autobiogra-phy, Hunger of Memory, can be read as the experi-ence of submersion writ large, wished to shed the“private” language of his home and family for a“public” language and the life that accompaniedit. . . .

How to learn a new language and adopt a newculture would seem to be a thoroughly understoodprocess in a country often described as a nation ofimmigrants. It is not. On the contrary, as observersfrom Tocqueville to the present have noted, a statelacking in some of the qualities of a nation over-compensates for its youth and diversity by requiringthe highest degree of conformity from all of its citi-zens. During its relatively brief history the UnitedStates has shown varying degrees of acceptance offoreign-language speakers. Until the last decade ofthe nineteenth century most states permitted pri-vate “nationality” schools, which carried out whatare now know as maintenance programs in lan-guages other than English. Ten years later, moststates had outlawed such schools. During World

From: Latinos: A biography of the people by Earl Shorris.Copyright © 1992 by Earl Shorris. Used by permission ofW. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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E A R L S H O R R I S Late Entry, Early Exit 93

War I, nationalistic and patriotic feeling led to legalxenophobia: A town in Ohio fined people twenty-five dollars for speaking German in public. Not until1923 did the Supreme Court strike down laws pro-hibiting private schools from teaching in languagesother than English. Even so, children were forbid-den to speak Spanish in the classroom or theschoolyard in the Southwest for most of the twen-tieth century.

The Bilingual Education Act was passed in 1968and strengthened and clarified by amendments in1974 and 1978. Its survival was assured by the Lauv. Nichols decision of the Supreme Court in 1974,which held that under the provisions of the CivilRights Act of 1964 children who could not under-stand the language in which they were being taughtwere not offered equal education. Yet by the end of1980, the law that made Spanish, as well as English,an official language of Dade County, Florida, wasvoted out, and in the realm of commerce, the fed-eral courts had upheld a ruling that an employercould prohibit the use of a foreign language in theworkplace. As the Latino population increased andbilingual instruction became more widespread, theReagan administration cut funding for bilingualprograms and English-only laws were passed in six-teen states, including Florida and California.

For most of its history the United States hasfeared bilingualism and biculturalism as impedi-ments to the forging of a nation. Assimilation or de-struction have generally been the choices offered tothose who differed from the majority. The brutalityinherent in democracy made it so. And the Consti-tution, which has served well in mitigating the dan-gers of raw democracy in most areas, has fewexplicit views on culture. On such matters as an of-ficial language, for example, the intentions of theframers must be discerned from their omissions.With interpretation left to the Congress and thecourts, the effect of the Constitution on pluralismhas been less consistent and less salutary than onemight have hoped for. Only during brief peaks ofliberal toleration have the pluralistic implications ofthe Constitution been allowed to moderate the na-tion’s politics.

As a rule, the educational arguments for andagainst bilingualism have been less important thanthe general willingness in the nation to tolerate theeccentricity of a second language and a nonstan-

dard culture. Economics have almost always beenthe determining factor. The Depression years, whenas many as a million people of Mexican descentwere deported, had a devastating effect on bicultur-alism in the United States. Spanish-language the-aters, newspapers, and publishing houses closed.Hard times produced xenophobia and exacerbatedracism; Latinos, being both racially and culturallydifferent, were easy targets. The desire then amongLatinos for racial, cultural, and linguistic assimila-tion was overwhelming. Everyone wanted to be re-born in the melting pot; in a troubled democracy, itwas the only safe response to xenophobia. . . .

In retrospect, the melting pot theory was coer-cive, illiberal in the extreme, but probably a neces-sary part of creating a nation in the uniquecircumstances of the United States. Whether a sta-ble political and economic union could have beenmade of a population Balkanized by language andculture is an academic question; one theory servesas well as the next. . . .

No educational method so perfectly mirrors theexperience of the melting pot as submersion; it isthe street of strangers brought into the school. Aftertwo weeks in the barrio, an eleven-year-old girlfrom Ecuador described New York as frío ycorrumpido, and she made it clear that the cold andcorruption did not end when she entered theschoolroom. Merely to survive physically the sub-merged student must learn to communicate; other-wise, she may never find the lunchroom or thebathroom. But elemental communication is onething, education by submersion another; the stu-dent can get through the educational system with-out learning and can even succeed by manipulatingthe definition of success.

The choice of how to respond to the new envi-ronment must be made quickly. In the first days andmonths of school the submerged student is facedwith making or accepting a series of definitions andthen making decisions about them. The pressure isterrible, for it is mostly negative, a demand to rebelagainst the newly imposed culture, yet the childrenknow that they cannot do well in the world eitherby maintaining their old culture or by adopting theculture of rebellion. The conflict leaves some ofthem paralyzed, mute in the classroom, raging inthe schoolyard. I have heard many teachers de-scribe these children as “the dead.”



Although submersion seems a murderous sys-tem, examples of survival and success run into themillions. The economic and intellectual prowess ofthe United States, it could be argued, is a direct re-sult of the effectiveness of the submersion methodof education. Of the three children described at thebeginning, all of whom had difficult submersion ex-periences, none failed. Sylvia Sasson, who faredbadly in the early grades, won the English prize bythe time she graduated from a prestigious highschool and became a published writer in English.Awilda Orta, who sat in the emotional dark, becamea brilliant teacher and educational administrator.Richard Rodriguez went on to earn a Ph.D. in Re-naissance literature and to write an autobiographyso preciously English it used single quote marks inthe British style.

One factor common to all three is their facilityfor language. They are astonishingly verbal peopleand almost equally at home speaking or writing.Sasson and Orta are bilingual; only Rodriguez doesnot speak Spanish. Perhaps their natural ability en-abled them to overcome the trauma of abruptlyconverting to a new language. Perhaps it was theschools they attended that brought them through.Orta and Rodriguez both went to Catholic schools;Sasson attended a girls’ high school noted for its rig-orous academic program. Perhaps they are merelyanomalies.

On the other hand, if the sampling were done ata prison in New York or Texas or California, theconclusions would be very different. Most pintos(prisoners) did not have successful school ca-reers. . . . The curious thing about ex-pintos is thatthey are not comfortable either in English or stan-dard Spanish; they speak Caló, which has a vocab-ulary of between a thousand and fifteen hundredwords and is used in conjunction with standardand non-standard English and Spanish. . . .

In the end, submersion performs a kind of socialtriage. Enough succeed to keep the method frombeing thrown out, but most fail, enabling themajority, who control the educational system, tomaintain their social and economic advantages.Submersion functions like a sieve, which can bemade coarse or fine by adding or subtracting suchthings as ESL classes, counseling programs, and ori-entation classes.

Submersion, which is a spur to the few, is toocruel for the many. The Chinese, French, Germans,

Jews, Poles, Russians, and Scandinavians of earliertimes knew enough to save their children withschools and newspapers in their own languages,ethnic clubs, religious clubs, anything they could doto mitigate the Darwinian cruelty of the submer-sion system. Since the passage of the Bilingual Ed-ucation Act, public schools in the United Stateshave been attempting to help children with limitedEnglish proficiency (LEP) learn to listen, speak,read, and write in a new language in the most effi-cient way. But so far, bilingual education has not, ofitself, solved the educational problems of Latinochildren. If submersion caused them to fail, bilin-gual education has not caused them to succeed.

Meanwhile, more Latino children enter kinder-garten and fewer finish high school. And the coun-try, which once embraced men and women whocould work with their hands and arms, wants peo-ple who can use their minds; (the) immigration lawpassed in 1990 makes provision for people withskills to enter the country on a priority basis. Theimmigrants of the early part of the twentieth cen-tury, who could grunt or nod while they attachedthemselves to machines, levers, tools, whateverneeded the strength of an arm and a human reflexto operate it, lived to enjoy union wages withoutadopting much of the new language or culture. It isnot so easy now. The Latino population is burgeon-ing at a difficult time. Too many Latinos have noEnglish when a little English is not enough.

So far, no one has produced the one study thatproves now and forever whether bilingual educa-tion works. The studies are inconclusive, in part,because they do not adequately define the goal ofbilingual education. . . .

The minimum definition of bilingualism is to beable to listen to someone speaking another lan-guage and understand what the speaker is saying.Such a definition, however, might mean that un-derstanding kitchen Spanish makes one bilingual.Maybe speaking is a better skill to use as a mini-mum, but speaking about what? lunch? love? loga-rithms? literature? The quality and complexity ofthe conversation will have to be considered. Orshould one be required to read and write two lan-guages in order to be considered bilingual? And ifso, how well? As well as Conrad? And didn’t Con-rad speak with a heavy Polish accent?

The most demanding definition insists that onebe accepted as a native in speaking, listening, read-



ing, and writing two languages. The Oxford EnglishDictionary, in the supplement published in 1987,states that bilingualism is the “ability to speak twolanguages; the habitual use of two languages collo-quially.” Assuming that either of the two definitionsin the OED is acceptable and that the failure even tohint at standards of literacy betrays carelessness andnot despair, is bilingualism the goal of bilingual ed-ucation? Or is the goal to convert children to mono-lingual English speakers?

Before addressing the social and political goals ofbilingual education, the question of how peoplelearn two languages and how they think after theyhave learned a second language needs to be consid-ered. If educating people to have the ability to speaktwo languages is relatively easy and not harmful totheir thinking in either language, that goal wouldappear to be a good one.

But what if speaking, listening, reading and writ-ing two languages fluently leads people to thinkmore slowly, to have just a little bit less facility thanthey might have had with only one language? Re-search can be found to prove the “jack of all trades,master of none” theory of language acquisition.And there is an enormous amount of research prov-ing that bilingual education lowers performance(test scores) in English.

Unfortunately, every statement about bilingual-ism and bilingual education requires an “on theother hand.” For every paper proving the “jack ofall trades” theory, there is another defending thenotion that whoever doesn’t know two languagesdoesn’t know one. When the two sides meet, . . .most of the argument focuses on statistics, and thebest anyone seems to be able to say about the sta-tistics is that they “suggest” something or other.Nobody is quite sure what. As Jim Cummins wrotein Bilingualism in Education, “It is clear, then thatthere is little consensus as to the exact meaning ofthe term bilingualism, and that it has been used torefer to a wide variety of phenomena. Researchassociated with bilingualism reflects this semanticconfusion. It is essential, therefore, in recon-ciling contradictory results associated with bilin-gualism . . .”

Meanwhile, the question of the goal of bilingualeducation remains unresolved. All Latino parentswant their children to learn English, and all propo-nents of bilingual education agree that in the endthe children must be able to speak, listen, read, and

write in English. The survival of English is not atissue, only the death of Spanish. With the questionunresolved, the monolingual Spanish-speaking stu-dent entering school in the United States partici-pates in a linguistic lottery: Depending on whichpublic school, even which class, the child attends,he or she may encounter a method ranging frominstruction entirely in Spanish to one in which theteachers and students do not use any language butEnglish.

The tragic aspect of this lottery is that the num-ber of losers far exceeds the number of winners; forLatinos, especially those who enter school speakingno English, the educational system is not a goodbet. Optimists put the dropout rate for all Latinochildren in the U.S. at 35.8 percent. Realists thinkthe national rate is over 40 percent. . . .

There is no standard by which the education ofLatino children in the United States can be consid-ered adequate, fair, or morally acceptable. If one ofthe goals of the Bilingual Education Act was to ed-ucate Spanish-speaking children as well as English-speaking white or black children, the act has failed.If the goal was to improve the education of Latinoand other language-minority children, there is stillnot much evidence to support its success. . . .

The issue of who is an educated adult has beendiscussed widely in the United States, but when itcomes to children, a few standardized tests arethought to be enough. Rarely, if ever, is the moralcharacter of the child considered part of his educa-tion. Rarely does anyone ask what happens to thevalues of one culture when that culture is deni-grated by the teaching of a new one. A superbly ed-ucated Latino professional man said to me about hisparents, “They speak broken English,” but it did notoccur to him to add that they speak beautiful Span-ish. In America, the old culture dies easily; thetragedy . . . is that it is replaced with drugs, vio-lence and rock and roll.

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryschools set up by the Germans, Italians, Jews, Nor-wegians, Poles, and Swedes and the more recentschools run by the Chinese and Japanese have en-deavored to help their students retain the old cul-ture as much or more than the language. Thefounders of those schools, many of whom were tiedto the religious center of the community, feared thenew or different or modern morality, which theyunderstood as no morality at all. In many instances



the conservation of values undoubtedly led to seri-ous emotional conflict. The literature of the earlypart of the twentieth century is filled with suchcases. Writers from Dreiser to Fitzgerald to Roth toldstories of the clash of cultures.

Now the clash is different, no longer betweenopposing sets of values but between values and theviolent vacuum. The substitute for culture pre-sented to newcomers was invented at the conjunc-tion of entertainment and advertising; it may still becalled culture, but neither Rambo nor Madonna hasthe character required to get a troubled childthrough the night. If submersion, which sets out todestroy every vestige of the old language and cul-ture, is to be supplanted, bilingual education willhave to offer something beyond words, or it will beno more than a mask to hide the old method.

The nature of the beginning, Spanish or English,bilingualism or submersion, early exit (transition)or late exit (maintenance), will determine how chil-dren understand school. If it is a place of failure andridicule rather than comfort and hope, the childmay choose to play dead. . . .

. . . When the home language is different from theschool language and the home language tends tobe denigrated by others . . . , it would appearappropriate to begin initial instruction in the child’sfirst language, switching at a later stage to instruc-tion in the school language.

. . . Where the home language is a majoritylanguage valued by the community . . . then themost efficient means of promoting an additive formof bilingualism is to provide initial instruction inthe second language.

Jim Cummins, Bilingualism in Education

The Bilingual Education Act, even with a tucktaken here and there to make it fit the politics of theinterested, does not deal with the problem of thedeath of the Spanish language. This death hides be-hind the myth of the Promethean immigrant whobears his language in a basket, another treasure hid-den among his few belongings. It is only a myth, nomore than that, yet it has sustained the faith ofthose who love the sound and soul of Spanish. Inreality, many Latinos now speak Spanish only totheir parents or grandparents, if at all. Most new-comers live in the worst of the social and economic

world, where the only middle-class Latinos theyhave contact with are shopkeepers or the grim offi-cials who try to keep order among the crowds at thebottom of the social scale. To depend on continuingwaves or newcomers, many of whom speak un-grammatically, using the tiniest vocabulary, is to en-sure the death of the language. Third or fourthgeneration Latinos who live in suburbs of Min-neapolis or Atlanta have no more reason to knowSpanish than Polish-Americans need to know Pol-ish or German-Americans to know German.

Spanish probably would go the way of French,German, and Italian in the United States, unless onethinks of it rather than English as the lingua francaof the hemisphere. And that is where the practical,political, and economic difference lies. Miami wasthe first city to make a business decision to maintainSpanish. So much of the city, its banking and exportsectors, is concerned with Latin America that Span-ish has become the preferred language of business.Everyone speaks English, of course, but it lacks thecomfort of Spanish; it is not at home in Panama orPeru.

Latino businessmen in Texas, New York, Califor-nia, and Illinois make the same argument. And ifthe hemisphere is declared a free trade zone . . . thepractical value of Spanish will increase tenfold or ahundredfold or more.

In the battle between maintenance and transi-tion, late and early exit from bilingual programs,the emotional issues of nationalism and the argu-ments for cultural enrichment may eventually giveway to the business proposition expressed at CoralWay Elementary: People who know two languageshave a better chance of getting ahead in life. If thatis so, however, why should Anglos be denied theopportunity to succeed? Shouldn’t bilingual educa-tion at the maintenance level be available to every-one who wants it? Wouldn’t that begin to overcomesome of the deficiencies in U.S. culture? Wouldn’tthat make the United States a more formidablecompetitor in the world?

Children in Latino neighborhoods could all learnSpanish as well as English. Where the Chinese lan-guage is strong, they could learn both Chinese andEnglish, and so on. In larger cities, with several eth-nic populations, children or their parents might bepermitted to choose between many languages.Cummins explains exactly where to begin for both



Anglo and Latino children. His method is not radi-cal, but practical, the homely logic of a man hopingto avoid the wars of chauvinism.

Coral Way Elementary School in Miami putCummins’s notions into practice. In bilingualschools the Anglos learn Spanish as a second lan-guage, attending special immersion classes from theearliest grades, just as their Latino counterparts at-tend immersion ESL classes. Before long, all thechildren are fluent in both English and Spanish. Tocontinue the process after the elementary grades,high school students may take courses in Spanishafter school for extra credit. If they do well in boththeir English and Spanish studies, those who takethe extra courses are awarded a second diplomafrom a high school in Spain.

It is not a sentimental system; Dade Countydoesn’t operate that way. Nor is it racist or ethno-centric. The method grew out of a sense of theequality of languages, cultures, and economic capa-bilities. It worked. Whether it will continue to workwill be the test. When the federal government firstprovided money for a bilingual program at CoralWay Elementary in Little Havana in 1963, the stu-dents were the children of middle- and upper mid-dle-class Cuban exiles. They arrived with greatfacility in Spanish, most of which was easily trans-ferable to English. Many of the Cubans have movedaway now. The newest immigrants are poor peoplewho fled the war in Nicaragua or the death squadsin Guatemala and El Salvador. . . .

The Spanish-speaking teachers and the adminis-trators at Coral Way Elementary are still Cuban, and

their methods have not changed. They still believethat the maintenance of two languages is the properform of bilingual education. It is still the culture ofthe school that accommodates the child, rather thanattempting to force the child to learn in an alien en-vironment. Only the students are different. Some ofthem come to school not knowing how to hold apencil, never having touched a book, speaking onlyrudimentary Spanish, emotionally wounded by theexperiences of war or drug addiction. This new co-hort stands in terrible contrast to its predecessor, asif in one famous bilingual public school a test of therelative importance of school and home had beendevised and the lives of the children had been com-mitted to it.

Unfortunately, many of the children who do notlearn Spanish well do not become proficient in Eng-lish either. The failure of schools to teach English toLatino children by any method – submersion, im-mersion, transition, or maintenance – is so commonin the United States that almost every successfulLatino in business or the professions attributes partof his or her success to the ability to read, write,and speak English, a set of skills that second-generation European-Americans took for granted.Their view of the basis for success emphasizes thetrue horror of the education of Latinos in theUnited States: The system destroys one language,but does not replace it with another, creating a greatclass of mutes, victims who cannot even speak oftheir pain.


I R E N E V I L L A N U E V A

Maintaining Bilingualism and Cultural Awareness

When Carlos Cortez went to school as a child, he was told to speak only in English, so helost the ability to speak Spanish. Later he enrolled in college, where he was told that heshould learn another language because it was good to be bilingual. He wondered why histeachers did not recognize this in elementary school. This author describes the efforts ofseveral families who understand that it is valuable to be both bilingual and bicultural,and relates how they are helping their children achieve both goals.

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Much research has been conducted on lan-guage attrition, the diminution of bilingual-ism across time, and the fact that within

three generations of migrating to the United Statesthe native language is eliminated.1 A conflictingview of this reality is often cited by English Onlyadvocates who are concerned about culturalassimilation.

US English, an offshoot of the Federation forAmerican Immigration Reform, promotes tighter re-strictions on immigration, organized around thesupposed need to establish English as the official lan-guage in the United States. Their efforts are based onthe misconception that recent immigrants are indif-ferent toward learning English and that the use ofEnglish is threatened by the sheer numbers ofspeakers of other languages. In fact, nothing couldbe farther from the truth. Spanish speaking immi-grants, for instance, are known to convert to English

after residing for a number of years in the UnitedStates, with each successive generation shiftingmore and more in that direction.2 In this monolin-gual context, institutionalized efforts toward main-taining a dual language facility among youth areoften actually nothing more than programs whichhelp to make the transition to English.3

For this study, I focused on a small group ofhighly educated Chicano parents and their attemptsto secure bilingualism for their children. . . . Six ofthe seven Chicano families in Southern Californiathat participated in this study indicated that Span-ish was the native language of the children. . . .

These parents made a conscious effort to create abilingual environment during their children’s earlychildhood years. For example, if the motherworked outside the home, the parents providedeither a Spanish-speaking nanny, grandmother, oranother member of the extended family to care forthe children during the day. Thus, thirteen of theseventeen children were native Spanish speakersand all of them had contact with grandparents andextended family. These children also had exposureto English through formal preschool experience aswell as informal experiences and interaction with

Reprinted by permission from Beyond Black and White: Newfaces and voices in U.S. schools edited by Maxine S. Seller andLois Weis, the State University of New York Press © 1997,State University of New York. All rights reserved.

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I R E N E V I L L A N E U V A Maintaining Bilingualism and Cultural Awareness 99

bilingual members of the extended family, friends,in the neighborhood, television and so on. . . .

In the Sánchez family, mother and father ac-knowledged that at family functions, the children’sinteractions were limited to Spanish with grandpar-ents and other adults, and English with their peers.

Q: ¿Con quién hablan inglés?

[With whom do they speak English?]

T: Con los amigos de la escuela.

[With their friends from school.]

F: En la escuela, con nosotros, con sus primos.

[In school, with us, with their cousins.]

T: Sí con sus primos, puro inglés.

[Yes, with their cousins, only in English.]

F: Mis sobrinos no hablan español.

[My nieces and nephews do not speakSpanish.]

As the children began to acquire a second lan-guage, it became apparent that the forces outside ofthe home were strong. Even for three-year-oldAnalisa, who had no formal preschool experienceof English instruction, both parents had becomeaware of her preference for English and were con-sciously striving to maintain Spanish as a means ofcommunication in the home.

Q: Y la niña, ¿siempre habla español o inglés?

[And the child, does she always speakSpanish or English?]

J: Ahora, el inglés es el idioma preferido deella. Sí puede hablar español. Sí entiendetodo, pero . . .

[Now, English is her preferred language.

She can speak Spanish. She understandseverything, but . . .] . . .

As the children got older the tendency to speakEnglish was stronger. Yet the Sánchez children,Maya and Jojo, spoke only Spanish to the baby, butthe parents had to remind the children to respondin Spanish when they spoke to them.

Q: Los ninos hablan español o inglés?

[Do the children speak Spanish or English?]

F: Entre ellos mismos, inglés.

[Between themselves, English.]

A: Y con Uds?[And with your parents?]

F: Si los acordamos que tiene que ser español,hablan español, si no, haablan . . .Pero al niño, al bebe le hablan español, los dos.

[If we remind them that it has to be Spanish,they speak Spanish, if not, they speak . . .But to the baby, to the baby they speak inSpanish, both of them.]

Thus, while Spanish was spoken in the home andappeared to be the native language of the children,it was used through the children’s infancy and earlychildhood years by all members of the family.

According to six of the seven sets of parents, theintrusion of English began at the preschool age. Asthe children began their formal schooling, the em-phasis on English presented a dilemma for theseparents who were struggling to provide a bilingualatmosphere and maintain Spanish in the home. . . .

Two parents spoke of their children’s inclinationto speak more English and less Spanish. Bertha andFrancisca said their children were native Spanishspeakers until they began school. By the time theyreached ages eight and ten, English had becometheir dominant language. This shift was attributedto the fact that Spanish has predominantly informaland oral functions while English has formal andacademic functions. . . .

Early in this study, two families (Reyes/Fuentesand Sánchez) with preschool age children statedthat they were seeking bilingual preschools, whilethe Carrera family decided to move to a more“bilingual” neighborhood in order for their childrento hear Spanish in their environment. These fami-lies researched the availability of bilingual preschoolprograms and found that the emphasis was onteaching English as a second language rather thandevelopment of the native language in a bilingualenvironment.

H: Esas, estamos buscando uno. Per todavía nohallamos un lugar que podemos decir que vair allí. Sí queremos un programa que enseñainglés y español.



[Those, we’re looking for one. But we stillhaven’t found a place that we can say thatshe’s going to. We do want a program thatteaches English and Spanish.]

J: No hay programa bilingüe aquí, programasbilingües aquí. Sí hay, pues no, no son.Como Head Start, esos no son bilingües. Sonpara que ellos aprenden inglés.

[There isn’t a bilingual program here. Thereare, but no, they’re not. Like Head Start,they’re not bilingual. They’re for them tolearn English.]

Although her parents continued to search for abilingual program until Analisa was four years old,they didn’t consider those available to be true bilin-gualism, rather they were to transition to English.

While the Reyes/Fuentes family contemplatedthe possibility of living in a Spanish-speaking coun-try in order for Analisa to develop her bilingualismand become biliterate, and the Sanchez family con-sidered enrolling the children in a Mexican schoolin order to develop literacy skills in Spanish, theCarrera family had in fact lived in Mexico for twoyears. As Carla was beginning kindergarten, Jorgewas entering second grade, and Tino was approach-ing junior high school, the family decided to enrollthe children in Mexican schools to read in Spanishbefore returning to the United States and continu-ing their education. . . .

When they returned to the United States at mid-year, Carla was placed in an “English-only” first-grade class because there was no bilingual programin the neighborhood school. In second and thirdgrades, however, she was placed in a bilingual pro-gram and transitioned to English in fourth grade.Jorge, who had been in bilingual kindergarten andfirst grade in the United States, continued his Span-ish instruction in Mexico for grades two and three,and was placed in an “English only” fourth grade onhis return. Although Tino had also been enrolled inthe Mexican schools, he had never been in a bilin-gual program in the United States and continuedhis high school education in the regular Englishprogram. Thus, both Carla and Jorge were trans-ferred to all English classes by fourth grade. Thisplacement corresponded to the transitional type ofbilingual programs in the United States which em-

phasized transition to English rather than the devel-opment of true bilingualism.

The importance of bilingualism and biliteracy is adilemma for parents who seek to maintain anddevelop the native language of their children withlittle support from society and educational institu-tions. Thus, the learning and development of Span-ish as well as English, and becoming biliterate, areconsidered important goals of these families. . . .

None of the parents stated that they believe thattheir children must reject their native language andculture in order to succeed. On the contrary, theyemphasized the belief that their children need tobecome bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural in orderto succeed in the United States. All of the parentsdeclared their rationale for maintaining bilingual-ism as instrumental and utilitarian, in that it wasnecessary in order to converse with the grandpar-ents and other monolingual Spanish-speaking rela-tives. As Javier put it:

J: ... por la razón de que vivimos en una areapredominantemente bilingüe y a parte deeso también por la cuestión de que muchosde nuestros familiares todavía hablanespañol primeramente.

[. . . because we live in a predominantlybilingual area and besides that also becausemany of our relatives are still native Spanishspeakers.]

Although they use Spanish in the home and intheir work, these parents found that it is difficult tomaintain bilingualism in their children. Those whosought bilingual preschools for their children wereunsuccessful. In fact, the parents discovered thatrather than working to develop and strengthen thechildren’s native language, most of the preschools,like the elementary schools, emphasize ESL instruc-tion and treat the bilingual child as requiring reme-dial education. Thus, these parents found itnecessary to prepare their children for preschool byeither keeping their children at home in a predom-inantly Spanish environment until about age four,while gradually increasing the use of English athome and providing a familiar bilingual environ-ment until the child could accommodate to an all-English setting. Those parents who sent their first


I R E N E V I L L A N E U V A Maintaining Bilingualism and Cultural Awareness 101

child to preschool or Head Start were discouragedby the emphasis on English.

In retrospect, the parents consider problems thechildren had in school a result of not having fullydeveloped their linguistic and academic foundationin the native language. Other parents providedwhat they felt was a strong foundation in Spanish,preparing their children with “readiness” conceptsand an awareness that instruction would be con-ducted in English. In addition, five of the sevenfamilies had researched the preschool and elemen-tary schools before enrolling their children, so thatwhile they may not have been able to fulfill a bilin-gual need, they also sought schools which wouldprovide a positive, creative, affective, and nurturinglearning environment. . . .

While the schools emphasize transition to Eng-lish, these parents have sought other means ofencouraging and developing their children’s bilin-gualism. In addition to encouraging academic suc-cess in English, the parents have also providedinteraction in Spanish at home, as well as withgrandparents and other Spanish-speaking adults.These parents and their associates also serve asmodels of educated and bilingual professionals.They work in occupations in which knowledge ofSpanish is regarded as an asset, for example, thelegal profession, education, and in community orsocial service agencies. Thus, the children are incontact with positive role models who acknowledgetheir bilingualism and culture as resources andqualities of which they are proud.

In addition to the home environment and ex-tended family, the parents also provided extracur-ricular activities for the children which promoteand encourage the use of Spanish for cultural ac-tivities – music, dance, arts, and sports. These or-ganized activities provide opportunities for thechildren to participate and interact in Spanish withother bilingual children and families.

All parents and children are involved in theteaching and learning of culture. These children,because of their interaction with their parents, ex-tended families, friends, and classmates, were alsobecoming bicultural. Their parents consciously se-lected various cultural experiences, some of whichwere more mainstream, others more Chicano orMexican, and all of which the parents believe areimportant for the child, for example, . . . activities

such as soccer, San Diego/Tijuana children’s choirand folkloric dance. . . .

In addition to these organized activities, . . . thefamilies also participated in social functions andcultural traditions such as weddings, baptisms,birthday parties, and family gatherings which pro-vided much of their children’s social and culturalexperiences. . . . The children were also involvedin numerous cultural and social activities in theChicano community such as Hispanic FutureLeaders workshops and summer programs forteens; community cultural celebrations of Mexi-can holidays; music appreciation and familiarity ofMexican music; as well as daily preparation of tra-ditional foods.

Recognizing the realities of schooling in theUnited States, the children have become English-dominant in order to succeed in school. Yet theyhave also been able to maintain and use Span-ish. . . . Like their parents who consider themselvesbicultural, the children are developing a culturalawareness and identity as Mexican or Chicano incontrast to some members of their extended fami-lies who not only lose Spanish language skills, butalso desire to assimilate into the mainstream soci-ety. . . .

For example, fifteen-year old Florencia related astory about an incident with a high school coun-selor in which she and a cousin were counseled totake an “easy class” rather than a college prepara-tory course. Florencia decided for herself whichcourse she needed in order to satisfy college admis-sion requirements and proceeded to counsel hercousin. However, the counselor directed her toleave the office and her cousin was made to stayalone with the advisor. Florencia interpreted the“guidance” of the counselor as discriminatory basedon their surnames rather than academic achieve-ment or potential.

Another example of the children’s awareness ofcultural identity was that of Jose Antonio. When hewas twelve years old, a number of children at hisschool were interviewed to participate in the film-ing of an educational program on early Californiahistory. Jose correctly determined that the inter-viewer was looking for someone to play the part ofthe child/narrator. Thus, he offered informationabout his family, his knowledge of Spanish andEnglish, and demonstrated pride in his Mexican



heritage. He was selected as the narrator of the pro-gram.

Most of these children had experienced discrim-ination and prejudice, and they were able to iden-tify social injustice as institutional and not onlyaffecting themselves as individuals but all otherswith whom they identified. For example, in sev-enth grade, Jorge wrote an autobiography in whichhe discussed his personal struggle to maintain ahigh academic standing as it conflicted with peerpressure and his personal need for group member-ship. . . .

The parents in this study are clearly extraordi-nary in their goals of maintaining bilingualism andcultural identity. In a society where one language,English, has more prestige than another, and where“success” is judged in terms of attaining proficiencyin that language as a means of assimilating to themainstream culture, these parents have taken ex-treme steps in their efforts to maintain their lan-guage and culture. . . . When one considers the factthat, in general, the native language is eliminatedwithin three generations of migrating to the UnitedStates, these second-and third-generation parentsare working against all odds to provide a bilingualenvironment for their children. . . .

In spite of these efforts to make Spanish thenative language of the children, and creating an en-vironment in which the children would be encour-aged to become bilingual, all of these children weresensitive to the outside forces which emphasize thedominance of English in the society. Thus, oncethey became enrolled in school . . . they quicklybecame English-dominant. Although most of thechildren have not developed Spanish academically,that is, literacy in Spanish, they have maintainedoral proficiency in Spanish. . . .

The children’s early exposure to Mexican andChicano practices and activities provided positiveexperiences in the Chicano community and en-abled the children to identify themselves as mem-bers of the community. Thus, as the children grew,

they began to voice their cultural awareness andidentify with the community in a positive way. Thechildren had a positive attitude about their culturalidentity. Their cultural pride and self-esteem wasevident by the way in which they identified othersas lacking “the culture,” the way in which they vol-unteered to demonstrate their knowledge of theirheritage to strangers, and their awareness of socialissues, such as discrimination and inequality, whichaffect the community as a whole as well as them-selves as students. . . .

Because these children have been able to main-tain Spanish, develop a cultural awareness andidentity, while at the same time developing anawareness of larger social issues, they have also setgoals for themselves. Their parents, as the first gen-eration to attend college, did not consider them-selves prepared for college. However, these childrenhave been prepared by their parents to expect to at-tend college, to carry on the legacy of a committedand concerned Chicano with a goal to create socialchange. . . . Their goals and efforts toward main-taining bilingualism illustrate a consciousness ofidentity, one that is successful in two languages andtwo cultural environments.

Notes1Irene Villanueva, The voices of Chicano families:Life stories, maintaining bilingualism, and culturalawareness. In M. Seller and L. Weis (Eds.) Beyondblack and white: New faces and voices in U.S. schools. (Al-bany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997),pp. 61–79.2C. Veltman, The future of the Spanish language in theUnited States (Washington D.C.: Hispanic Policy De-velopment Project, 1988); R. Sánchez, Chicano dis-course: Socio-historic perspectives. (Rowley, MA:Newbury House, 1983).3K. Hakuta, Mirror of language: The debate on bilingual-ism. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1982).


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C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 103S H I R L E Y B R I C E H E A T H

Oral TraditionsAlthough people may share the same language, learning to communicate is not alwaysthe same process with the same outcome. A team of ethnographic researchers studied tworural communities in the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. “Roadville” was populated bylow-income white families; “Trackton” had low-income black families. Both relied on alocal mill for employment. In the following excerpts, the author describes differences be-tween how children in these communities learned to communicate, and the implicationsof this learning when the children entered elementary school.

Roadville: A piece of truth

Roadville residents worry about many things. Yetno Roadville home is a somber place where folksspend all their time worrying about money, theirchildren’s futures, and their fate at the hands of themill. They create numerous occasions for celebra-tion, most often with family members and churchfriends. On these occasions, they regale each otherwith “stories.” To an outsider, these stories seem asthough they should be embarrassing, even insultingto people present. It is difficult for the outsider tolearn when to laugh, for Roadville people seem tolaugh at the story’s central character, usually thestory-teller or someone else who is present.

A “story” in Roadville is: “something you tell onyourself, or on your buddy, you know, it’s all ingood fun, and a li’l something to laugh about.”Though this definition was given by a male, womendefine their stories in similar ways, stressing theyare “good fun,” and “don’t mean no harm.” Storiesrecount an actual event either witnessed by others

or previously told in the presence of others and de-clared by them “a good story.” Roadville residentsrecognize the purpose of the stories is to make peo-ple laugh by making fun of either the story-teller ora close friend in sharing an event and the particularactions of individuals within that event. However,stories “told on” someone other than the story-teller are never told unless the central character orsomeone who is clearly designated his representa-tive is present. The Dee children sometimes tell sto-ries on their father who died shortly after the familymoved to Roadville, but they do so only in Mrs.Dee’s presence with numerous positive adjectivesdescribing their father’s gruff nature. Rob Macken,on occasion, is the dominant character in storieswhich make fun of his ever-present willingness topoint out where other folks are wrong. But Rob isalways present on these occasions and he is clearlyincluded in the telling (“Ain’t that right, Rob?”“Now you know that’s the truth, hain’t it?”), asstory-tellers cautiously move through their talkabout him, gauging how far to go by his response tothe story.

Outside close family groups, stories are told onlyin sex-segregated groups. Women invite stories ofother women, men regale each other with tales oftheir escapades on hunting and fishing trips, or

From Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communi-ties and Classrooms, Copyright © 1983 by Cambridge Univer-sity Press. Reprinted with the permission of CambridgeUniversity Press.



their run-ins (quarrels) with their wives and chil-dren. Topics for women’s stories are exploits incooking, shopping, adventures at the beauty shop,bingo games, the local amusement park, their gar-dens, and sometimes events in their children’s lives.Topics for men are big-fishing expeditions, es-capades of their hunting dogs, times they havemade fools of themselves, and exploits in particularareas of their expertise (gardening and raising a 90-lb pumpkin, a 30-lb cabbage, etc.). If a story istold to an initial audience and declared a good storyon that occasion, this audience (or others who hearabout the story) can then invite the story-teller toretell the story to yet other audiences. Thus, an in-vitation to tell a story is usually necessary. Storiesare often requested with a question: “Has Bettyburned any biscuits lately?” “Brought any possumshome lately?” Marked behavior – transgressionsfrom the behavioral norm generally expected of a“good hunter,” “good cook,” “good handyman,” ora “good Christian” – is the usual focus of the story.The foolishness in the tale is a piece of truth abouteveryone present and all join in a mutual laugh atnot only the story’s central character, but at them-selves as well. One story triggers another, as personafter person reaffirms a familiarity with the kind ofexperience just recounted. Such stories test publiclythe strength of relationships and openly declarebonds of kinship and friendship, with no “hard feel-ings.” Only rarely, and then generally under the in-fluence of alcohol or the strain of a test in therelationship from another source (job competition,an unpaid load), does a story-telling become the oc-casion for an open expression of hostility.

Common experience in events similar to those ofthe story becomes an expression of social unity, acommitment to maintenance of the norms of thechurch and of the roles within the mill commu-nity’s life. In telling a story, an individual shows thathe belongs to the group: he knows about eitherhimself or the subject of the story, and he under-stands the norms which were broken by the story’scentral character. Oldtimers, especially those whocame to Roadville in the 1930s, frequently asserttheir long familiarity with certain norms as they tellstories on the young folks and on those members oftheir own family who moved away. There is alwaysan unspoken understanding that some experiencescommon to the oldtimers can never be known by

the young folks, yet they have benefited from thelessons and values these experiences enabled theirparents to pass on to them.

In any social gathering, either the story-tellerwho himself announces he has a story or the indi-vidual who invites another to tell a story is, for themoment, in control of the entire group. He managesthe flow of talk, the staging of the story, and dictatesthe topic to which all will adhere in at least thoseportions of their discourse which immediately fol-low the story-telling. . . .

Perhaps the most obligatory convention . . . isthat which requires a Roadville story to have amoral or summary message which highlights theweakness admitted in the talk. “Stories” in thesesettings are similar to testimonials given at revivalmeetings and prayer sessions. On these occasions,individuals are invited to give a testimonial or to“tell your story.” These narratives are characterizedby a factual detailing of temporal and spatial de-scriptions and recounting on conversations by di-rect quotation (“Then the Lord said to me:”). Suchtestimonials frequently have to do with “bringing ayoung man to his senses” and having received an-swers to specific prayers. The detailing of the actualevent is often finished off with Scriptural quota-tion, making it clear that the story bears out thepromise of “the Word.” . . .

In Trackton: Talkin’ junk

Trackton folks see truth and the facts in stories inways which differ greatly from those of Roadville.Good story-tellers in Trackton may base their storieson an actual event, but they creatively fictionalizethe details surrounding the real event, and the out-come of the story may not even resemble what in-deed happened. The best stories are “junk,” andanyone who can “talk junk” is a good story-teller.Talkin’ junk includes laying on highly exaggeratedcompliments and making wildly exaggerated com-parisons as well as telling narratives. Straightfor-ward factual accounts are relatively rare in Tracktonand are usually told only on serious occasions: togive a specific piece of information to someone whohas requested it, to provide an account of the trou-bles of a highly respected individual, or to exchange


S H I R L E Y B R I C E H E A T H Oral Traditions 105

information about daily rounds of activities whenneither party wishes to intensify the interaction ordraw it out. Trackton’s “stories,” on the other hand,are intended to intensify social interactions and togive all parties an opportunity to share in not onlythe unity of the common experience on which thestory may be based, but also in the humor of thewide-ranging language play and imagination whichembellish the narrative.

From a very early age, Trackton children learn toappreciate the value of a good story for capturing anaudience’s attention or winning favors. Boys, espe-cially on those occasions when they are teased orchallenged in the plaza, hear their antics becomethe basis of exaggerated tales told by adults andolder children to those not present at the time of thechallenge. Children hear themselves made intocharacters in stories told again and again. They hearadults use stories from the Bible or from their youthto scold or warn against misbehavior. The mayorcaptures the boys’ conflict in the story of KingSolomon which features a chain of events and res-olutions of a conflict similar to that in which theyare currently engaged. Children’s misdeeds provokethe punchline or summing up of a story which theyare not told, but are left to imagine: “Dat pólice-man’ll come ‘n git you, like he did Frog.” The storybehind this summary is never told, but is held outas something to be recreated anew in the imagina-tion of every child who hears this threat.

Trackton children can create and tell storiesabout themselves, but they must be clever if theyare to hold the audience’s attention and to maintainany extended conversational space in an ongoingdiscourse with a story, but if they do not succeed inrelating the first few lines of their story to the ongo-ing topic or otherwise exciting the listeners’ inter-ests, they are ignored. An adult’s accusation, on theother hand, gives children an open stage for creat-ing a story, but this one must also be “good,” i.e.highly exaggerated, skillful in language play, andfull of satisfactory comparisons to redirect theadult’s attention from the infraction provoking theaccusation.

Adults and older siblings do not make up sus-tained chronological narratives specially for youngchildren, and adults do not read to young children.The flow of time in Trackton, which admits fewscheduled blocks of time for routine activities, does

not lend itself to a bedtime schedule of reading astory. The homes provide barely enough space forthe necessary activities of family living, and there isno separate room, book corner, or even outdoorseat where a child and parent can read together outof the constant flow of human interactions. Thestage of the plaza almost always offers live actionand is tough competition for book-reading. Storiesexchanged among adults do not carry moral sum-maries or admonitions about behavior; instead theyfocus on detailing of events and personalities, andthey stress conflict and resolution or attempts at res-olution. Thus adults see no reason to direct thesestories to children for teaching purposes.

When stories are told among adults, young chil-dren are not excluded from the audience, even ifthe content refers to adult affairs, sexual exploits,crooked politicians, drunk ministers, or waywardchoirleaders. If children respond to such storieswith laughter or verbal comments, they are simplywarned to “keep it to yo’self.” Some adult stories aretold only in sex-segregated situations. Men recountto their buddies stories they would not want theirwives or the womenfolk to know about; womenshare with each other stories of quarrels with theirmenfolk or other women. Many men know aboutformulaic toasts (long, epic-like accounts of eitherindividual exploits or struggles of black people)from visitors from up-North or men returned fromthe armed services, but these are clearly external tothe Trackton man’s repertoire, and they do notcome up in their social gatherings. Instead, Tracktonmen and their friends focus on recent adventures ofparticular personalities known to all present. All ofthese are highly self-assertive or extol the strengthand cleverness of specific individuals.

Women choose similar topics for their stories:events which have happened to them, things theyhave seen, or events they have heard about. Con-siderable license is taken with these stories, how-ever, and each individual is expected to tell thestory, not as she has heard it, but with her own par-ticular style. Women tell stories of their exploits atthe employment office, adventures at work in themill, or episodes in the lives of friends, husbands, ormutual acquaintances. Laced through with evalua-tive comments (“Didja ever hear of such a thing?”“You know how he ak [act] when he drunk.” “Youbeen like dat.”), the stories invite participation from



listeners. In fact, such participation is necessary re-inforcement for the story-teller. . . .

The traditions of story-telling

Roadville members reaffirm their commitment tocommunity and church values by giving factual ac-counts of their own weaknesses and the lessonslearned in overcoming these. Trackton membersannounce boldly their individual strength in havingbeen creative, persistent, and undaunted in the faceof conflict. In Roadville, the sources of stories arepersonal experience and a familiarity with Biblicalparables, church-related stories of Christian life, andtestimonials given in church and home lesson-circles. Their stories are tales of transgressionswhich make the point of reiterating the expectednorms of behavior of man, woman, hunter, fisher-man, worker, and Christian. The stories of Road-ville are true to the facts of an event; they qualifyexaggeration and hedge if they might seem to beveering from an accurate reporting of events.

The content of Trackton’s stories, on the otherhand, ranges widely, and there is “truth” only inthe universals of human strength and persistencepraised and illustrated in the tale. Fact is often hardto find, though it is usually the seed of the story.Playsongs, ritual insults, cheers, and stories are as-sertions of the strong over the weak, of the powerof the person featured in the story. Anyone otherthan the story-teller/main character may be sub-jected to mockery, ridicule, and challenges to showhe is not weak, poor, or ugly.

In both communities, stories entertain; they pro-vide fun, laughter, and frames for other speechevents which provide a lesson or a witty display ofverbal skill. In Roadville, a proverb, witty saying orScriptural quotation inserted into a story adds toboth the entertainment value of the story and to itsunifying role. Group knowledge of a proverb or say-ing, or approval of Scriptural quotation reinforcesthe communal experience which forms the basis ofRoadville’s stories.

In Trackton, various types of language play, imi-tations of other community members or TV person-alities, dramatic gestures and shifts of voice quality,and rhetorical questions and expressions of emo-

tional evaluations add humor and draw out the in-teraction of the story-teller and audience. Thoughboth communities use their stories to entertain,Roadville adults see their stories as didactic: the pur-pose of a story is to make a point – a point about theconventions of behavior. Audience and story-tellerare drawn together in a common bond through ac-ceptance of the merits of the story’s point for all. InTrackton, stories often have no point; they may goon as long as the audience enjoys the story-teller’sentertainment. Thus a story-teller may intend onhis first entry into a stream of discourse to tell onlyone story, but he may find the audience receptionsuch that he can move from the first story into an-other, and yet another. Trackton audiences are uni-fied by the story only in that they recognize theentertainment value of the story, and they approvestories which extol the virtues of an individual. Sto-ries do not teach lessons about proper behavior;they tell of individuals who excel by outwitting therules of conventional behavior.

Children’s stories and their story-telling opportu-nities are radically different in the two communi-ties. Roadville parents provide their children withbooks; they read to them and ask questions aboutthe books’ contents. They choose books which em-phasize nursery rhymes, alphabet learning, ani-mals, and simplified Bible stories, and they requiretheir children to repeat from these books, and toanswer formulaic questions about their contents.Roadville adults similarly ask questions about oralstories which have a point relevant to some markedbehavior of a child. They use proverbs and sum-mary statements to remind their children of storiesand to call on them for comparisons of the stories’contents to their own situations. Roadville parentscoach children in their telling of stories, forcingthem to tell a story of an incident as it has been pre-composed in the head of the adult.

Trackton children tell story-poems from the ageof two, and they embellish these with gestures,inclusios, questions asked of their audience, and rep-etitions with variations. They only gradually learnto work their way into any ongoing discourse withtheir stories, and when they do, they are not askedquestions about their stories, nor are they asked torepeat them. They must, however, be highly cre-ative and entertaining to win a way into an ongoingconversation. They practice the skills which they


S H I R L E Y B R I C E H E A T H Oral Traditions 107

must learn in order to do so through ritualized in-sults, playsongs, and of course, continued attemptsat telling stories to their peers.

In Roadville, children come to know a story aseither a retold account from a book, or a factual ac-count of a real event in which some type of markedbehavior occurred, and there is a lesson to belearned. There are Bible stories, testimonials, ser-mons, and accounts of hunting, fishing, cooking,working, or other daily events. Any fictionalized ac-count of a real event is viewed as a lie; reality is bet-ter than fiction. Roadville’s church and communitylife admit no story other than that which meets thedefinition internal to the group.

The one kind of story Trackton prides itself on isthe “true story,” one in which the basis of the plot isa real event, but the details and even the outcomeare exaggerated to such an extent that the story isultimately anything but true to the facts. Boys excelin telling these stories and use them to establish andmaintain status relations once they reach schoolage, and particularly during the preadolescentyears. To Trackton people, the “true story” is theonly narrative they term a “story,” and the purposeof such stories is to entertain and to establish thestory-teller’s intimate knowledge of truths about lifelarger than the factual details of real events. . . .

The story in school

When Trackton and Roadville children go to school,they meet very different notions of truth, style, andlanguage appropriate to a “story” from those theyhave known at home. They must learn a differenttaxonomy and new definitions of stories. They mustcome to recognize when a story is expected to betrue, when to stick to the facts, and when to usetheir imaginations. In the primary grades, the term“story ” is used to refer to several types of writtenand oral discourse. When the first-grade teachersays in introducing a social studies unit on commu-nity helpers, “Now we all know some story aboutthe job of the policeman,” she conjures up for thechildren different images of policemen and storiesabout them, but the concept of story which holds inthis school context is one which refers to factualnarratives of events in which policemen are habit-

ually engaged. Following their home model, Road-ville children might conceive of such a story as“telling on” a policeman or recounting his failure tofollow certain rules. Trackton children would ex-pect stories of a policeman to exaggerate the factsand to entertain with witticisms and verbal play.During rest time after lunch, the primary teachermay read to the student the “story ” of “CuriousGeorge,” a monkey who talks, gets involved in awide range of antics, and always comes out the vic-tor. Roadville children have had little experiencewith such wild fantasy stories, and Trackton chil-dren have not heard stories about such animalsread to them from books. Neither group has hadthe experience of helping negotiate with an adultthe meaning of the story: “Isn’t he crazy?” “Do youthink they’ll catch him?” “What would have hap-pened if . . .?”

For Roadville children, their community’s waysof learning and talking about what one knows bothparallel and contradict the school’s approach to sto-ries. In the classroom, occasions for story-telling be-tween adults and children are established by adultrequest, just as they are in Roadville at home.Teachers sometimes politely listen to very youngchildren’s spontaneous stories (for example, thosevolunteered during a reading lesson), but these arenot valued as highly as those specifically requestedby adults as digressions. When teachers ask childrento “make up” a story or to put themselves “in theshoes of a character” in a story from their readingbook, they prefer fanciful, creative, and imaginativeaccounts. In Roadville, such stories told by childrenwould bring punishment or a charge of lying. Thesummary of one story can be related to the sum-mary of another, and the moral of one story can belinked with another, but extension of the facts of astory by hyperbole without qualification, and thetransfer of characters, times, and places would beunacceptable features of stories in Roadville.

For Trackton children entering school, the prob-lems presented by the school’s conventions and ex-pectations for story-telling are somewhat different.Questions which ask for a strict recounting of factsbased on a lesson and formulated in the teacher’smind which simply recounts facts accurately has noparallel in their community. Their fictive stories inresponse to assignments which ask them to makeup a story often fail to set the scene or introduce



characters, and often the point of their stories is notclear to either teachers or other students. Inside theclassroom, their language play, incorporation ofcommercial characters, and many of their themesare unacceptable. The close personal networkwhich gives Trackton stories their context and theirmeaning at home has no counterpart in the school.For each community, the story whose features aremarked here are only those produced and recog-nized as “a story” by community residents – modi-fied nonfictive for Trackton and nonfictive forRoadville. “Story” in the school being the type mostoften used in language arts contexts (reading andwriting lessons) and the nonfictive (being) thatmost frequently used in social studies and sciencelessons. . . .

The significance of these different patterns oflanguage socialization for success in school soon be-comes clear. After initial years of success, Roadvillechildren fall behind, and by junior high, most aresimply waiting out school’s end or their sixteenthbirthday, the legal age for leaving school. They wantto get on with family life and count on getting ahigh school diploma when and if they need it in thefuture. Trackton students fall quickly into a patternof failure, yet all about them they hear that theycan never get ahead without a high school diploma.Some begin their families and their work in themills while they are in school. But their mood isthat of those who have accepted responsibilities inlife outside the classroom, and that mood is easilyinterpreted negatively by school authorities whostill measure students’ abilities by their scores onstandardized tests. Trackton students often driftthrough the school, hoping to escape with the val-ued piece of paper which they know will add muchto their parents’ and grandparents’ pride, althoughlittle to their paychecks. . . .

An ethnographer of communication has nomore talent for accurately predicting the future

than any other social scientist. However, our exam-ination here of the maintenance of patterns of lan-guage use and their mutually reinforcing culturalpatterns leaves us with ample possibilities for spec-ulation. Through the numerous geographic andeconomic moves of (the 20th) century, both Road-ville’s and Trackton’s forefathers maintained habitswhich were forged in the social, regional, and eco-nomic milieus of preceding centuries. In the 1920s,the schools of the Piedmont began to articulatetheir mission as preachers of culture to the mill peo-ple, the poor whites, and the mountain folks whohad come to the mill villages. Through the decades,the schools maintained this goal while mill peoplekept their faith in the power of the schools to helpthem get ahead. When blacks came to school withwhites in the late 1960s, most people saw no needfor a change of mission or methods. . . .

Will the road ahead be altered for the studentsfrom Trackton and Roadville who have, throughthe efforts of some of their teachers, learned to addto their ways of using language learned at home?Will their school-acquired habits of talking aboutways of knowing, reporting on uses of language,and reading and writing for a variety of functionsand audiences be transmitted to their chances of thenext generation? Internalization and extension ofthese habits depend on opportunities for practice aswell as on a consciousness that these ways mayhave some relevance to future vocational goals.Maintenance of these habits depends on both sus-tained motivation for entrance into some vocationin which they are seen as relevant, and exposure asadults to multiple situations in which the habits canbe repeatedly practiced. . . . In short, the orienta-tion toward uses of language must include not onlythe interactions of the present, but also the needsof the future.


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C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 109A U R O R A C E D I L L O

Working with Latino and Latina Students

“Hispanic” is a term created by the U.S. Census Bureau to identify people who are Spanish-speakers; Latinos/as is an alternative term preferred by many. Chicano is a termchosen by Mexican-Americans who strongly identify with their indigenous cultural heritage. The author has worked successfully with many Latino/a students, and sheshares some of the reasons for and the strategies behind that success.

As the 21st century begins, it is apparent thatLatinos have influenced U.S. society in a vari-ety of areas such as music, entertainment, and

even the English language. Mexican cuisine can befound almost everywhere from fine restaurants tofast food; salsa recently surpassed ketchup as themost popular American condiment. Latinos havealso made significant contributions to the Americaneconomy. Although anti-immigrant critics claimthat Mexican immigrants in particular contributeprimarily to the Mexican economy by sendingmuch of their money to families and relatives inMexico, yet Ramos (2002) cites a National Acad-emy of Science study reporting that both legal andillegal Mexican immigrants spend more than $10billion each year in the United States.1 From 2001to 2003, Latinos’ disposable income increased byabout 30% to total $652 billion (Grow, 2004).2 As

this population continues to increase, so will theirinfluence and their purchasing power – estimatedto exceed $1 trillion by 2010.

Aurora Cedillo was born in south Texas, butwhen she was 12 years old she came with her fam-ily to harvest crops in Idaho and Montana. Herfamily decided to stay in Oregon where she gradu-ated from North Salem high school. She attendedcollege with assistance from a federally funded ca-reer ladder teacher-preparation program. Upongraduating, Salem-Keizer schools hired her as theirthe first bilingual-bicultural teacher. Twenty yearslater she earned a Masters degree in Bilingual Edu-cation Administration from the University of Ore-gon. She has currently completed her doctoralstudies at Oregon State University and will beawarded her doctoral degree upon completion ofher dissertation.

Aurora describes herself as “a holistic bilingualand multicultural educator, consultant, interpreter,and conference presenter,” but she is more thanthat. Although her parents had eighteen children,she is the oldest female of her ten surviving sib-lings. She is also a single mother and grandmother.

Originally appeared in Cultural competence: A primer for edu-cators by Jerry V. Diller and Jean Moule (Belmont, CA:Wadsworth, 2005). Reprinted by permission of author.



She has always enjoyed telling family and culturalstories, and has written about her beliefs and expe-riences. She believes that “the words I speak todaywere at one time spoken by my grandmothers inthe past. Therefore, I am the words my grandmoth-ers and my mother spoke.” The following is aninterview conducted by Jerry V. Diller and JeanMoule (2005) with Aurora Cedillo.3

Could you talk about your ownethnic background and how ithas impacted your work?

I’m caught between ethnicities. As I’ve grownolder, I realize I have a multiple identity. I describemyself as Chicana, of Mexican-American heritage(but) as I look deeper, I realize that Mexican meansmixed race. My mom is French. My dad is moreindigenous, though his last name was Cedillo, avery Spanish name. Therefore, I am French andSpanish and indigenous. My father’s father, mygrandfather, lived with my mom at the begin-ning of her marriage, so she learned a lot fromhim about his indigenous culture. Many of hisideas, belief, and practices were taught to us.Therefore, I would describe my ethnic backgroundas Mexican American, Chicana, and all of my re-sponses in this interview derive from my livedexperience. . . .

As a bilingual of diverse language, culture, andcolor, my work involves balancing the cultural,linguistic, and socioeconomic scale for students,staff, and parents. Opening means of communi-cation, increasing awareness and acceptance be-tween the groups is a continuous daily task. Iconfirm the efforts of the groups and value theirinput, but progress is slow in coming. Successcomes one grain of sand at a time; teachers areoverwhelmed with students that don’t understandthe language and culture of the school, parents thatseem to not care about the education of their chil-dren, and administrators that can’t support theteachers’ efforts. Institutional historical practices ofsilencing and promoting invisibility are alive andvital constantly in every element of the educationalexperience for teachers, students, and parents ofcolor. . . .

What characteristics doLatinos/Latinas share as a group?

. . . A characteristic Latinos share is a belief in des-tiny. The belief is that we are not in complete con-trol of everything that happens in our lives. “Si DiosQuiere” (God willing) is a typical yet simple state-ment of such belief. A higher being, God, has a pur-pose and a plan destined for each of us. . . . ToLatinos destiny is being. No plan, no objective, noroad map, no timeline. I never planned to be in thisinterview. I never planned to attend Oregon StateUniversity as a student participating in a doctoralprogram. I never planned to be a teacher, to travelnationally and internationally to share my teachingexperience. Terms like goal setting and objectives andplans are words I learned in the mainstream world.I learned to use them; however, I can tell you thatthe plans I have made have very rarely beenachieved. Our beliefs on destiny are based in our in-digenous experience of European conquest, ofgenocide, of never having choice in our lives. I can’tchoose my place of employment. I can’t choosewhere to live my life; I can’t choose my doctor. Ican’t even tell you I will see you tomorrow, becauseeven that depends on someone else.

Another fundamental belief that guides Latinosis the belief that we are born into a family and thatthe family becomes the most important element inlife in this world and beyond. The family is the cen-terpiece, the glue that bonds one to nature. Familyis plural and multifaceted. It is elastic and fluid-like.To Latinos, family is much more than the biologicalmembers one is born into. Family is broad anddeep. It is inclusive of several generations, social re-lationships, and local community members. Familyincludes mother, father, sister, and brother. It in-cludes sister cousins, political sisters, and growthsisters; also . . . aunts, uncles, grandparents, andgreat-grandparents. It includes children, grandchil-dren, and great-grandchildren. . . .

The community family includes members of arural community meeting in faraway places anduniting to assist one another in surviving in the newplace. Individuals share housing, food, medicine,and money. They provide guidance in survival in thecommunity, employment, and resources. Once ableto sustain themselves, they leave and set up another


A U R O R A C E D I L L O Working with Latino and Latina Students 111

place to assist the newcomers. Everyone from yourbirth farm, community, or state is a brother and sis-ter. The term paisano relates to the brotherhood.

So, we are community centered in the family,defined by destiny, and our connections extend so-cially, religiously, and politically. We are one. Thisbelief, if misunderstood, creates problems on the joband in relations in mainstream culture. Somethingas simple as a statement in an invitation to an eventcan be misunderstood. For example, the statement“no children please” to some Latinos may meanthat he/she wasn’t really welcomed because if oneis invited, all are invited.

Another characteristic of Latino culture is collab-oration and cooperation. “One” does not know “it”all. However, everyone knows something. So col-lectively, as a family or as a community, we Latinosare able to solve the immediate concerns. All mem-bers are responsible for something. Some are goodat speaking and negotiating; others are good atthinking; others are good at math; others are morespiritually inclined; others are better caregivers.Everyone in the family is an expert in something.Depending on the task . . . different leaders arise.When we came to Oregon, my father did notspeak, read, or write English. He could not read amap, a road sign, or was unable to ask for direc-tions. My sixteen-year-old brother took the map,read it, and another brother asked directions. Therest of us participated by cleaning and feeding thecrew in the cabin. . . .

What historical experiencesshould educators be aware ofin relationship to the Latino/acommunity and Latino/astudents?

Historical events that include the histories of thestudents in the classroom are very important.Teachers must be inclusive of the countries repre-sented in the classroom. For Latino students, ateacher must look to include members of communi-ties represented in her class. For Mexican Ameri-cans, . . . a teacher must include Cesar Chavez. . . .It’s amazing how quickly Heroes of Color fade

away in the daily tasks of teaching. Once I askedthird-grade students to tell me about Cesar Chavez.Eager and enthused students discussed a boxer alsonamed Cesar Chavez. In less than ten years, CesarChavez had been lost to a new generation of teach-ers and students!

Teachers must celebrate the sixteenth of Septem-ber, Mexico’s day of independence, as well as manyother Central American countries that celebratetheir independence day in September. As teachers,we must know what event happened on the fifth ofMay and why we celebrate that day. For MexicanAmericans and Chicanos, Cinco de Mayo is espe-cially important. The battle in Puebla, Mexico, onthe fifth of May is a day to remember – that regard-less of poverty, training, or language, positive changecan happen if we fight a battle as a united people.

Teachers must be inclusive when discussing his-torical events. Many of our teachers were not ex-posed to the history of Latino countries and are notinformed. I would suggest that teachers invite com-munity members, parents, or minority staff withinthe school to come and share with the students. . . .Also important is the discussion of the contribu-tions made by members of these communities inthe development of this powerful nation. . . .

Are there any subpopulationsin the Latino/a community youfeel deserve additionalattention in the classroom?

The two groups that I think deserve additional at-tention are the newly arrived to our communitiesfrom indigenous backgrounds and the locally bornand grown Latino children. Our indigenous Indianpopulations intermixed racially with Latino/as asthey come from Mexico, Central America, andGuatemala. We know very little about their back-ground, how they learn, where their historicalplaces are, or their lifestyles in their countries of ori-gin. We are unfamiliar with their social practicesand do not speak their language if it is not Spanish.Frankly we are at a loss. Right now in our schools,we are looking for representatives from these indige-nous communities who will come and share with usinformation on how we can reach their students and



families. They tend to be even harder to reach thanChicano students, fall through the cracks, drop out,and underachieve at even higher levels.

A second group, particularly at high risk, are thefirst- and second-generation Latinos, both immi-grant and U.S.-born. These students grow up in twoworlds. They learn two languages at one time. Theylive between worlds and have not developed astrong foundation in either one. The minute theyare born, they’re listening to English as well as to theSpanish of their parents. So they must learn two lan-guages. Educators in charge of instructing these stu-dents have little knowledge about bilingualism. Indesperation, Spanish-language experts from Mexicoand other Central Americans are hired to work withthese students. These teachers know Spanish but donot know how to work with bilingual students. Justbecause you speak two languages does not makeyou a teacher of bilingual students.

Inappropriate or no assessment of these students’academic skills leads to inappropriate placementsand instruction. Many of these students attend high-risk schools where the least experienced teacherstend to teach. Since they require a bilingual place-ment, they are taught by teachers who are justlearning Spanish as their second language. Theyhave not yet developed the depth or the breadth ofthe language in order to provide students with richembedded language required in academics.

Students from these two Latino subgroups tendto be the ones who drop out of school the most.They are also the fastest growing population inpenal institutions. They also tend to be discon-nected from the cultural practices and linguisticfoundation that strengthen the first generation.

Could you talk a little moreabout the controversy amongbilingual educators, theirapproaches and what needs tobe done for bilingualstudents?

Controversy among bilingual educators centers onpressures from the mainstream society dictatingthat English is the only language to be taught.

Research shows that if you teach children in thelanguage they understand, they will be successful.But there are political pressures coming from theeducational establishment that allow non-Englishstudents three years in special programs and thenpush them out. Research, however, says that ittakes five to seven years for a child to develop theacademic proficiency of an English speaker. Butnew educators want to keep their jobs and want tomake sure they are doing what the system tellsthem to do. Older educators who have seen the re-search and know from firsthand experience aremore likely to challenge the political pressures andpush for teaching (students) in their native lan-guage. But basically, educators are caught betweenthese forces, and what are you going to do?

Another great controversy is the misalignment inbilingual education. So-called programs are plantedon hard soil. Allocated funding is misused; programsare left to the discretion of unqualified staff; and re-sources are either lacking or inappropriate.

Higher education institutions provide very littlein bilingual education courses. Bilingual teachershave to figure it out on their own. Due to the lackof bilingual staff, multicultural education, languageacquisition, and foreign language are somehowsupposed to prepare bilingual educators. Bilingualeducation is very political. It involves learning therights and the Constitution. It involves moving stu-dent, parents, and staff to question the system. Thisis very scary, and few teachers feel strong enough tobattle.

All of these misalignments take a toll on teacherswho are on the front lines. She is the one who seesthe failure, the student dropout rate . . . (yet) she isblamed for the lack of support given to non-Englishspeakers at such a crucial time in their develop-ment. . . .

How do different culturalstyles, values, and worldviewsaffect education ofLatino/Latina students?

The biggest thing I see . . . is that the teacher tends tocome from an “I” perspective and is in charge ofteaching students who are from a culture with a


A U R O R A C E D I L L O Working with Latino and Latina Students 113

“we” perspective. Not being aware of this culturaldifference can result in confusion and arrogance onthe part of the teacher who desires to control every-thing. The “I” perspective is an egocentric attitudethat predominates in Anglo culture. I need to plan, Ineed to do, or I need to fix. For the mainstream cul-ture, the idea is that you fail because (you) failed toplan. This “I” perspective creates misunderstandingtoward people that have a “we” perspective. In orderfor “I” to do something, “we” needs to happen. Inorder for “I” to attend, “we” need to have a car, paythe insurance, get a license, learn to read English,and learn to drive. “I” is dependent on how manyresources “we” can gather.

. . . The element of time heavily impacts the class.In situations where the relationship is more impor-tant than the event, measuring time can be prob-lematic. For mainstream culture the clock runs theshow. In Latino culture, the relationship runsthe show. So it is more important to save the rela-tionship than is to save time. In Latino culture, theconcept of time is different; luego, despues, al rato, alratito, ya all have a different time value. If a teacherdoes not know that, it could cause disruptions intransitioning times.

Another issue is the concept of collective owner-ship. In Spanish the word la, el is used instead of myor mine. In English we say “my car,” “my house,” or“my pencil.” . . . In Spanish we say el carro, la casa,el lapiz. Even your personal parts don’t belong toyou. So it’s los manos, the hands, . . . Not wash yourhands; wash the hands, wash the face, clean theears. But in Anglo culture, it’s I washed my hands,I washed my face.

So this little boy or girl comes to school. He orshe needs a pencil, so they pick one up off a desk.Not my pencil or her pencil, but the pencil. Anotherchild yells out, “He stole my pencil. She took mypencil!” The Latino child says, “I did not take yourpencil.” “You have the pencil right there!” Theteacher intercedes: “Is that her pencil? Give herback her pencil!” “But why?” Now he goes homeand he takes a dinner plate. He had that plate yes-terday, now his sister has it today. “That’s my plate!”he says, and his mother disciplines him, feeling theneed to remind him about sharing. “This is not yourplate; it belongs to the family; it belongs to whoevergets it first.” . . .

There is also the high respect given to food inLatino culture. It is a community where everything

is shared, especially food. Nothing is thrown away,and you share your food rather than throw it away.You don’t play with it. At home one gets scolded orspanked for wasting or throwing away food. In theclassroom, when food like rice or salt or macaronior beans are used in learning activities, that is play-ing with it; the child is put in a difficult bind. Hedoesn’t participate. He refuses to play with it. Hemay be graded down. But if the teacher is aware ofthese cultural things, they can use rocks or popsiclesticks, anything but food.

What are some of the factorsimportant in assessing thelearning style of Latino/Latinastudents and what classroomfactors could be manipulatedto match these styles?

Learning styles are basically the different wayshumankind learns. We learn by seeing. We learn bydoing. We learn by acting out. We learn by observ-ing others and modeling their behavior. We teachchildren by modeling the things we expect fromthem. It’s a continual process in the classroom. Youreach out to the kids, you model, you show, you do,you explain. You have other people explain. Lookat Jose; he did it really well. Could you tell us howyou did that, could you show us? I do much of myteaching in the context of small cooperative learn-ing groups. You give them tasks to practice, prob-lems to solve, explain your expectations step bystep. Put things on the wall that reinforce thelessons, always giving them references to what theyneed to do. Reviews for when they are absent fromthe classroom. All of these little efforts or bricks ofsupport provide scaffolding for learning and suc-ceeding. Especially where language is an issue . . .

In working in small groups, it is important to finda student leader who understands the lesson and isable to tell what he learned. I always tell my bilin-gual teachers, when you set up your cooperativegroups, you want to find someone to lead who isfluent in English as well as someone who is fluentin Spanish (and) a balance of gender, girls and boys.In classes for bilingual children, everyone must be a



teacher to each other. English speakers are going to learn Spanish; the Spanish speaker is going tolearn English. The bilingual children are going to learn everyday.

Also look to language ability when you’re form-ing groups. With different levels of ability, you’renot the only teacher. You cannot teach such aclassroom alone. You need your environment tohelp you. You need your students and their peers to help you. You need the materials to support you,and above all you need the cultural awareness ofwhere those kids are coming from and their homeexperience. Finally, learn by doing. Create the ex-perience for and with students. Learning involvesall the senses. Use them. If you do all of these thingsand make all of these connections, kids will be moresuccessful.

I have spoken of many strategies throughout theinterview. Of all the ones I’ve spoken about, com-municating is the most important. . . . (If) youleave parents out of the learning loop (or) theaunts or the grandmothers, you are only using halfof your resources. You need to bring the familiesinto the learning environment. . . . They knowtheir children the most. They know if their chil-dren are morning people or afternoon people, theirabilities and capabilities, their individual histories.We have a lot of kids who bring trauma with them

to the classroom: abandonment, abuse, neglect,just being poor, not having the right foods, medicalcare, attention. We can’t expect them to read andwrite when their teeth are falling out or they havean ear infection that has never been corrected. . . .

Our schools witness families who have experi-enced death, drownings, and fires. We tend to bequicker to help them if they are English speaking.The school gets together, brings boxes of food andclothes, making sure that the family gets the sup-port its needs. When Latino kids get hurt or theirfamilies have problems, there is a tendency to ex-pect other agencies to take care of things. Some-body else will take care of it. We need the kind ofsystem that will respond equally to all students whoare hurting. And in a language and style they canunderstand.

Notes1Jorge Ramos, The Other Face of America. (New York:Rayo, 2002)2Brian Grow, Is America Ready? Business Week, 2004,Issue 3874, pp. 58–70.3Jerry V. Diller and Jean Moule, Cultural competence: Aprimer for educators. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005,interview excerpts from pp. 194–206).


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C H A P T E R 1 Understanding Ourselves and Others 115M A M L E K A B U

Human MathematicsFolake is a new arrival at Ridgefield, a boarding school in England. Although the narra-tor is also from West Africa, she has been at the school for two years and has adapted toher surroundings. This excerpt from the short story begins after Folake has been at theschool for a year and has begun the process of adaptation; it ends following a conflict thatstems from cultural and linguistic differences.

Folake and I were often compared with eachother because we had several things in com-mon beyond our West African blood.

There were other Nigerian girls in the school, butnone were both in Folake’s year and in her board-ing house, as I was. There were also a few girls fromother West African countries and a handful fromEastern and Southern Africa. In addition, there wasa strong representation from Asia. In fact, althoughnot officially international, Ridgefield had a strongforeign contingent. There were different degrees offoreignness, however. There were the fresh arrivalsfrom abroad, and then there were the ones wholooked foreign but had spent much, most, or all oftheir lives in England.

The one other Ghanaian girl in the school, StellaAmissah-Smith, fell into this latter category. Shehad been in the school since the earliest level andhad spent all of her life in England. I had been quiteexcited to meet her at first, but somehow we hadnever formed a real friendship. My social circle wasa veritable league of nations, while hers comprised

almost exclusively British girls. The two circles sim-ply did not intersect. Once we both understoodthat, we maintained a neutral distance from eachother.

In these divergent social constellations there wasanother important difference between us, which,incidentally, also distinguished Folake from me.Strictly speaking and certainly in biological terms, Iwas only half African. My other half was German,European, Caucasian – white. This distinction,which in purely racial terms might have bracketedFolake and Stella together and placed me outsidetheir subset, did not, in reality, constitute any com-mon ground for the two of them. In fact, the dis-tance between them was even greater than thatbetween Stella and me. On a line with threeequidistant points, I would have been the midpointwith the two of them at either extreme. Midpointwas the natural position for me.

The subtle complexities of this situation demon-strated the inefficiency of color as a lowest commondenominator for human mathematics. Fortunatelyfor me, I had realized early in life that the ability ofcolor labels to seem hopelessly superficial at bestand ridiculously inaccurate at worst, was, like thetip of the proverbial iceberg, the very indication thata dense, hulking mass lurked beneath.

Strangely enough, growing up in Ghana as a vis-ibly brown child, I had been labeled “white.” Yet I

From Mixed: An anthology of short fiction on the multiracial ex-perience edited by C. Prasad, © 2006 by Mamle Kabu.Reprinted by permission of the author.



had metamorphosed into a “black” the first time I traveled to a white country. However, like the chameleon, another creature of distinct in-betweens, I had already learned that it was I whohad to make the adjustment, not my surroundings.

In my years at Ridgefield Girls’ the ease withwhich I moved between the colors of my spectrumwas as involuntary as the changes in my accent.When I spoke to Folake, her Nigerian accent teasedout and propped up my languishing Ghanaian one.When I spoke to the teachers and the British girls,their clipped tones braced and nurtured my bur-geoning British accent.

Some of my classmates had teased me about myGhanaian English in my first year at the school.What seemed to stand out most was intonation.This had caused some embarrassment in my firstweek when Sarah, a girl who sat next to me inclass, had been unable to understand my request toborrow an eraser. The problem was that I pro-nounced the word with a heavy stress on the firstrather than the second syllable. Sarah had obvi-ously never been asked for an “ee-raser” before andwasn’t sure what to make of my request. After afew efforts to make myself understood, I realizedwe were drawing attention to ourselves and tried toput her off, but it was too late.

“What’s the matter over there?” asked theteacher.

“Oh, nothing,” we chorused. I was anxious forthe fuss to die down, and Sarah was sensitive tothat. But the teacher genuinely wanted to help be-cause I was the new girl.

“Did you need something, Claudia?” she per-sisted gently.

“Well, I was just trying to borrow an ee-raser,” Imumbled, hot with shame and cold with dread.

“Oh, you mean an eraser,” she said straightaway. Apparently it was not the first time she hadheard it pronounced that way. Her correction hadbeen completely involuntary and was not mockingor patronizing. I was grateful for that but still had toendure the snickers of my classmates.

Although embarrassing for me, the incident hadbeen a genuine misunderstanding on Sarah’s part.She was not one of the girls who made fun of myaccent. In fact, she later became one of my closestBritish friends. In my first year at Ridgefield, whichI had entered at the third form level, we had sat

next to each other in our classroom preceding as-sembly every morning.

In the fourth form we were in the same dormi-tory together with four other girls. We were notclose in the way best friends were, but we likedeach other and had an easy familiarity that camefrom being thrown together in several settingswithin the school environment. She sometimesteased me good naturedly by calling me “Ee-raser.”My interactions with her, as with the other whitegirls, generally featured the more Caucasian me.

My Caucasian identity, thus far in my life, hadconsisted of looking different, being “white” in ablack home country, knowing European foods,having an ear for my mother’s favorite classicalcomposers. It was being dropped at parties long be-fore they began and collected long before theyended because we were operating by Europeantime in Africa. It was calling my grandparents, eventhe Ghanaian ones, “Oma” and “Opa.”

Thus it was that I was more easily accepted,warmed up to by the white girls, safer territory forthem than the pure African girls from Africa. Thesame situation pertained in reverse. In Folake’s firstyear at Ridgefield I could sense that she was grate-ful to me for stopping at her downstairs dormitoryon the way to breakfast. She had an amicable butstill slightly stiff relationship with her dormitorymates and was more at ease with me. She probablysensed that she could be more herself in the fewminutes of our walk than for the rest of the day.This was despite the presence of my best friend,Mira. Perhaps Mira’s being Indian and strongly ac-cented made Folake comfortable too.

In the fifth form we outgrew large dormitoriesand earned the privilege of double rooms. Althoughwe were not given a choice of roommates, therewas some effort to pair well-known sets of friendsand I was happy to discover that I was placed withMira. Next door were Stella Amissah-Smith and herbest friend, Jenny James. Those who were not partof an obvious friendship were randomly paired.And that was how Folake and Sarah became room-mates.

There seemed no immediate problem with thispairing. The two had known each other for a yearand had often been in my company at the sametime in the common areas. However, we had notadvanced very far into the term when undercur-


M A M L E K A B U Human Mathematics 117

rents of tension began to hum. Although I had ini-tially been pleased that I could see two friends at thesame time, I quickly discovered that I did not feelcomfortable when they were both present.

For the first time I became conscious of theswitches in my accent. What was normally an auto-matic, involuntarily transition became a linguisticquandary. As often happens when switching rapidlybetween languages, elements from one linguistic setsoon started to jump into the other like nerve im-pulses firing out of control. The result was not thesmooth, natural blend of the two that I effortlesslyused with Mira. It was a jarring, clumsy combina-tion that made me feel awkward like a tunefulsongbird that had unexpectedly produced asquawk. Under these tensions conversations dwin-dled to pleasantries and flat jokes until I found my-self looking for an exit.

I started to question myself – my very being andmy genuineness. I did not like feeling awkward andfake, and did not understand why I should feel thatway in their room when I never did otherwise. Wasit false and deceitful to be black with a black friendand white with a white one? And to be yet a third,perhaps “brown,” person with friends who wereneither black nor white? Did it make me two- oreven three-faced? If it did, could I help it?

For a while I avoided Sarah and Folake, trying tomake the echoes go away. Deep down, I knew theywere with me to stay, but at least I could quiet themby staying in as neutral territory as possible. In aschool like Ridgefield, however, this was not easyand my concerns returned with renewed vigor onthe day of the row.

I was always grateful to have missed the mainaction of that fight. In theory, it had little to do withme anyway. Yinka and Alison were not even in myyear. They were younger, and at that stage of ourlives and in our highly structured school environ-ment, a year’s age difference was worth as much asa decade’s in later life. However, both girls were inmy house. It was natural for quarrels to break outonce in a while in that populous, hormone-chargedatmosphere. They usually affected only the twogirls involved and perhaps their closest friends. Butthis one was different. This one became a fight be-tween black and white.

One of the girls had been talking on the phonewhile the other was listening to a radio program.

One had complained that the other was being toonoisy, but neither was prepared to compromise. Inthe end, both radio and telephone were forgottenwhile they screamed at each other in the corridor. Itwas never firmly established which of them hadfirst brought color into it, but the myriad versions of“you white girls don’t respect anybody” and “goback to your country if you don’t like the way weare” that later flew around the school clearly indi-cated the direction the quarrel had taken.

What disturbed me most was the divisive after-math of the conflict. There was a tacit need foreveryone to take a stance. I feigned a senior’s indif-ference to the immature carryings-on of the juniors,but Mira was not fooled. At lunchtime Stella andJenny joined our table. I longed to hear Stella’sopinion on the topic but did not want to ask her. SoI almost dropped my fork when I heard Mira say ina bantering tone: “Hey, so you two are flouting thenew rule of segregation, are you?”

“Nothing to do with me,” said Stella with a dis-missive shrug.

“Pathetic,” said Jenny as she passed the ketchup.“I wish they’d grow up.”

Stella squirted the ketchup all over her chips anddug into them with gusto. I could see that the topichad already vacated her mind, and I envied her de-tachment. I was quiet on the way back to classes,and when Mira said, “You don’t have to take sidesyou know, Claudia,” I pretended to be broodingover my upcoming mathematics lesson.

But Folake would not allow me to forget the in-cident. She knew Yinka and her family from Nige-ria and was outraged on their behalf.

“Do you know what that small girl said to her?”she fumed when she came to our room thatevening. “She told her that she couldn’t even speakEnglish properly and then she and her white friendsimitated her accent and laughed. Ah! How I wish Icould take a lot of them to Nigeria, just for one day.They would smell pepper!”’

My African blood boiled up. “Couldn’t speakEnglish properly?” I shouted, “Can she speakYoruba? Why didn’t they ask her how many lan-guages she can speak? Someone who can speakonly one language, insulting a person who canspeak three or four! Chia! They feel so superior, butthey don’t know that in Africa even the childrenspeak two or three languages.”



With every sentence my voice grew louder, faster,and more Ghanaian. Mira shot me a look of mingledawe and amusement. As the conversation heated upshe kept up with us by waggling her head from sideto side in that uniquely Indian way, that blend of anod and a shake which looks like no but means yes.

Folake invited us back to her room to share someNigerian food her aunt had brought on the week-end. Mira was tactful enough to know that Folakereally wanted to be alone with me, to bathe in thesurging African tide. And indeed, it seemed like anappropriate moment to do such a thing, almost likedrinking a toast to the renaissance of our Africanunity, our enlistment in the war against the inso-lence of spoiled white girls.

I watched Folake mix the gari and water withthat deft grace with which Africans handle food. Iwas already being transported back to Ghana, evenbefore I caught the pungent, mouthwatering aromaof the salt fish stew. She had warmed it on the littlestove in the upstairs kitchen and beamed with prideas she brought it in.

“It’s my favorite,” she said, spooning it over themoist mounds of gari in the two plates. With eageranticipation I watched the steaming orange rivuletsof palm oil trickle over the white sides of the gari likelava from a volcano. We settled on her bed, plate inour laps, relishing the saltines and the added plea-sure that eating with one’s fingers always seems toimpart to a meal. The unique flavor of the palm oil,the coarsely chopped slivers of onion so characteris-tic of a West African stew, and the fiery tang of thechili pepper were like old friends found again.

“Ah! Ah! Ah! Tell your auntie I said her stew istoooooo sweet!” I sniffed, sinuses streaming andeyes watering from the pepper. Folake smiled at myAfrican turn of phrase, understanding the compli-ment. She asked if my mother ever prepared foodlike that.“ Not anymore,” I said. “She made the ef-fort when we were in Ghana. But as for the saltfish . . .” I laughed and she nodded knowingly.

“Yes, the smell! As for that one, the oyibos can’tstand it.”

“Hmm, you know already! How she hated it!She didn’t want that fish in the house at all! I usedto ask her how she could complain about it whenshe loved eating those moldy, stinking cheeses. Kai!I could never bring that stuff close to my mouth.”

Folake heartily agreed and as we marveled overthis gastronomic puzzle, the door opened and Sarahwalked in.

Astonishment registered on her face as she sawme seated cross-legged on Folake’s bed, plate bal-anced in my lap, oily orange fingers halfway to mymouth. I could tell at once that the greatest shockhad been to discover that the loud African voicechatting and laughing with Folake did not belong toone of her Nigerian friends, but to me.

“Hi, Sarah!” I said too quickly and too brightly.“Hello, Claudia,” she said in a voice which could

easily have continued, “pleased to meet you.” Theshock had been so great that she could not hide herdiscomfort. She had entered her own room to findherself in alien territory.

“You’re invited,” I said, unable to think of any-thing else to say.

“Invited?” she echoed, shaking her head in irri-tated confusion. “Invited to what?” I pointed at thefood.

“No thanks,” she said. She was polite enough notto put into words what her eyes said, which was,“How can you eat something that smells like that?”Instead she said, “I was just coming to get myglasses.” She grabbed them from her night tableand, without further ado, fled the smell of salt fishand the two aliens sitting in the African den thathad once been her room. There was an uncomfort-able silence that Folake broke with, “My friend, asfor dis one she no fit chop am!”

“No, you’re right of course. She doesn’t knowhow to eat it,” I replied, using a Ghanaian expres-sion that had always infuriated my mother. “Whatdo you mean you don’t know how to eat it?” shewould say. “Just put it in your mouth, chew it, andswallow it!” But Africans knew what it meant.Sarah could no more have eaten that food than per-formed a Yoruba dance on the spot.

I giggled at the expression because the memoryof my mother’s indignation always made it amusingto me. Folake giggled at her own use of broken Eng-lish. Some tension was released, and I started to feelsorry for Sarah and a little disloyal.

“I hope we didn’t offend her,” I said.“Ah-ah! Why should she be offended?” asked

Folake. “We didn’t do anything wrong. This is alsomy room.”


M A M L E K A B U Human Mathematics 119

“Yes, of course, I know,” I said hastily. “But Ithink we made her uncomfortable. She’s such anice girl,” I added lamely.

“Well, you may find her nice but you don’t haveto live with her.”

“I just don’t know why two people as nice as youand her can’t get on,” I said with some exaspera-tion, finally giving voice and life to that delicatetopic.

“Claudia, please! That girl looks down on me be-cause I’m a Nigerian. She doesn’t like my music be-cause it’s too ‘noisy,’ she doesn’t like the smell ofmy food – you saw her just now, didn’t you, turn-ing up her nose at it. She doesn’t like my Africanfriends coming to the room. She thinks she’s betterthan me just because she’s oyibo. And she alwayswants the window open when it’s freezing cold. Ican’t even feel comfortable in my own room be-cause of her. Ah-ah!”

“Folake, Sarah is not like that. Honestly. She’snot one of those girls who looks down on peoplejust because they’re black. I’ve known her longerthan you, you know. I mean, she’s always been per-fectly nice to me.”

“Yes, but you aren’t really black are you? I mean,you can also be an oyibo when you want to. Shedoesn’t see you as a black. That’s why she’s so nice toyou. As far as she’s concerned, you’re one of them.”

I was not happy with the turn the conversationwas taking. I felt somehow offended without beingsure exactly which part of what she had said hadupset me. I was not even sure if the offensive parthad been explicitly stated or implied. Or whether itjust hung there between the lines, with or withoutthe intent of the speaker. I also felt that familiarsense of unease that always pervaded me when theissue of taking sides, of being “one of them or one ofus” was so bluntly articulated. What I was sureabout was that I was no longer comfortable in thatroom.

I finished my food a little too quickly and toldFolake I was sleepy. She had already sensed thatthe mood was spoiled and did not make it any moreawkward for me. That was one of the reasons Iliked her: she was sensitive and intuitive. I knewshe would not have said what she had if I had notbrought up a delicate topic. I had only myself toblame.

After that incident I renewed my resolve to stayin neutral territory. However, as if the cosmos itselfhad determined to make me face up to my own du-ality, things came to a head a mere fortnight later. Itis amazing how an event of barely a minute’s dura-tion can generate hours, even days of discussion,then years of reflection. Yet a minute was probablyall it took from the moment Sarah placed thewastepaper bin on Folake’s bed until we burst intotheir room to find a handprint emblazoned on hercheek. Five fingers, long and graceful, stampedbeautifully in scarlet on a background white withshock. I had always envied Folake’s elegant fingers.

They were locked in a thrashing embrace, claw-ing, tearing, swaying dangerously. As Mira and Ipried them apart, Stella and Jenny came runningdown the corridor from their room.

“What the – oh my God!” gasped Jenny.“She hit me, she hit me!” Sarah screamed, as if it

weren’t evident. Folake stood there with a face likethunder, looking as if she would like to slap heragain. I looked from one to the other, lost for words.Mira pulled Sarah away, sat her down on her ownbed, and put her arms around her. Sarah collapsedinto sobs, ruining the perfect contrast as the red ofoutrage and humiliation spread all over her faceand neck.

The doorway was crowded now as more girls ar-rived to see what all the noise was about. In herfury Folake addressed us all as one.

“That bitch put the dustbin on my bed!”Where Sarah’s feelings seemed to be composed

of equal parts anger, fear, and humiliation, Folake’sconsisted of pure, unadulterated rage.

“How dare you?” she spat in Sarah’s direction,making the word “dare” sound like an explosion.As all eyes turned to Sarah, she wailed: “I didn’teven realize what I was doing, I was just trying tosweep the floor.”

“Oh please!” snorted Folake. “You knew exactlywhat you were doing, you wanted to insult me. Totell me I am no better than rubbish.” The more im-passioned she became, the more Nigerian shesounded.

Realizing the futility of talking to her, Sarah ad-dressed herself to the rest of us. “I always lift up thebin when I’m sweeping – sometimes I put it on thetable, sometimes on my own bed, it doesn’t really



matter. I just wasn’t thinking when I put it on herbed. I wasn’t trying to insult her. I don’t know whyshe has to be so touchy.” And she started cryingagain.

At that moment the housemistress arrived at thescene. She took in Sarah’s weeping distress andFolake’s icy fury in a glance. Aware that she mightnot obtain a clear picture of events from either ofthem, she allowed Jenny and Stella to acquaint herwith the basic facts before ordering all of us back toour rooms. Before we left I went up to each of thembriefly.

“Sorry, Sweetheart,” I said patting Sarah’s shoul-der awkwardly. “You’ll be fine. Can I get you any-thing in town?” It was harder to look at Folake, herunrepentant rage more daunting to face than tear-ful misery. So I just said, “Let’s talk about it later,OK?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Stella watch-ing me with an amused expression and as wewalked down the corridor, she said with a smirk,“Poor old Claudia, always trying to be everyone’sfriend.” The sting of that well-timed remark lastedfor years, but over time, my resentment mellowedinto something bordering on pity for her.

After speaking to the two girls, the housemistresstelephoned their homes and asked for them to becollected from school. They returned on Monday,Sarah with her mother and Folake with her auntwho served as her guardian in England. After a longmeeting in the headmistress’s office it was decidedthat Folake, as the primary aggressor, should be sus-pended for the rest of the term. This would alsoneatly postpone the need to solve the accommoda-tion problem for the two of them until the nextterm. Since Christmas holidays were little morethan a week away, it was not such a long sentence,

however it did mean that it was Folake’s last day ofschool until the new year.

Sarah was punished with a detention for engag-ing in a fight. She was furious as she felt she hadonly been defending herself, but as she later re-counted, the headmistress said she should havewalked away and reported the situation immedi-ately. Both girls were reminded in the crispest termsthat fighting was unseemly, unladylike, and utterlyforbidden at Ridgefield.

I had little chance to discuss events with Folakebefore she left that day or indeed to do much be-yond saying good-bye and wishing her a MerryChristmas. Although I spent some time with herwhile she packed her things, we could not talkproperly in front of her aunt. Only when her auntcarried the bags downstairs did she hug me.

Perhaps she read in my eyes that I felt let down,that I wanted to ask her why she had done it – whyhad she lived up to their stereotypes? – for she saidin a rush: “Claudia, I’m not usually a violent per-son, you know that. But she really offended me andit was the last straw. I can’t put up with that sort ofthing anymore. I have my dignity too. I know she’syour friend too, and I’m sorry you’re . . . caught inthe middle, but it’s OK, you don’t have to takesides.”

Folake was put in a different boarding house thefollowing term. Several of her Nigerian friends werethere so she fit in easily and became even more apart of their set than she had been before. Thesechanges, combined with our increased workload aswe prepared for our examinations, facilitated a nat-ural loosening of our relationship. Mira and I chat-ted with her whenever we sat together in thedining hall, but things were never quite the same asthey had been before the fight. . . .


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