As I sat at the kitchen table on those chilly winter evenings in Kenner, Louisiana, I could feel my mother staring at me from where she was. I was busy doing my homework, and she was preparing that night's supper. She would always start off by asking me what I was doing and the only thing I would ever answer was, "Oh, nothing. Just homework." Then I would turn away and sort of look in the other direction as if to tell her to leave me alone, because I had a lot to do.
At the time I was only eight years old, in my second complete year of schooling in the United States. I had already fully grasped the English language, and it had been a year and a half since I had been removed from the bilingual program. In actuality, I had become Americanized quiet easily. Although this was a process that involvedgive and take, because although I did adapt to my new environment very well, I never let go of what I had already learned in my previous environment.
I can recall that at the same time that I was learning to read and write in English, I was also learning to do so in my native tongue, Spanish. In school, as I sat in the small wooden house, which was the bilingual classroom, I could clearly remember wondering why it was that "Spot" was so important. For more than a month we had been learning about this brown dog and about seeing him run. This experience was very strange for me, not only because it was in a totally new language but because I never did really see spot run. I only saw him painted on an oversized illustrated notebook. After a long and confusing day at school, I would come home to do my assignments; alone. It wasn't that my mother did not want to help me, but she couldn't. She knew little about the assignment , and knew even less about the language. At first I didn't mind. The assignments were easy for me to figure out, and if it was really hard I would just tell the teacher the next day that I couldn't figure it out. She would ask me why I didn't ask my mother for help, and I would have to respond to her, "because she didn't know either." She would look down at me with pity, and then she would offer me a seat and we would begin to do the problems I had not understood. Mrs. Hoppy, my first grade teacher, who soon came to be "the woman I wanted to become", did not realize that just by being herself, she gave me the hope of someday making it in life.
When I reached the third grade, I looked around me and noticed that many of the children that I had spent first grade with were not in the same classes I was in. Many of them had to stay back, and the others had been put in special, slower programs. Those who had stayed with me, however, had changed drastically. It wasn't the fact that we no longer spoke Spanish when we were around each other, but that they never spoke it at all. They were almost embarrassed of who they truly were, and that is why they were trying to hide it so much. Sometimes I would even try to speak to my girlfriends in Spanish, just because I thought they would be less harsh about it. They responded to me in English.
When I think back on why this could have been, I realize that I owe it all to my mother. On those chilly winter evenings when I had finished my assignments, she would sit both my sister and me next to her, one on each side, and she would read us children's Bible stories, in Spanish. Oh, I would look up at her in amazement. She was so eloquent, and so dramatic. And the sounds....those deep and passionate sounds of my language. I really could not understand why anyone would want to let this go. Then after she finished the story, she would give my sister the chance to read it to me, and although she didn't sound as good as my mother, she did a fine job. Then finally it was my turn. My sister did not have the patience to hear me stutter and mispronounce words, so after she was done she would walk away to finish her other tasks.
I am grateful, but for a long time as a child I had to fight off those horrible feelings of dissatisfaction. At times I wanted so much to be someone else that I was willing to do anything. Those were the times when I was frustrated, stuck on one math or grammar problem with no one to help me. I could no longer show up to class the next day with my work unfinished, and of course I couldn't ask my sister, because although she was two grades ahead of me, she was having enough trouble herself. I was full of hate and anger. Why couldn't I just be like the other kids who always had their parents there to help them? If the father was busy, they could always run to their mother. Not me. I had no one. I had never met my father, since my mother and he had divorced when I was very young, so the only person that I thought I could count on was my mother. I would look away from my books and up at her, and wonder why she had to be so stupid, why couldn't she have gotten an education, and be able to speak English like everyone else. There were times that I would be so mad, that I would refuse to speak to her in Spanish knowing that there was no other way she could understand me. It hurts me deeply to think of it now, but I hated my mother. At the same time that I loved her so, I hated her.
Regardless, I would not change my experience for any thing in the world. While the other children I was schooled with are off somewhere as unilinguals struggling to again acquire their native tongue, I sit her bilingual. Not only do I have the ability to speak Spanish, but I also read and write it, and I do so with passion, knowing that behind it stands a People. Knowing that it is only a small part of my Latino heritage, but a very important one. How could there be anyone out there that would want to keep this from a child? Why would you want to deprive a child of something so beautiful? I find NO legitimate reason whatsoever to excuse a person from such a wrongdoing. Even less if it was a parent. Your parents raised you with an awareness of who you are and where you came from. They instilled in you their pride and their love for their culture, your culture. Don't then keep it from your own child. This, I promise you, is the most beautiful gift you could give a child: self love, cultural pride, and the ambition to succeed in life without pretending to be who he or she is not. To keep this from a child, or allowing them to forget it, causes self hate, and self denial. Without your culture, without your heritage, you are nothing. Throughout the semester we have studied the works of various authors who have had experiences similar to mine. Out of the many that we reviewed, I have chosen to present the arguments of two of them; Keith Gilyard and Richard Rodriguez. These men represent the two extreme sides to my argument, which leaves mine smack in the middle of theirs.
I found the greatest support for my argument in Keith Gilyard's book Voices of the Self. One of the greatest similarities between his work and mine is his discussion on the irrelevance of some of the materials used as a method of educating in grammar school. Quoting Frank Smith in Gilyard's third chapter " Rapping, Reading, and Role-Playing":
" They (children) must be able to predict and make sense of language in the first place, and they can do this only by bringing meaning to it. This is certainly the way that all children learn spoken language and is probably the reason that many of them succeed in learning to read despite the instructional method used."
In reference to the "Spot" lesson in my first grade class, I still wonder what the true meaning behind it was. Although I don't think I could actually remember what method it was that brought me to become literate, I do know that I got very little, if anything, from "seeing Spot run." More than anything, I think it was the most confusing lesson that I have ever encountered in my educational career. However, one thing that I did not agree with in Keith Gilyard's methods was that he felt that in order for him to survive, he had to become someone who he was not. Although this was only temporary, he consciously acquired a "split personality" during most of his educational career. He in a lot of ways was very similar to the Latino kids in my third grade classroom. Not only had these children decided to disregard their native tongue by deciding not to speak it, but by doing this they had done something much more harmful. They had chosen to be self-negating, forgetting where and from whom they actually came. In our experiences both Gilyard and I felt like aliens who had just walked on to a totally different planet, but the way he chose to deal with it was what I had promised myself not to do. This alter-ego could be clearly seen in the following excerpt taken from the fourth chapter of his book:
"The point was to have a plot. To keep a part of myself I could trust. A way to pull myself through. Be a Raymond, a brother, a son, a Keith, a son, a Raymond, a son, a brother. Keep juggling and save myself. So along with handwriting drills, simple addition, simple subtraction, and readings from the primer, I began getting familiar with these strange people around me. Peeping into their lives while trying to keep their strange pale noses out of mine."
From the beginning I had decided that nothing or no one could persuade me to become someone who I was not. Even as a child I felt content with who I was, and although at times there were those feelings of dissatisfaction, there was never a yearning in me strong enough to make me want to become like those people who had so often made me feel uncomfortable. Therefore I never had to deal with any juggling, I was simply Mary, if they didn't like it, they didn't have to deal with it.
Although there was this particular difference of opinion in the methods I used as a child versus those used by Gilyard, I think that in him I found the greatest support for my argument towards promoting bilingual education primarily in the home, and then in the school. I, like Gilyard, disagre with Richard Rodriguez's argument on the benefits of a completely "American" education in his book Achievement of Desire. In his book Rodriguez argues that the best way to educate a child is by forcing them to leave behind what they already know and then learning only what the school feels is appropriate for him or her to learn.
It is shameful to say that there was that brief period of time in my life that I chose to place my mother into the stereotype of Latinos as being less intelligent, and capable of only achieving certain things in life. Much like Rodriguez explained in his book, he had so strongly focused on his teachers and put them on a pedestal that he had disregarded his parents as role models and rather he looked down on them. I had done the same thing by looking upon Mrs. Hoppy as the woman who I wanted to become. This woman that I only knew on a professional basis had become my every wish and desire. I wanted to imitate her every move, disregarding all that my mother had done for me, and all that she hoped for me, I looked down on my mother. Very much like the way I stereotyped the African-American girls living on the "Quiet Lifestyle" floor in my ethnography, I had also limited my mother's abilities. I thought to myself, "she's a Latino woman, working as a mechanic at an alternator repair shop, how could she ever get ahead in life, so why would I want to be like her?" Fortunately I could say that this is the only thing Rodriguez and I had in common. Unlike him, my success depends on the adjoining of my academic education with the ever more precious education received at home. To tear myself away from my Latino heritage would be like tearing myself away from a lifeline. I quote from a chapter in his book Achievement of Desire an excerpt that contradicts in every way what I believe and stand forbr: " The scholarship boy is a great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker; the very last person in class who ever feels obliged to have an opinion of his own. He does not forget that the classroom is responsible for remaking him. He relies on his teacher, depends on all that he hears in the classroom and reads in his books. He becomes in every obvious way the worst student, a dummy mouthing the opinions of others. But he would not be so bad--nor would he become so successful, a scholarship boy--if he did not accurately perceive that the best synonym for primary education is imitation."
Rodriguez seems to be under the false pretense that in order to succeed in life one must let go of what makes he or she unique in order to be just like everyone else, an imitative piece of society. I do believe that Rodriguez finally did come to realize what a great mistake he made by trying so diligently to become who he was not, but then it was too late. There came a time in his life that he yearned to again grasp what he had so long ago let go of. There was something within him that let him know that he had done wrong. Maybe he had become the most elite intellectual, but this did him no good if he achieved this under a false identity.
I will conclude by saying that I am not a collector of other's thoughts, but rather a creator of my own. I am very much a thinker, and I am always willing to voice my opinion. I have not allowed the classroom restructure me, but I have made it benefit my needs. I plan to succeed in life as myself, a Latina, not as an imitation of someone else. My most valued possession is my heritage, my culture, and this I would not trade for any amount of so-called intellectuality. This pride I intend to pass on to my children, so that future generations will not forget who they are and where they came from. In this manner Latinos could be just as capable of "Achieving Desire."