D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
Reading Between the Lines
The illiterates among us.
A few years ago I was employed for a while at a chile processing plant in Deming. I worked a big machine that moved 64-ounce cans onto a conveyor belt. One of the things I did was to remove damaged cans and record the number on a clipboard.
Once I had to ask someone to take over when I went to lunch. He was a tall man from Parral with light skin and a big moon-face. When I came back, he showed me how many dented cans there'd been by showing me both hands, with fingers raised, about five times. He was telling me there were 50.
It took me a while to figure it out, and to see him do it for a couple more days, to be certain he was illiterate. Or rather, "innumerate," but almost certainly illiterate, too. He didn't know how to write the numbers down, and he couldn't say the names of numbers that high.
I didn't expect this, because I'd been making the unconscious assumption that people at the chilera had a higher level of education than in the fields. But the fact is they're often the exact same people.
This man was probably over 60. The guy who took his place later was in his early twenties, I think, but made the same gestures with his hands. He was from Michoacan (he called himself, in a shrill, high-pitched voice, "el Micho!") and was funny all the time.
Mexico made progress decade by decade over the last century toward universal primary education, but a lot of people still fall through the cracks. I was surprised to learn, when I substituted in a "behavioral disorder" class in the fourth grade in Deming, that some of those kids had never been in a classroom before their family moved to the US.
In the small town where I grew up, to call someone "illiterate" was insulting, implying the person was stupid, or almost half-animal. There was a kind of moral overtone to the word. I don't think I knew anybody back then who was illiterate.
Going to Guatemala in 1985, one of the most important things I learned was that illiterates aren't necessarily any of the things I thought they were. With my cultural presuppositions, it was somehow surprising to me that those people could even put words together in a sentence. But they could.
According to the last census, 60 percent of the residents in Luna County have finished high school, and 10 percent have a BA degree. With so many under-educated Mexican agricultural workers here, these statistics aren't surprising. But the illiterates aren't only Mexican. I've met an Anglo about 40 or 50 years old, whose father made a living poaching wild animals in this remarkable state of New Mexico, and he never learned to read.
I don't know what it's like to be illiterate. I can't imagine how people can get by without being able to read road signs, directions on soup cans, prices at stores, or the letters they get from the IRS. I'm sure it's frustratingly limiting, not to mention humiliating at times. Both of those men at the chilera, I sensed, were embarrassed to show me this vulnerable side.
Once when I was at the Post Office, I saw an old man I recognized as someone staying in the house behind the Snappy Mart, where farmworkers live. He was wrestling with the stamp machine in a kind of panicked way, and I moved over hoping I could help him. I knew he couldn't speak English and probably couldn't read.
I turned the knob and a stamp slid out. The man and I maintained a conversation while we walked down the ramp outside, as he held his head high with his rescued dignity. One stamp. How often does a man like that send mail?
But life without reading might have a kind of beautiful simplicity, I suppose. When I was talking to a Tarahumara man, Juan, who can't read, near the Pink Store in Palomas not long ago, I remember thinking to myself that I'll probably never attain his sincerity and lack of affectation.
When Juan talks, he seems to draw on a quiet pool of thought that's never been ruffled by sophistication. He makes me think of the Spanish word remanso, meaning "backwater," that includes the word "meek" — manso. It's part of the political correctness I learned from being in Guatemala not to call the indigenous people "innocent," but I don't know. There's often something sweet about illiterates.
The Tarahumara haven't read magazines and books or watched TV and movies all their lives as almost everyone reading this paper has. It would take years to scrape back all the thin layers of style and facial expressions and physical and mental stances we've learned, like wallpaper or paint that we literate people decorate ourselves with.
We work so hard to know as much as possible, to impress people, to get a job, or just to maneuver in society. But just think what an achievement it would be to roll back all the psychological, moral and political stances we've learned, to arrive at the primal image underneath it all. I wonder if it's possible.
I'm sure it's a mistake to think that Tarahumaras don't have cultural conventions of their own, or that they don't lie, but what I often like about the Indians I know is the way they are shorn of pretensions.
I recognized a man from the chilera once at one of the dollar stores in Deming. He was someone who'd asked me in the cafeteria to read a letter to him about his food stamps. It was in English, and he didn't read at all.
I guess I was being a bit over-friendly with him in the store, and he thought I was coming on to him. I was aghast. Those Mexican men with their weird machismo jump to conclusions about women, I thought. His mentality seemed like a damp, dark bog to me. I said to myself, as I do every once in a while, "I don't know why I mess around with these people."
But then a week or so later I saw him at the supermarket a couple lines away at the checkout counters. With the smirk on his face, he let me know he fully appreciated the humor of the situation. The world became normal again, and my faith in humanity was restored — just like that, in a flash.
Illiterate people live in the same world literate people do. I get the funny feeling sometimes that the difference between illiterates and us readers is less than I may have believed.