2008 Writing
D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September
2008
Spanish Spoken Here
The world that advocates of "English-only" never see.
In the cool air of the summer evening, we sat on the stoop and in lawn chairs outside Mayra's trailer. There was me, three Mexican ladies who worked at a chile processor, and the daughter of one of them with her little son, playing with a plastic truck by himself.
Chatting and giggling in equal measures, they were some of the pleasantest company you could hope for. They were happier than I was, I thought wryly, who often worry about the state of Mexicans here.
I'd been trying to teach English to Mayra and Yadira. But I ended up teaching only Yadira this night, because Mayra got wrapped up in a conversation with Erica, the third woman. Their chatter was obviously far more interesting than what I was trying to do. Mayra grinned a big wide grin as they gabbed, and Erica's button-dark brown eyes smiled, too.
A few of Mayra's red roses had just started to come out, but the neighbors' sunflowers on the other side of the fence were more impressive. Mayra and her husband had put in a lot of work planting rows of bushes, flowers and trees on their quarter acre. In the unpaved street, a few kids were wobbling around on their bikes.
Yadira and I worked on some new English sentences for her in the notebook she balanced on her lap.
"How much is the green one?" (with "Jau mach is da grin uan?" written next to it)
"How much is the yellow one?"("Jau mach is da yelo uan?")
Yadira looked studious with her glasses on and long hair spilling over her shoulders. And she was studious. She somehow kept focused while a lively conversation flew back and forth beside her.
These women are cheerful and sweet-natured, but it's not that they don't have problems, big problems. Their husbands drink way too much. Mayra had a relative in Lordsburg who kept her children in a broom closet while she worked at a motel. Yadira was kept a virtual slave, locked in for a few weeks, working for a Mexican man in Tucson.
But they're looking for answers. I probably wouldn't have been teaching them English if Mayra hadn't bugged me for so long. She probably asked me when I first met her, which was at a red-chile processing plant several years ago.
Mayra was sorting chiles across the linea from her best friend, Sara, and they happily talked a blue streak most of the time. (The supervisor came over to them at one point and with great good humor — "Senoras," he said very formally — requested them to slow down a bit.) With her typical enthusiasm, Mayra turned to me and engaged me in conversation, too.
Afterwards, when we met at the supermarket, she was always eager to talk. Just in the past year she was especially insistent with me to teach her English. So that's how I got hooked into doing it.
For the few years I worked at Border Foods, women sometimes asked me to teach them English. I never did, which sounds pretty selfish, but it was because when I worked there I always felt I needed to recuperate physically on weekends. I also don't particularly mind if people never learn English. It gives me an opportunity to practice Spanish.
Yadira was from Jalisco and had worked in the US since 1984, mostly in the fields of California and Washington. She was legalized in the amnesty of 1987 and 1988, like most agricultural workers in Deming I've known. She had been in Deming for just a couple months, living next door to Mayra.
This night Mayra brought out some orange creamsicles and handed them out to each of us as darkness fell.
When Yadira got a sentence right, I'd say, "Good, good!" In the middle of this lesson I asked her if she knew what "good" meant, and she said no. She's been in the US for 24 years.
Soon after I had started teaching Mayra a few months ago, it came clear to me that she didn't know what the word "the" meant. She's probably been here about eight years.
It's hard to imagine being in the US for so long and not knowing such simple words. It's astonishing. Especially when these women want so badly to learn.
Part of it comes from the fact that Mayra has only two years of schooling and Yadira three. But even more, I think, it comes from their almost total exclusion from Anglo society.
Mexicans come here to work, and they usually work where only Mexicans work. There's a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon between people who were born here and those who weren't, in terms of language, education and experience. Even ethnic Mexicans born here have been known to put down immigrant kids in the schools who don't speak English well.
It isn't at all easy to break free of the gravitational pull of one's own culture. I know I have used all my energy at times to break out of my centripetal forces to learn the amount of Spanish I know.
The moral of this short tale, in case you've been wondering, is that people who think English-only rules should be enforced in workplaces and in government offices don't know what they're saying. A major part of the Mexican immigrant community works in the fields or in processors, and almost by definition doesn't speak English.
It's a different story in the cities, where even Mexicans who are professionals sometimes don't speak English. They at least have the means.
But the thought of making farm workers speak English in the fields is really outrageous. When I've worked in the fields, it seems there's usually one guy who will come up to me trying out his English. It's an English so submerged in Spanish that it takes a minute to figure out which language he's speaking.
If an English-only law were passed, what would these guys do? I can hear them now, saying, "How do you do?" "Fine, thank you," and other phrases they've learned from their brother's old English-for-foreigners book with its stiff model sentences and incorrect grammar.
The fact is, these people aren't even on the radar screen of these activists, so the issue will never come up.
Will Mayra learn English? She doesn't think she will. But I've felt once, just a little bit, that a key was being turned in a lock. It was when I was teaching her the word "please," and she said, "I've heard that word."
I can imagine more and more keys being turned, until she gets at least a functional use of English. She has to start somewhere.