MOM – I don’t know what they’re doing, but they got this certain website that she goes to and listens to the- she can tell you all about it. She runs around the house singing Spanish songs all the time.

MISHA – [to the fourth grade youth] And how did you learn all the Spanish that you know?

D2 – from Spanish class

MISHA – But how do you, what helps  you to learn?

D2 – We go to a website called Señor Wooly

MISHA – Wooly? Ok, I don’t know that. What do you learn there?

D2 – There’s Spanish videos and you can do karaoke and you can listen to the video and sing along.

MISHA – And you like to do it?

D2 – (nods yes)

MISHA – That is so cool. I’m so happy for you. Now next year they’re trying to decide if we’re going to have any more Spanish here at the school or not. Would you recommend that we keep Spanish at the school?

D2 – (nods yes)

MISHA – You would? Why?

D2 – because it’s fun!

Ah, that’s the ticket! If language educators (like the one at this elementary school) can make learning non-English languages fun and inviting, then maybe we can have more success encouraging future American youth (and adults) to enjoy Spanish, French, Chinese, or Arabic class.  I did look up “Señor Wooly” and there are a few free videos on youtube to give you a taste of the way to make learning languages fun, funny, and do-able through music,repetition, and comedy.  Check out “Puedo Ir al Baño,” a ballad sung by an adolescent pleading with his strict teacher for permission “to go to the bathroom,” backed up by a chorus of understanding peers.  Or for even heartier laughter check out “Soy Guapo,” a pop tune sung by a dandy of a dude who claims repeatedly, “I’m handsome” cheered by two women (“¡Ay, Victor!”).  This “Guapo” gets out of household chores, bills, even reading. By being handsome he gets all his desires met.  It’s over the top fun and while singing along to this guy not needing to be funny or have any personality, the song helps teach dozens of vocabulary words, expressions, and challenging grammar points (¿personalidad?–¡él no la tiene!/ personality? He doesn’t have it!–no more struggles with teaching the direct object with the verb tener!).

It’s not that all target language learning is fun and games.  However, when I review the overwhelming variation of “Spanish Level One” books that exist, the market is flooded with dry vocabulary lists.  Señor Wooly is indeed a sight for sore eyes & ears, utilizing technology to embrace context and interaction as essential components of effective language acquisition.

When my husband turned 40, we placed candles in a circle around the golf ball design on the cake.  My two year old daughter cried, “like ashes ashes, we all fall down!” connecting the candle circle to one of her favorite song activities in her daycare class.  Young and old, language learners make connections between what is known and what is unknown.  Our natural creativity makes leaps and bounds between experiences.  My children have been working with a Spanish speaking nanny for 4 weeks now (about two days a week).  I encourage her to do the following:

1. interact with the children in a natural setting doing regular, daily routines–in my case, going through morning rituals of getting dressed, eating, and readying for the drive to school.

2. try to introduce contextualized language–when asking the kids to put on their zapatos and calcetines, to show them their shoes and socks when saying the words

3. to encourage repeated production just as I do in English when trying to teach good manners.  ”I want more yogurt!” my son screamed this morning.  ”Más yogurt, por favor,” I rephrased for him.  ”Más yogurt, por favor,” my son repeated, mumbling obediency.

4. to accept all English productions

When we were in North Carolina, my daughter waved her hands in the air and shouted “These are manos Mommy!”  Then she counted out the pasta she would eat on her plate “uno, dos, tres, cuatro!”  These are small steps for small language learners.  But I can’t wait to show them “puedo ir al baño!”  to see if this can appeal even to very young children.

This is not to say that language learning is all fun and games.  It’s not.  Real frustrations occur all the time. My son standing at the sink told his Spanish teacher today that “I don’t understand Spanish!” and then proceeded to follow her request in Spanish to go outside and play.  Language learning is not always to be taken lightly, especially when real needs have to be met.  I remember having spent the entire summer in Mexico feeling quite fluent.  I was leading a group of college students on a long term stay in the Mexican state of Veracruz and had finished my work to head home.  My flight was delayed for several hours and finally cancelled.  I had to navigate getting on a different flight, making connections to my home destination.  I was tired and frustrated and embarrassed at the airline ticket counter when I simply gave up speaking Spanish.  I knew the Delta employees were also bilingual and they would be in their language comfort zone to explain my flight options to me in English.  Such code-switching is not always possible when operating in an L2 but it made me aware what a luxury it was to be able to draw on more than one code choice in order to be heard, to get needs met, and occasionally have fun.

I was delighted to hear this young girl feeling so excited about her Spanish class.  I was even more startled yesterday when I visited a dual immersion elementary school in Clayton County, “Unidos.”  The fifth grade chorus treated my UGA students and I to a short bilingual concert where it was difficult to tell which students had Spanish at home and which did not.  The children’s accents and fluency were so outstanding!

“What has your experience been in this program? Is it ever hard to learn another language?”

“Yeah! At first I was so confused!”

“Yeah, like I didn’t know what was going on!”

“But now it’s easy and its fun to speak two languages.  Like we have this new girl in our class and she speaks Spanish but we’re helping her in English.”

“When we go to restaurants, the people there are all like “You speak Spanish! Well, alright!”

There’s a whole story written by Dell Perry Giles about the challenges of opening up an elementary school where two languages are used for instruction.  But she made it happen.  To watch these children sing effortlessly in two languages was a gift.  They are showing us by their songs as well as on their state mandated test scores (which equal or surpass the scores of their district peers) that learning more than one language in the context of a public U.S. school is indeed possible and enjoyable.

Dear Prof. Cahnmann-Taylor:

Acting upon the recommendation of the University Review Committee, I am truly pleased to notify you that you will be promoted to Professor effective with your 2012-2013 contract.  Promotion is a significant achievement in academic life and a recognition of the valuable contribution that you make to the life of the University.

Please accept my hearty congratulations and my personal thanks for all that you do for the University.

Sincerely, 

Micheal F. Adams

President

My response:

Dear President Adams, Colleagues and Students at the University of Georgia:

I am filled with joy and gratitude on this day when I receive news of my promotion to full professor at this institution.  From the first day of my interview to today when I receive this letter, I have felt welcomed and respected.  On only one small occasion when I began at the University did one person in an administrative role of authority respond negatively to my research, referring to my request for funding as “boondoggling” to study American in-service teachers on a summer abroad program in Mexico.  My department chair immediately came to my defense and support and I found other sources of funding for work in local schools.  When some of the courses I teach such as “poetry for creative educators” and “theatre for reflective practice” were referred to as “boutique”courses, at first I took offense, believing that some colleagues in administrative positions felt these courses were unnecessary baubles, pretty and interesting but overpriced and excessive.  Nonetheless, I was allowed to offer these courses, to see their enrollments grow, and share the joy and muscle of creative thinking and learning.  I don’t think most institutions would allow me such flexibility in course development or generously support the guest speakers I have helped to bring to our campus: Ruth Behar, Joni/Omi/ Jones, Anne Waldman and Steven Krashen this spring.  And when Joni/Omi/Jones performed “Sistah Docta” and removed her shirt to perform the vulnerability of the black, female body on campuses of higher education, some administrative faculty squirmed in the front row, snickered uncomfortably afterward, and may have missed the point.  But no one stopped the show or pulled funding or refused my future applications (although my first application to bring another powerhouse African American artist was refused–I am sure it was because of budgetary constraints and I will try to bring poet Patricia Smith again!).  You have written on paper that you will promote me to full professor despite the fact that I protest at our campus arches against HB 59 which would essentially ban highly qualified but undocumented youth from attending our beautiful institution.  You give me license to be at the top of the University heap fully knowing that I was part of a gang of academic parents who protested the lack of daycare services at this institution until you finally opened a large daycare center this year to serve our community and both my children have spots in a campus daycare facility.  No future pregnancies for me but I smile every time I see the two new parking spaces reserved for expectant mothers in the College of Education parking lot and the new stroller and wheelchair friendly ramp that leads from the busstop to our building.  I have breastfed in many corners of our campus, posted a breastfeeding welcome sticker and rainbow queer-friendly flag in my office and have heard talk about building lactation rooms across campus.  When, in other public corners of Athens, Georgia, nursing mothers and I have been asked not to breastfeed, this campus has been nothing but friendly to me as a nursing academic mother.  Sure, it would have been swell if you’d had any kind of maternity leave policy that might have allowed me to navigate work and new motherhood with a bit less stress and strategy, but luckily I had a grant and flexible students and understanding colleagues and it all worked out.  Would I like this to change? You bet–I want our campus to continue to grow as a place that is welcoming to all kinds of diversities and life changes.  I would like never to hear another colleague snickering about a Jewish student who “tried to get out of a test” by complaining that it was Yom Kippur (the most holy and sacred day in the Jewish calendar).  I wish there were more open and explicit talk about what to do when experiencing harrassment on this campus and that we’d have fewer incidents covered up for years and fewer to no incidents at all.  I realize how tricky such policies must be and that it is my role now to participate in faculty governance to help create and sustain policies that favor people and ideas and shun intolerance, abuse, immorality, and narrow-mindedness.  I feel truly lucky to be here and honored by this promotion because it says you value faculty who publish and teach wildly across traditional academic boundaries, who question authority, and voice the taboo.  I have a published disclaimer that the thoughts and ideas on my blog are mine and mine alone and protect you–to the extent that I can–from our association. But now you have not only invited me to the table, but given me a long-term contract to remain in my white, cinder-block office which I have now painted athenian blue.  Thank you President Adams, for protecting me from many of the bureaucratic decisions that come with running a public university and for allowing me the freedom and time to write, think, teach, and learn and feel the urgency of continued critical, intellectual work. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other better in the coming years as I participate more actively in how to create and sustain the best possible environment for higher learning.  Upon receipt of this letter I feel honored and renewed, knowing my work at the University of Georgia has only just begun.

DM: No entiendo, tu eres maestro del español pero estás tomando clase de español

MS: Could you maybe say that a little slower, I think your accent is throwing me off.  Where are you from?

DM: Ohio. But my parents are from Chile and we only spoke Spanish in the house growing up.

Mr. Shu’s gaff that an “Ohio accent” is difficult to understand is an early comic moment that foreshadows the many blunders the Glee Club director/Spanish teacher will make regarding the language, culture, and identity of Latino USA.  In class Mr. Shu declares the Glee Club will sing songs written or performed by someone of “Latin descent or performed bilingually.” He explains:

Mr. S: Where do you think you’ll you be by 2030? Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you’re gonna need to speak Spanish.  The reality is by 2030 more people on this planet will be speaking Spanish than any other language.

Mr. Shu (mis)ventriloquizes his own Spanish teacher’s wisdom and suddenly he moves the significance of Spanish in the U.S. to world dominance  (Look out English! Look out Chinese!) Despite the exaggerated statistics, I agree with Mr. Shu’s central message: “The world is changing, our culture is changing, and that needs to be reflected in here [in U.S. high school].”

Who would think Fox TV’s Glee club would be talking about Spanish as a vital language of our (inter)national future?! –that by the show’s end Mr. Shuster would hand over his Spanish position  to Ricky Martin and decide to go for a history position instead (my colleagues in Social Studies education should also have a field day with this episode!).

Well, as readers likely know by now, I prefer to remain on the positive, rather than cynical, side.  “Latin music” for Glee club ends up meaning a mostly English version of the Gypsy Kings “Bamboleo,”  Madonna’s “Isla Bonita,” and Elvis’s “Satisfy me” with one English-Spanish tranlated line. Although the hour long show is depressingly filled with the hyperbolic “hot Latin” (Okay, Ricky Martin is indeed eye and ear candy) and filled with stereotypes, Santana plays the critical cultural reader and educates her defensive educator.

Santana [to Mr. Shu]: You went from La cucaracha to a bull fighting mariachi!  Why don’t you just dress up as the Taco Bell Chihuahua and bark the theme song to Dora the explorer?  You don’t even know enough to be embarrassed about these stereotypes that you’re perpetuating!

David Martinez  invoked Lorca’s concept of “duende” had me over the top with GLEE! Okay, so duende was given short shrift, quickly and mistakenly translated as dwarf and pawned off as  Ricky Martin’s sexual energy.  He explains duende through a bilingual performance of “I’m sexy and you know it”:

David Martinez:
Cuando hago mi entrada, this is what I see
Todo el mundo para pa’ mirarme a mí
I got passion in my pants and I ain’t afraid to show it, show it, show it,
show it.

I’m sexy and I know it
Soy sexy y lo sabes

Hey, checalo.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle yeah (x4)

To the wiggle man, así menealo man yeah
Soy sexy y lo sabes.

Do I wish the show’s writers would have included some discussion of the term “duende” coined by Spanish civil war poet, Federico Garcia Lorca–you bet.  Lorca called the duende, “an emotive and poetic logic rather than a disembodied rational logic” (Hirsch, 1999, p. 13).  Duende’s etymological root comes from duen de casa [not dwarf!], “master of the house,” a house that is filled with emotion and death. I wrote in Teachers Act Up (p. 80): “Like the flamenco singer or bullfighter whose dark improvisational arts place them closer to death, duende allows one to succumb to mystery, and absorb its carnival of hunger, desire, sin, and sunlight.”  It’s NOT reduced to “passion in my pants.”

But we critical academics can’t remain all tied up in what isn’t all the time.  We must recognize the slow celebratory moments of cultural shift and laugh outloud when the show makes fun of a U.S. Adult Spanish student whose goal is to learn enough Spanish to say “Stop using my toilet to my maid” (hello, “The Help”).  The show illuminates U.S. Americans’ backwardness through great doses of humor and irony.  By the end, this same adult student is awarded “best conjugator” and gives thanks to her teacher:

Adult Spanish learner: Thank you Sr. Martinez. Thanks to you, Claudia knows now “to go” before she comes to work.

Oye (Yiddish groan not Mexican command “listen!”).

Mr. Shu is awarded “most improved” as he celebrates his fiancé getting the covetted “tenure track” position at the school and hands over his Spanish classroom to Ricky Martin.  Should I worry about the effect of this show, reinforcing Fox viewers’ understanding that diversity means the White English-only speaking guy (or woman–see the show’s take on Sue Sylvester) loses his credibility and his job to more qualified women and minorities? Or will viewers’ feel invited to sing along to bilingual lyrics by their favorite all American heros, gyrate their stiff hips to global Spanish rhythms, and rethink their attitudes towards cultural and linguistic knowledge.  Maybe it is important for English speaking Americans to take World Language & Spanish language education seriously?  English speaking Americans do great damage  to U.S. students’ future potential if they are “protected” from integrated schools, linguistic diversity, and the struggles inherent in learning different ways of being in a multicultural world.  And while we may be cultivating critical geniuses like Santana–at what price? We can’t hope that minority youth will trade in their anger and cynicism in light of ignorance and symbolic violence against cultural and linguistic “others.”  Until we pay more attention to world language education and -yes- history, we will never create learning environments that nurture respect, humility, inquisitiveness, and care.

In the meantime, who else saw the show?! Responses?!! LA Times blog on it, in case you’d like a  review of the various narratives.  Any other links to other “Gleeks” writing with loving criticism of the show?

January, 2012.

Six students sat around a half moon shaped table.  ”Las ocho fases de la luna [the 8 phases of the moon],” their FLAP funded teacher said.  ”Vamos a dibujarlas y ponerlas en orden [we'll draw them and put them in order.]

Each child had 8 black color paper squares and a white crayon.  They drew and labelled the moon’s phases:

Luna Nueva (New Moon)

Creciente Iluminante (Waxing Crescent)

Primer Cuarto/Cuarto Creciente (First Quarter)

Gibosa Iluminante (Waxing Gibbous)

Luna Llena (Full Moon)

Gibosa  Menguante (Waning Gibbous)

Ultimo Cuarto/Cuarto Menguante (Last Quarter)

Creciente Menguante (Waning Gibbous)

As one child drew, her white crayon broke.  She learned how to ask for a new one in Spanish.  Another child sang Montell Jordan’s lyrics to himself “this is how we do it!” and numbered each moon phase, saying “uno, dos, tres, cuatro….” in Spanish, the language he speaks at home.  Another child worked on creating an index card “pocket” on a manilla folder–she learned how to say “tape” (cinta) and card “tarjeta,” and how to make a pocket by taping only three sides “solo los tres lados.”  She wanted a green marker to label her folder–her teacher pointed out that what she wanted was “el color verde” and pointed out that even crayola is multilingual–with “green/verde/vert” written in kelly green on it’s thick white side. Another child asked his teacher, “Do you have facebook?” And the teacher asked in Spanish what this had to do with the moon? The child replied that his facebook password would be “the moon.” The teacher and several hispanic students started talking about “facebook en español,” stretching a “science lesson” into a lesson about world communication and Spanish as a global language.

How does our world view shift when we learn that people look up and label the “same sky” differently, when we make connections to cognates such as “quarter” and “cuarto” and distinctions between words such as “waxing/waning” to “iluminante/menguante.”

Beyond acquiring a bilingual vocabulary, these children were learning to communicate like citizens of the world, making connections between science content and their lives as transnational citizens.

Senator Isakson wrote me back on September 15: “it is urgent that Washington get its fiscal house in order….I believe that in addition to passing a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget, we must also reform our broken appropriations process and reduce wasteful spending….I have nine grandchildren. The rest of my life is about seeing to it that we leave them a country that is as free, as prosperous and as safe as the country our parents left to us.”

Any American who wants to leave our children and our grandchildren with the greatest chance for prosperity and safety must take the teaching and learning of World Languages under serious consideration.

The FLAP representative tells me there’s a new appropriations bill on the table through reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to sponsor programs for “well rounded education” that include “the teaching and learning of arts, foreign languages, history and civics, financial literacy, environmental education, and other subjects.”  While I was hopeful, my interlocutor in Washington dampened my spirits.  ”It’s unlikely this kind of bill will go through in an election year.”

That’s alright.  I have lots of time.  One positive outcome of growing older is having to learn patience–this is how we do it!  Remember, too, the beautiful lyrics of Same Cook:

It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die

‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know (oohhhh), change gonna come, oh yes it will

Draft: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, 1_31_12

Introduction to Blurred Genre in Ethnography

            For several decades now social scientists in a variety of fields have been seeking alternatives to the scientific paradigm in approaches to designing, conceptualizing and representing empirical studies in order to further understandings of human life—in families, classrooms, institutions and any number of interactional contexts.  Anthropologists have been at the forefront of these movements, experimenting with a variety of “blurred genres” (Behar, 2007) including poetry, drama, fiction, and creative nonfiction.  Ruth Behar, one of most prolific advocates and among the most talented producers of blurred genre ethnography, argues that “until the time comes when we pursue the art of ethnography without fear, ethnography will remain a second-fiddle genre, a poor stepchild of memoir and fiction, an academically safe form of writing” (Behar, 2007: 154)  According to Behar, “safe” in the academy means access to jobs, scientific grants, and professional associations.  While these privileges are not to be discounted, the implicit warning is that these goodies come at the price of being esoteric, easily ignored outside of a small number of field specific insiders, and to content ourselves with being very interesting people who write very boring books (Pratt 1986: 33 cited in Behar, 2007).

            I have been inspired by anthropologists such as Ruth Behar, Kirin Nayaran, Paul Stoller, Renato Rosaldo, Kent Maynard, Adrie Kusserow, Nomi Stone, Billie Jean Isbell, and others who affiliate as both anthropologists as well as writers—poets, memoirists, fiction writers, and “reverse anthropologists” (Gomez-Peña, 2000: 132).  These scholars have turned inward toward their home disciplines for theoretical and empirical foundations as well as outward to study the craft of creative writing in order to enliven their various ethnographic narratives—sharing a variety of creative, self-other ethnographies about the few remaining Jews in Cuba (Behar, 2007) and Tunisia (Stone, 2008), folk music and folklore in Northwestern India (Nayaran, 2007), and indigenous medicine in Cameroon (Maynard, 2001).  These scholars have also turned outward to study the writing of ethnography as a craft that requires just as much attention to theory as to narrative, character, image, metaphor, and dialogue.  Narayan (2007) writes “As ethnographers, we are usually trained to set forth arguments, rather than to write narrative.  We learn to use illustrative anecdotes, but not how to pace our representations of events to hold a reader’s interest.”

            I read many of these and other inspiring blurred genre scholars as a graduate student in the late nineties with a level of “reader’s interest” that stood in stark contrast to much of the other required scholarship I studied in order to become an “expert” in the field of U.S. bilingual education and merit a Ph.D. upon completion of my own ethnographic work.  I often turned toward poetry writing as a side project, one that was marginal and/or separate from my ethnography of bilingual schooling (Cahnmann, 2005) and soon realized that my poet’s mind was also active, helping me to sort through my fieldnotes and shaping what ultimately composed them.  My “leaping mind” (Bly, 1975:1) was alive and useful in the ethnographic project and became the source of meditation for poetry’s vitality in educational research (Cahnmann, 2003). While much as been written about the contributions creative genres make to ethnography, neither myself nor other blurred genre writers I know have written much about how theoretical and/or empirical scholarship informs creative writing. A handful of scholars working with “poetic inquiry” have written about taking liberties with theoretical prose and/or empirical interviews, seeking to convert it to poetry, e.g. breaking up the exact language of Foulcault or an interview transcript into lines and stanzas that appear to be verse (Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima, 2009).  I have found these projects to be interesting intellectually but aesthetically uninspired and far from poetry.  Poetry requires less fidelity to another’s precise words and ideas and more journeying to find what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) described as the “best words in the best order” to transform a lived moment into poetry. Academic discourse, as it frequently dwells in dense, multi-syllabic abstraction is often the antithesis of poetry, slicking the lyric down with theory like a crude oil spill, an accident with devastating aesthetic consequences for the wild life of art.  “No ideas but in things,” is the famous dictum of America’s poet W.C. Willimas to explain the power of images such as the “red wheel barrow” to ground poetry in concrete particulars. 

            While poetry may suffer from abstract theoretical language, I believe creative nonfiction (personal essay, memoir, “faction” [Nayaran, 2007, p. 130]) offers the genre space and craft strategies to embrace both creative and academic voices.  Just as Behar (2007) advocates “reading ethnographies like a writer” (p. 148), I have been reading memoir and personal essays as an ethnographer in order to write more meaningfully about bilingual education.  Through a doctoral seminar I teach titled “Translingual Memoir,” I have been exploring the intersections between big “T” anthropological theories and their place in personal and empirical narratives of bilingualism. Unlike poetry, creative nonfiction encourages what memoir writer Judith Barrington (2002) refers to as musing, “the presence of the retrospective voice.” Anthropologists have an edge when it comes to musing, as much of our “resulting wisdom” is informed by extensive theoretical study as well as empirical investigation.

            Inspired by memoir writer Judith Barrington’s (2002, p. 148) diagram illustrating the way a successful memoir moves back and forth between the writer’s inner personal life and the surrounding public life of local, national, and global communities, I have created another diagram to illustrate how the blurred genre anthropologist can move back and forth between what is “personal,” “empirical,” and “theoretical.”

Figure 1. Diagram of Translingual Memoir & Other Arts-Based Inquiry Practices

            I agree with Barrington that it is the personal voice that carries the reader from the most intimate corners of the writer’s lived experience to the “wide open spaces of a shared culture” (p. 148), a culture the translingual memoirist may wish to transform through public/ation of personal narrative.  I agree with Tsao (2011) that anthropologists need to write forms of ethnographic prose that are “legible and intelligible to the authors on the front lines of those [social justice] movements” (184).  I am inspired by Chican@ scholar-artists (or scholARTists) such as Gómez-Peña (2000) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) who have embraced alternative notions of theory building from narratives of personal witness and experience, what Anzaldúa referred to as “autohisteoría” (Keating, 2000: 243).  The invention of crush words can at times be an overly used “cute” postmodern glitch.  But in this case I find inventions such as “scholARTist” and “autohistoeoría” (which merges autobiography, history, and theory) to be thought-provoking neologisms.  I have often perceived the invention of crush words as an overly used “cute” postmodern glitch.  But in this case I find inventions such as “scholARTist” and “autohistoeoría” (which merges autobiography, history, and theory) to be thought-provoking and theoretically informed neologisms, creative acts with language to produce new ways of thinking. 

            The following personal essay [posted January 27] represents a contribution toward this project, interweaving my personal stories of struggle as a bilingual parent with theoretical, pedagogical, and empirical work.  Despite a number of years spent as an ethnographer in public bilingual schools, the empircal gaze in this previous blog post is largely autoethnographic, attempting to understand the opportunities and constraints against widespread Spanish-English bilingual education in the United States. While I have written what follows so that it might stand on its own as personal essay or memoir, this introduction was written to situate it specifically for an audience of anthropology peers.  Are we interested in anthropology that explores the field sites of “home,” including when the “native anthropologist” observes the culture of mainstream American English monolingualism? What balance do anthropologists seek in blurred scholarship between the ethnographic narrator’s “story” and theoretical and empirical foundations in order to both trust and learn from the writer to advance the field as well as engage the readers’ interest? While the terrain of ethnographic narrative is longstanding in journals such as Anthropology & Humanism and a regular slot of presentations through the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, are those of us in related fields of anthropology and education, medicine, policy and elsewhere prepared to embrace blurred genre as readers as well as writers, reviewers, and editors? If we do embrace such a shift, what does this require of anthropologists  in terms of the ways in which we instruct theory, methodology, and writing craft?

            I wish to give permission to new generations of anthropologists to study writing as well as theory and to break the boundaries between the personal and the academic.  Through the essay that follows I offer but one example of the way writing through personal narrative has helped me further explore my own participation in authoritarian discourses (Bahktin, 1986) that diminish U.S. bilingual potential as well as my role in shifting those discourses, opening up spaces for those of us on both sides of the “border/lands” (Anzaldúa, 1987) to live in permanent liminality between nations, languages, cultures, perspectives, and practices. Of course my author’s and educator’s hope is also that the writing that follows serves not only to entertain but also to inform the field of bilingual education, galvanizing those of us on the front lines of bilingual education policy and practice to stay the course.

READ the previous post to see the Translingual Memoir portion–this is a work in progress. Your feedback is most welcome. Write me to request the complete cited references listed here.

When the stewardess regretted on the intercom that she only had customs forms in Spanish and that those who preferred English would have to wait until landing in PuertoVallarta, I, nonplussed in my aisle seat, extended an arm for the Spanish form.  Linea de vuelto: Delta. ¿Cúanto tiempo es el viaje? Two weeks. ¿Razón por el viaje?  I checked “pleasure” in Spanish because my two children, father, and stepmother were with me and we were headed to a timeshare resort [¿Destino principal en México?]outside the city. But I might have also checked business or trabajo, work.  After all, my goals while in Mexico were multifold.  I’d brought with me the textbook I newly adopted in my course on bilingual education, The Bilingual Edge and I planned on practicing some of the book’s advice about how, why, and when U.S. parents should help their children to become bilingual. There were several examples in the book that related the bilingual edge to travel and time spent abroad in non-English speaking contexts.  Time spent in Spain and Mexico were certainly pivotal to my own Spanish fluency as a college student twenty years ago.  I hoped two weeks in Mexico would ignite my own English dominant children’s Spanish abilities as well as new ideas for the bilingual courses and workshops I teach.

When the stroller stalled like a belligerent donkey on the cobblestone streets of Puerta Vallarta and I had to carry my two year old daughter 10 blocks to get to the stationary store to buy a string full of colorful papel picado, plastic flags to decorate my classroom, was this work or pleasure?  It was work to carry a newly purchased, sturdy mesh market bag with these flags, foam puzzles of the United States of Mexico, and play Mexican currency in one arm and my daughter in the other in the heat of midafternoon past dinosaur delivery trucks turning narrow street corners, belching their black exhaust in our faces.  But this is the kind of work I welcome.  If it weren’t for my self imposed mission to bring back authentic materials to use with my students, I wouldn’t have passed the small juice stand where two men stood squeezing liquid from fresh oranges and carrots into beautiful tall clear glasses.  If I didn’t speak Spanish or if I hadn’t spent many years travelling and living in Mexico, I might have been too fearful to drink from the sweet fresh nectar or to have been delighted when he placed the large machete in Liya’s small hand to help her chop a fresh coconut for its sweet milk and tender white meat.    

“You did what?” My stepmother asked, wrinkling her nose. “You could get sick drinking juice from the street.  You don’t know what’s in it!”

“It’s orange juice.  From oranges.”

“But the oranges are different here and you don’t know how they washed them.  Did you see their cows? They’re different too and the meat tastes different.  I never eat meat here.  Only fish and chicken.  Did you eat any breakfast?”

I needed more diapers and had taken the kids on a bus from the hotel to Walmart and then into town. 

“We had some eggs at a restaurant near the Walmart.”  I didn’t mention the bus or the machete.

“Why didn’t you eat at the hotel? You’re going to get sick! Look out for Montezuma’s revenge—good thing you bought more diapers!” 

A few hours later when I felt I had a cactus stuck in my gut, I didn’t dare say anything to my stepmother and I was relieved the kids were just fine.  Maybe it was the water and instant coffee I’d had but they did not.  Maybe a child’s stomache, like his tongue, could more easily become bilingual (and bi-gastronomical). When my first child, Oren, was born in 2007 I explored my childcare options and optimistically hired a Spanish speaking nanny, Rina.  She had just arrived from her home country, Chile, with her ten year old, accompanying her second husband pursuing graduate work in Math education at my university. Trained as a teacher in her home country, an exceptional nurturer, and fluent in the language of my desire–I felt so lucky to find her.  Despite my so-called fluency in Spanish, I suddenly became a learner again—burp, nipple, rash, breastpump, baby food—there were so many words and meanings I had never learned before in Spanish literature and linguistics courses or during travel as a young, single woman. As a new mother I now had the intense motivation to acquire every noun, every verb that would help us communicate about how Oren had experienced each hour of his day away from me.

At six months old Oren wailed inconsollably when I learned the word for teething in Spanish (dentición—so close to the Spanish word for teeth, dientes!).  Rina bemoaned the inability to access cochayuyo, seaweed they sell in Chile that soothes a baby’s sore gums (las encías).  How many remedies for sleepless nights, fever, rash, gas, etc. were there worldwide in languages and cultures I couldn’t access that could expand and improve my tentative grasp on new motherhood? Pharmacy, grocery, Walmart, Target—I bought teething tablets to melt on his burning gums, tiny pink q-tip like sticks that once snapped in half, poured a soothing pain relief gel; plastic rings filled with saline that I froze along with wet washcloths and frozen bagels for him to suck on and numb the pain. Knowing there was a remedy in Chile that I couldn’t access made me feel irresponsible, guilty—surely the seaweed would have done the trick.

When enough of Oren’s first teeth had finally arrived, I returned from work to see that Rina had given him a whole apple that he was greedily sucking from a peeled side.  To see him toddle around the kitchen, his small hands holding a giant apple to a face not much bigger, was like watching a miniature, whimsical clown.  It wasn’t long before manzana was one of his first words and an easy treat to pack with us on park playdates.  But my American “mother friends” gave me grief for giving such a snack to a toddler:

“The baby books say you need to purée the apple until age 1.”

“I’d only give an apple to my little one if it were cut into tiny pieces to prevent choking!”

“He’s so cute! But do you think that’s such a good idea?”

“What is he saying? Banana?”

Oren’s first word, “ma-za-ah,” sounded like banana to most ears but Rina and I knew what my son desired.  His first words were a mixture of Spanish and English—zapatos, agua, leche—the things he needed most (putting on shoes, drinking water and milk) he learned to say in whichever language would accomplish the end goal. Unlike many of the myths people around me had about bilingualism—that it would result in delayed or truncated language abilities—Oren had an impressively large and bilingual vocabulary of over 100 words by the time he was twelve months old.

As we were about to land in Mexico for our first time together, I began forecasting our trip, preparing four year old Oren and two year old Liya for the “kids club” they would attend at the resort the next morning and the Spanish activities they would do there.

“I don’t want to speak Spanish!” Oren said, as he has said so often, since he began associating the Spanish language with daycare and separation. 

Liya, my younger daughter chimed in with “No Spanish!” mimicking her brother. 

“But Skippy John Jones speaks Spanish and you do too!” I said, pointing to the masked Siamese cat stuffed animal at his side.

“We need to speak Spanish to los Chimichangos!” 

Skippy is a character from a widely acclaimed children’s book series by Judy Schachner about a Siamese cat who thinks he’s a Chihuahua and speaks an Americanized form of comic “Spanglish” that includes some actual Spanish words (¡Ay caramba! gracias, loco, fiesta, siesta, frijoles) and several nonsense words such as “Bumblebeeto” for bumble bee (actually abeja) and bandito and Yes indeed-o as rhymes—reinforcing that an American character may pretend to speak Spanish but really doesn’t, just as a Siamese cat may pretend he’s a Chihuahua dog—but he’s really not. Linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill has scrutinized what she called “mock Spanish” as a form of linguistic appropriation, elevating the mock Spanish user while denigrating and stereotyping Spanish and Spanish speakers. Adding the “o” suffixation as in “indeed-o” is one of the many uses of mock Spanish in the text that Hill argues “constitute(s) a form of symbolic violence” as they implicitly associate Spanish as a language that is nonserious, disorderly, undemocratic, and un-American. “Indeed-o,” her argument draws my attention to an unjust disparity between perceptions of a non-Hispanic’s use of mangled Spanish as humorous and/or cosmopolitan and widespread perceptions of Hispanic code-switching or Chicano English/Spanish as vulgar, discreditable, and/or untrustworthy. 

At the same time, comic figures such as Skippy Jon Jones, are unique moments in children’s literature, showcasing a bumbling American “Siamese” Cat-youth attempting to use Spanish and adopt a pseudo-Mexican identity in service to the multicultural imagination.  I theory-switch between Hill’s cultural critique and Chicana feminist writer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizing of nepantla, a permanent in-between space where one dwells in collision—between languages, nation-states, sexual orientations, genders, cultural assumptions.  I suspect humor is one way in which U.S. Americans, unaccustomed to identity struggles, make sense of becoming swept up in an increasingly intercultural and bilingual world.  Is it possible that nepantla has an open door policy and might replace mockery with humility and understanding?

Schachner gives us many moments of comic relief when this wanna-be Chihuahua cat, travels to “outerspice” by pouring red chile powder over his bedding and sneezing his way intergalactically to be with his true Chihuahua friends, “los Chimichangos”.  There are times when I read the Skippy books where a Spanish tag word appears when I will do on-the-spot translation to complete the entire surrounding phrase in Spanish.

“Stop that!” Oren will say.  “Just read it!”

He means “read it in English.” Oren knows Skippy doesn’t really speak Spanish.  After all, Skippy’s mother-cat explains repeatedly to her son, “what it means to be a cat, not a bird… not a mouse or a grouse…not a moose or a goose..not a rat or bat…You need to think about just what it means to be a Siamese cat.”  The book’s message coincides with so many messages we receive in the United States that conflate what you speak with who you are, ascribing a static monolingual identity as symbolic of a kind of national identity and loyalty as a United States citizen. It’s safe to speak Spanish like a Gringo but once you start trying to actually speak “real Spanish” you then become the object of derision.  I recall watching the Saturday night live skit where comedian Mike Meyers and his fellow “news correspondents” and “executives” grossly exaggerated their Spanish vowel and consonant sounds for Latin American place names during the broadcast (e.g. neeek-ah-rah-gwaa for Nicaragua) and continued this exaggerated (mis)pronunciation when ordering lunch  (e.g. “gway-vos” for the Spanish for eggs, huevos) and exaggerating any word with Spanish origin (e.g. Las-Hang-o-lees for Los Angeles and De Brawn-cose for the Broncos).  The sketch is funny because it breaks with unmarked patterns of linguistic assimilation where the sounds of most Spanish loanwords have been absorbed into English much the way the melting pot theory throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries was supposed to seamlessly absorb whole peoples and cultures into an all American stew.  The comedians exaggerate gestures to acknowledge foreign sounds and words as politically (in)correct buffoonery. I remember laughing along about those Americans, the ones that don’t really know Spanish and, in trying to demonstrate expertise, showcase their ignorance.  But might my own Spanish use be perceived this way—a wanna be? An imitator?  Like a savvy businessman, English absorbs other languages’ ideas and talents, invisibly growing the U.S. monolingual corporation with silent, bilingual partners.

When I lived in Mexico City in my early twenties I aspired not only to sound like a native speaker but to act like one too. I believed that if I imitated the market women holding bags in the crook of their elbow, pursing lips as they reviewed avocados and oranges with disdain, then I would be better able to get an authentic, native-like price.  If I walked Mexico city streets with my eyes cast downward, steady in the same knee length skirts and square heeled shoes, that I would repel another version of the man that had jumped out of his car in a raincoat and flashed his nudity when I walked home alone from the University. If my American girlfriend had spoken more Spanish and carried herself differently when entering the metro, a group of teenagers might not have slashed her hand with a knife and stolen her bag. I approximated the Spanish language and Mexican ways of my peers when fencing in a Mexico University gym, travelling to see the solar eclipse in the mountains, attending a protest rally against the Iran-Contra war as Mexican demonstration leaders burned effigies of American soldiers. “Real Spanish” had real consequences for elevating my sense of safety as a very tall guera or white woman (a term men used to catcall me daily) living and studying alone, abroad.  But speaking and acting as “native-like” as possible, illuminated different world views on war, friendship, health, and love.  A wanna-be is an accusation of wanting to be someone one’s not; what do we call someone who wants to be something more than what one is?

As a teacher educator I am amazed that we make it acceptable, even funny, for an American K-5 teacher to deny Spanish ability (e.g. “I don’t speak annnyyyy Spanish”) or “Solo hablo un poco español-o” yet we expect their expertise in a vast range of other domains such as science, math, social studies, and “language arts.”  Learning about languages other than English, however, is denied, disdained, and/or deferred to the too few of us who have become “experts.”  French Theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1991) would call the social pressures against acquiring Spanish as the “unification of the linguistic market.”  Under this system, mocking “real Spanish” and elevating “mock Spanish” are cultural practices that reinforce English monolingualism as our official national identity, despite the many deviations.  Despite living in the mainland United States where 34.5 million people speak Spanish, twenty-one states (as of 2007) have laws declaring English an official language (Potowski & Carreira, 2010). Note the satire in this common language joke:

What do you call someone who speaks two languages: bilingual

What do you call someone who speaks three languages: trilingual

What do you call someone who speaks one language: American!

Since Oren and Liya lucked into spots in the “best” pre-school daycare in our town, we haven’t seen much of Rina and when we do, her English has gotten so strong that she hardly communicates in Spanish with my children. There has been no need and no desire—on a tight, working parent’s schedule it seems quicker to answer Liya’s request for milk or Oren’s request for an apple in English then frustrate communication by using another tongue . The field of pragmatics refers to this as speaker and listener “economy”–as humans in interaction we want the most amount of communication with the least amount of work. Spanish means more work for all of us.  Trabajo, work. But perhaps the pressures are just as much about economy as they are about social forces, a kind of national peer pressure (bullying at times) to keep to the English monolingual status quo.  English is our hip fashion and the world market all wants a part of it—Learn English now! Reduce your accent in 12 days! TESOL programs world wide amass a fortune based on global yearning for English proficiency. 

Yet when I think of the popularity of cartoon figures like Dora the Explorer (la Exploradora), her cousin Diego, and non-Hispanic counterparts like Skippy, I can’t help but optimistically wonder if our nation is also in the midst of a very slow continental drift toward bilingualism? As my children receive birthday cards with “¡Feliz Cumpleaños!” written above cartoon Latino characters, receive flyers announcing Spanish classes through the public park and school systems, and crave the ever more accessible Spanish treat, churros con chocolate, are these signs of the Spanish-English bilingualism and biculturalism to come? Or are they mere gestures, capitulations that absorb a few token elements into our English system but still leave the Spanish—a global—language languishing on its own between U.S. borders. 

“Oye!” I say and hold my hand to my head just as my Yiddish speaking Grandmother has so often done to bemoan a situation. 

“Oye, your brother is going to another scrabble tournament.”

“Oye, your sister hasn’t come by to see me in weeks.”

“Oye, shena putim, did my little Oren get hurt?”

But she doesn’t say, “Oye, you and your mother never learned to speak Yiddish and now the language of my upbringing will die in our family and so many others!”  As an accomplished daughter of immigrants, a certified middle school social studies teacher, I don’t know if my grandmother feels any regret for having passed standard American English onto her offspring.  She did what everyone told her she and her immigrant family and friends were supposed to do.  She thinks my interest in Yiddish as cute; she shares a few phrases and cartoon vocabulary books.  She loves her language—hers, not mine. 

I think that acquiring Spanish, the language of my generation’s immigrant community, is in some senses, a personal journey of linguistic recovery.  I remember sitting in the audience for a “Conversation between Sandra Cisneros and John Phillip Santos” at the American Writing Programs conference in D.C. when Santos defined “Latinidad” as “an opportunity for all Americans to identify with social and linguistic exile.”  Yes! That’s it! That’s the invitation I felt when I first read Cisnero’s Woman Hollering Creek, House on Mango Street, and My Wicked, Wicked Ways when it didn’t matter that the characters were Latina and not Jewish because they were fully human.  Cisernos’ characters (including herself) explored feelings of isolation, fear, dignity, and love grounded in the context of displacement.  These books helped to make the familiar strange and served as companions throughout my Spanish language journey.  Describing “Latinidad” in this way gave me hope that maybe someday Spanish could legitimately and lovingly also be called “mine.” 

***

The Mexican stewardess came by and my daughter demanded “more pretzels!” and two shiny blue celophane bags dropped onto her plastic tray.  “Díle grácias” I commanded, beginning to shift into Spanish through known politeness conventions.  Liya dutifully repeated as she has already learned to do in English, “¡Grácias!”

“What a cute accent!” the stewardess observed.

My children speak Spanish like Americans!  All those years of care with Rina, I thought at the very least my children would shape the Spanish syllables like a Chilean, not an American.  But what, exactly, is wrong with speaking Spanish like an American?  After all these many years of being the exception to the American rule, I want to help change the image of my country and the images my U.S. compañer@s (Linguistic invention in Nepantla Spanish offers a gender neutral noun for compañeros, “companions”) have of learning Spanish. “Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States” the former Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz is noted for saying as a commentary on the power the US had manifested over Mexico.  I would like to think we’ve come a long way as nations since the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and that we have a long way to go until power is more in balance and that power requires us to ask which learners acquire whose language for what purpose, and to what end?  We are so accustomed to the world learning to communicate with us in English, but the opportunities abound for us to learn so much more about the world and about ourselves through the study of the language that is not only “next door,” but readily available in most—if not all—major and minor cities and towns across the country.  “Americans, so far from bilingual, so close to Mexico,” I thought to myself as our plane touched down a mere 4.5 hour direct flight from Atlanta, across the continent to the West coast of Mexico.

_______

 Shall I go on……”translingual memoir” in progress.

Our version isn’t quite so beautiful but here it is!

I’m so proud of us! We’re starting the New Year off right!

My students and co-planners spent many weeks considering the possibilities for the workshop with an emphasis on including lessons on language learning processes–how does an adult English speaking American begin to tackle meaningful, communicative Spanish language acquisition without becoming quickly overwhelmed? What about learning a second language also includes learning a second culture and a second/third/fourth perspective on what constitutes “normal” in every context–from dining to primary school learning to driving a vehicle, child rearing, or deciding upon a time to meet for lunch.  Normal is in the eye of the cultural beholder.

The day we spent together was exhiliarating–filled with many more than the “7 words a day” that one typically can acquire! We immersed, we greeted, we dined, we danced, we cut and strung [papel picado], we played [lóteria, trivia] and won–it was a full, busy day that enriched workshop attendees and facilitators alike.  Thank you to all who came–especially those in attendance from the far corners of our state!  We will announce the spring workshop date shortly and look forward to what happens next.  There is a common toast in Mexico: Pa[ra] arriba, Pa’bajo, Pa’centro, Pa’ dentro–raising a glass of “agua de Jamaica” to the group–up, down, to the middle, to the inside!  The day, like the delicious hibiscus drink, has gone inside to stay and percolate many ideas for more Spanish to come!

Spanish in a day–no way.  Spanish for every Georgia educator–absolutely!

The bilingual reality bristles with greater tensions regarding language rights–the right to be understood, the right to understand, the right to have access to more than one language and culture or not. Anthropologists remind me that languages and dialects (and the speakers who speak them) are under threat around the world–Jamaican Creole, Haitian Kreyol, Singapore English speakers (e.g. Singlish speakers), Wampanog and 1000s of indigenous languages that are endangered or extinct, Montreal French. Rarely are tensions about one word or a slight difference in pronunciation (see the Singlish youtube video about cock/coke), more often they are about power, cultural maintenance and survival, identity, fear and love. In 6 minutes my cab arrives to take me away from this bilingual city, rich in struggle and examples of bilingual survival. May the conversations begun continue until we find ourselves code-switching in hybrid genres, where the norm is to move through multiple codes and Codes, where we can remember Dora as a fond but distant memory of a time that was.