I have been living in a language carnival over the past month, with several very different languages rolling through me and around me, as well as new questions about what kind of language gives us access to our inner strengths and to other people.
February began with a visit my Immigration Justice Civic Engagement group made to Heartland Alliance, for a conversation exchange with the ESL students, who hailed from Burma, Iraq, Ethiopia, and many other countries. The people we talked with have refugee status, which entitles them to a few months of services like housing, English classes, and job training. Certainly, it isn’t enough time for people to be able to get their feet on the ground – yet, the fact that these services do still exist speaks to our country’s immigrant-welcoming heritage. But the contrast with immigrants who are not designated refugees is striking. I see people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico fleeing violence in their countries not welcomed and stabilized but put in jail and deported.
A painting I saw as I walked into a conference a couple of weeks later pointed to this problematic contradiction. The text on the yellow “Curious Jorge” poster read:
Syria= refugee
Darfur=refugee
Uganda=refugee
Afghanistan= refugee
Latin America = ILLEGAL ALIENS
For generations, this country has sorted immigrants into legal and illegal, deserving and undeserving – contributing to a contradictory relationship to immigration in this country, but also an unhealthy relationship to culture. At this conference I learned about approaches to culture, language, and education that are healthy and generative. “Embracing the borderlands consciousness,” the conference’s keynote speaker Monica Valadez said, “we gain strength.”
The conference was in McAllen, Texas, right on the border with Mexico, and it moved fluidly between English and Spanish. Francisco and Miguel Guajardo and their many colleagues, students, and family members hosted the 3-day event, the annual North Dakota Study Group meeting. Alongside coalition-building to organize against corporate-driven education, the people in the meeting – community organizers, teachers, students, and professors from South Texas and from all over the country – considered the relationship of language and culture, and the informal education associated with plática, which, the Guajardos’ students explained to me, is culturally grounded conversation.
Plática is learning that begins with one’s own experience, in connection with others, and grows outward from there; it leads to both keen critical analysis and deep cultural affirmation. Whereas much of academic discourse pretends to “objectivity” and disregards the specificity of people’s local, home, and inner experience, plática lives in human bodies and real space. The Guajardos write about plática as a base of their research, teaching, and writing, and learning plática from their parents:
The constant pedagogical tool was the plática, which made sense to us at every level. Plática was performed in language we understood, through an expressive cultural form that felt natural, and in a way that was respectful and affirming. It was a teaching and learning experience that conferred great privilege to our lives, the lives of our children, our students, and our communities (Guajardo & Guajardo 2013, p. 162).
This is language of learning that doesn’t stop at the doors of the school, but that affirms the human beings in home spaces as well as school spaces. The NDSG conference focuses on the power of school-community relationships, and the educators at the conference go out to learn from local community organizations in the same way that my Parker students do for their civic engagement learning. My group visited La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), the local United Farmworkers group founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. LUPE organizes in the colonias of the Rio Grande Valley, in which some 300,000 people live — and where they have to campaign to gain public services like lights, sanitation, and transportation. As LUPE’s sister organization Equal Voices Network emphasizes, organizers “bring the government to the people.” LUPE leaders gave us a handout that included this description of community organizing; it resonated with what I have been coming to understand about language:
Organizing does two central things to seek to rectify the problem of power imbalance – it builds a permanent base of people power so that dominant financial and institutional power can be challenged and held accountable to values of greater social, environmental, and economic justice; and, it transforms individuals and communities, making them mutually respectful co-creators of public life rather than passive objects of decisions made by others. — Mike Miller, Organize Training Center.
Language that is prescribed and controlled by faceless powers prevents people from developing as “co-creators of public life.” So, it’s no wonder that decision makers keep low-income and immigrant children in schools that ignore and devalue their home language, knowledge, and culture. Test-based education, just like English-only policies and de facto school segregation, ensures that the populace will be “passive objects of decisions made by others.” Local, place-based, culturally affirming practices, on the other hand, provides people with space to grow as human beings who see clearly, love fiercely, and act collectively for justice.
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