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Hispanic Youth Symposium 2009 — Hispanic College Fund

30 Oct 2009 by SenoritaRuth

Video cour­tesy of Stina Augustsson.

Work­ing at South Val­ley Acad­emy as their Col­lege Coun­selor dur­ing the 2008–2009 school year was a gal­va­niz­ing expe­ri­ence. It forced me to bring into focus the strug­gles I endured in rela­tion to com­plet­ing my post-high school education.

Going to col­lege was an under­ly­ing assump­tion in our famil­ial cul­ture. My mother holds a bac­calau­re­ate degree from the Uni­ver­si­dad Autónoma de Chi­huahua in Chem­istry. My father com­pleted his emer­gency med­i­cine degrees and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions within two years of return­ing to the U.S. with his young fam­ily (us). How­ever, the exe­cu­tion of this expec­ta­tion proved to be messy and painful. Long story short, I quit UNM in the mid­dle of my sec­ond semes­ter. As an 18 year-old dis­tracted by a boyfriend, an apart­ment, friends and par­ty­ing, I walked away from UNM in the mid­dle of the spring semes­ter after my grad­u­a­tion from West Mesa HS.

Unfor­tu­nately, WMHS did not pro­vide the type of intense guid­ance that a first-generation, immi­grant ado­les­cent needs when com­mit­ting to becom­ing not only a col­lege stu­dent, but a col­lege grad­u­ate. We were a grad­u­at­ing class of about 350. We had been a fresh­man class of over 900. The sta­tis­ti­cal cor­re­la­tion between begin­ning and fin­ish­ing high-schoolers remains con­stant in large schools. In a pop­u­la­tion of over 2k, the college-bound poten­tial of a stu­dent or even a group of stu­dents becomes lost in the cacoph­ony of sur­vival that shapes the most crit­i­cal years of thou­sands of our stu­dents. National His­panic Merit Scholar semi-finalist? Sounds fancy! My under­stand­ing of what it meant to do well on the PSAT only became clear to me as an adult.

This long-story-short ram­bling intro out­lines my expe­ri­ence as a teenager in the Albu­querque, NM USA school sys­tem because of the unique oppor­tu­nity that I was granted after fin­ish­ing my B.A. in Lin­guis­tics & Span­ish and wrap­ping up course­work for my Master’s. I accepted a posi­tion at South Val­ley Acad­emy as an Edu­ca­tional Assis­tant. The work sounded intense and intrigu­ing, the pace seemed dynamic.

Well, I had no idea what I was in for. I will leave my largely-positive com­men­tary on char­ter schools for another time. That said, there is an inher­ent ben­e­fit to a small-population school envi­ron­ment. Com­mit­ting to ensur­ing that all 26 seniors would be enrolled and famil­iar with one of our local higher-learning insti­tu­tions was an incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence. It was chal­leng­ing, a bit insane, but eye-opening and morally awakening.

I attended the sym­po­sium to fol­low up with the SVA stu­dents that attended, and to get a feel for the type of event that HCF put together. What a thrilling time! I attended a com­pe­ti­tion where stu­dents put together com­mu­nity action plans to address social issues that keeps stu­dents from being suc­cess­ful. I watched a tal­ent show that show­cased skills and tal­ents from singing to tae kwon do. I vis­ited sev­eral booths at the career fair event. It’s the event that can be the pivot point for a stu­dent that oth­er­wise has not been taught where to find the bridge between “I want to be a … when I grow up” and the con­crete plan of action that will ful­fill that dream. If the His­panic Youth Sym­po­sium would have been around to help my gen­er­a­tion, suc­cess­ful as we are (go Mus­tangs! Class of ’98!), I’m con­vinced that the out­come of our efforts at col­lege and beyond would have been couched in bet­ter strat­egy and more knowledge.

Some­times it is dif­fi­cult to con­ceive that there are peo­ple younger than us. Most of the rest of the time, it’s easy to assume that they’ve got it under con­trol, since we turned out so well with no guid­ance or super­vi­sion (adjust to your own expe­ri­ence as needed). Yet, the fab­ric of a cul­ture and a soci­ety is only cre­ated by the con­nec­tions between peo­ple. It is our respon­si­bil­ity to ensure that those fol­low­ing the same paths as us have access to our insight.

Beyond access, it should be our pri­or­ity to pro-actively share our expe­ri­ences and exper­tise. Espe­cially at such a chal­leng­ing time as the tran­si­tion between teens and twen­ties. Some say that high school is hard. The real­ity is, the years right after high school are the most chal­leng­ing. For those of us that sur­vived, it may now seem ele­men­tary, but we should never under­mine the poten­tial for influ­ence and empow­er­ment that we can have in each oth­ers’ lives. After all, today’s high school stu­dents are tomorrow’s col­leagues, employ­ees, fel­low dri­vers and par­ents. Let’s com­mit to a bet­ter community!

The His­panic Col­lege Fund is an amaz­ing orga­ni­za­tion, and they need our help when it comes to ensur­ing that pro­grams such as the His­panic Youth Sym­po­sium remain avail­able for our stu­dents, and that they become excit­ing hubs of knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion exchange in the areas that will affect tomorrow’s col­lege graduate.

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Infrastructure fractures

10 Oct 2009 by SenoritaRuth

Cruis­ing west on Cen­tral, past Coors, is never going to be the same again. I’ve watched it change, pas­sive eyes scan­ning the long, brown flats chock full of weeds green or brown as the sea­sons changed, from 5th grade through…well…now. Granted, I’m the pas­sen­ger less often, and par­al­lel to that there is less dirt, cov­ered over by con­crete foun­da­tions and tidy, American-dream-achieved homes. Just as many weeds though, they just grow closer together.

Regard­less, it used to be a hel­luva ride. First from 98th, where we turned east out of West­gate to head to church on 57th street every Sun­day (every Sun­day– every one), to later on when 86th was cut out of the dunes and later paved. They even­tu­ally put some side­walks, too. The long-awaited side­walks were the indi­ca­tion of civ­i­liza­tion. For almost a whole decade we lived, seem­ingly stranded, sep­a­rated from the city and its ameni­ties by an ever-swirling spring wind storm, with­out much more than the infor­mal con­crete curb to mark the place where peo­ple should drive, ver­sus the place where peo­ple should tromp through the sand in the awk­ward way sand makes one do so; it has the same sense of humor as snow piled up in substance-less drifts.

West­gate was for a long time before we ever arrived a neigh­bor­hood tucked out of the way, a micro-system that I par­tic­i­pated in as a ten year-old child and middle-schooler. My imme­di­ate, prac­ti­cal world view finally expanded while I attended West Mesa and ran around the greater north­west part of town. Coach Gee would lit­er­ally makes us run around all over the west side; from the ditch banks of the South Val­ley to the bike paths of Unser, in front of the pet­ro­glyphs, near St. Pious and Fly­ing J on 98th. Cross-country was my own per­sonal tour of the place where I lived, a place with which I suf­fered a con­flicted, slightly angry rela­tion­ship. Still, those places are for­ever embed­ded in my mind and in my emo­tional landscape.

As is Cen­tral; wide and dark, fast and dirty. It was an inevitable road in my life, the only way out of West­gate long before Unser, Blake, Tower and Bridge net­worked and expanded. 98th and Cen­tral, to Cen­tral and Unser, Cen­tral and Coors. To free­dom, new expe­ri­ences and the vast land­scape of a brand new coun­try, lan­guage and adven­ture. Sun­light enter­tained day­dreams and the deep­en­ing shad­ows cush­ioned dark fears as asphalt, white lines and adolescent-tall tum­ble­weeds rushed in place past us.

The ride from Cen­tral and Coors to Cen­tral and 98th was the per­fect stretch of road to lull one to sleep with a mind full of final, tired thoughts. After Wednes­day night church meet­ings, after long days of extra-curricular-related activ­i­ties, on the way home from friends’ houses or shop­ping expe­di­tions. The wide road curved up 9 Mile Hill in the dis­tance, vehi­cles of all sorts motor­ing their way steadily into the set­ting sun.

Ver­i­zon rose out of the desert sands behind Albertson’s and gave us a traf­fic light. The fash­ion spread like 21st cen­tury eco-mindfulness. Now, between Unser and 98th, there will be two more work­ing sem­a­phores. One is at as-of-yet uncar­ved inter­sec­tion, where the desert imme­di­ately south of Cen­tral is still curbed and unde­vel­oped. The other is at 86th and Cen­tral, the inter­sec­tion which became, unex­pect­edly, a rivulet of life & traf­fic, with the dol­lar store and the gas sta­tions rep­re­sent­ing the cul­mi­na­tion of human need for the dusty beings that live on the dunes, tucked away and oppos­ing the Sandias.

I’m not say­ing that there shouldn’t be traf­fic lights. First of all, BCFD Divi­sion Com­man­der Boris would, almost imper­cep­ti­bly and only momen­tar­ily, raise an eye­brow in dis­ap­proval of my fast and loose take on pub­lic safety. Hor­rific events play in my head, past human costs for the priv­i­lege of dri­ving fast in a metal death trap under the influ­ence of chem­i­cal inhibitors, cut­ting across the as-of-yet unlit roads of Albu­querque in the dark like a furtive noc­tur­nal rodent.

When I was in 7th grade I cov­ered the Gor­don House deba­cle for the Tru­man Mid­dle School news­pa­per, crap­pily imi­tat­ing the AP style in my first attempt at jour­nal­ism. My young mind gained its first rudi­men­tary under­stand­ing of drunk dri­ving and how it affects life in the wild west. The traf­fic lights are good, nay, nec­es­sary. It makes sense to inter­rupt the con­stant flow of machin­ery at high speeds. It’s good we can’t ramp it up to 65mph by the time we hit 98th from the healthy 45mph we were doing down Unser. The ride now takes a bit more delib­er­a­tion down that stretch as a frown­ing red sig­nal mod­er­ates the urge to push on the gas pedal, just a lit­tle further.

Yet I can’t feel but a bit of nos­tal­gia as I stare down Cen­tral for the nth time in my life, the engine faith­fully fir­ing as I man­age the lane change to the inside lane, visu­al­iz­ing the lean­ing turn onto 86th in t minus 5 min­utes after I turn off Unser. I no longer see an open road of poten­tial, as gen­er­a­tions before me saw it in the shim­mer­ing sun­set light that cast the mun­dane real­ity of every­day liv­ing in a con­tin­u­ous golden dream light of romance and adventure.

Route 66 is just that more civ­i­lized now as it courses through the lit­tle big out­post town of Albu­querque, New Mex­ico. We must be so proud to be so grown up.

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I grew up like a

24 Sep 2009 by SenoritaRuth

wild west weed wan­der­ing
tall and round, spiky.
dried and hol­low, drifting.

shot out of loose sand home,
dull fibrous bit­ter green.
raises a stink when torn.

sun dries to a hard snap
pro­tec­tive, razor lances.
scrape skin, embed in nap

Lots, gar­dens, street edges
squeeze, wrenched brown dry while
winds woo the wiry wenches.

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2009 New Mexico Wine Festival — my first time

05 Sep 2009 by SenoritaRuth

While I’ve resided in Albu­querque for almost 20 years and have spent all my drink­ing years firmly ensconced between the moun­tains and the rio, I’ve never been to the Bernalillo Wine Fes­ti­val. You’d find this odd if you knew how oppor­tune I can be to arrive when it’s a gath­er­ing that involves “tast­ing.” Yes, that’s what the kids call it nowadays.

That I haven’t been is due to a vari­ety of rea­sons, mostly coin­cid­ing with out­ra­geous lack of plan­ning and the gen­eral social amne­sia that peo­ple deeply embed­ded in their daily rou­tine tend to have toward spe­cial events. Some­times I spaced it out, other times I’m already doing some­thing else. I’ve been try­ing really hard to over­come the Sat­ur­day Lazies (though they can hap­pen on any day, not just Sat­ur­day). For me, the symp­toms of SL often include an excuse for not attend­ing or par­tic­i­pat­ing, some­times my finances are the scape­goat, other times I develop a sud­den dis­dain for the rest of human­ity; the mere thought of being with other peo­ple makes me change my mind about going.

This Sun­day, how­ever, proves to be an excep­tion. Along with a cou­ple of fun friends, I’ll be traips­ing across the Bernalillo land­scape, sip­ping wine and mak­ing ama­teur­ish deci­sions about how much I like it while enjoy­ing the cooler post-summer dog days weather. There’s even chance of thun­der­storms! I’ll be grab­bing my umbrella on my way out the door. I’m look­ing for­ward to tast­ing wines from Blue Teal and St. Clair, who are my favorites, as well as dis­cov­er­ing new bot­tled friends to get me through the ran­dom, emo­tional Sat­ur­day night. Hey, it happens!

The crown­ing jewel of this achieve­ment of local, social par­ticip­tion would be totake the Rail­run­ner up to the shindig. How­ever, my mates are less keen on the envi­ron­ment and more keen on hav­ing an imme­di­ate exit strat­egy avail­able. I must say that I under­stand. Should some­thing unto­ward hap­pen, I don’t want to have to wait for the train; I’d like to be able to jet outta there as quickly as possible.

So this leaves me with not hav­ing taken the Rail­run­ner yet. That’s okay, my next daytrip to Santa Fe will be trans­porta­tion­ally spon­sored by our quick, if not some­times deadly, light rail sys­tem. It’s dif­fi­cult to move the Wild West out of the men­tal­ity that the auto­mo­bile rep­re­sents the con­su­mate indi­vid­u­al­ity, the ulti­mate free­dom to go any­where and do any­thing. Instead, our mod­ern Wild West soci­ety needs to empha­size and cham­pion the causes of com­mu­nity, coop­er­a­tion and that small-yet-huge amount of self-sacrifice it will take to shift the par­a­digm toward a cleaner, more effi­cient trans­porta­tion system.

All that said, I know I’m going to enjoy the car pool­ing up to the fes­ti­val, as well the com­pany of some great friends and fine local spir­its. I’ll be tweet­ing from the Fes­ti­val, in case you expected any­thing dif­fer­ent. See you around!

Rel­e­vant Links:

New Mex­ico Wine Festival

NM Rail­run­ner Sched­ule & Pricing

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Señorita Ruth on: being Green

22 Apr 2008 by SenoritaRuth

I’m get­ting tired of toss­ing stuff in the trash. Espe­cially as I raise a child, the guilt I feel when I toss out another plas­tic con­tainer or glass bot­tle is get­ting pretty unbear­able. So, what to do? There are sev­eral options to change your Car­bon Foot­print, even if solar pan­els are still out­side your price bracket. In addi­tion, there’s a slew of web­sites and books out there with valu­able insight into the lit­tle things (and big!) that we can do to change our impact from neg­a­tive to pos­i­tive. Fol­low­ing are some of the most acces­si­ble ways to alle­vi­ate waste and guilt.

Recy­cling: The City of Albu­querque will pick up your recy­clables road-side pro­vided you have them sep­a­rated and bagged appro­pri­ately. Alter­na­tively, they also offer 22 drop-off points through­out the metro area. As the years have gone by, the city has expanded their recy­cling reper­toire, now accept­ing all plas­tic bot­tles regard­less of num­ber, as well as plas­tics #s 1 and 2. This is in addi­tion to cor­ru­gated card­board, not chip­board (i.e. cereal boxes), alu­minum, and any and all house­hold paper, includ­ing the godaw­ful obnox­ious shiny paper of junk mail­ings. They won’t pick up glass for safety rea­sons, but you can drop that off at the recy­cling point near­est you. Over­all, recy­cling around here can be pretty effort­less, pro­vided you’re will­ing to build into your rou­tine the extra sev­eral min­utes a week it would take to make sure waste is sep­a­rated from reusable mate­r­ial. Like any good habit, this can be hard to incor­po­rate into our already packed lives, but as a mat­ter of pri­or­ity, it’s cer­tainly worth the effort to get the recy­clable mate­ri­als to the curb by 7 a.m. on trash day. A way to do this eas­ily is to sort trash from the get-go. You can re-purpose sev­eral trash­cans to do the dirty work, or you can find a solu­tion like this one to keep all your cans and bot­tles out of sight. Or hell, you can build it if you’re car­pen­try inclined. A cheap and handy can crusher can be wall-mounted and kept out of sight in the laun­dry room or garage. This will help you save space and effort, as you’ll have to put out your alu­minum recy­cling less often. If you use a sturdy card­board box to keep all your old news­pa­pers & junk mail­ings in, you can cut deep slits down the mid­dle of each side, lay out the twine ahead of time, and viola! An easy way to keep paper tidy and mess-free when tying it up for the recy­cling man!

I was talk­ing to a fel­low grad stu­dent here at UNM who also works in Oper­a­tions. He broke the news to me that UNM recy­cles only 30% of its paper and metal. Hav­ing worked in Admin­is­tra­tion here, I know that even with our exten­sive online sys­tems, stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff still gen­er­ate MASSIVE amounts of paper waste. When I think of all the Daily Lobos dis­carded through­out cam­pus, used up nap­kins from the Mer­cado, and the paper that paper reams come wrapped in (very meta), even 30% is a lot. Addi­tion­ally, he men­tioned to me that aside from recy­cling cop­per, UNM actu­ally loses money by recy­cling. It costs .12 more cents to recy­cle paper and most met­als than it does to toss all our trash in the local dumps. I find this sta­tis­tic wor­ri­some and a lit­tle con­found­ing. As he pointed out how­ever, the social cost we must pay for recy­cling will last for a long time before we start see­ing the ben­e­fits (as in, lesser cost to recy­cle than dump) of our actions. This, how­ever, should not dis­cour­age us from doing our share. In fact, it should light fire under our asses to get on the ball and keep using the sys­tems in place to recy­cle, as the only way to bring down these costs is to stan­dard­ize and mech­a­nize these streams of mate­r­ial. Inter­est­ingly, I also learned today that a lot of our recy­cling goes to China as raw mate­r­ial, to be returned to our coun­try later on as all the “Made in China” prod­ucts that lit­ter our homes and lives. Inter­est­ing stuff! So, keep recy­cling, or start if you haven’t already.

Reuse stuff at home: Com­ing from a fam­ily with a crafty mother, I’ve learned to look around and re-purpose stuff within my home. Like my mom, I’ve stopped throw­ing away Bueno Chile plas­tic con­tain­ers because they’re the per­fect size for a left­over side dish or extra grated cheese. The glass jars from my yummy Maranatha peanut but­ter are now used to store bulk raisins and nuts, which are bet­ter to buy because you’re not pay­ing (or wast­ing) new pack­ag­ing. You’re sav­ing money & mate­r­ial. It’s a no-lose sit­u­a­tion! How rare are those? Egg shells and cof­fee grounds have stopped going in the trash. Since I rent I’m reluc­tant to start the type of com­post pile my dad has been work­ing on for years. How­ever, grind­ing up eggshells and mix­ing them and cof­fee grounds into the soil of your house plants is an egg­cel­lent (awww!) way to reuse mate­ri­als, giv­ing directly back to the earth, and you’re able to enjoy the results directly. Recep­ta­cles, con­tain­ers, and tubs with lids are things we use every day in our lives. It shouldn’t mat­ter from whence they came, as long as they’re liv­ing out their work­ing lives serv­ing and sav­ing extra food, but­tons, or other small items.

Change your car habits: I know, I know. Eas­ier said than done, right? And here is where I con­fess a dirty, nasty secret. I live 5 min­utes away from UNM. I haven’t timed it walk­ing, but since I can get there in less time than it takes to play one of my favorite songs on my favorite dri­ving CD, I’m pretty sure that the walk­ing is less of a hard­ship and more of the good exer­cise I need any­way. My excuses include: I’m always late, I have a kid that needs a car seat, it’s cold, it’s hot, etc, etc. I have per­fectly good, ratio­nal ways to over­come each one of these obsta­cles, and yet here I am, typ­ing this at school and accu­mu­lat­ing a mas­sive park­ing struc­ture fee for the day. I read in a recent issue of the Alibi that Albu­querque was voted one of the cities best suited for bik­ing. It’s true! Our bike paths are exten­sive and fairly rider-friendly. My next big pur­chase will be a good, depend­able bicy­cle. Our tran­sit sys­tem needs some work before some of us can depend on it reg­u­larly (ever try to get from West­gate to Tramway?), but it already serves many Albu­querqueans well (my neigh­bor included, his car sits qui­etly in the yard most of the time, unmoved), and the Red and Blue Lines have done won­ders to expe­dite one’s jour­ney down Cen­tral Avenue.

In short, there are a mil­lion dif­fer­ent tiny things to do in our every­day lives that can cumu­la­tively help shift the tide of waste­ful exis­tence we’ve been born into. It’s not gonna hap­pen overnight, and being from a cul­ture that’s used to instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and imme­di­ate results, this may be a lit­tle frus­trat­ing. How­ever, we’re all respon­si­ble for our­selves and each other, as well as the land we use for our ben­e­fit. While my inten­tion is not to sound the Holier-hippie-than-thou horn of green judg­ment, I want to encour­age every­one to take a bit of time to reflect on their use and usage. It’s a jour­ney, not an instant achieve­ment, which means we all have room for improve­ment.

Happy Earth Day!

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The James & Ernie Show

15 Apr 2008 by admin

I’m sorry, but the recipe will have to wait. I just attended a per­for­mance of the James & Ernie Show in the UNM Ball­room. I offered my stu­dents extra credit to attend, and I’m so glad to have seen some of them there. It was bril­liant! I won’t do the show an injus­tice by try­ing to recap­ture it, but I will say this: if you get the chance to attend, do not pass it up. It’s a great way to cap­ture some of the nuances we may or may not be exposed to in the rest of our lives. Their take on the mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism we expe­ri­ence daily.

Check them out online:

James and Ernie

And if you’re on Myspace, request to be their friend because they’re “tired of Tom being our only friend”:

Jame and Ernie Myspace

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The Duke would be so proud!

15 Apr 2008 by admin

Today’s blog post will be a recipe from Mamá‘s Kitchen, just in time for din­ner later on.

For now I just wanted to point you in the direc­tion of Duke City Fix.

When I started this blog (this last week­end), I wasn’t sure what the state of blog­ging was in our oasis of tech­nol­ogy. Now I know! Get your pro­file there and come say hi!

A warm wel­come by the cre­ator reminds me that this is a local, community-based effort, a social net­work worlds apart from Tom being your first friend on Myspace (I have one of those too, but you’ll have to work to find it if we’re not acquainted). I’m keen on jump­ing head­long into this effort.

Now, off to teach and learn. Stay tuned for Green Chile Stew later!

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Señorita Ruth on: English Only Pt. 2

13 Apr 2008 by SenoritaRuth

Are They Talk­ing About Me?
What are the ide­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of choos­ing an offi­cial lan­guage? What kind of under­ly­ing belief sys­tem does it betray? A major marker of cul­ture and iden­tity, lan­guage sep­a­rates worlds of expe­ri­ence. And when it’s not your own, it’s often uncom­fort­able to have to deal with. Basic ques­tions that seem both ludi­crous and star­tlingly wor­ri­some express thoughts and assump­tions that begin to sur­face along the lines of “Are they talk­ing about me?” This may appear para­noid and self-centered, but is also a reflec­tion of the lin­guis­tic iso­la­tion mono­lin­gual Amer­i­can Eng­lish speak­ers expe­ri­ence on a daily basis. The unique geo­graph­i­cal posi­tion, along with the desires of the founders of the coun­try, have com­bined to cre­ate an insu­lar envi­ron­ment for Eng­lish, much more so than in other parts of the world. In addi­tion, Amer­i­can cit­i­zens speak one of the world’s most influ­en­tial lan­guages, afford­ing them lit­tle moti­va­tion to learn a sec­ond lan­guage beyond the cur­sory high school or col­lege cur­ricu­lum expe­ri­ence. As any bilin­gual speaker will tell you, that’s not really speak­ing two lan­guages at all.

So we have a nat­u­rally pro­tected envi­ron­ment for “one nation, one lan­guage” to func­tion as the ide­o­log­i­cal as well as the policy-based modus operandi. Our fore­fa­thers did not feel it was the role of gov­ern­ment to dic­tate to the peo­ple what lan­guages they should speak. Fur­ther­more, it was not uncom­mon in the early days of this coun­try, as it is now, for legal doc­u­ments, pam­phlets, and other offi­cial or quasi-official com­mu­ni­ca­tions to be pub­lished in the myr­iad of lan­guages that rep­re­sent our multi-cultural roots. Span­ish, Ger­man, French, and Dutch are a few of the first lan­guages immi­grants brought with them to add to the cul­tural and lin­guis­tic land­scape of a coun­try made up of trans­plants. From a healthy lin­guis­tic com­pe­ti­tion, Eng­lish emerged as the early win­ner, the lan­guage to bind speak­ers of many lan­guages together. To that effect, it is the de facto, con­ven­tional and fully accepted pri­mary lan­guage.

Nested within our overtly anglo­phonic cul­ture we have a long-standing tra­di­tion of multi-lingualism. Ves­tiges of true bilin­gual­ism exist in our efforts to expose chil­dren at every level of edu­ca­tion to other West­ern Euro­pean lan­guages. Even in the face of this tra­di­tion and ide­o­log­i­cal moti­va­tions behind cre­at­ing a coun­try with­out an offi­cial lan­guage, how­ever, there is a voice that in the form of leg­is­la­tion has asked both fed­eral and state-level gov­ern­ments to adopt Eng­lish as the offi­cial lan­guage of the United States. The cur­rent efforts by orga­ni­za­tions such as U.S. Eng­lish would see Eng­lish adopted as the offi­cial lan­guage, and in such a capac­ity dis­place lan­guages spo­ken in fam­i­lies and minor­ity com­mu­ni­ties more than ever before.

What has Eng­lish done for you?
Regard­less of its (lack of) offi­cial sta­tus, Eng­lish is the lan­guage of the peo­ple. Over­whelm­ingly used as the pri­mary lan­guage in all walks of life, Eng­lish is trans­mit­ted suc­cess­fully to the kids of every gen­er­a­tion, and of every cul­tural back­ground. The Amer­i­can pub­lic school sys­tems guar­an­tee trans­mis­sion by using Eng­lish both in the class­room and in the play­ground. It’s the lan­guage of for­mal edu­ca­tion as well as of infor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It’s present in every form of media, and is highly sought as a sec­ond lan­guage around the world and by non-native speak­ers in the U.S. Stud­ies show that even those with no for­mal sec­ond lan­guage edu­ca­tion, sim­ply by being immersed in the cul­ture, acquire a func­tional grasp of the lan­guage. Its far-reaching global sta­tus is rec­og­nized in Africa as well as Europe and Asia. It’s very appar­ent to the world that speak­ing Eng­lish is asso­ci­ated with socioe­co­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties not avail­able in many people’s first lan­guage, there­fore it is desired. Most impor­tant to real­ize is that, even if not every per­son speaks Eng­lish in the U.S., those person’s chil­dren will. Remov­ing the abil­ity of non-fluent cit­i­zens and vis­i­tors the abil­ity to inter­act with the gov­ern­ment and within their own com­mu­ni­ties by enforc­ing Eng­lish Only doesn’t change the actu­al­i­ties of lan­guage use: Peo­ple have dif­fer­ent capac­i­ties to learn and retain a sec­ond lan­guage, but as long as that lan­guage is being taught as a first lan­guage, the sta­tus quo is nat­u­rally main­tained by the major­ity lan­guage.

English Only pol­icy seeks to reaf­firm a sta­tus that it has no right to either cre­ate or uphold. A lan­guage becomes widely used and influ­en­tial through use. Award­ing it a legal sta­tus changes lit­tle in the way it prop­a­gates through the greater cul­ture and soci­ety. Edu­ca­tion, the media, and the vari­ety of social exchanges that occur in Eng­lish are respon­si­ble for Eng­lish being the major­ity lan­guage. When under­stood in this light, the Eng­lish Only move­ment is hol­low and mean­ing­less, a mis­placed effort that could and should be used to attend to other, more press­ing mat­ters regard­ing the sta­tus of lan­guage and lan­guages in this coun­try.

Further­more, there are the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of legal­iz­ing a human cog­ni­tive facil­ity. Like many other efforts in the past to reg­u­late human behav­ior and cat­e­go­rize peo­ple accord­ing to eth­nic or genetic mark­ers, this effort will only work to strengthen the bound­aries of an arti­fice upon our cul­ture that we would do bet­ter with­out. Giv­ing Eng­lish legal sta­tus directly works against the social mech­a­nisms we have in place by which to iden­tify our­selves and each other. Gov­ern­ing people’s spo­ken lives will incur costs both finan­cial and cul­tural that we should not be pre­pared to shoul­der, and will doom yet another gen­er­a­tion to a pur­ga­tory of self-identity as the same words echo as have in the past: “I don’t know my mother tongue.” We as a soci­ety are still deal­ing with the after-effects of the Native Amer­i­cans who for­sook Navajo and other lan­guages after suf­fer­ing through board­ing schools and the rural ele­men­tary school chil­dren who suf­fered phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment for speak­ing Span­ish in the class­rooms of old Texas and the South­west. These peo­ple kept their own chil­dren from learn­ing their mother tongue to the detri­ment of their fam­ily and cul­tural iden­tity, and encour­aged them to only speak Eng­lish. The fal­lacy in these efforts is that the chil­dren of immi­grants become so quickly accul­tur­ated that any overt effort to do so by pre­vent­ing the learn­ing of another lan­guage is redun­dant and effec­tively irrel­e­vant. It should be the ideal of a pro­gres­sive, diverse soci­ety to encour­age a healthy lin­guis­tic home envi­ron­ment. Bilin­gual­ism should not have a neg­a­tive value when it comes to cit­i­zen­ship, par­tic­i­pa­tion and inte­gra­tion within the greater soci­ety.

English Only poli­cies will cast a reign of shad­ows over minor­ity lan­guage speak­ers. Legal immi­grants and Native Amer­i­cans alike who use the same ser­vices and inter­act with the same gov­ern­ment as native Eng­lish speak­ers stand to lose oppor­tu­ni­ties in offi­cial capac­i­ties. The time, effort, and money it takes to trans­late offi­cial U.S. doc­u­ments into other lan­guages has always been devoted to the same task since the 1700s, and in no way eclipses other gov­ern­ment spend­ing fig­ures which may or may not be as sig­nif­i­cant. Beyond the bureau­cratic con­se­quences, by accept­ing this pol­icy the coun­try runs the threat of expe­dit­ing the rate at which some lan­guages become extinct.

Ethics and Progress
Beyond the ques­tions of legal­ity, which on their own are sub­stan­tial, we also deal with the more abstract but just as cru­cial con­cepts that influ­enced the orig­i­nal deci­sion to do with­out an offi­cial lan­guage. It’s been pointed out that the fore­fa­thers couldn’t have pre­dicted how many lan­guages we have to deal with. Yet I won­der how sym­pa­thetic they would be to our plight if they com­pared their tech­nol­ogy to ours. We ben­e­fit from dig­i­tal media that have brought the world closer together, stan­dard­iz­ing and mak­ing avail­able more lan­guages to more peo­ple. It would stand to rea­son that we uti­lize these advan­tages to ben­e­fit all. How­ever, even these flimsy argu­ments side­step the under­ly­ing sen­ti­ment that dri­ves pol­icy efforts such a Eng­lish Only. Claim­ing patri­o­tism, these efforts eclipse more fun­da­men­tal mem­ber­ships that we should also feel a strong respon­si­bil­ity toward: Amer­i­can multi-cultural and multi-lingual cul­ture, and the human race, wherein every­one has an equal right to speak the lan­guage they were taught to express them­selves in.

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Señorita Ruth on: English Only Pt. 1

11 Apr 2008 by SenoritaRuth

Nations & Lan­guage
It’s easy to trace and under­stand the con­nec­tion between the ideas of “one nation” and “one lan­guage.” These sim­ple asso­ci­a­tions have out­lined the lan­guage poli­cies of west­ern Euro­pean coun­tries from the mid­dle of the 19th cen­tury for­ward. Even before that, con­quer­ing pow­ers have under­stood the fun­da­men­tal need to estab­lish a com­mon tongue amongst the newly con­quered, often wildly dif­fer­ent peo­ples they con­trolled. While effec­tive in build­ing a nation, these poli­cies have also neg­a­tively affected count­less lan­guages and cul­tures across the world. It’s true that the moti­va­tions for the expan­sion of any given nation or empire are usu­ally money, trade, and com­merce. How­ever, the under­ly­ing struc­ture of such endeav­ors is lan­guage. In order to suc­cess­fully inter­act with other cul­tures, even in the role of con­quer­ing or col­o­niz­ing power, the lan­guage “issue” must be addressed.

It would be dif­fi­cult to enu­mer­ate all the instances of lan­guages being aban­doned, by either will or force, for another as a result of cul­tural and social pres­sure. How­ever, I don’t have to stray far from the South­west to find evi­dence of mul­ti­ple efforts through­out his­tory to estab­lish, through force, the use of the Euro­pean lan­guage of power. First it was Span­ish, and then it was Eng­lish. The first estab­lished a trans-continental iden­tity for a large num­ber of inhab­i­tants of the Amer­i­cas, and the sec­ond rede­fined that iden­tity as polit­i­cal bor­ders changed and nations exchanged land for peace. As an exam­ple, New Mex­ico has belonged to the Span­ish Empire, the Mex­i­can nation, and of course the United States.

In this his­tory, we have instances of Native Amer­i­cans being force­fully accul­tur­ated into both Span­ish and Eng­lish speak­ing roles. A direct result of this forced accul­tur­a­tion is the loss of Native Amer­i­can lan­guages. Across the coun­try and the Amer­i­cas, the sta­tus of native tongues is dire as they are con­stantly decreas­ing in usage. This sit­u­a­tion is detri­men­tal to those that study the world’s lan­guages, but is more imme­di­ately a blow to the cul­tural and self-identity of the speak­ers. The puni­tive nature of forced accul­tur­a­tion becomes a deter­rent when peo­ple that have suf­fered pun­ish­ment are unwill­ing to pass on a minor­ity tongue to their chil­dren for fear of sim­i­lar reper­cus­sions on them.

Native Amer­i­cans were intro­duced to Span­ish in the 1600s, and it’s effected a notable dif­fer­ence in their respec­tive lan­guages from that time for­ward. Resis­tance to learn Span­ish helped pre­serve Navajo, Apache, the Pueblo lan­guages and oth­ers for 400 years. Yet it was impos­si­ble to suc­cess­fully fend off the Span­ish and later Eng­lish lan­guage influ­ences. There exist records, as they do all across the Amer­i­cas, of priests and other work­ers col­lect­ing the words and mean­ings of these unfa­mil­iar, rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent lan­guages. These records are invalu­able as lin­guists try to piece together lan­guages that are no longer fully real­ized in con­ver­sa­tion. Words and mean­ing have been lost beneath the wheels of progress in the major­ity lan­guage of the day, and even­tu­ally cen­tury.

Currently, in the same geo­graph­i­cal area, Eng­lish plays that role, sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties that speak Native Amer­i­can lan­guages, as well as Span­ish, Viet­namese, and other immi­grant lan­guages. What are the effects of hav­ing Eng­lish as a non-official major­ity lan­guage sur­round­ing Native Amer­i­can lan­guages that are on the decline in speak­ers? What are the effects of hav­ing lin­guis­tic and cul­tural con­tact with other major lan­guages of the world where Eng­lish is the major­ity and Span­ish, Hindi, Farsi, Ger­man or Korean are the minor­ity? These inter­ac­tions breed con­ster­na­tion and worry in some, inter­est and research ques­tions in lin­guists. For the sake of both, these issues must be addressed.

While the U.S. has never had an offi­cial lan­guage, a rar­ity in the day and age of the mod­ern nation-state, the ques­tion whether to adopt Eng­lish as the offi­cial lan­guage seems to remain uneasily unanswered.

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Señorita Ruth on: A fence is not a fence is not a fence

10 Apr 2008 by SenoritaRuth

Immi­gra­tions and Emo­tion
At a Q & A with the Mon­ti­cello, MN Cham­ber of Com­merce, Con­gress­woman Michele Bach­man (R-MN) pointed out that Amer­ica is being lost to immi­grants, and that a fence at the bor­der between Mex­ico and the U.S. from Ari­zona to Texas is a well-thought-out answer to the seem­ing prob­lem. Fol­low­ing is the excerpt from the Mon­ti­cello Times:

She touched on var­i­ous top­ics, includ­ing the Iraq war, immi­gra­tion con­trol, health­care and energy con­ser­va­tion.

She was par­tic­u­larly emo­tional about immi­gra­tion, a sub­ject that she made head­lines with back in Feb­ru­ary when she was very crit­i­cal of the sys­tem that allowed the woman charged with crash­ing into a bus in Cot­ton­wood, Minn., to con­tinue dri­ving.

“We’re los­ing our coun­try,” she said. “Peo­ple are not assim­i­lat­ing them­selves to Amer­ica. They’re not speak­ing Eng­lish, and you must speak it if you want to suc­ceed here in this coun­try.”

A Mon­ti­cello busi­ness­man asked about a fence along the south­ern bor­der of Texas and Ari­zona.

“The money is there. Why haven’t we seen any­thing?” he asked.

“Exactly. The money is there. It’s our (Con­gress’) fault. We aren’t doing our job here,” Bach­mann replied. “And the argu­ment that fences don’t work doesn’t hold water. Look at Israel and Pales­tine Fences work. Maybe peo­ple have too much inter­est or ben­e­fit from open borders.”


Where to begin! I’d like to address first the fla­grant mis­un­der­stand­ing she seems to have regard­ing the “suc­cess” of fences in Israel and Pales­tine. Obvi­ously a con­gressper­son that hasn’t trav­eled to the region, or one who keeps up with inter­na­tional news, because if she did, she’d know that suc­cess is elu­sive in the con­flict between Israel and Pales­tine, and that the fence she so right­eously cham­pi­ons is one put in place as a deter­rent from a pop­u­la­tion with whom Israel is in fre­quent con­flict, and whose goal is the eth­nic cleans­ing of Israelis in cer­tain areas they inhabit within that fence. In other words, the fence is part of a com­pre­hen­sive defense sys­tem against ene­mies with whom they’re at war. At least one Min­nesotan agrees.

To equate the neces­sity of the Israeli-Palestinian fence with one along the south­ern bor­der of the U.S. is noth­ing short of ludi­crous and incon­gru­ous. It min­i­mizes the strug­gle between Israel and Pales­tine, equat­ing it to the overblown immi­gra­tion media cir­cus in this coun­try, and it fur­ther scan­dal­izes an issue that gets lit­tle ratio­nal thought and much ide­o­log­i­cal abuse. This irra­tional urgency in fin­ish­ing the fence between the U.S. and Mex­ico has lead to the head of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, Michael Chertoff, waiv­ing (via con­gress approved waivers) more than 30 laws in place to pro­tect prop­erty, envi­ron­ment, and peo­ple.

An imme­di­ate trig­ger of sus­pi­cion for me is the report that the con­gress­woman got “par­tic­u­larly emo­tional” regard­ing immi­gra­tion poli­cies. This is indica­tive of an opin­ion not based on fact or fig­ures, but on a “gut feel­ing,” or a set of ideas cob­bled together through hearsay or mis­un­der­stand­ing about the topic at hand. To be led, as a politi­cian, by one’s emo­tions regard­ing any pol­icy will inevitably cause one to pro­ceed with blind­ers on, to cham­pion things other than log­i­cal courses of action or clear-headed notions of the facts, thus moti­vat­ing leg­is­la­tion that does not have a clear prac­ti­cal goal, but rather serves to stand as an ide­o­log­i­cal state­ment of such emo­tions. She appeals to those present by using words like “los­ing our coun­try,” which is a base­less state­ment meant to rile the emo­tions. Again, a clear indi­ca­tion of a lack of knowl­edge regard­ing the issue, and fur­ther­more an encour­age­ment to oth­ers adopt sim­i­lar myopic views.

Con­gress­woman Bach­man would be well-recommended to visit the areas about which she speaks with such igno­rant com­mand. By stand­ing next to and appre­ci­at­ing the full mean­ing of the wall between Israel and Pales­tine, I would hope she might come to appre­ci­ate its true pur­pose and rea­son for exis­tence. By vis­it­ing the Amer­i­can South­west and star­ing out across the vast miles of desert the bor­der tra­verses, she might come to under­stand that what doesn’t hold water is her uni­lat­eral, une­d­u­cated view of what a fence will and won’t do.

A fur­ther dis­cus­sion of immi­grant assim­i­la­tion, begin­ning with a crit­i­cal view of Eng­lish Only poli­cies and the demys­ti­fi­ca­tion of bilin­gual­ism will fol­low in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned!

Category: fence, homeland security, southwest  Tags: , , , , , ,  6 Comments
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