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 6 5 ,  6 - ; / , 0 9 ; , (* / , 9 : ^P[O5LPKH/LYUHUKLa:HU[HTHYPH When Neida told me she wanted to be a lawyer but her LSAT scores weren’t good enough, we were sitting around a table near the coffee stand in the noisy student union, discussing the session of her PP seminar class I had just observed. I had realized, soon after starting these observations, that she was part of a larger story about education and literacy, so I had asked if she wanted to collaborate on this chapter with me. “You’ll have to show me the ropes,” she said. I mentioned Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1983), which was in the campus bookstore because I was using it in one of my writing courses. She said she probably wouldn’t read it. We were sitting at the same table at the end of the semester when she mentioned she had not only read Rodriguez’s book but had also tracked down a PBS interview he had done. “You should be shocked,” she joked. “I don’t read.” As we discussed her reactions, she mentioned she had also attended the recent campus dinner for Nilo Cruz, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who, like her father, had come from Cuba. After dinner, Cruz had read from Anna in the Tropics and other works, so I asked if she liked his use of language. “You know at the moment I don’t think I was in the mindset,” she said. “I was just ready to go.” Agreeing that it had been a late evening, I tried to explain what I liked about his lyrical language. Neida and I often discussed her experiences and this project as I tracked the PP students through the institution. From time to time, she shared reflections she had written for this chapter. Then, eighteen months after we started our discussions, she notified me in an email that she was “out of fuel for this project”: So although I loved the idea of seeing your project through to the end, I have found that the end for me has to be sooner than the project’s. Now, I will    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 understand if instead of using me to co-author a chapter you simply use me as having been part of your research. At this time, the PP students from Neida’s class and their program peers had just completed their first semester after the PP program (fall 2006), and they, according to traditional expectations, still had eighteen months before graduation. By NEIU standards, they could have years. When I started this project, I had also volunteered to tutor PP students. For the first three weeks, I sat alone in the PP conference room during activity hour—an officially designated time free of classes for meetings and other uses—while the Proyecto Pa’Lante and Project Success advisers and administrators used the microwave and refrigerator that, along with the long conference table, filled the room. Although I often overheard Spanish and English conversations in the nearby offices, I sat in silence until one day a work-study student, an older woman with rectangular glasses and highlighted hair, came into the conference room and asked if I was waiting for students. I introduced myself, and she told me her name. “They need to know,” she said, “that it’s a service right here.” Then she left. A few minutes later, another person came into the room and asked if she could complain about her PP students’ English. She told me her name was Neida. Once she finished describing her complaints, we discussed popular beliefs about English and culturally specific ways of speaking and writing. Then the work-study student returned. She said she had overheard our discussion and wanted to say that even Spanish-English speakers could be condescending to other Spanish-English speakers whose English wasn’t as strong. The following week, one of my students stopped when, passing the doorway, she saw me sitting at the table. Soon, she was telling me about watching political debates in English while her father watched in Spanish on another television in another room. She explained that as the oldest, she was the family translator—from English to Spanish for her parents, from Spanish to English for her brothers. Neither the work-study student nor my student returned, but Neida did. Over the weeks, we discovered some surprising similarities. She was a conflicted Catholic who was...

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