Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions

5. Language, Ethnicity, and Higher Education

 3 ( 5 . < (. ,   , ; / 5 0 * 0 ; @  ( 5 + / 0 . / , 9  , + < *(; 0 6 5 (UNLSH=PKHS9VKYPN\La The professor started the speech to tell the McNair scholars why being McNair scholars was important. She started reading a beautiful fable and the literary analysis about it. She explained to us how this fable was an oral story that Mexicans in Texas used to tell. Mexicans in this region had a strong tradition of oral history which they kept after the annexation of Texas territory. She told us that much of this oral history had been compiled by a Mexican American women scholar who had lived at the end of the 1800s and beginning of 1900s. The author translated the stories so they wouldn’t be lost. The same hope drove her to publish the compilation. The compilation however was lost in the libraries of Texas for many years. Finally, fifty years later, it was rescued by another Mexican American, a low-income and first-generation scholar who found it in the library and got intrigued by it. Now, the professor giving the speech, a Mexican American and first-generation low-income student, was writing her doctoral thesis about the author and her writings. “Do you notice a pattern?” the professor asked us. This beautiful part of American literary history was there but nobody before noticed it. Nobody before gave it value, nobody before thought it was important, nobody before until somebody like us found it. “Do you understand now?” she asked. Yes, I understood. I understood how what I value and what I think is important, as well as the contribution to the world of my fellow Latinos, won’t be valued by the mainstream academia because they cannot recognize its value. There is the obligation to show its value to the world. Many other anecdotes of this type I have in my life, yet this is one that depicts the best how it is that I understood that I had an obligation to myself to embrace my status as the Other instead of rejecting it. The reason is that I understood that I have to work for the advancement of my entire group so the group can show its real value to the American society, and then I would be valued as an equal.    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 0 5 ; 9 6 + < * ; 0 6 5 One of my main reasons to come to the United States was “to dominate the English.” For me to dominate the language meant to lose the accent, speak quickly, understand all English speakers, learn all the idioms, read books in English, sing in English, and dream in English. Oddly enough, writing was not on the spectrum at all. The goal was to learn the culture to perfection and be able to replicate it perfectly too. My idea was to be an American when I was in the United States and be a Mexican when I went back to Mexico. In the meantime, earning a degree in the most prestigious educational system in the world wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. My master’s in business administration was a result of the naive way in which I understood, or misunderstood, my migration. Entering Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) was a blessing for me. I wanted to continue studying, but I didn’t know how I would be able to afford it. Lucky enough, I met a professor in the business program at NEIU, and he was willing to help me. The professor proposed the best deal in the world at that moment. If I was admitted to the NEIU MBA program, he would hire me as a graduate assistant (a totally new concept for me). In this way, I could pay for my education. I never wanted to study business administration, but my qualifications as an economist were just perfect for it. Plus the graduate assistantship depended on the business program . As a result, I thought that was “the deal,” and I took it gladly. My rush to keep studying English, to change my lifestyle, and to change my visa status were my incentives to enroll in a master’s program, something I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. When I came to United States I never considered myself an immigrant . I had no reason to leave my country, and I had many reasons to go back. I just wanted to be economically independent, travel the world, and learn many languages. My desires were not very different from other immigrant desires. People come to this country for many different reasons, but rarely to immigrate. They come to visit their families, to study, to escape from war or a bad husband or a draft, to forget a love, to follow somebody, to save for a special item, to get training for a job, to learn the language. The majority of them, I will dare to say, believe that their pass through this country is temporary and think of their comeback as a strong reality. Yet when I migrated, I had no idea about this “shared wish” and I thought I was so different. 3HUN\HNL,[OUPJP[`HUK/PNOLY,K\JH[PVU    I arrived in Chicago by plane with a tourist visa and with three hundred dollars in my pocket. I was confident that I would survive and succeed in “my adventure” no matter what. After I smoothly entered the United States, I used to call myself a mojada light as a way to laugh about my obvious immigrant status, which I didn’t acknowledge at the time. It was not because I wasn’t faced with the immigrant life right away. In less than a month, I was working in a fast-food restaurant and cleaning houses. I even had my immigrant ID provided by the Mexican consulate. However, I never identified myself with my kitchen coworkers. Yes, we spoke the same language and had similar culture. We even came from the same country, but that was it. I thought I was a special case. I came with a bachelor’s degree from one of the best universities in Mexico. I had two good jobs there, and my parents provided me with whatever I needed whenever I needed it. I knew how to read and write in English, and I was able to have a simple conversation. Furthermore, I was planning to go back to Mexico. I had come specifically to learn the language and perhaps to continue my education. My self-perceptions were not aligned with my stereotype of an immigrant . I thought an immigrant was one who left home knowing he or she wasn’t coming back, traveling through lonely parts of Mexico until getting to the frontier and finding a way to cross the border. An immigrant was usually a peasant, poor, uneducated, ignorant, with one motive for leaving their country: better pay. There was no way I could tune this stereotype to my self-image, at least not yet. 3 0 ; , 9 (* @  , + < *(; 0 6 5  ( 5 +  , ; / 5 0 * 0 ; @ The first semester of my master’s reminded me about my story of the upper level of the bookshelf in my parent’s library. My parents have a library at home. Its contents are the most appreciated objects in my house. The library is separated by sections, some of them unknown to me until now. There are different nonfiction sections with medical journals , books of social sciences, natural sciences, some statistics and management books, several encyclopedias of different themes, and general information books for which my parents have some interest or use. In addition there is a huge fiction section, the preferred readings of both of them. That section has the most mysterious arrangement to me, for I haven’t read half of it, and it is always acquiring new selections. Of course, there is a huge children’s section arranged in the lowest levels of the library, of which I was very fond all year long.    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 Although we could choose some books by ourselves, my mom and dad always acted as the librarians and tried to guide our reading. We asked for books, and they made an effort to give us something we could understand and might like for our age. I remember that when I turned twelve, I was still reading young adult books, but vacation time allowed me to read a lot and at a fast pace. After several books, and at my request, my mom took me to the library. She was browsing the book cabinet when she looked at me and asked: “How old are you?” “Twelve,” I answered “I think you are ready to read books with no drawings,” she replied, staring at me but speaking in voice that sounded more like she was talking to herself. “What can you read?” she asked herself. Contemplative, she started looking at her collection. “Aha! Here it is! The Black Tulip. This book has only one drawing. Then, if you like it and do not get bored, you can read this other book with no drawings at all.” I felt excited, proud and little nervous. My heart was beating fast and hard. I could feel it inside my chest pumping blood to my neck, my ears, and my head. I was looking seriously at my mom, accepting the challenge and pretending I had no butterflies in my stomach. The truth is I had no idea that day that I would advance to an upper level of the bookshelf. To my surprise I enjoyed that book. From that moment on, I would devour my parents’ fiction collection with an unsatisfied appetite , fearing the end of each novel but eager for the beginning of every new one. When I got in the MBA program, I felt as if I had got myself into the upper level of the shelf again. The reason was that the amount of reading and writing that one was to do at the graduate level was completely unexpected for me. Reading in English took me, and I think it still does, two or three times longer than reading in Spanish. Soon after I faced the quantity of reading needed to succeed in my classes, the English language became a tool instead of a goal. The dilemma was deciding between reading everything on time and understanding the meaning of the words through the context of the text, or reading even more slowly and translating every unknown word. I chose to use the dictionary only when the word gave the meaning to the text. Now I want to continue to a PhD, and I have to get a good score in Graduate Record Examination (better known as the terrifying GRE). I think of my decision as one necessary and practical but nearsighted. 3HUN\HNL,[OUPJP[`HUK/PNOLY,K\JH[PVU    Writing in English. Oh my God! The challenge was unbelievable. Writing in English made me feel as challenged as if the book my mom wanted me to read that day in my parents’ library belonged to their medicine bookshelf. I had a bad relationship with writing already in my language . In general, the Mexican education system poorly valuates writing. Ironically, for many years (things are changing now) Mexican college seniors had to go through the difficult process of learning how to write doing a formal research paper guided only by their mentor. It took me one year and two mentors to finish my research project. My final mentor was great but strict. I had to handle it chapter by chapter, and I had to write and rewrite each part several times. This was my first encounter with the rewriting process. She was more concerned about content, so she used to correct organization, grammar, and spelling herself in order for me to keep advancing. The priority of the undergraduate thesis was the content and the structure that economic research should follow, and that I learned very well. Still my writing didn’t improve too much, and that lack of skill would haunt me in the United States. The first semester in the MBA program was the most difficult. As an international student, I was obligated to take three classes and maintain full-time student status. (According to the state, that rule prevents international students from having time to plan and carry out terrorist activities.) In just one of the classes, I had to write three papers of thirty pages each, plus the team project (paper and presentation) plus the final exam. I was writing like a machine. Nonstop was the rule. I just tried to put all my ideas into the paper and answer all the questions. I remember that while I was writing, I used many Spanish words to be able to develop an idea completely, and then I had to come back and translate them. (I still have to do that.) Again, I was happy just with handing in my papers. Although that semester I had the worst grades of my master ’s (two Bs and a C), I was satisfied that I could even handle it. The main priority was accomplished. I had endured the first semester and I was still in the program. I couldn’t believe I had written and read so much—and in English at that!!! My language also caused me some issues with my classmates. I really never had any issues with my master’s peers. Although I had to work in teams frequently, which usually worked pretty well, working with teams only worked well with my master’s peers. Somehow, by the last semester of my master’s, I had skipped one of the master’s core courses. To cut costs, the program administration had decided that graduate students    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 could meet these requirements taking 300-level classes and doing a little more work so they could be counted as 400-level classes. The 300-level class I took was in the mornings and full of people younger than me. There were many more native speakers than in the master’s class. My usually successful teamwork didn’t go well at all this time. In that class, I had to change teams three times. The first team fired me because they were used to having many meetings during the mornings when I was working, and I couldn’t go. The second team fired me because my “work in process” language was perceived as lack of dedication and seriousness on my part. At the end, the team that accepted me was a team of friends, all guys who needed so much help, and they were happy with my cooperation. The class had many other individual assignments, and oddly enough, my individually written projects were the ones that assured me a final A. However, the experience taught me that my imperfect language was perceived as a lack of professionalism and commitment. In spite of my language issues, the support of my classmates at the master’s level, mostly international students, made my program a very enjoyable experience. At the end of the master’s, I was a straight-A student , and my papers had been praised as “a fine piece of independent thinking.” As in my story of the upper level of the book shelf in my parent ’s library, I didn’t expect to do an MBA, but when I did I enjoyed it and I was happy and satisfied with my performance. Although during the MBA program my objective to dominate the language became a secondary goal for me, it didn’t become secondary to my other goals. I was trying to get in the history master’s program at NEIU (again my naivete), so I went to see the master’s advisor at that time. His name was Sharman; after my visit I named him Mr. Sharkman. He heard my case, and at the end of my monologue, he asked me how my reading skills were. I answered him that I had good understanding of the readings but a slow pace. He explained to me that right there I had a problem because the amount of reading in history was substantial. He also explained that he knew a little bit of Spanish and that he could hear that my English was better than his Spanish, but not good enough to be admitted in the history master’s program. “We are looking for a certain level of writing skills in English that, after hearing you, I don’t think you have.” I wanted to cry. Maybe because it was true. Maybe because I assumed that he only knew how to say “Como está, amigo” in Spanish and that my 3HUN\HNL,[OUPJP[`HUK/PNOLY,K\JH[PVU    English was being compared to that. Maybe because I felt that I was being denied the opportunity to learn something I like because my native language was not English. Maybe I was just a little sensitive at that time. It didn’t matter. I was already afraid. Yet I still took some history prerequisite classes and got As. Therefore I decided to apply to the program. The As were not enough, and I was rejected. The rejection letter said, “We encourage you to continue developing your writing skills.” How could I develop my writing skills if they didn’t let me in and give me a reason to practice? I did it in the MBA Program. I believed I could do it in history. Apparently they didn’t. Now that I look back at this incident, I think I also felt upset because my capacity to learn the concepts and content of a discipline was being measured with my ability to use the English language, which I think it is an unfair assessment. Little did I know about the relation of my ethnicity and the perception of my cognitive capabilities that still carry a weight in this country. I don’t know if I’m a rare case. But I could bet I’m not. When I came to United States I didn’t know that race matters. Don’t get me wrong. I knew about Lincoln, about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. I witnessed the Los Angeles riots after Rodney King, and I have seen thousands of movies depicting blatant racism in United States, usually during a different time period. Of course I knew about the Ku Klux Klan and the new racist Skin Heads. I also knew about the killing of Chinos in the Wild Wild West, and the Cesar Chavez jornalero movement, about the Chicanos and their belonging to a lower class, and their problems with gangs. Still, I didn’t know race matters. For me everything was in the past. The United States was the land of opportunity. If you wanted you could make it here big. I used to think that African Americans should get over it and move forward. Latinos, well, they were lower class, and their problem was a class problem. It took me several history classes and one year inside my job to understand how much I was mistaken. My job is to increase the number of low-income, first-generation students and minorities attaining PhDs. When I started working for the NEIU McNair program, I didn’t know I would acquire a broader view of the social system of the United States by learning about the higher-education system. The stories of my scholars about all the injustice, police abuse, neglect, and confusion they experienced because of their ethnicity increased my understanding and brought into my time period what I thought was in the past of the United States, a huge race problem among the dominant culture with minorities, and surprisingly, among minorities too.    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 Although Mexico, as any other, is a country full of inequities, I was in many cases protected from the consequences of its social injustice. I never faced the discrimination and bigotry that poor and indigenous people face every day. Sometimes my rich classmates at my university looked down their noses at me because I was upper middle class, but those behaviors never changed my life. Not even once did I suffer from closed doors in any advancement opportunities. On the contrary, I always had doors open all the time. I was a good student with a good attitude and full of ambitions. I believed my hard work would pay back always. I just needed to keep putting a lot of effort in anything I did. My parents had worked hard all their lives so I could have this freedom of becoming whoever I wanted whenever I wanted. The sky was the limit. My class status allowed me to live in a bubble. Of course I was a strong critic of the system of inequalities. My parents were committed leftist activists during their youth. In general, through reading they empowered their young teens to participate in the political life of our country and more importantly in the usual after-dinner conversations with my close and extended relatives, which many times involved discussion of social issues. Although I was a critic, my activist peak was during high school, and after I went to a private college, I stayed as a spectator of injustice. I never suffered about it, so I could detach myself fairly easily from the problems that people in different class levels faced every day. When I came to the United States I thought I would be able to do the same. I’m of the idea that an international student can live his or her life in the United States identifying themselves with their classmates and university mates and never feel the need to connect with the broader ethnic group to which we belong. This international student sense of belonging creates a bubble similar to the class bubble that protected me from the injustices of Mexico. The reason is that not identifying with other people means you are rejecting them as the Other, such as I rejected identifying with my fellow immigrants at the beginning of my stay in United States. However, I decided to stay in the United States and the understanding that I was the Other began to sink in. Working inside the higher-education system helping low-income, first-generation and minority students helped me to understand how their stories of crude racism were only the most visible face and nasty face of a system as unjust as the Mexican one. I remember one of my scholars telling me that her teachers at her school used to tell her, “You are very bright for a Mexican,” or another 3HUN\HNL,[OUPJP[`HUK/PNOLY,K\JH[PVU    scholar telling me that when she used to look for a job, during the interviews the employers used to praise her: “You have a commendable resume; when I got it I didn’t think you were black.” As part of a bigger system, the world of academia is also shaped with this notion that some people are superior to others. The inertia of many years still shapes student, teacher, and administrator attitudes that express consciously or unconsciously a range of negative prejudices against minorities. The simple need for a program like McNair speaks about this issue. The cold numbers of minority students underrepresented in academia speaks even louder. However, the voices that spoke to me strongly were the voices of many professors and students indicating to me the visible and invisible ways academia fails to see the Other as equals or simply to see the Other. The McNair program supposes that after attaining their PhDs, the students will come back to the universities, become faculty, and in this way diversify academia. A diversified faculty will help to improve the numbers of minority students at the college and graduate level. This cycle works under certain assumptions. The first one is that minority students need more role models. That idea is pretty evident. Students will perform better if they feel familiarized with the institution and with their professors. Yet one of our most committed mentors had a different notion of minority faculty as role models. Her idea was that minority role models are more important for the dominant culture students. Minority faculty help them to understand that the prejudices and stereotypes against minorities are only that, prejudices. However, the students have baggage with them, and it is difficult to deconstruct an idea that has been sunk into their minds since they were young, as another professor would explain to me during a higher education conference. She was a young Latina who had written several articles and books already. In spite of her publishing record and her good reputation as a teacher, she still faced students questioning her syllabus. They often accused her of not teaching them what was “important” because they were reading about U.S. Latino history and problems. Both anecdotes made me understand that different from Mexico, even if I am educated and higher class in the United States, one day I will face similar stereotyping as any other Latino in the United States. Maybe it was my upbringing as social critic that helped me to understand my dilemma here in the United States. As an international student , the latent plan of going back to my country allowed me to see los    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 toros desde la barrera (see the things from the outside). This expectation allowed me to believe that, because my presence in this country was temporal, I could go through my life without understanding the country and without internalizing its complex problems. Yet, when I faced the reality of my immigration, I saw my dilemma. I could have decided to continue with my mentality of an international student, the mentality that wanted me to believe that I was not an immigrant, that I had nothing to do with my compatriots of America Latina, that because of my education and success I would be different than the Others. I would be the one who would blame the Others for their own misfortunes; the one who took advantage of the land of the opportunities and made it, and therefore was the strongest. As we say in my country: el tuerto en el mundo de los ciegos (the one-eyed in the world of the blind), as I know now. On the other hand, I could learn, understand, and accept that even if I didn’t know it, when I decided to come to this country I was automatically positioned in the category of the Other, in an eternal race to “overcome ” my ethnicity that could play against me. Yet, embracing my “category ,” understanding that I belong to a group of people named immigrants , Latinos, Hispanics, or minority, allowed me to see that it is not my ethnicity that I have to overcome. My ethnicity is not the problem!! The problems are out there, waiting to be identified and addressed, and as an educated Latina, part of my duty is to address them. Today I don’t want to “dominate” English anymore; I just want to keep learning so I’m able to communicate clearly my ideas. I don’t wish to lose completely my accent because I realize I will lose some of my personality with it. I will lose the flavor and the feeling that I put into my words in order to transmit different sensations as well as to get different reactions from people. I don’t want to read or sing or dream only in English. I want to take advantage of the richness of both languages I know. I don’t want to replicate the culture and be an American in the United States of America and Mexican only in Mexico, first because I cannot stop being Mexican (I love it!), second because after four years in the United States of America, moreover at Northeastern, I realize how naïve and ignorant I was. There is not just one culture that I can replicate so I can be an “American.” America is full of different cultures and even languages (I think that is the part that I like the most about my life here). Finally, now that I understand this quest in academia for the original idea, I don’t think I can be very original if I forget my culture and try to replicate another one. My way to see the world as Angela, Mexican, 3HUN\HNL,[OUPJP[`HUK/PNOLY,K\JH[PVU    immigrant, Latina, women, sister, daughter, wife, friend, professional, citizen, permanent resident, morena, dreamer, traveler, and so forth, is what will allow me to offer something new to the body of knowledge. Once again, such as it happened with my desire to dominate English, my desire to be more American than the Americans when in the United States disappeared, and I understood that I was a Latina in America and that was who I needed to be. , 7 0 3 6 . < , I answered the phone and my brother Camilo was calling me from Boston. He had applied to ten ivy league universities for his PhD program , and he had been rejected. He was bummed down; his Harvard master’s hadn’t helped him get in. He thought it was his fault. The English maybe, that could be the reason, he said, or his average GRE of 1200. “Well it was pretty difficult that I would have been chosen as the fifth Latin American in the political science PhD of Harvard. I would have to be a genius, right?” The only thing I could see by that time was that he didn’t understand that race matters. He was a freshman in this living in the United States. He was still thinking as an international student. The rejection letters were telling him “you are not a good fit with our department,” and he believed the problem was him. However, he was far from understanding that the department didn’t think he shared the characteristics or the research interests of the professors in that department. In other words, he would break the homogeneous research interests of those departments . There was nothing that Camilo had to offer to the departments, and then he was rejected. The truth is that Camilo needs to find a university and a department that believes that in order to have an accurate understanding of the whole world, it is necessary to bring to the discussion a broad diversity of scholars. The department that is committed to this inclusive belief would then have in place a selection process that values access more than selectivity. Then he will have to publish as many scholarly articles as he can per year to create value for his own research, and then, maybe then, we will compete for the same professorship positions as those who graduate from the most prestigious universities in America. It was not a question of being a loser or not. It was the question of finding the loophole in the closed system of the creation of knowledge and then expanding its boundaries.    + 0 = , 9 : ,  ) @  + , : 0 . 5 Camilo’s perception of the same problem is different from mine because I have understood that I’m part of a group that is disadvantaged in higher education. This awareness prevents me from internalizing prejudice easily and allows me to see how there are mechanisms in the academic system that block fair competition for minority students. The identification of this mechanism enables me to find the loopholes so minorities like me can achieve their maximum potential and eliminate prejudices. ...