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117 Niños Milagrizados: Language Attitudes, Deaf Education, and Miracle Cures in Mexico Claire Ramsey and José Antonio Noriega “When I woke up, my toe was throbbing. I couldn’t stand on that foot, much less walk! And there were bite marks —not broken skin mind you, but actual teeth marks! Those marks were real! The bite was real!” Farrokh insisted. “Of course it was real,” the missionary said. “Something real bit you. What could it have been? . . . The point is, you were really bitten, weren’t you?” the Jesuit asked him. “People get so confused about miracles . The miracle wasn’t that something bit you. The miracle is that you believe! Your faith is the miracle. It hardly matters that it was something . . . common that triggered it.” (Irving 1994) In all but deaf cultural groups, the appearance of a deaf child is an extraordinary event that must be accounted for. Many “causes” of deafness emerge from cultural accounts that have at best shaky bases in science; even unknown causes wield cultural power, illuminating the mysteriousness of this condition to hearing people. In addition, the deaf child must be dealt with (treated or rehabilitated). All sociocultural groups offer possible solutions to the dilemma that a deaf child presents to the larger group. This information may not be widely distributed because few hearing people have ever met a deaf person. Specialists (physicians, teachers, and audiologists) handle the child’s needs on behalf of the group. Accordingly , special knowledge of the practices undertaken to deal with a deaf child is held by only a few members of the group. One set of common solutions for deafness aims for “unification” of deaf children with the rest of the world, from which they have been isolated . In nineteenth-century North America, deaf people were commonly defined as isolated beings who needed special treatment (training or education ) that would “restore” them to society. This theme can still be detected in contemporary U.S. definitions and treatment of deaf children 118 : c l a i r e r a m s e y & j o s é a n t o n i o n o r i e g a and accounts in part for the popularity of mainstreaming and of spoken languages rendered in signed form (e.g., Signing Exact English and Signed Spanish). A second set of solutions attempts to create equilibrium or order out of the “unnatural” (or “out-of-order”) state that deafness brings upon a child; for example, it is common practice to exploit a child’s residual hearing. Accordingly, maximizing the use of hearing via hearing aids or auditory training allows the deaf child to use her or his sense of hearing for the purpose nature intended. A child who has “learned to listen” is a child who is no longer out of order. Not surprisingly, in Mexico themes of unification and of restoring or rediscovering the true nature of the world also appear in cultural responses to a deaf child. In this chapter we describe a set of popular “cures” used with deaf children in Mexico. The treatments take speech as the pathway for restoration or, in Mexican terms, “unification” of the deaf child with “real” people. The initial objective of a cure is to connect a hearing, speaking parent to a deaf child. Through this connection the child can be uni- fied with others and become part of the “real world.” A second objective is to take what is “out of order” and restore its order and its nature. Mexican parents refer to children who have been “cured” as niños milagrizados , or “miracle-ized children.” This chapter has two primary goals. First, recognizing that knowledge about other cultures and their responses to deafness is limited in the United States, we focus on rituals that are not widely known to North Americans, and that may seem peculiar or at best exotic. We offer descriptions of these Mexican rituals to advance our understanding of the ways other cultures interpret the meaning of deafness. (It is worth pointing out that the objectives of the Mexican cures are not unique. The desire for unification of the different ones with the group and the yearning to restore the true balance of nature to a world in disequilibrium also underlie educational, medical, and rehabilitative practices common in the United States.) Second , the rituals are indicators of beliefs and attitudes toward language and communication —powerful, serious issues in any sociopolitical context...

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