The People Who Spell: The Last Students from the Mexican National School for the Deaf

3. Deaf Lives and Research on Deaf Lives in Mexico

36 3  Deaf Lives and Research on Deaf Lives in Mexico What Does It Mean to Live a Mexican Life? The ENS signers’ narratives could easily stand alone, and any reader interested in Mexico, in Deaf people, or in sign languages, would be able to engage with them. Ultimately, though, the narratives have value beyond their charms as life stories from a barely known group.They are individual autobiographical narratives, as well as expressions of the collective remembering that recounts, among other topics, the story of a group of Deaf people, their school, and their lives unfolding in a very specific context. My aim is to tell the ENS signers’ stories, and through them, locate this small social group of Deaf signers in the culture of the larger Mexican society in which they live. In several ways,however,gathering,translating,analyzing,and writing about life narratives of Deaf Mexican signers is not straightforward.Most importantly, if I want to make the case that it is interesting and useful to see the ENS signers’ lives as both Deaf lives and Mexican lives, I need to provide background knowledge to illuminate Mexico.To place the ENS signers’Deaf lives in the reality in which they exist,the iconic Mexico of travel writing,news reports,and movies will not suffice. And,to make the Deaf Lives in Mexico 37 case that the ENS signers are both Deaf and Mexican, my first move should be to consider what Deaf people in different countries might share. Commonalities Across Deaf Lives When I began to consider ways of writing about my research in Mexico, one of my goals was to grapple with a common belief that had drawn my curiosity for many years. Simply stated, this belief is that the lives of the world’s Deaf people have so much in common that national and cultural boundaries do not present the obstacles that hearing people confront when they leave their home cultures.Deaf people understand each other despite differences in sign languages and national cultures because being Deaf creates similar lives all over the world.A strong version of this belief about cross-national similarities would tempt us to view Deaf people as practically separate from their national cultures. All over the world, Deaf children are typically born to hearing families, a commonality that is shared among Deaf people. Variation exists, however, in both the occurrence of Deaf people and the society’s response to it. In some places, we find that many Deaf people have either Deaf family members or signing hearing family members (e.g., Marsaja, 2008; Meir, Sandler, Padden, & Aronoff, 2010; Nonaka, 2004). Alternatively, the ratio of Deaf-to-hearing people in one region of the world, or at one point in time (e.g., Groce, 1985), may differ from the ratio in another, where Deaf families are rare (Costello, Fernandez, & Landa, 2008). The inconspicuous nature of congenital deafness itself generally leads to a diagnosis that may come late for many of the world’s Deaf children. And sadly, many Deaf children suffer the unintentional consequences of their societies’ expectation of assimilation of all members, especially parents’ fantasies and anxieties about the impact of their child’s perceived disability on future participation in society.These commonalities generate difficult developmental circumstances for Deaf children. In particular, many Deaf children are subjected to speech and hearing training because their parents, doctors, and societies view them 38 Deaf Lives in Mexico as hearing children who are out-of-order and in need of repair so that they can fully join in society.(For a description of some Mexican parents’ tactics for assimilating their Deaf children, see Ramsey & Noriega, 2000.) Life circumstances create parallels among Deaf people across national boundaries that are specific to growing up as a Deaf person. Still,the similarities,while undeniable,also interact with a national or local culture, which, yearning for so-called normalcy, interprets the presence of, and the needs of, Deaf children differently. It is easy to understand that Deaf people may be disposed to first note the many similarities across groups.The similarities intrigue me too, and deserve more attention than they receive. However, I am equally curious about differences, especially how life’s phenomena are understood in different contexts, what those understandings consist of (e.g., Sutton-Spence & Ramsey, 2010), and how they are expressed. Accordingly, in this volume I train my lens on the way that...