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

5. Childhood and School Years

93 5  Childhood and School Years As I watched the videotaped interviews with the ENS signers, I was particularly interested in their stories about the reasons they are Deaf and their sense of the kind of children they were, especially before they encountered signing and other Deaf children. I also noted that they all talked about their parents’ search for schooling for their Deaf child. The ENS signers’ descriptions of their school years belie the myth of a golden,Deaf-friendly past that many Mexican signers,including the ENS signers themselves, suggest in their life stories, their critiques of presentday treatment of Deaf students, and their sense of previous generations of Deaf Mexicans. Still, for those who attended ENS, their school years offered pivotal life experiences, despite the ENS signers’ reports suggesting that their schooling was less academic than communal and social. Most of the ENS signers were born during the first half of the twentieth century. Fidias and Ignacio were the oldest in the group, born in 1916.The youngest in the group were Daniel López López and his wife Teresa Lila Martínez Montiel, who were born in the 1950s. Eleven were born in Mexico City.The others were born in towns in the State of Mexico, which surrounds the federal district of Mexico City, or further away in las provincias.Most were born to large families of modest means,although a few were more comfortably off. Almost all of their parents were also born in Mexico,although Cándido Garcia’s parents were immigrants from Spain,as was Renato Pérez Abelenda’s father.Renato’s mother was Cuban.With the 94 Childhood and SchoolYears exception of Antonio Alonso, whose mother was an unschooled Deaf woman,all were born to hearing parents who spoke Spanish.While nearly all of the narratives mention siblings and parents, it was also typical for the ENS signers to include extended family members—their grandparents, aunts,uncles,and cousins,and neighbors and godparents in their life stories. Their families were typically Mexican, close-knit, local, social networks. Their fathers held a variety of jobs—bus driver,farmer,brick maker,tailor, trolley worker, violinist, engineer. Rubén Leonel Mosqueira y Matute’s mother was a teacher, but most mothers either did not work outside their homes or worked with other family members in their husbands’ homebased businesses,as Gela’s mother did in her husband’s men’s shirt business. In short,the ENS signers’families lived as many Mexicans of their era lived, fitting within a general template for extended family life in the first half of the 20th century. Still,the ENS signers’young lives suggest that the template was adjusted, especially subsequent to the discovery of the loss of hearing, to accommodate the Deaf children.The adjusted life story template includes accounts of the families discovering that the child was Deaf and diagnosing the cause with ethnomedical explanations.It also includes comments on strategies for communicating with their Deaf and hearing family members.Although a typical story recalling the school years could be entitled “My First Day of Primary School,” the ENS signers’ outlines of the. events leading to their entry into ENS and their subsequent school years suggest an alternative title: “Where Is a School for Someone Like Me?” Likewise, the details about daily life at ENS,including descriptions of the school moving between ENS and ENC buildings, memories of learning signs and spoken words, commentaries about teachers and academic subjects,reactions to the gaps in their learning,and comments about los talleres (vocational skills workshops), and accounts of life in el internado (the boardinghouses where out-of-town ENS students lived) construct their own template about attending school. Reasons That People Can be Deaf As in other countries (e.g.,Champie,1996;Ruben,2010) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Mexico a range of causes and precursors Childhood and SchoolYears 95 explained the incidence of deafness. Medical and religious specialists, as well as lay people applied their particular kinds of knowledge to the problem of accounting for Deaf children. Generally, these explanations were recounted to most of the ENS signers as they were growing up. Information about the discovery that they were Deaf, and the causes for it contributed to the episodes they narrated as they told about their early years. The ENS signers, given the time period of their births...