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

2. The Research in Mexico City

14 2  The Research in Mexico City Señor Tomás Ybarra, Sputnik, and Me I did not visit the interior of Mexico until 1996, but my sentimental visits to an imagined Mexico began many years earlier,when I was in the third grade.That year my school district,outside Seattle,Washington,sent an English- and Spanish-speaking museum docent to visit my classroom with a trunkful of objects from Mexico.Soon thereafter,Mrs.Morris,our teacher, announced that we would be learning Spanish via educational television, a thrilling prospect for us as students. It was the early days of the introduction of technology in schools, and we had never imagined being permitted to watch TV at school. Our television Spanish teacher was SeñorTomásYbarra, an authentic speaker of Spanish, who appeared on the television screen a couple of times a week, taught us Spanish words and sentences, played music, and told us about Mexican children.We had a book too, but Mrs. Morris cautioned us not to attempt to read the stories because we did not know how to pronounce the words correctly, especially words that contained a z, which was pronounced differently in Spanish. Of course I read the stories, being very careful with those z’s, and I still remember the evocative watercolor illustrations in the Spanish book: adobe houses under a blue sky and a little boy wearing sandals, leading his burro. Research in Mexico City 15 I had no trouble learning to pronounce Spanish a few years later in junior high school. Much later, while pursuing a BA in Romance Linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle and having learned Spanish quite well, I realized that TomásYbarra Frausto, PhD was not a television personality but a prominent scholar of Chicano history and culture, a theater director, a curator of Chicano art, and a community and academic activist. Beaming Spanish lessons out to elementary school students was the least of his contributions to the world. As a young adult, I also realized that teaching a “foreign language” to U.S. school children was an artifact of the Cold War and the accelerating Space Race.Steeves et al.(2009) review the panic that the Soviet launch of Sputnik caused in 1957,and especially the alarms raised about U.S.schooling .The solution was explicit:“If you want to fix social and political problems , look to schools” (p. 72).Where deficiencies in education appeared, particularly in science,math,and languages,federal agencies generated and imposed top-down remedies.The federal role in setting educational priorities was without precedent, as was the level of shock and anxiety created by the public’s fear that the United States was losing its technological and political edge to the USSR.Popular belief was that the Soviets beat us into space simply because their schools were better than ours.While Johnny was wasting his time fooling around in deficient U.S.schools,studious Ivan focused on science and math in rigorous Soviet schools. I suspect that the national political atmosphere and the fear that our enemy would outstrip us scientifically, technologically, and militarily, sent the “foreign language” speaking docent and SeñorTomásYbarra to my classroom.That early contact with Spanish put Mexico on my radar screen and Spanish into my head. Like many others before me, as Joseph and Henderson (2002) note, Mexico took a “tremendous hold” (p. 1) on my imagination. Fieldwork In the 1980s I took a few beach vacations to Mexico and before long, I wandered away from the beaches to explore the surrounding neighborhoods and small towns. I wanted to see where Mexicans lived, ate, and bought their groceries.In the mid-1990s I stopped going to the beach and 16 Research in Mexico City started going to Mexico City,at the invitation of a group of psychologists, linguists,and teachers working with signing Deaf children.In 1999,I met Fabiola Ruiz Bedolla and her father,Benigno Ruiz Quintana. With their assistance,I began preliminary fieldwork during trips to Mexico City,and started planning a project about LSM and its signers. During my trips, I visited classrooms and participated in Deaf events, including informal gatherings of Deaf people at restaurants, Sunday afternoons at a Deaf club in a crumbling building that was slowly sinking into the lake beneath Mexico City,events for Deaf senior citizens organized by a federation of Deaf groups in...