Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education Noticiario Noticiario_Summer2017 | Page 10

My Mother’s Language History: Lenguaje de la Familia
By Amanda Cordova, Doctoral Fellow
introduced Spanish to her by inviting the whole family to attend a Spanish speaking, Mexican
Baptist church where she worshiped every Sunday. Although my mother’s family was Catholic,
eventually they all started attending the same church as her teacher. My mother explained that
at that time all the Catholic services were conducted in Latin and her family liked attending
church where everyone spoke Spanish. She recalls the whole family made new friendships at
the church.
Elementary: The Neighborhood Learns English
Upon entering “Beginners”, what we now know as Kindergarten, my mother felt
she already knew how to speak, read, and write in Spanish. She remembers feeling exited to
begin “regular” school and arrived “with one pencil and one tablet with a big red chief on the
cover” given to her by her mother. Her brother took her to school and walked her to the
classroom where she described the children, including herself, looking like “scared little
rabbits” because “nobody knew English.” To her surprise, her teacher was Japanese and she
remembered thinking as a young child, “I’m in real trouble here because I don’t know
Japanese.” She recalls not even being able to communicate that she had to use the bathroom
and relying upon the one English speaker in class to help her ask to leave the classroom.
My mother noted the whole school was learning English and it started in much of
the same way as when she learned the Spanish alphabet under the trees of her neighbor’s
house. The teacher instructed them to write one letter per page from the English alphabet. She
would write “one letter per page, repeating it over and over.” She described her teacher as
“very nice and understanding” because the teacher knew none of the students knew English.
The teacher never spoke Spanish and remembered that back then “they were strict with the
teachers” and they followed the lessons teaching only what they were supposed to teach.
There was never any instruction in Spanish. The first word she learned to spell and write was
“cat.” This was a monumental event for her and she smiled when she told the story of taking
her school paper home with the word “cat” spelled and a “big red check mark” on the page.
She showed her whole family that she could spell in English and everyone was proud of her. She
was so excited that she used black shoe polish from her brother’s shoe shine kit he used for
work to write “CAT” on her grandmother’s prized white feline. She laughed thinking about how
she “almost got a whipping” for that.
During my mother’s school years, her family always spoke Spanish at home. Her
mother was very proud of her for learning English and for being the first one of her children to
graduate from high school. She had three older siblings who did not complete highs school. Her
brother quit school in the 10 th grade, because her mother took ill and he became “head of the
house” earning an income to support the family. She said her whole life consisted of “Spanish
at home and church, and English at school” because they never went anywhere outside of the
neighborhood environment. During high school, she realized, she wasn’t speaking Spanish
“correctly” as her Spanish teacher told the class “your Spanish is horrid.” Looking back on that
experience she realized the Spanish spoke in her neighborhood was not formal Spanish, but a
dialect of Spanish. She noted she never questioned her Spanish teacher, thinking the teacher
was the educated one and just focused on learning how to speak Spanish “correctly.” She
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