By Nadja Drost
When Martha Anaya was eight years old, she was toiling away in the fields under a Mexican sun hotter than the chilies she was harvesting.
When she asked her mother why she couldn’t go to school like her friends, she was told it was more important for a girl to be tending to the home and cooking for her 15 siblings than learning to scribble numbers and letters.
Today, more than 30 years later, Anaya is in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class learning to read and write English. But her road to English literacy has not been simple. Over the last six years, she first had to learn how to read and write her native Spanish.
“Never in my life did I imagine I could do this,” she says in Spanish, carefully dabbing the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Anaya is one of many illiterate Spanish-speaking immigrants in New York who are learning English by learning how to read and write in Spanish first. The center where she is learning, Little Sisters of the Assumption in East Harlem, is one of 15 agencies across the city offering classes in basic education – reading, writing, and math – in Spanish. It may seem like a circuitous route to learn English, but according to many educators, it’s necessary.
“It’s too hard to take a second language if you don’t know the first,” says Flor de Maria Eilets, Director of the Community Life Program at Little Sisters of the Assumption, where Anaya takes her classes. She says it’s key to understand grammatical structures and word associations in a language they speak before learning them for a new one.
She knows from experience. Several years ago, Eilets and her colleagues were perplexed when they started teaching ESL classes to Mexicans. “Once they were accepted in the English classes, they couldn’t learn,” Eilets says, mimicking her initial shock. “We were asking ‘What is going on? What did we do wrong?’”
Their mistake, they found, was trying to get students to bypass becoming literate in Spanish before learning English.
It’s with this in mind that Plazas Comunitarias was launched in 2006. The city-wide umbrella network connecting Little Sisters with other agencies teaching Spanish and ESL is a joint initiative between the Department of Education, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at NYU, and the Mexican government. When students graduate, they are awarded with a certificate of grade six education.
Four years after starting their Spanish literacy classes, Little Sisters of the Assumption saw its first class of seven graduates in July. Anaya was one of them. Like six of her fellow graduates, she has just started ESL classes.
She’s a role model for the 40 students enrolled in the Spanish literacy program – and there are 35 on a waiting list wanting to follow in her footsteps. The students have anywhere from a grade one to five level of education, and are grouped with peers of similar ability.
At one table, a tutor helps students read with greater ease. At another, a middle-aged woman in her first week of grade one carefully grips her pencil, copying out the phrase “1 – uno” down the page. Next to them, a whiteboard fills up with drawings of pies cut into quarters and halves as Guadalupe Martinez teaches her students about fractions.
Some have been in America for only two years; others, like Anaya, for over 15. Almost all of them have no legal immigration status. They come from rural parts of Mexico, where women in particular–about 85 percent of students – rarely experienced a world beyond their village and daily chores. “These moms didn’t know the earth was round,” Eilets describes. “Some didn’t even know they were going north to come here.”
A growing number of students in the class –almost half – are Mixteca, an indigenous group from Mexico that tends to speak little or no Spanish. Because of that, they tend to be socially isolated. “They want to learn Spanish because that is the way they can socialize with other Mexicans,” says Eilets.
But Eilets admits there’s far more to it than that. Not knowing how to speak, read, or write Spanish, let alone English, severely limit a person’s job prospects. Finding better work is one of the main reasons students take classes, Eilets says.
There’s also the day-to-day navigation of life without literacy, like dealing with forms at schools, hospitals, and other things taken for granted by literate people.
“It was like I was blind,” Anaya says about her life before reading. “I saw the letters but I didn’t know what they meant.” Today, Anaya describes the satisfaction -and relief – of being able to understand the “Uptown” and “Downtown” signs on subway platforms. “Now I can go wherever I want without getting lost,” she says.
But according to Martinez, 48, the students’ motivation to take classes is driven by far more than everyday practical considerations. Being parents, many “want to be able to help their own kids learn,” says Martinez.
Eilets emphasizes that teaching parents literacy and language skills doesn’t just impact their future, but that of their children. “These are the parents of American children,” she says, “and there’s a lot of evidence that a child’s education is a reflection of your parents’ education.”
Anaya only wishes she could have helped her daughter, now 27, with her homework. Instead, her daughter helped her learn how to read in Spanish. “She became the mother, and I became the child,” says Anaya.
Now, Anaya teaches her seven year-old son how to write in Spanish, and he’s teaching her English. But despite all the progress she’s made, she hasn’t forgotten the taunts of her childhood friends and brothers who told her she was ignorant for not knowing how to read and write.
When that changed, the first thing Anaya wrote was a card to her mother, the woman who had said she didn’t need to go to school. “I’m not ignorant, because I’ve learned how to write,” Anaya wrote. “I know I’m older, but if I decide to learn English, I’ll do that too.”
