Two New Case Studies
But it would be far too easy to make conclusions simply on the personal accounts of well-published authors. (Though only Anzaldúa’s 1987 book is referenced here, she is, in fact, a highly published poet, feminist, and lesbian activist.) As educators, we must be aware of the everyday experiences of our own students and colleagues. We must look beyond a few well-documented anecdotes and begin looking for patterns among those who live bilingually in our classrooms every day.
Method
Thus, in the winter and spring of 1994, I conducted two case study interviews with bilinguals studying at the university level at that time. The first was with Celia (Appendix A), at that time twenty-eight years old, who was working on her thesis in ESL instruction while teaching Spanish at Eastern Washington University (EWU). The second was with Leonore (Appendix B), a twenty-three-year-old senior studying social work and sociology.
My objective was to discover the educational experiences and identity issues of two very different bilingual adult students who had grown up fully bilingual in monolingual school systems.
The Subjects
I chose my subjects partly out of accessibility, but primarily because of their extremely disparate educational and language experiences. Celia was 28 years old at the time of the interview. She spoke English fluently but with a noticeable Spanish accent, even though she grew up in a primarily English-speaking community, and she claimed that her Spanish carried a corresponding English accent. Leonore was 23 at the time of the interview. She, unlike Celia, was not noticeably bilingual. Had I not known her last name, I would not have realized she was Hispanic, and had she not openly discussed her bilingualism, one would not have known, since her English carries no Spanish accent and she claims her Spanish is equally void of any English accent.
Celia
Celia describes the same sense of cultural, social, and linguistic bifurcation that we see in Rodriguez’s and Anzaldúa’s stories.
Her story begins much as Rodriguez’s and carries a tone of experience similar to Anzaldúa’s.
I grew up speaking Spanish first because that’s what my parents...spoke....I didn’t have any influence from English. When my brothers started going to school, that’s when the English was introduced into the home.
Celia is the eighth-born of twelve siblings, so she always had some exposure to English. But, as she says, the “influence” of English was negligible until she personally entered school.
There is a notable reason for this fact: one which places Celia somewhat in a different experiential category from either Rodriguez or Anzaldúa. While both Rodriguez and Anzaldúa were asked to speak only English in school and Rodriguez was all but forced – by the schools – to speak only English at home, Celia’s experience was virtually the opposite.
I think I spoke Spanish and English, but my mom and my dad were a big influence, and my mom forbade us, she just forbid us to speak English....She would punish us, even throughout high school....My mom still gets mad at us if we speak English.
I will discuss later Celia’s reference to the “influence” of English and how this relates both to the cases discussed above and to our roles as teachers. First, though, we need to note that although English was not spoken in Celia’s family home, it still played a major role in Celia’s life, which echoes Rodriguez’s experience.
I used to interpret for my parents, and I still do, because they understand English, and they can...It’s very limited. They can speak it. But, you know, I would take them to the hospital, interpret, fill out forms.
I say this echoes Rodriguez’s experience not because he interpreted for his parents – remember that English was forced into his home when he was very young – but because English became a transition point in Rodriguez’s life, just as it later did in Celia’s. Remember the confusion and alienation Rodriguez tells of experiencing when he walked into the kitchen and heard his parents speaking the old, familiar Spanish, only to hear them switch to halting English when they saw him there. He refers (1995b) to the day when the nuns – teachers at the Irish Catholic school he attended – appeared at the front door as the day when English violated his personal, private world. It was such a violation that Celia’s mother sought to prevent.
And one might think that such an opposite approach would produce an equally opposite result. If Rodriguez felt confused and alienated by the forced conquest of Spanish by English in his life, then one might expect Celia to experience a stability and continuity in not being forced to forfeit her language and her name (as both Rodriguez and Anzaldúa were expected to do).
But this was not the case. Because Celia’s mother was so adamant about the Spanish, Celia shied away from Spanish, much the same way Rodriguez initially shied away from English when the nuns were so adamant and as both Rodriguez and Anzaldúa eventually moved away from Spanish (Rodriguez more permanently, Anzaldúa only in the rebelliousness of youth). Celia used English in school and with her friends, who by mere happenstance were primarily English-speaking, while she used Spanish only with her family and in church.
I kind of favored English, because I was able to express myself. I still think I’m able to express myself in English better than in Spanish....you know, in...when you speak a language for...I think I feel a lot comfortable speaking English. I do. I feel a lot more comfortable.
Remember that Anzaldúa writes of resenting the music and the language of her youth. Celia gives a possible explanation for such resistance to Spanish in her own life: an explanation which additionally suggests why Rodriguez initially resisted the English of his teachers.
And I guess, speaking Spanish with my parents, my mom would always, not be nit-picky, but you know...You tend to shy away, because you're going, “I don’t really know how to speak Spanish,” and you know, you just have insecurity....I was torn. I was torn between the two cultures, because I felt that being an Hispanic, I didn't really fit in with the majority....But I want to fit in like anyone else. So, what I did is, you know, I tried, I was in the cheer leading squad. I was the only Mexicana. Everyone else was white. So, I wanted to fit in with everyone. And I didn’t want to be known as...I didn’t want to be different.
She says she ultimately felt a part of neither group. And where Rodriguez ultimately rejected his Mexican background in favor of the common culture, where Anzaldúa ultimately claimed bifurcation as her reality, Celia began struggling for her own balance between two existences. This change, her working out of the struggle, started in high school when she decided she “was being a hypocrite.”
[I] just one day, looked at myself, and I’m going, “Who am I kidding? I am not, I’m not gonna ever be, and I’m never gonna be like them. I’m gonna be, I’m a Mexicana, so I might as well just face it,” after that, so, and you know, and be proud of myself.
At that time, she started acknowledging and living her Hispanic heritage. She no longer denied her Mexican ancestry and, over time, went on to use her Spanish pronunciations of Spanish names and words even in the English-speaking public. She began mixing the two heritages within herself at all levels and within all contexts, even while maintaining a substantial degree of diglossia. She even began using Spanish pronunciations for Spanish names, such as Los Angeles and Mexico.
Nevertheless, she still struggles:
I still don't feel like I fit in. I mean, I go to the Chicano Education, where the Chicano Lounge...I don’t feel like I fit in. I mean, when I would go to Mexico, or if I would go to Mexico, I don't think they would accept me, because I’d be too Anglicized, or too Americanized, you know.
But the point is that Celia never was forced to give up her diglossia as Rodriguez was and as Anzaldúa was expected to but did not. To the contrary, her circumstances virtually forced her to maintain her diglossia. The English lingua franca of the schools, where she wanted to fit in, played against the familiar and expected Spanish of the home and church, where her heart already resided. This caused struggle for her; it still does. But it was only when Celia started making honest decisions about her own identity that this struggle began working itself out, in much the same way that Anzaldúa’s own struggle has worked itself over a greater length of time. Celia still is in that sorting out process, but she daily finds new aspects of herself and strengthens her self-identity. This is quite different from Rodriguez’s involuntarily enforced monolingualism in his second language and his subsequent coping strategies. It is also different from Anzaldúa’s defiance, although it is much closer to Anzaldúa’s acceptance and use of her own bifurcation than it is to anything Rodriguez reports or supports. The differences here are clearly matters of expectations and acceptances, not of language or language competition.
This fact is underscored by Rodriguez’s (1982, 1995a) confession that he still is singled out, both because of the high quality of his English and because of his skin color. Without fully admitting to what he demonstrates, Rodriguez shows that the question is not language but social/cultural attitudes. He offers monolingualism (most likely forced) as a remedy to social ills. He essentially takes the stance of “You can't beat them, so you have to join them.” But along the way he inadvertently exhibits the reality that such a solution is simplistic and ultimately fails; he makes it clear that even making the United States totally English-speaking culture, as Adams (1780) would have had done and as U. S. English promotes even now, will not eliminate the social/cultural bifurcation which exists in this country.
Celia, on the other hand, demonstrates that such bifurcation can be used for personal, social, and cultural growth and enrichment, even without the monolingualization of society. And this is illuminated by the light of Anzaldúa’s fully accepted and manifested multiculturalism and multilingualism.
Leonore
Leonore’s experience is quite different from Celia’s, or for that matter from Rodriguez’s and Anzaldúa’s, and it demonstrates how beneficial multilingual education can be. Whereas Celia grew up entirely in a single bilingual town which, nonetheless, was primarily English-speaking, Leonore had a varied experience which mandated multilingualism:
[W]e traveled a lot....I was born in California. And then, when I was about five, we moved to Germany, ‘cause my dad was in the military. And so, I learned another language, which I forgot, though....[W]e lived there for about three years, and moved to Central America....El Salvador....We lived there for about a year. Then we moved to...California, again. And I guess, when I was really small, before I moved to Germany...we lived in Texas, in Corpus Christi, Texas. But, I don’t remember that very much....And then, we ended up in Washington.
Leonore explains that her home situation was bilingual Spanish/English from the outset, due to a mixed-language ancestry.
My parents...both spoke Spanish. Their native language is Spanish....And my grandfather lives with us, too...up until I was in my sophomore year in high school...spoke to me mainly in English....He is my...real father’s step-dad....And he was Russian...but he never spoke to us in Russian. He spoke to us in English.
Leonore mentions that her grandfather attended a Russian-language congregation on Sundays, meaning he retained his first language, while the rest of the family attended a Spanish-language congregation which met in the same building, where there also was an English-language congregation.
She also tells of being put straight into a German school in Germany and of having all her lessons in German.
When asked if she experienced any confusion or division (read bifurcation) over her multilingualism, she responds,
[I]t never caused any confusion at all, um, in any of the schools....[W]hen I went to Germany, I had to acquire a third language....[B]ecause I was in a German school, they just put me into a German school....And so, I had to learn German; I had to learn the language in order to do well in school. So, I guess I spoke it really well. My mom says I spoke it very fluently.
It was not until she returned to the United States, in her elementary school years, that a problem developed, and she makes it quite clear that this was not a problem with her language or cultural identity – which were then and are now intact – but with the school system’s unwillingness to accept her language, specifically her third language, German.
And then, when I came back to the States, I remember that the teacher told my mom that I needed to forget...The teacher...There was a counselor, a teacher, and a principal that came to our house one day. And they said that it was causing problems for me at school, because I was forgetting words, and I was putting in German words or Spanish words in term of, when I was talking, I would forget a word, and if it couldn’t come out immediately, then I would stick a word from another language, the same word that I was looking for, but a different language. So, um, then my mom didn't emphasize German anymore, because she used to speak to me in German, after...
Note that Leonore makes a case for learning the common language and using it in school, but not for eliminating one’s first language. She was required to function in German in the German school, so she had to learn the language, and she values this experience. In this regard, she sits right alongside Rodriguez. But the Germans did not require her to sacrifice either her native Spanish or her native English. Only when she returned to the U. S. did she have such an experience.
And when Leonore talks about her language use growing up, it becomes clear that even the American school system did not ask her to forfeit her Spanish at home, but only at school, and that it was only the third language, German, which she was asked to suspend.
Um, at home, it was mainly Spanish, unless I was speaking with my grandfather, which was English. And then, in school and around my community, it was English, just complete English....With my family – and it still is ‘til this day – if you go to my house, it’s Spanish. My church is Spanish. Everything I do is Spanish. But, when I'm at school, at work, everywhere else, it’s English. And it doesn’t cause any confusion. It’s just...that's how you were raised. You know, it’s like, if you spoke to your dad in English, you're not gonna go and speak to him in Spanish....It never seemed to me, you know, to think about it, why I know two languages. It just kind of was, like, natural. I mean, I didn’t see myself as being different from other kids, because...for all I knew, they could be speaking some, some other language, um, at home, too.
Leonore has gone beyond even what Anzaldúa relates in her story. While Anzaldúa tells of multilingualism being a natural state, still even she writes of resentments and struggles involved. But Leonore speaks of no such struggles and resentments, only of the richness of her experience. And Leonore speaks in less-than-complimentary terms of school systems which mandate the elimination of one's first language and of the specific system which asked her to forfeit her third language.
You know, and that was a big mistake, I think...Their mistake, because of the fact that I would be trilingual, and, you know, valued as three people, instead of only two, you know. I mean, because, you know, you’re, you’re...you’re valued...you’re not valued, but you are, you serve for two different cultures, type thing. You know, you serve for the American culture, and you serve for the Spanish culture, ‘cause you can communicate with both. And if I knew how to speak German as well still,...then I would have learned, learned and known it very well by this time, and I could have communicated with other people, like in a third culture. And, since...they told my family, my family didn’t want me to be different. They didn’t want me to...stick out like a sore thumb, or be retarded or anything in school, so...they stopped speaking to me in German.