AMcCcontactzone


WRITING for REAL:
Writing in the Service-Learning Contact Zone

Ignoring and Embracing Culture

Allison McCarty

Anyone who reads the statistics on racial representation at La Serna High School is impressed, and quite rightly so. Though the school's campus is located in the heart of the predominantly white, upper-middle class neighborhood of Friendly Hills, California, the Hispanic population at La Serna makes up approximately forty percent of the student body. The English Language Development (ELD) program buses in native Spanish speakers from as far away as East Los Angeles, about ten miles from the school, and these students represent nearly a quarter of the La Serna population.

The moment you set foot on La Serna's campus, however, the numbers no longer seem so impressive. At lunchtime, the entire ELD program, along with a few scattered native English speakers of Hispanic descent, can be found in the West Quad, completely removed from the rest of the school. Expanded Horizons, a club organized several years ago with the intention of promoting multiculturalism at La Serna, hangs posters advertising dances and fundraisers all over campusŠ but written only in Spanish. La Serna, twice named a California Distinguished School, did not receive that honor a third time when evaluated one year ago. The committee's report criticized the blatant lack of unity between cultures, describing La Serna as "two schools in one."

La Serna's students are daily presented with the opportunity to make an effort to bridge the gap between the English and Spanish speaking communities on campus and enter what Mary Louise Pratt dubbed in a keynote address at a Modern Language Association Literary Conference "contact zones," which she defined as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other." It was rare, however, that a La Serna student native to one language made the effort to interact with a student who speaks a different language. Students preferred their own tiny bubbles of comfort to the contact zones that awaited them. I, like most students, spent my four years at La Serna ignoring the opportunity to embrace the different cultures surrounding me.

It wasn't that I didn't believe in diversity. I just had a hard time figuring out where I fit into a multicultural community. Deeply affected by the epidemic of paranoia that political correctness has spread across much of today's society, I reasoned that any curiosity I had about others' cultures would be viewed as ignorance and bigotry. In my experience, creating an environment in which all cultures are accepted and celebrated has always meant simply gathering together people of different backgrounds and strictly ensuring that no one group or person offends another. And how are these offensive situations to be avoided? It's simple, really. As long as no one mentions anyone else's culture, no one will get hurt.

One problem: that's not embracing culture. That's ignoring culture. And someone will get hurt that way. The person who does not get the opportunity to share with others the joy of their lifestyle gets hurt. The person who remains uninformed about cultures other than his own gets hurt. It hurts to believe that your background is something that must be hidden. It hurts to be told that your culture is not worth celebrating. It hurts to have a fear of hurting others grow into a fear of others themselves.

For nearly eighteen years, I was too foolish to realize this. It was not until the summer after I graduated from La Serna High School, when I worked as an Instructional Aide at my Alma Mater during summer school, that I allowed myself to truly embrace culture. For one week, I worked in the ELD Foundational Skills class, helping students read the newspaper, translate their ideas into English, and write complete English sentences. I quickly recognized that these students were more excited to learn than any I had encountered. The students came to me with such eagerness for approval of their efforts to compose paragraphs of grammatically correct English. They constantly asked me the meanings of English words that they did not understand, setting aside their pride for the sake of their education. This commitment to learning benefited the students greatly, and though they may not have realized it, their eagerness to share with me also impacted me tremendously. In this excellent example of a contact zone, my students taught me about the cultures of Mexico, Peru, and even Hungary (one student was not a native Spanish speaker) while helping me practice my Spanish. More importantly, however, my students befriended me, and helped me to realize that the barrier I sensed between my social circle and theirs &endash; my culture and theirs! &endash; for my entire high school career didn't, in reality, even exist.

There was no longer any reason for me to be afraid. I did not need to worry that my curiosity about culture would be deemed unacceptable by others who didn't share my enthusiasm. The feeling of freedom that I've felt since sharing with my ELD students is incredible, but it is nothing compared to what the students themselves must have gained from this experience. The backgrounds of my students run the gamut of Latin and European cultures, but because of their common language, at La Serna &endash; and probably in the majority of their experiences in America &endash; they are viewed as one entirely homogenous group. Every day in Southern California, people refer to all Spanish speakers as "Mexicans." How unwelcome and unappreciated my students from El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, and Venezuela must feel! The Foundational Skills teacher understood this. To help geography come alive, she asked each of the students to share one thing about their hometown, and in doing so, turned that classroom into a brilliant contact zone. Students told stories of the crowds in Mexico City, the laid-back lifestyle of their small pueblos, the animals and crops they raised on their farms, and the beauty of the Andes Mountains. Finally, my students were able to share their cultures &endash; their -distinct cultures &endash; and feel that they mattered.

In the essay "Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan," June Jordan stresses the importance of ensuring people of the validity of their culture. Jordan shares the anecdote of a class she started teaching at the University of California at Berkeley on "Black English" after students in her "In Search of the Invisible Black Woman" class were appalled and confused by Alice Walker's use of the language they spoke every day. Amazed to find that "none of the students had ever learned how to read and write their own verbal system of communication: Black English" and that the idea of writing in Black English "began to baffle or else bemuse and then infuriate my students," Jordan asked, "Why not? Was it too late?" In the case of Jordan's students, and also in the case of the ELD students at La Serna High School, it was not too late. The students in Jordan's Black English class found strength and confidence in the celebration of their culture in the classroom. The same is undoubtedly true of my students this summer. In the Foundational Skills class, while they were still united by the universal commonalities that hold together any multicultural group and by their shared need to learn English, each student was able to celebrate the uniqueness of his own culture. This celebration, teamed with the cultural awareness that it brought with it, gave my students and me the confidence and enthusiasm necessary for success in the contact zone.

Every moment there was a new success in this contact zone of a classroom. My first day, Magda, who spoke the most English of anyone in the class, helped me to communicate with the other students before I felt comfortable using my feeble Spanish to answer their questions. When my students played games which required them to find someone who fulfilled certain criteria, they never left me out of the fun. Federico once set down the newspaper I was helping him read to ask me where my family came from. Shocked and intrigued when he found out I was not of Hispanic origin, he began asking me questions about the Irish culture. I spent a few free minutes standing over the classroom globe with Ferenc and Antonio, listening to them locate and compare their countries of origin and describe the journeys they made to get here. Ferenc flew across the Atlantic from Hungary and landed on the East Coast where he visited his brother before coming to California. For Antonio, the trip was quite different. He spent days on a boat that took him from Peru to Southern California. I pointed to L.A. on the globe and told them I'd lived here my whole life. We all chuckled, but there was no mocking in their laughter. My students would hug me when they saw me in the halls. After class one day, as I walked and chatted (one moment in English, the next in Spanish) with Antonio about his desire to serve in the U.S. Navy, he smiled and said "We are friends?" Returning the smile, I nodded and said "Si, somos amigos."

From these experiences, I learned this valuable truth: multiculturalism is more than a bandwagon that institutions and groups feel the need to jump on in order to keep up with today's society. Multiculturalism means many cultures are alive and celebrated within the community. It does not mean that people of differing origins have been thrown together and forced to live "peaceably" (translation: with no semblance of any culture). Multiculturalism cannot exist without cultural awareness. How can you embrace something that you know absolutely nothing about? In order to function as a diverse community, we must share and celebrate those things that make us diverse. We must ask questions, and answer them happily. We must set aside the foolish pride that keeps us from learning about other cultures and sharing our own. We must, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, "go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect."

Out of fear of stepping on toes, of sounding condescending, of making someone feel like they weren't a part of a community, I ignored culture for years. I allowed myself to think that no one ever did anything differently than I did. And if there ever was a hint that someone else's lifestyle was less than identical to mine, I let it be. I thought it best not to meddle. Working in the ELD Foundational Skills class this summer, I meddled. I inquired. I learned. I experienced. I embraced multiculturalism. In one week, my life was transformed by a handful of students who weren't afraid to share their lives with me and who helped me to overcome my fear of sharing mine. That is multiculturalism.

Works Cited

Pratt. Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America.