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

I cheerfully butchered the Spanish language every day I was in Mexicali. I dearly wanted to be able to communicate better with the people there, but I had had only had one year of Spanish instruction back in seventh grade and had forgotten virtually everything I learned. I once tried to ask a group of young Mexican girls how to say "curly hair" in Spanish. I pointed to my hair and said with what must have been a terrible accent, "¿Como se dice el pelo como esto?" When several of them piped up with the answer to my question, I had to repeat it tentatively, "Rizo? Rizado?" I could see from the looks on their faces that they were delighted at my attempt to learn Spanish, even though I wasn't very good. Next, one of them asked me if I had always had curly hair, but I didn't understand her question on the first try. Seeing the confused look on my face, the girls explained their question to me again and asked optimistically, "¿Entiendes?" Looking up to the sky to perhaps spot the answer there and finding that I still had no clue as to what they had said, I turned back to them and admitted with a grin, "No!" At this point, we all burst out laughing in amusement and exasperation. The girls were kind enough to explain themselves yet again and when I finally understood the question, I pantomimed, "Tengo pelo como esto" (pointing to a girl's straight hair) "y cuando tieneŠ cuando tengo doce anos, BOING!!"

I was on a mission trip to Mexico with fourteen other members of the Stanford Catholic Community. One of the focal activities of our trip was putting on afternoon programs for the Catholic children of Mexicali, so that they could play organized games and learn more about their faith. With only one-third of our Stanford group speaking fluent or proficient Spanish, we knew from the beginning that we were going to have communication problems. Of course, we didn't quite understand how difficult things would be until we arrived at the churches for the first afternoon of programming.

My team of four, which included only one fluent Spanish speaker, was stunned to see fifty Mexican children between the ages of five and twelve who looked to us for instruction. The Stanford students had come to the kids' programs that first day with the reasonable expectation that we, as adult leaders, would have authority and agency with respect to the children; however, those of us who did not speak Spanish well soon discovered that, as linguistic foreigners, we had neither authority nor agency. We didn't know many of the words necessary to direct the children in activities, so all the activities and all of our ideas had to be communicated through Jorge, the leader among us who was fluent in Spanish. The non-Spanish speakers watched from a distance as Jorge directed the kids in games. The children often came to me and the other non-Spanish speakers that first day with questions, expecting that we would have the authority to answer them. They were disappointed when they discovered that we were unable to understand what they had said, much less answer their questions.

Richard Rodriguez narrates a similar experience of disappointment in his book, The Hunger of Memory. Rodriguez explains that a rift was created between himself and his Mexican immigrant parents as he became educated in the American school system. Early on in his education, he had turned to his father for help with a homework assignment, knowing that he should be able to gain assistance from this authority figure. Young Rodriguez gave up on his father in frustration however, because his father didn't have the skills to help: "The night my father tried to help me with an arithmetic exercise, he kept reading the instructions, each time more deliberately, until I pried the textbook out of his hands, saying, 'I'll try to figure it out some more by myself'" (653). Like Rodriguez, the kids were frustrated, because we, the leaders, didn't have the competence which they expected us to have. We, as leaders, were also frustrated, as Rodriguez' father must have been, because we did not have the competence and authority that we ourselves expected to have.

This type of authority imbalance, in which one party is assumed to have virtually all the authority and a second party is assumed to have virtually none, is characteristic of a "contact zone." Mary Louise Pratt coined the term "contact zone" in her speech "Arts of the Contact Zone," defining it as one of the "social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of powerŠ" (584). Although we held Catholicism in common, the Stanford leaders and the children of Mexicali were most certainly from different cultures. Even as a group of Stanford students, we were culturally very different from one another: I was an American who had grown up in England; Victoria was a graduate student from Singapore; Jorge was a Mexican-American from Chicago; and Eugene was a Chinese-American from Ohio. By virtue of our common experience at Stanford, we were accustomed to intellectual discourse, multiculturalism, instant gratification, the 24-7 pace of American college life, and the hope of obtaining a job we liked in a booming economy. Thus shaped by our experiences, we ran up against a culture where it was extraordinary to finish high-school much less go to college, where people did not receive communion at mass because they believed that they were unworthy, and where the people seemed to live vibrantly every day despite a backdrop of dirt streets, stray dogs, graffiti and polluted water.

Even with the mindset that we were in Mexicali as servants willing to learn, we made the mistake of envisioning a one-way flow of knowledge and instruction from us to the children. We discovered soon enough that this sort of power structure was not viable in our situation; we could not force communication to flow from four leaders to fifty children through one mouthpiece. We realized our mistake when on the first day, we tried to sing "Father Abraham" with the children and received some very bizarre looks in return. This was a song from an American-English tradition, and we had found a copy of it translated, albeit badly, into Spanish. I knew the tune but could not sing well in Spanish, and Jorge did not know the tune but could at least pronounce the words properly. The two of us sang it together and tried to get the children to join in, but it was just impossible for them to make out the words to the song. Very much like Guaman Poma, the Andean who centuries ago wrote the Spanish king in an unintelligible smattering of Quechuan, Spanish and pictures, we too were speaking the unwieldy mixed language of the contact zone (Pratt 584). And furthermore, we were trying to speak the cultural language of our own childhoods to children whose childhood experiences were so different from our own. No wonder we weren't understood.

The key to our eventual success in Mexicali was bilateral accommodation. As leaders, we had to gracefully accept our diminished authority and, to the best of our abilities, tailor the activities we planned to the unique contact zone that we and the children had created. I, for my part, came on the second and third days of the program, mentally prepared to tell the children exactly what words in Spanish I didn't understand and to ask them to explain themselves with different words. This proved to be a dramatic improvement over the first day, when I was often at a loss for words in my encounters with the children. Others in our group of four had also adapted quickly; on the second day, having learned from the "Father Abraham" debacle of the previous day, we decided to do the "hokey-pokey" with the kids. We realized that the "hokey-pokey" was most definitely an American phenomenon, but instead of trying to convert the song into Spanish, we decided to turn it into an English lesson. Using Spanish, we taught them the names of body parts in English and had them do the motions with us as we sang. This approach seemed to be more satisfying both for the kids and for us. The kids still thought that the activity was a little strange but at least they could participate with confidence and learn some English words while they were at it.

We also realized that we needed the help and accommodation of the children as we struggled to teach them about the Bible and engage them in activities. The children were wonderfully willing to explain themselves when I had not understood them, and they were also very helpful in communicating with one another about us ("She doesn't speak much Spanish," or "I think this is what she meansŠ"). Another group of Stanford leaders at an adjacent church reported that several children helped them facilitate the group; the leaders could turn to the children and ask them for a particular word they needed to know. The children really seemed to enjoy helping us; they picked up the authority that we lacked as non-Spanish speakers, and took initiatives of their own.

In the end, we were successful at communicating with the children (with them and not just to them) because we were willing to admit our relative powerlessness and let the children take on the authority necessary to communicate with us. There was a feeling of mutuality in this two-way exchange; this is the type of contact Guaman Poma wished that his people could have had with the Spanish, rather than the exploitative contact that actually did occur. Guaman Poma wrote in The First New Chronicle and Good Government that "the Spanish brought nothing of value to share with the Andeans, nothing but armor and guns with the lust for gold, silver, gold and silver, Indies, the Indies, Peru" (qtd. in Pratt 372). Frustrated by this lack of reciprocity in Andean relations with Spain, Guaman Poma imagined a scenario in which the Spanish king asked him for advice on how to rule his empire (Pratt 588). In this ideal situation, the Spanish king shed his authority in order to ask advice from Guaman Poma, who himself took on authority in dispensing advice. Even in his pictures, as Mary Louise Pratt points out, Guaman Poma shows his desire for mutual exchange with the Spanish, since he draws the Andean man face-to-face with the Spanish man&emdash;a depiction that indicates equality (589).

The implication, drawn from both my experience and that of Guaman Poma, is that even authoritative visitors in the contact zone need the input of natives, and that such visitors cut themselves off from a great resource if they insist on a one-way flow of communication. As my love and assistance to the children was freely given, so was the love and assistance of the children freely given to me. On the last day, Carmen, a member of the Mexicali youth group who was our age, brought me a gift&emdash;a coin purse which she had crocheted for me. We had become warm friends over the few days, even though we couldn't say much to one another. When she gave me this little purse, she said, "This is for you, so that you can always remember me." And I will.

Bartholomae, David, and Anthony Petrosky, eds. Ways of Reading. New York: Bedford St Martin's. 2002.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." 605-620.

Rodriguez, Richard. "The Achievement of Desire." 652-671.