MLO 5: CULTURAL PRAXIS
(CULTURAL INTERNALIZATION & LANGUAGE IMMERSION)
The student demonstrates that he or she has been actively immersed in and has internalized Hispanic culture.
There are three pathways by which this outcome can be fulfilled:
There are three pathways by which this outcome can be fulfilled:
- By participating in a study-abroad program in a Spanish-speaking country for at least one semester. WLC's Spanish program has exchange agreements with the University of Aguas Calientes and the University of Queretero in Mexico, and the University of Córdoba in Spain. In addition, through CSU International Programs, you can study at universities in Madrid or Granada, Spain or in Santiago, Chile.
- By living and working in a local heritage community over an extended period of time without interruption for at least two years.
- By participating in and/or completing 10 of the following cultural learning scenarios with accompanying documentation, in the target language:
- Participate in service learning within a local heritage community for a minimum of eight weeks beyond the actual service learning requirement.
- Make a minimum of three home-visits in the local heritage community to interact and communicate with members of the Hispanic culture regarding topics of personal interest, the community, culture and language.
- Attend or view via media a minimum of 10 cultural events and /or social activities of Hispanic culture.
- Actively participate and/or perform in a school or heritage community event or celebration.
- Participate in a heritage-community project (of some duration) that requires proficiency in Spanish and knowledge of Hispanic cultures.
- Conducting a one hour in-depth interview with a speaker of Spanish, eliciting, in a conversational manner, comments of a biographical nature, cultural and social observations and anecdotal reflections.
- View and comment on 10 movie-length films produced within and about Hispanic culture.
- Participate at least five times in organized sports or recreation activities of Hispanic culture.
- Demonstrate cultural skills by making hotel reservations, ordering meals and shopping in stores or markets in heritage settings where Spanish is spoken. This objective is assessed by faculty.
In order to fulfill this Major Learning Outcome, I chose to combine it with a project I was working for in one of my courses. I wanted to interview two people in our community that could paint a picture of the immigrant life in our community. During the course of this project I happened to travel to Mexico. This presented a unique opportunity for me, what if I could establish two narratives by interviewing a person that has immigrated to our community and one who is thinking about doing the same. By comparing their experiences, I was able to comprehend the culture that they come from in a much clearer light. The following is my completed paper.
The individuals interviewed were Mario Ramos and Chendo Amezcua. Mario is an agricultural worker who lives in East Salinas with his wife and four children. He moved to the United States during the 1990’s with two of his children and has worked in the Salinas Valley for more than 20 years. Chendo lives in the state of Michoacán and makes a living as a driver. Both of these interviews were conducted in 2015.
The Immigrant Narrative References
A focus on the connection between East Salinas and the Tziróndaro Valley with a personal approach
Nestled 1,200 miles away from the US-Mexico border, the Tziróndaro Valley is located in the northern portion of the state of Michoacán. Michoacán is located near the center of the country along the west coast. The name Tziróndaro derives from the native P'urhépecha tongue and means “swamp land”. The region’s fertile land has paved the way for agriculture to become the backbone of the local economy. Mostly rural, the countryside is dotted with small towns and villages which center around the cities of Zamora and Jiquilpan. This is where my native town of Chavinda is located and where most of the research for this paper took place.
It was about 8:00pm local time and amidst a light drizzle we landed in the Guadalajara airport. Like many times before I waited for our driver outside customs and wandered how many people ‘Chendo’ has driven to town over the years. Nothing complements a four-hour flight more than a two-hour drive across a hastily built highway and backroads of farming towns. Chendo is an old family friend in his late fifties, he makes a living shuttling people from town to town. We talk about the usual. Politics, sports, our families, the town. Always the same responses, it seems as if the more the area changes, the more it stays the same. It is with Chendo that I would do most of my research, driving from town to town and listening to a very biased, but very honest, description of Tziróndaro.
We drove to Zamora the next morning. With a population of 141.627, Zamora is without a doubt the region’s biggest city. The one thing that stands out as we approach the city is the cathedrals twin spires. At 105 meters, the towers of the Cathedral of our Lady of Guadalupe are the tallest in Mexico. The name immediately makes me recall the legend of the Virgen de Guadalupe. The Virgin Mary herself that appeared to a Nahuatl Indian and asked him to build a temple for her. Her image helped unite the indigenous population and assimilate them into the Catholic fate. Coincidentally, the hill which was chosen for her temple happened to be the site of an Aztec earth goddess, Tonantzin. A fact not overlooked by the Indians and certainly used by the missionaries to their advantage. It strikes me as odd that a mere couple of blocks from the cathedral sits another church, and another just a few more. I asked Chendo why they need so many churches so close to each other, he replies with a simple ‘hay pobres y hay ricos’, there are the rich and there are the poor.
The next day we decided to make a longer trip to Jiquilpan. Jiquilpan is most famous for being the birthplace of Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas. Lázaro is fondly remembered as the post-revolutionary general that led the oil expropriation of 1938. On the way to visit his city we passed by a small town known as Villamar. Villamar, as Chendo explains, was built around the hacienda of a man who had been given claim to the valley by the king of Spain himself. Today, his residence is the center of the town. The main living quarters turned into a school and an adjacent house turned into a museum. Further down the road one can glimpse the source of countless wealth and human suffering that inflicted the area for decades, the abandoned sugar mill.
At one point during the 1800’s this mill sent sugar to the eastern port of Veracruz, ‘on burros’, Chendo quips. Whenever we drive pass the mill, I can’t help but think of my own connection to the place. My great grandfather was a foreman at the mill before the revolution broke out. It’s always a feeling of pride, but know I can’t help but feel some remorse, shame even. When I think about the privileges I had growing up I see that events that happened over one hundred years still dictate certain social placement and limitations.
A visit to Mexico would not be complete without a visit to my grandfather’s parcelas. As we drive across the wet, red dirt in the 1985 Datsun pick-up we see the surprising agricultural diversification that has struck the area. Twenty years ago you would be hard pressed to find something other than corn and wheat growing in these lands. Now they’re covered by strawberry, onion, tomato, and berry fields. Corn and wheat are still role players but they have taken a lesser role.
Seeing so many varieties of crops makes me think about the corporations funding these operations. The region’s strawberry output is among the highest in Mexico and most of these growers are contracted by Driscoll. An American company, buying Mexican strawberries with Mexican Pesos but selling them in American Dollars. This corporate influence leads me to think about another story close to home.
About fifteen years ago a new crop craze swept the countryside. Agave, the plant used to make tequila, was being sold at close as high as $40 pesos per kilo. One of my grandparents invested in this plant, along with half of the other growers. It takes about five to six years for agave to grow to proper size for harvest. By the end of the second year it became clear that the tequila distilleries had intentionally encouraged growers to overplant agave by charging prime rates for subprime plants. Towards the end of the fifth year, my grandfather sold the agave at a rate of $2.50 per kilo. Lucky, some called him, most of the other growers averaged below $1.50. The foreign born distilleries benefited from the surplus of agave and our local bars here in America remained well stocked for two-dollar shot night.
It’s not hard to draw a conclusion as to why people leave Tziróndaro for the promise of El Norte. It’s true, cartel violence has turned some parts of Mexico into guerrilla warzones. Despite its proximity to the cartel controlled Sierra Madre, this area has been virtually untouched by the violence. At least that is what the locals like to tell you when you ask. If someone has been killed or disappeared they were probably involved with bad things, that seems to be the narrative to explain drug related crimes in the area. If violent crime is not an emigration factor, the state of the local economy certainly is.
The federal minimum wage in Mexico is 67.29 pesos per day. This is the de jure interpretation of the law, most of the people I talked to did not know what the minimum wage was. The promise of a better salary, access to adequate healthcare, and a better quality of life in general are the main reasons why people in this part of the country leave for the United States.
When I came back to Salinas I decided to take a fresh approach to my research and see the places of the community I hadn’t seen. The community of Alisal is primarily Hispanic and growing up it seemed as if someone from our town lived on practically every block. I took the Sanborn Road exit, parked my car in the parking lot across from Bank of America and rode the city bus for about an hour. Seeing the different people made me think about Adichie’s lecture on the dangers of a single story and made me realize some of the biases I had been indoctrinated with.
Yes, the main reason for immigrants to come to the United States is employment. Yes, the biggest source of employment in East Salinas is agriculture. Driving around in the bus though, I saw the people that would come out of the businesses, the workers, the patrons. Not all immigrants of course but one can’t help but make an assumption that anyone with Hispanic features has at least some cultural ties to Mexico. And the one think they all had in common is that none of them were the same. Without thinking really thinking about it I had set out to observe migrant workers coming back from the fields or on their way to do grocery shopping when I realized the hypocrisy of my subconscious expectations. I too came to this country as an immigrant, why wasn’t I expecting to meet someone like me. Someone with a good paying job and higher education.
This moment made me realize that part of my identity was not what I imagined it to be. It made me think about my education and my own experience as an immigrant. Reading Anzaldúa’s chapter, How to Tame a Wild Tongue, I thought about my own experiences learning English. I came to this country when I was in fifth grade and I struggled with English so much that when our teacher asked us to write in our journals I would copy random parts of my textbook word for word. Sadly for me, I wasn’t counting on the fact that my teacher could read and she quickly discovered my plan. I can’t remember when I learned to speak English. I remember learning new words and I remember being promoted out of the thirty minute ESL classes we had twice a week but I can’t remember the moment when English became my first language. I do, however, remember when my name stopped being Mendoza and became Men-doh-za.
This subtlety I noticed while talking to various Hispanic members of the community. Depending on the tone of the conversation, their pronunciation of their own name changed. This subconscious attacked on the native Spanish names seemed to be present across all income levels in the community, even people in our class could relate to this subconscious switching of names. A product, no doubt of the internal struggle that the children of migrants face. A sort of psychological borderland we live in, if you will. Never really embracing one culture over the other but finding space to make our own despite different but powerful pressure from both.
The gang violence, the distrust of the police, the alarmingly high poverty levels were all in my mind when I began to think critically of East Salinas and how policy in Mexico may play a role in the United States. As I kept writing this essay however, I became less and less interested in finding the cause of these problems, perhaps it’s too easy to attribute blame to our selective globalization but the most elaborate problems often have the simplest ideas at their root.
I came to believe that it is our Orientalist view of the outside world that leads to most of the immigration problems that we are faced with today. As long as we are unable to relate to someone that lives a mere two-hour flight away and see them as our equals, we will be unable to see the dangers of selective globalization. As the famous Mexican president Porfirio Diaz once said “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States."
References
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Paperback.
"Los Datos Del Santuario." Santuario Diocesano De Nuestra Señora De Guadalupe Datos Del Santuario. Diocesis De Zamora, n.d. Web. Apr.-May 2015. <http://www.santuarioguadalupano.org.mx/datos.html>.
INEGI. "Número De Habitantes. Michoacán De Ocampo." Número De Habitantes. Michoacán De Ocampo. INEGI, n.d. Web. Apr.-May 2015. <http://cuentame.inegi.org.mx/monografias/informacion/mich/poblacion/>.
REVISTA DE LA DIRECCiÓN DE ESTUDIOS HISTÓRICOS DEL INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ANTROPOLOGÍA E HISTORIA Número 49 México. D.F. Mayo-Agosto 2001 ÍNDICE ENTRADA LIBRE SILVIO A. BEDINI
Knight, Alan. "Cárdenas del Río, Lázaro (1895–1970)." Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture. Ed. Jay Kinsbruner and Erick D. Langer. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 106-109. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 13 May 2015.
Baker, George, and Sean H. Goforth. "Petroleum Industry." Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture. Ed. Jay Kinsbruner and Erick D. Langer. 2nd ed. Vol. 5. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 212-215. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 13 May 2015.
Harrup, Anthony. "Mexico Raises Minimum Wage for 2015 by 4.2%, In Line With Inflation." World. The Wall Street Journal, 19 Dec. 2014. Web. Apr.-May 2015. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-raises-minimum-wage-for-2015-by-4-2-in-line-with-inflation-1419049866>.
Adichie, Chimamanda N. "The Danger of a Single Story." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:. TED Talks, July 2009. Web. Apr.-May 2015. <https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story>.