Mexican schools teach indigenous languages (fwd)

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Mexican schools teach indigenous languages
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/centralphoenix/articles/0521mexlanguage0521Z4.html#

Mary Jordan
The Washington Post
May. 21, 2004 12:00 AM

MEXICO CITY - Jose Roberto Cleofas depends on red lights to make a
living. As soon as cars brake for the stoplight in front of the Pizza
Hut on Insurgentes Avenue, Cleofas, 14, moves in on dirty windshields
and starts wiping.

"How else can I eat?" said the fifth-grader, one of the hundreds of
thousands of indigenous people who have migrated to Mexican cities in
search of work as agriculture has failed in their dying villages.

The federal government is struggling to educate migrant children here
and in other Mexican cities. The Education Ministry has opened more
than 2,000 bilingual schools for speakers of 62 indigenous languages in
the past 10 years.

In part, the initiative is a response to the armed Zapatista movement in
southern Mexico in the 1990s, which embarrassed the government by
bringing worldwide attention to its neglect of indigenous people. Most
of the new schools are in rural areas where indigenous children are in
the majority. Now, the challenge is to accommodate their growing
numbers in cities where they are a minority.

Like 300,000 other Mexicans, Cleofas' first language is Otomi. There are
10 million indigenous Mexicans in a population of 103 million. During
the Spanish conquest 500 years ago, indigenous people fled to remote
desert and mountain areas and remain among Mexico's poorest,
marginalized by racial prejudice and inferior schooling.

Cleofas attends the Alfredo Correo school, a two-story brick
schoolhouse, where about 100 of the 124 students are indigenous,
according to the principal. The school was chosen last year to be one
of 76 city schools in a vanguard bicultural project because nearly all
students speak the same language and are from Santiago Mexquititlan, a
farming village 100 miles north of Mexico City. The schools' computers
are programmed in Spanish and Otomi, and teachers are required to learn
Otomi so they can communicate easily with students who are not
proficient in Spanish.

Cleofas, who began speaking Spanish five years ago at age 9, has already
attended school longer than many indigenous students, who typically
don't finish primary school. He said no one in his family had ever
finished fifth grade.

The soaring number of indigenous children in urban Mexico is being
compared by education officials to the situation in the United States.
In both countries, the influx of migrant children is prompting schools
to introduce native languages in the classroom. And in both countries,
multicultural education is facing some resistance.

"Yes, there are parents who don't like it," said Nancy Miranda, head of
the parents association at the Alfredo Correo school. She said some
parents believe assimilation and speaking Spanish are the way to get
ahead in Mexico.

Some parents said the cost of training teachers in indigenous languages
and creating special bilingual textbooks was a wasteful expenditure for
an already thin education budget. Rather than have their children learn
Otomi, some parents interviewed said they would prefer their children
learn English or French, the languages wealthier Mexicans study.