Mexico schools embrace native tongues

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Mexico schools embrace native tongues

Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Mar. 15, 2006 12:00 AM

CHIMALAPA DE ACAXOCHITLN, Mexico - With its bare walls, battered desks and
worn but well-swept floors, the classroom where Floridalia Guzman teaches
looks a lot like any other school in Mexico. But it doesn't sound like
one. "Xi tlakuiloka nochi tlen istoke ipan ininchinanko," Guzman said in
Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, as her third-graders scrambled to get
out their notebooks. "Make a list of things in your community," she
repeated, this time in Spanish. The children don't understand much
Spanish, but that's OK. At the Benito Juarez Bilingual School, teachers
introduce the national language slowly, a few words at a time. By sixth
grade, the children will be bilingual.  advertisement

In the United States, bilingual programs such as these have ignited fierce
debates as schools search for the best way to teach migrant children who
don't speak English. But in Mexico, where 7 percent of the population
speaks an indigenous language, the government has embraced bilingual
education. Mexico's experience could offer important lessons for the
United States, Mexican educators say. Until 15 years ago, Mexican schools
enforced a strict Spanish-only policy, much like the English-only
education rule adopted in 2000 by Arizona. Mexico eventually declared the
policy a failure, saying it was creating generations of confused students
and adding to poverty and discrimination. "It didn't work," said Gudelio
Trevio Cruz, director of indigenous education in Hidalgo. "And if you
(Americans) fill your students with nothing but English, you're going to
have the same problems we had."

Nationwide, about 1.2 million Mexican children attend bilingual classes.
The federal government publishes textbooks in 55 of the country's 63
languages and actively recruits teachers who are native speakers.
Bilingual education is even guaranteed in the constitution.


Mix of tongues


Mara Rosa Martinez scrunched up her nose at the sentence in her notebook,
trying desperately to remember how to translate it to Spanish. "In the
water, there are . . . " she trailed off as her fifth-grade classmates
crowded around, racking their brains for the word for axoxovili. One made
a swirling motion with his hand. "Whirlpools!" shouted someone in Spanish.
"Yeah!" his classmates exclaimed. Martinez nodded. "I like science
better," she said. "Spanish is hard." Still, Martinez and her classmates
are light-years ahead of the third-graders. They slip easily from Nahuatl
to Spanish and already are reading history lessons in the national
language. In Chimalapa, 75 miles from Mexico City, most children enter
school without knowing a lick of Spanish. So for the first few years, the
teachers lecture mostly in Nahuatl (pronounced NAH-WATT).

The children learn to read and write in Nahuatl first, reading from
Nahuatl storybooks and sounding out the language's impossibly long words,
such as achiyamazchiuhqui (windmill). Math and science also are taught in
Nahuatl, but the textbooks are in Spanish. So teachers introduce
vocabulary words like "pistil" and "stamen"  in both languages
simultaneously. "If I speak to them only in Spanish, they won't
understand," Guzman said.  "So I try to mix it in. The idea is to get the
information across, not just teach them Spanish." Arizona used to have
similar bilingual classes but eliminated most of them after voters passed
the English-only education law. Most of the state's 154,000
English-language learners now attend "English immersion" classes where
they are taught in English.

Of Arizona's 155,000 English-learners, 2,956 remained in bilingual
education in the 2004-05 school year because their parents obtained
waivers based on their children's needs. The waivers must be sought each
year. Once children pass an English-proficiency test, they may attend
bilingual classes. Meanwhile, a federal court fined Arizona $1 million a
day for failing to put enough money into teaching immigrant children
English. The fines stopped March 3, when state lawmakers approved a plan
that is now awaiting a federal judge's ruling. All told, the fines reached
$21 million.


Changing tide


Mexico wasn't always so tolerant of its native languages. For centuries,
Mexico's mixed-race majority tried to impose Spanish on students at the
expense of Zapotec, Totonac, Chatino and other tongues. As Indians moved
to Mexican cities in search of work in the 20th century, education
officials redoubled their efforts to "Mexicanize" them. "All the teachers
were from outside our communities," said Mara Antonio Tolentino, who now
teaches the Hahu language in the town of San Esteban Huehuetla. "When we
spoke our language, the teachers thought we were talking bad about them,
so they punished us." The policy created an atmosphere of shame, people
who grew up under the system say. "If your language is prohibited, you
feel like less of a person," Trevio said. "It makes you reluctant to
participate in public life. You get stuck in this culture of poverty, and
there's no way of getting out."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things began to change. After Mexican
leaders botched rescue efforts during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake,
citizens nationwide began questioning their government and its policies.
The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas state and activists such as Nobel Peace
Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu cast the spotlight on Indian rights in Latin
America. The first bilingual programs were started in 1992. The government
started printing textbooks in other languages in 1994. "It was part of a
recognition that we are a multicultural society and that those cultures
need to be valued," said Rubn Viveros, head of Mexico's Indigenous
Education Department. In August 2001, Mexican lawmakers amended the
constitution to include a raft of new rights for Indians. One of the
amendments requires the government to "guarantee and increase levels of
scholarship, favoring bilingual and intercultural education."

Mexico now has 21,046 bilingual programs in elementary schools nationwide
and more than 52,500 teachers teaching in them. In Hidalgo state, where
Chimalapa is located, about 30 percent of all students are in bilingual
schools, Trevio said. The government's textbook department now churns out
colorful paperbacks in Amuzga, Ch'ol, Tlapaneca, Mayo and dozens of other
languages. "What we learned is you have to teach children in the language
they already know,"  said Eleuterio Olarte Tiburcio, head linguist for the
Indigenous Education Department. "If your goal is to impose your language
on children, whether it's Spanish or English . . . then your objective is
no longer education."

One nation

Back at the Benito Juarez School, a group of fifth-graders practiced for a
contest for singing of the national anthem scheduled for the next day.
Eleven schools would be participating. Like everything at the school, the
competition would be bilingual. So instead of the rousing refrain
"Mexicanos, al grito de guerra," the children bellowed the Nahuatl
version: "Ihcuca yaotl tenochnotzas mexihca." Until last year, singing the
national anthem in a language other than Spanish was a crime punishable by
a $4,300 fine or three days in jail. But in July, Congress made it legal
to sing the anthem in indigenous languages and even directed the
government to come up with official translations.

Like bilingual education, it is a sign that Mexico is coming to respect
its homegrown languages, Trevio said. "In the beginning, there was
resistance to what we were doing," Trevio said. "People said, 'How are we
ever going to teach these children to be Mexicans?' But it has worked.
We're a multilingual country, but we're still one country."


http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0315secondtongue.html