my boat, your boat

one of the more surprising gifts i’ve been given in my current school is the opportunity to work with an extremely culturally diverse population. all major (and plenty of less than major) religions, most inhabited continents and just about every language family sit in a desk somewhere in the building, most often in my classroom. generally, this makes for a kinder, smarter, more interesting community. generally. but sometimes there are problems. sometimes there is ugliness.

quite a few of our students come here, come to this country, from countries too poor for living in, war-torn countries, places where genocide has destroyed everything but memory, places where children are still fighting wars. they come to this country believing it is made of gold and candy and new lives for everyone. and sometimes it is, but for most of the kids who come here it’s not quite like that. everything exists inside a different language and for those children, the first small pile of words they learn consists mostly of words to keep them always aware of their status as other, alien, foreign. but uglier than that is what they learn next. words to keep all the other children who are not from here off kilter. i am an alien but not as alien as you. and although in my mind every day is the small world ride at Disneyland, more often than not, it goes like this:

loud noise from the back of the classroom while students are supposed to be reading silently. i look up. silence. angry looks across the aisle. we all go back to our reading. rustling and then hostile whispers. louder, even more hostile whispers. i see one boy turned around, gesturing wildly at a group of four boys. he is albanian. they are all part of what the children here would call the spanish community. not a single child among them is spanish. the word, here, suggests a common language, not a common culture or history. and yes, i know that between them they represent three expressions of the language, but i am telling you how children see things, how they represent difference and sameness. one of the not really spanish boys is angry, calling the albanian boy stupid, his anger compressing his words into one long stream of word, rising steadily in pitch as he goes. this delights the albanian boy, cracks him up. he is watching this child slowly become less and less his new home and more and more his old as pronunciation of the words shifts more and more toward spanish. he whispers something again to the not really spanish boy and the three others nearby try very quietly to tell him to shut up.

by now, other children are glaring. some small part of me notes this and is pleased they are annoyed by an interruption to their reading. the rest of me calls the first not really spanish boy out into the hall. he is angry. i ask what’s happening. the albanian, it seems, is calling him a name. a name that he and the other children, at least these children, have determined is appropriate to use as a slur against mexicans. the child is incensed, not because the albanian has used the word, but because he has used it incorrectly. “i’m not even mexican, miss!” he wails. i ask him what he is. “ecuadorian.” and what i want to tell him is that the word isn’t appropriate, even to use when folks are mexican, but the strangeness of the situation gets me a little and i have to look up and pretend to be mad so i can hide the fact that i’m about to laugh out loud.

so i pull the albanian out into the hall, too. i ask if he’s been using this word. he denies it, looks confused. “i’m not even mexican, you idiot!” hisses the ecuadorian child standing behind me. "i'm ecuadorian!" “oh,” says the albanian, genuinely fascinated. i am not sure what to do here but they seem reconciled after this so we go back in. there is reading to do and neither one is particularly strong in this area.

a day or two later, there is some sort of ruckus between the albanian and the ecuadorian yet again. i pull the ecuadorian outside first, ask what’s happening. i do this because he is the more rational of the two children, more likely to understand diplomacy and all. but not today. he is so angry he is taking up about twice his normal space. it seems that although both boys established that this word is really for use to degrade mexicans, the albanian doesn’t know the word to use to make ecuadorians feel bad about being ecuadorians and besides, he likes hearing the ecuadorian yell. because he likes the way the ecuadorian says the word. but the ecuadorian knows this is a subtle attack on the way he says all words, on his pronunciation of words he wasn’t born hearing.

i move the ecuadorian’s seat and although he is fuming about that, too, he is sitting next to a very pretty, very smart, very nice girl who touches his arm when she speaks to him during group work time and i am more or less forgiven by the end of the period.

but i spend more time outside with the albanian, who looks, both behaviorally and academically, like a fourth grader. i intend to call his mom and talk about his behavior. i have the phone number and ask about a good time to catch her. in spite of his generally annoying behavior in class, he truly is a sweet child who means well and he suggests several times that would be good because his brother will be home then. because his mom doesn’t understand English. neither does his dad. and i start to laugh, which confuses him but he smiles a little, too although he’s not really sure why. i am not laughing at his parents. i'm in the same place i was when the ecuadorian child explained why he was mad.

“does your mom work?” i ask. she does. she works where she has to deal with other people. now, i do not know which words the children have settled on as being offensive and hurtful to albanians, but i know what the word stupid does to people and i ask him this: “how many times a day do you think your mom hears someone say stupid albanian or stupid foreigner or why don’t you learn to speak english?” and his face focuses for a minute in a way i have never seen. because he loves his mom and because he doesn’t want anyone ever to call her stupid or make her feel like an alien while he has been fitting in so well making by others stand out. his head drops a minute and i hear his voice, surprisingly quiet, say, “ a lot, maybe.” and this is the ugly part. it’s not just in schools that people use the words the children have settled on. it is on the street and the train and the bus. it is in stores and at work and when you have to fill out forms and see doctors. his mom hears, every day, some version of the word he uses to hurt the ecuadorian.

i do not know how long it will take the rest of the world to make these things less ugly or what exactly it will take to get to that place, but in my classroom we only have until june.