Background
My students at Thomas Edison High School in North Philadelphia, just like my former students in West Philadelphia, bring a variety of local and international experiences to the table when they attempt to speak and write. Largely Hispanic, Edison is defined as a bilingual school, and serves the neighborhood across Theodore Roosevelt Boulevard from Olney High School, where I taught for four years. While Olney was composed of equal parts African American, Latino, and, different from Edison, Asian students, along with a smattering of possibly 10% immigrants from over 40 countries, it is separated from Edison by the visible barrier of Roosevelt Boulevard, or Route One. While rt.1 runs the length of the city from deep West Philadelphia at the three-way intersection of Darby Road, Chester Pike, and Lansdowne Avenue 5 miles to cross the Schuylkill River, a stretch called City Line Avenue. Upon crossing the river, however, Route 1 begins a 2 mile path as a highway called Theodore Roosevelt Expressway. My own neighborhood is at the base of this section, about ten minutes East by car to City Hall and the center of the city establishment. Running North and East for the length of the rest of the city, twisting and turning nearly 14 miles to the edge of Philadelphia's geographical boundary in Bensalem county, what becomes Theodore Roosevelt Boulevard physically interrupts the residential articulation of Philadelphia's diverse neighborhoods. Philadelphia is the 5 th largest city in the United States, next to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta, (footnote), and slightly ahead of Phoenix, with a population hovering around 1-1.5 million people. Nonetheless, while the Boulevard and North and Northeast Philadelphia's visible boundaries are clear in the streets and engineering boundaries of bridges and pedestrian crossings, the invisible boundary between people of the region, like many American cities, is language. While about 225.5 million people in the United States, or approximately 80% of the overall population in the 2007 census spoke English, nearly 20% spoke a language other than English at home, and 8% spoke nearly no English at all (as reported in Bilingualism in the USA, by Fredric Field, p.10 - http://books.google.com/books?id=bIsHiWDNLZQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false). Spanish language accounts for nearly 34.5 million people, or 12%.
English language acquisition is not as necessary for social interaction among Spanish speakers within the "Hunting Park" area surrounding Edison, as there are a plethora of shops, people, schools, and recreational activities within close range where Spanish is the dominant tongue of discourse. Nonetheless, to succeed financially, to understand the city and country's laws, housing contracts, business codes and tax structure, one really needs to learn English fluently. In 1998 I had graduated college at Temple University in North Philadelphia and began a graduate course in TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and chose Edison as my site for tutoring in English after school. My older brother and I had scrimmaged with teams of wrestlers from Edison throughout high school, growing up in the Germantown section of Northwest Philadelphia, and I liked the idea of returning there as soon as my teacher suggested I go. Students from Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, and in particular Puerto Rico graced my small space in the library those afternoons at Edison, struggling to capture the sounds and inflections of my native language. I had studied Spanish from 7 th-10 th grade in upper school, as my school called it, suffering through the ineptitudes of my limited memory skills with teachers from Paraguay, Peru, and Ecuador. As I grew older I attended classes in Spanish language at college as an undergraduate with teachers from Argentina and Puerto Rico, but I learned Spanish more predominantly through reaching out for the kindness of Spanish-speaking strangers up and down the East Coast, and throughout a year spent living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my fascination with the language grew.
Foreign languages often allow for what feels like confidential communication between old friends. Outsiders become insiders, strangers become fellow travelers, and grim communication becomes an experiment in choosing strategic combinations of words from a limited palette of colorful possibilities. I feel as though when I travel from my home, either by foot, bike, car, or public transportation into Edison's neighborhood, I leave behind the creature comforts of safety, not because of any danger in terms of violence, but in how I embark on a transcendental journey to another way of seeing the "City of Brotherly Love", or to use the title poets C.A. Conrad and Frank Sherlock give their 2010 chapbook about Philadelphia, "The City Real and Imagined". In that book of one long poem about our city, they say quite eloquently "Something intangible / is here beyond exhaust / the smell of flower sweat / the smell of printing" (p.59). Throughout my own life I have hosted international students from South Korea, Mexico, and Germany; I spent a month at an international summer camp in New Hampshire, where my best friends were Koreans, Russians, and French campers who challenged me at the game of table tennis ("ping-pong"), an activity where language became less necessary than communal fun. In one formative experience, I was paid by the Philadelphia Tourist Bureau to interview international visitors to the Liberty Bell about their travel activities and countries of origin. Later, a relationship with a German woman for two years taught me that language can at times be less relevant than other forms of communication. Even my mother worked with the Philadelphia International Business Exchange and hosted businesspeople from all over the world for several years, from Russia, France, Eastern Europe, England, and Latin America, while I traveled to cities throughout the Soviet Union for a few weeks as a senior in high school. Philadelphia becomes an ideal junction, as almost any city in the world today, for the kinds of language exchanges and diverse international interactions that make conversation a greater transfer between people than any other transaction we might have, even than with money. Language becomes an invisible link that bounds us to one another, as a means of working through emotional journeys as well as in navigating the physical world in which we travel.
I am only 15 minutes from Edison by car, but a world away. Just as many Latinos are migrants to the United States and away from homes far in the distant South of our hemisphere, so does reading take us across some invisible boundary, much larger a leap than Roosevelt Boulevard's ten lanes of traffic going Northeast and Southwest at any speed? As Hazel Rochman points out perceptively, "Reading makes immigrants of us all - it takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/22123-reading-makes-immigrants-of-us-all-it-takes-us-away ) In Chicano/Native American Jimmy Santiago Baca's early collection of poetry, Immigrants In Our Own Land, he stirs the pot with
I practice being myself, And I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me, They were goaded out from under the rocks in my heart When the walls were built higher, When the water was turned off and the windows painted black. (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238136)
Santiago Baca, who learned to read while imprisoned for six and a half years in prison, spent the final three years in solitary confinement, reading. His first poem out of confinement, when in his own words he was "experiencing the power of literature, and it was changing my mind" (http://www.progressive.org/radio/baca09.html), was called "Immigrants in our own Land".
Comments: