Spanish Becomes a Secret; Language of the Dead

After reading “Spanish Becomes a Secret; Language of the Dead” from the book My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes, I was struck by how eloquent yet tragic this personal story was.  Looking at the context of this excerpt, it is difficult to determine if this is autobiographical, if the author is the young girl in the story.  Like most authors, I am sure Hudes is using a good amount of personal experience to craft her tale.  Even if some of the details are not exactly fact, it is clear that the emotion coming through is genuine.

Socially, it is fascinating to observe the interactions of people who are close to each other.  The love the author feels for her mother is almost a tangible, solid thing.  The minute detail she uses to describe the way her mother works her garden shows an amazing attention to detail.  It is as if Hudes knows she is the caretaker of her mother’s hard work.  She must watch it attentively and scribe the details meticulously, if only so other people, the readers, can realize her toil.  This brings to mind memories of my grandfather.  I would watch him perform various tasks around the yard: lawn care, gardening, painting… In everything he did, he was careful and deliberate; however, it was the painting I remember most.  My grandfather was the type who always had to be busy.  If there wasn’t anything that needed doing, he would create something.  That something was usually painting.  Picnic tables, metal lawn chairs, doors, it did not matter.  He would paint them and paint them again.  I always regret that I never asked him why.

Hudes paints a beautiful description of her mother as the “bone-tired breadwinner.”  After an exhausting day of work, her mother would come home “soggy limbed, a marionette whose strings had come loose.”  I can clearly visualize the fatigue.  It is interesting that Hudes spends so much time and affectionate energy describing her mother, yet her father is more or less a footnote.  Based only on this excerpt, it seems that she may be resentful towards her father.  Describing her mother as the only person bringing money into the house is a clear indicator that her father was not.  Did she feel her father did not work as hard as her mother?  The resentment may also stem from the fact that they could only speak English around her father.  Clearly, the young girl is proud of her heritage, as indicated by how much she values her mother’s stories.  Finally, the fact that her mother trusts her with a story that even her father knows nothing about indicates that there is definitely a family rift.  Hudes shares that even after a hard day at work, her mother would sometimes get energized through a fight with her father.  “I’d stare at the ceiling to mom and dad’s vitriolic screams.”  From an emotional standpoint, I think we can all relate to this.  Most of us have fought with significant others; most of us have had to witness fights between family members.  Especially as a child, this is difficult and stressful.  Children often blame themselves even though the problems have nothing to do with them.

The girl in this narrative seems to be caught between two worlds, fighting between what she perceives to be a choice of maintaining traditions and heritage or assimilating to something new.  This is where, as teachers, we come in.  We cannot control what happens to a student at home, but we can control the classroom environment.  Intellectually, we know what we need to do.  The difficult part is usually acting on that knowledge.  This is where our moral responsibilities as educators (and as members of the community) come into play.  If our students are experiencing some sort of crisis or turmoil at home, we can usually see signals.  The student may be overly tired, excessively irritable; maybe they fight with friends they usually don’t.  As educators, we need to be aware of these changes and ask them what is going on.  It is easy to give a consequence for certain behaviors, but we really need to train ourselves to look beyond the behavior for the source.  Misbehavior in the classroom is not the problem.  It is merely a symptom.