Elena
By Pat Mora
My Spanish isn’t good enough.
I remember how I’d smile
listening to my little ones,
understanding every word they’d say,
their jokes, their songs, their plots.
Vamos a pedirle dulces a mamá. Vamos.
But that was in Mexico.
Now my children go to American high schools.
They speak English. At night they sit around
the kitchen table, laugh with one another.
I stand by the stove, feel dumb, alone.
I bought a book to learn English.
My husband frowned, drank beer.
My oldest said, “Mamá, he doesn’t want you
to be smarter than he is.” I’m forty, embarrassed mispronouncing
words,
embarrassed at the laughter of my children,
the grocer, the mailman. Sometimes I take
my English book and lock myself in the bathroom,
say the thick words softly,
for if I stop trying, I will be deaf
when my children need my help.
Patrice—
I was introduced to this poem in 1995, as a first year teacher in downtown
San Diego. I had 34 fourth graders in my classroom—30 of them spoke
Spanish. I had learned to speak Spanish during the previous 18 months
of college while student teaching for part of that time in a three – track
year round school where the parents and teachers from the “English
Only” tracks would call INS to report suspected “illegals”—parents
whose children attended on the bilingual track. Talk about a welcoming
school climate!
So there I was in my first official teaching job, 23 years old and struggling
to communicate. I taped this poem to the inside of the cabinet next to my
desk; it became my inspiration when frustration took over. It justified
working twice as hard for the same paycheck. It gave me purpose.
When I became a parent, I was tired of fighting, tired of the struggle. I
accepted a comfortable teaching position in a very middle-class suburb
near home. This poem was packed neatly into a box holding the bilingual
books and teaching materials that I no longer needed. It sat in my garage
until we moved to Colorado.
And now “Elena” is very real to me once again. She is the mother of
Nallely, José and Josefina, of Cesiah, of Luis. She is the woman
standing for an hour at the bus stop with her children on parent
conference day because she cannot read the school bulletin to know that
the bus will never arrive. She is the mother the P.T.O. will never recruit.
She is watching her children move into a world from which she is
secluded—watching them trade her language for something foreign. She
is the reason I walk from classroom to classroom passing out flyers and
reminders about English classes for parents. She is the reason I pick up
the telephone and corner mothers in the halls to plead with them to
attend. She is the reason I spend three hours everyThursday afternoon
translating parent information into Spanish. She is still my inspiration.
--Tiffani Breaslain