Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education Noticiario Noticiario_Summer2017 | Page 9

My Mother’s Language History: Lenguaje de la Familia
By Amanda Cordova, Doctoral Fellow
At the time I interviewed my mother I was
surprised at the natural flow of her responses to the
interview questions. In fact, although I had a list of questions
prepared to ask her, she led the interview. She was a natural
story teller, taking me through her early childhood years until
now, ultimately explicating her memories of her tri-lingual
identity. I quickly adapted to her style and re-fashioned
questions to follow her lead. The themes of the interview
follow her story to stay close to her words and the meaning
she made from them. I realized, later, after pondering upon
and re-reading the interview that her life had truly come full
circle, to the roots of her language, firmly nestled in her
family life. My mother’s language history is divided into what
she shared from her early years of informal and formal schooling, her formal years of schooling
from elementary to high school, her adult life in marriage and work, and her views on
bilingualism. Throughout each of these sections there are clear demarcations in how her
language use shifted from Spanish to English that corresponded to her relationships and work
life. The following is an explanation of what my mother described as her language history over
her 76 years of living.
Early Years: Pre-School At the Little School in a Humble Home
My mother grew up in a small south Texas, Rio Grande Valley town, named San
Benito where everyone she knew spoke Spanish. During that time most of the people she knew
from her tight knit neighborhood had not finished high school, and she noted making it to junior
high wasn’t even usual. She recalled they didn’t have a car and she, along with her siblings
walked everywhere they went. Her family lived in a small home next door to her grandmother
with her mother, brother, and little sister.
Her first memory of connecting with language in a learning setting centers around
her time spent at a neighbor’s house where she learned to read, speak, and write in Spanish at
the age of 5 years old. She excitedly recalled her older brother coming home from work one day
to tell the family that a woman was teaching Spanish classes for free to any of the young
children in the neighborhood. She fondly described it as “that little school” in a very humble
home where she “had class under the trees.” She smiled as she explained that’s when she
learned the alphabet in Spanish recalling learning the letter a by listening to the teacher tell her
“has una bolita con una colita” which in English translates to make a circle with a tail on it –
that’s the a.” Soon after learning the alphabet she learned to spell.
This first experience in the little school of a humble neighborhood home had 30 kids
who were learning from 9:00 am to noon. She described her teacher as a Christian lady who
didn’t have any children. She explained the teacher was “very nice and very patient,” and liked
to teach. Although her neighbor was a qualified teacher she didn’t work because, she was
married and her husband worked. This neighbor, the first teacher in my mother’s life, also
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