Category: ALL

Review by Gaiutra Bahadur
Ms. Magazine
Summer 2006

Monica Ali’s debut novel, Brick Lane, won her kudos and condemnation. She earned the kudos for gracefully telling the undertold stories of Bangladeshi immigrants in London. The condemnation came from some of those very immigrants, who denounced her portrayal of their community as “insulting and shameful.”Ali’s second book removes the Dhaka-born, British-raised writer from the spotlight—and the crosshairs—of her ethnic background.

Alentejo Blue unfolds in Portuguese corktree country—nowhere near Dhaka, or its outpost on Brick Lane. And, if Ali has any literary debt to pay, it’s not to Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai or any other South Asian writing in English. Ali evokes the village of Mamarrosa the way American novelist Sherwood Anderson did the town of Winesburg, Ohio, in 1919—with spare prose, through interior monologues built on a foundation of silence.

In the quietly lyrical opening chapter, an octogenarian named Joao finds the body of his friend Rui hanging from the mossy branch of a cork tree. As he cuts down and cradles the body, the arc of their friendship and its erotic subtext emerges through flashbacks. Fishing by the riverbank one day, Rui, an agitator for workers’ rights, had questioned Joao about conditions at his factory. He wanted to know if the barracks bring men closer. Joao, who knew what species of furtive closeness the barracks promote, did not want to talk about it. He barked, “No.”

“‘All right,’ said Rui. ‘Let’s be quiet, then. We are not afraid of silence. ’”

In nine spare chapters, Ali tests that declaration. She introduces us to a series of village regulars who must cope with silences loaded with the baggage of relationships, mortality and God.

At the end of a long day, Vasco, the cartoonishly fat cafe owner, meditates on a question of great moment: Should he eat the almond pastry, or not? Memories of his life in America—and the death of his wife in childbirth—crop up in the vast pauses around that question.

Chrissie, the mother of a family of slovenly English transplants, seems at first to have given up the fight against dirt, chaos and despair. One character describes her as a “dishcloth.” Her daughter, Ruby, is the town tramp. A writer has an affair with both women, but primarily because he is bored and in search of material. Still, the mother dutifully takes the daughter for an abortion, illegal in Portugal, and is kicked out by her alcoholic husband for the deed. In her banishment, there is nothing to do but listen to the rain and reflect, in a stream of consciousness.

In Alentejo Blue, the characters matter more in dialogue with themselves than in their interactions with each other. And, despite the dramatic details of affairs and a criminal abortion, characters matter more than the plot. If anything, Mamarrosa is the kind of place that annihilates plot. Nothing much happens, except for the schemes of the young to escape its nothingness, and the bargains made by the old, who no longer desire escape. That nothingness provides the central tension of the book, symbolized by a clock that drives Teresa, a 20-year-old longing to break free of the village, absolutely mad. It’s stuck at 20 past three, the clock hands as immobile to her as all of Mamarrosa, with its Internet café where the computers don’t work.

© Ms. Magazine. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The hullabaloo over the signs at Geno’s Steaks has been fed by a perception that many immigrants don’t want to, try to or have to speak English.

That perception is so fierce and deep that elected officials at every level have reacted: The U.S. Senate voted last month to make English the national language as part of its proposed immigration overhaul. The coal-country town of Hazleton, Pa., just passed an English-only ordinance. And President Bush, in an address in May, urged newcomers to learn English to “honor the great American tradition of the melting pot.”

He was proselytizing the converted, judging by the demand among adult immigrants for English classes – a demand that has been outpacing funds for such instruction.

“You close your mind. You close all the opportunities for your life” without English, said Ruben Del Rosario.

The 27-year-old Mexican immigrant lives near the now world-famous Geno’s signs that exhort, “This is America. When ordering, please speak English.”

That is just what Del Rosario has been trying to do since coming to the United States six years ago. He picked up the word cocky from sportscasters riffing on Sixers games. He puzzled over the word nappy, overheard on the streets of Philadelphia. And he attends English classes three hours a day, five mornings a week.

About 1.2 million adults take English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes subsidized partly by the state and federal government and typically run by civic groups, community colleges, churches and even unions. Others take classes funded by charitable groups; still more pay for-profits to school them.

The classes are full to the brim, pushed there by growing numbers of immigrants who are isolated by language. Ten years ago, Philadelphia’s Center for Literacy had a few English classes for adult immigrants. Now it has 16 classes and 400 students.

One in four people speaking a foreign language at home wants to study English but can’t because of a lack of time, child care, money or transportation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

At the same time demand has risen, state and federal funds for adult-education programs, which include English for immigrants, have stagnated. The budget for one program, Even Start, was halved last year and faces more cuts in 2007.

“There aren’t enough resources to teach all the people who want to take English classes,” said Liza Rodriguez, an ESOL teacher for a decade.

Juntos, a Mexican community association in South Philadelphia where Del Rosario studies English, gets no government money for its small, volunteer-taught classes. It applied for funding through the state but was told there was no more, organizer Peter Bloom said.
More groups are applying for federal and state adult-education grants distributed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said spokesman Brian McDonald.

“We’ve had to turn them away,” he said. “We can’t necessarily take on more of a load.”
Despite the growing need, the department has awarded the same yearly amount for ESOL classes since 2002: about $8 million, or one-third of all its money for family literacy.
Funding for English classes at ACLAMO (Accion Comunal Latinoamericana de Montgomery County), a community service agency, has dropped from $119,000 to $98,000 over the last five years.

“We’re stuck having to raise more private dollars,” said Justin Fink, its associate director of education programs. The agency used to serve 20 families through Even Start. Now it serves 18.

A health crisis with her baby daughter drove Norma Flores, 21, to ACLAMO’s classes a year ago.

“We went to the emergency room, and sometimes nobody spoke Spanish,” the mother of four explained in English. “The doctor needs to know if she drink the medicine, if she has a fever, and I couldn’t tell him.”

“I feel…,” Flores said, straining to find the words. Her teacher, Marla Benssy, pulled out a binder and indicated a page with emoticons. Flores found the ones that applied: “I feel ‘stressed out.’ I feel ‘sad.’ ”

Most of ACLAMO’s English students are women from impoverished rural areas in the Mexican state of Puebla. About a third balance classes with work and child-rearing. Many were forced to drop out of elementary school, some as early as the third grade.

“It’s one thing to teach English when it truly is a second language,” said Benssy, an ESOL teacher for 15 years. “It’s another thing when they have no idea not only what a tense is, but what a verb is… . They really are up against huge odds, and it’s amazing that they get it.”

To skeptics, it might be striking that immigrants even want to get it. Twenty-seven states have passed ballot initiatives or bills making English the official language for government business. A similar legislative effort is underway in Harrisburg.

Those who want to mandate the use of English, whether from state capitals or from cheesesteak row, say that society does not force immigrants to speak English the way it did a century ago.

Limited-English speakers now have federal protections. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars discrimination based on national origin. Under Title VI of that act, recipients of federal money must take “reasonable steps” to give “meaningful access” to services for those with little English, according to 2002 Justice Department guidelines.

But enforcing those guidelines is a battle, said Paul Uyehara, a lawyer at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia.

“You could walk down the street, and there are violations left and right,” he said.

The Philadelphia Police Department, for one, was in danger of losing federal funds until last fall, when it started training officers to use qualified interpreters to talk to victims and suspects.

Also, neighborhood comfort zones remain for non-English speakers, on small scales such as South Philadelphia’s nascent Little Mexico and on large ones such as Miami-Dade County in south Florida.

“In almost any language in the U.S., you can find an enclave,” said Benssy. “You can get through your life speaking only Korean in some parts of Lansdale or Philadelphia.”

A Korean woman here for three decades finally went to Benssy’s class in Glenside so she could communicate with her grandson.

“Some people come here at an old age, and it’s very difficult to master the language, but most people want to speak English,” said Marina Lipkovskaya, a teacher at the New World Association.

Her nonprofit teaches English to 700 adults in Bensalem and Northeast Philadelphia, areas crowded with Russian-speaking doctors, auto mechanics and insurance agents.

West Marshall Street in Norristown, home to ACLAMO, is an enclave in the making. The street is studded with signs in Spanish. They advertise Las Mejores Botas de Mexico (“the best boots from Mexico”), apartments for rent, children’s clothes, DVDs and phone cards.
Adelita’s Mexican Market carries Maxim en español, a telenovela magazine, a book about migrant deaths on the border and erotic comics – all in Spanish. A Spanish-English dictionary stands out in the mix.

Nearby, an African American barber has posted a written sign in Spanish. It translates to: “Victor the barber. There’s a Mexican here to serve you.”

Even in this linguistic cocoon, Andres Rosas, a cook at a Buca di Beppo restaurant who has been in this country six years, realized he needed to learn English. He enrolled in ACLAMO’s program with his son 11/2 years ago.

“When you don’t speak English,” he said, “always it’s very hard.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

The Immigration Debate | Then vs. Now
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

How do you say steak wid’ in Spanish?

Joseph Vento, the owner of Geno’s Steaks, doesn’t know. And he doesn’t care.

Just read the laminated signs, festooned with American eagles, at his South Philadelphia cheesesteak emporium: This is America. When Ordering, Speak English.

The political statement – coming from a man whose Italian-born grandparents spoke only broken English – captures the anger and discontent felt by many Americans about illegal immigrants.

With a battle looming between the House and Senate on legalizing some immigration violators, the public backlash is framed by two complaints: One, my grandparents came legally. How come these guys can’t? And, two, my grandparents had to learn English. How come these guys don’t?

“Go back to the 19th century, and play by those rules,” said Vento, 66, whose grandfather became a U.S. citizen in 1921.

But history challenges many assumptions about the hurdles aspiring Americans used to face, say scholars of the last massive migration to the United States, which occurred between 1880 and 1920.

“There was no such thing as an ‘illegal’ immigrant,” said Roger Daniels, a member of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island History Committee and author of Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigrants and Immigration Policy Since 1882.

The Old Country often required exit visas, which created the possibility of illegal emigrants. But the United States did not issue entry visas until 1921.

Before that, no meaningful immigration restrictions existed, except for a bar on Chinese enacted in 1882. Congress imposed no other limits on the number of immigrants – from any one country, or in total. About a million arrived each year in the early 1900s. It wasn’t until 1924 that Congress imposed an annual cap of 155,000 immigrants. “If you could get here and weren’t terribly diseased, you could get in,” Daniels said.

By contrast, backlogs, country quotas and annual caps now make legal immigration a tortuous and nearly impossible process for many, said Thomas Conaghan, director of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Center in Upper Darby.

Past immigrants, once here, faced a backlash fueled by anxiety about religions, languages and races that were relatively new to the United States. Fear of anarchist and “Red” ideologies and the competition for jobs also played roles.

Help-wanted ads limited applicants to native-born Americans, said Kathryn Wilson, director of education at the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Current critics of illegal immigration echo earlier generations of nativists, say academic experts on ethnicity.

“A lot of the rhetoric was similar: ‘They don’t speak English. They don’t want to be Americans,’ ” said Mae M. Ngai, a University of Chicago historian and author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.

The Senate bill passed last Thursday, which gives some illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens, included an amendment that would make English the national language.

An English-only movement also took shape in the late 19th century, with an abortive attempt to require newcomers to read a passage in English at Ellis Island. In the end, the literacy test was administered, but in the immigrant’s native tongue.

Joseph Vento’s grandfather and namesake, a street-corner jeweler from Sicily, had trouble with English.

“They tried,” Vento said of his grandparents. “They had a hard time. Look at the price they paid. They were limited.”

The Ventos rarely left their South Philadelphia neighborhood. Now, in a way, the neighborhood has left the couple’s descendants. Geno’s sits at Ninth and Passyunk, the hub of Little Italy turned home to thousands of Mexicans.

Some try to order a cheesesteak. And it bugs Vento if they can’t ask for American cheese, provolone or the classic – Cheez Whiz – without pointing.

“If you can’t tell me what you want, I can’t serve you,” he said. “It’s up to you. If you can’t read, if you can’t say the word cheese, how can I communicate with you – and why should I have to bend?

“I got a business to run.”

Vento, who lives in Shamong, put up the signs when the immigration debate seized national headlines six months ago.

With Geno’s Steaks tattooed on his arm, Vento is used to publicizing things, especially what’s on his mind. Speak English signs also poster his Hummer. He has driven through South Philadelphia blaring through the SUV’s P.A. system denunciations of neighborhood business owners who hire illegal immigrants.

“I say what everybody’s thinking but is afraid to say,” Vento said. That many think as he does may be true. The dominance of Latinos among new immigrants has triggered a backlash, said Peter Skerry, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution.

Spanish-speakers make up about 30 percent of legal migrants and roughly 80 percent of illegal migrants, compared with the 21 percent preponderance of Italians a century ago.

“It’s just a huge concentration . . . that raises questions for people about how these immigrants are assimilating,” Skerry said.

He and other experts say that current immigrants are taking no longer to assimilate than Vento’s grandfather did. Now, as then, English takes hold among the children of immigrants, and native languages disappear by the third generation.

What’s different, Skerry said, is that many Americans now value multiculturalism, and technology allows it to flourish. Satellite TV beams soap operas from Latin America to U.S. living rooms, phones make it cheap and easy to connect with relatives back home, and airplanes allow a back-and-forth existence.

In society, “there is a notion that people are entitled to their own culture,” he said. “Assimilation is a dirty word in many quarters. Sometimes, we don’t even use the word anymore.”

Vento is lashing out at that self-assertion by immigrants: “I don’t want somebody coming here to change my culture to their culture,” he said. “They want us to adapt to these people. What do you mean, ‘Press 1 for Spanish’? English, period. Case closed. End of discussion. You better make it the official language.”

Follow-up Story: A Lesson in English; Figures show that demand among adult immigrants for language classes is outpacing funds for such instruction.

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.