Chapter 3: Class Gives me some Culture
After spending two years at UC Berkeley, and living together for a good portion of that time, Maria and I decided that it was time to stop playing around and get married. We took a year off from Berkeley, got married, and then worked on changing our majors while taking some classes. Maria had decided that the hard science major of chemistry was not what she really wanted to study after all; while I made my shift from math to psychology.
The easiest place for us to make these transitions was at the local junior college, San Joaquin Delta College. I took advantage of the classes being offered and took a basic and then a Conversational Spanish class. The basic class was very simple, but did give me a grasp on the grammatical side of Spanish. The Conversational Spanish was what had the greatest impact on me, however. It was taught by Roberto Vallejo.
Mr. Vallejo took his job extremely seriously and loved what he was doing. His view was that you could not have a decent conversation without understanding the culture of the language that you were learning. He taught the class at a level above what most of the other classes at the junior college, but he saw his role as that of sort of a Pied Piper. He would pull his students, many of which were of Mexican background and whose parents had little education, up to a university level. He would push them, but in an enjoyable manner. Having already been at the university level, it was a nice continuation for me especially when many of the other classes I took reminded me of the classes that I would sleep through in high school. I thoroughly looked forward to his classes every day.
We would read a selection from a novel or a play, work out what the work meant and then discuss it and its impact on society, particularly for the Latinos within the US. There was also the opportunity to earn extra credit points by transcribing the lyrics to songs on cassettes that Mr. Vallejo would lend us. It was my first experience with the music and art of any country other than the United States.
Anyone who thinks that transcribing music is easy, doesn’t remember singing wrong song lyrics at the top of their lungs and getting embarrassed. I swore for years that the Rolling Stones had a big hit called, “Don’t leave your pizza burning” and not because I worked as a delivery driver for Dominoes. I have heard quite a few people singing about “butter dreams” instead of “life is but a dream” in “Row, row, row your boat.” Words are broken up differently in music than how it is while speaking, because you need to match with the music. Understanding lyrics, especially in a second language, is a difficult task. This was more complicated by the fact that Mr. Vallejo did not choose his cassettes based on the ease of transcription, but on the fact that he liked the music.
The best part of all the transcribing was the fact that I began to listen to, and like, the music in Spanish that Maria liked. We had one other thing to share as well, but it wasn’t positive for me. Now, she could make fun of the way I sang songs in Spanish, like I did when she tried to sing in English.
Mr. Vallejo challenged everyone to be precise in our writing as well. One of the simplest aspects of Spanish is that it is phonetic: each letter has one and only one corresponding sound. Unlike English where the same letter can be associated with different sounds (check the e’s in this sentence for an easy example), the sounds never change in Spanish. One of the most difficult aspects for many Spanish speakers who do not have a relatively high level of education has to do with accent marks. Accent marks in Spanish, mark where the pronunciation no longer follows the given rules. Once you learn the rules, any word pronounced differently would need an accent mark to show that difference. It would seem simple enough, but again it seems to be the easiest thing for people writing Spanish to forget about. Mr. Vallejo did not let us forget about accent marks at all.
“Are you speaking English or crotches?” he would ask.
The plural of crotch, crotches, is spelled ingles in Spanish. The first vowel is stressed (i.e. IN-glays). English, in Spanish, is spelled inglés with an accent mark because the second vowel is stressed (i.e. in-GLAYS). The small difference in writing is quite large in meaning, since I don’t know too many people who speak crotches. Mr. Vallejo would take 5 points off for every mistake with an accent mark. Unless we were writing an essay, each sentence was worth only 10, so a sentence needing only 3 accents marks could leave you in the negative, not a good place to be. I don’t know too many former students that don’t know how to place accent marks correctly.
One of the last assignments during the semester was one where we had to read a selection from an author and then enter into a discussion with others in the classroom. The trick was that we had to take upon the characteristics that the authors portrayed in their writing. We had to hold the discussion as if we were the authors themselves. This was a challenging task for many of the students, since most of us had never done anything similar before. As usual, Mr. Vallejo did not let us off the hook easily.
I had been assigned Octavio Paz. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Mr. Vallejo had done his doctoral dissertation with the nobel prize winning Mexican author while a student the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He knew Paz better than most people in the US, and better than most in Mexico as well. I read a brief essay written by Paz and went to class expecting to easily discuss with the other students.
“What do you think about how young women dress today?” asked Mr. Vallejo.
“What?!” was my response. Nothing along those lines appeared in what I had read.
“What do you think about how young women dress today?” he asked. “How about the way that they pluck their eyebrows? How about all the time they put into fixing their hair.”
One of the girls in the class with finely plucked eyebrows and heavily gelled hair, combed upwards in the style of the time (looking similar to a peacock’s tail), blushed.
I had no idea how to answer. The short essay that I read didn’t talk about anything remotely related to hair styles or plucking eyebrows. Luckily Mr. Vallejo saved me from getting too embarrassed, “What about you, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz? What do you think about the fashion styles of today?” By asking around the room, we saw that none of us were prepared for the type of discussions that Mr. Vallejo was pushing us towards. After class, I asked him for a more appropriate title to read.
“If you want to know and understand Octavio Paz, you need to read ‘The Labyrinth of Solitude.’” he suggested. “It is a little complicated to read in Spanish, but you can read the English translation and get the gist of what he would think.”
I was fascinated by reading “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” In the book, Paz talks about how he found out what it meant to be a Mexican by coming to the United States during the 50s and watching how the immigrants and their styles changed in the new country. At that time, the pachuco fashion with zuit suits and hats was what the Mexican males wore. The styles in Mexico were very different, but here it was something that allowed them to express their difference within the larger American culture. Paz wrote that he saw the true reflection of “mexicanism” in the reaction of the immigrants to their new surroundings. It was as if they were more Mexican by being outside of Mexico than they were by staying in it.
Paz spoke an awful lot as well about masks. He wasn’t referring to literal masks, but emotional or psychological ones that many people wear based on with whom are they are interacting. Appearance was important, and you have to maintain different appearances with different people. Paz’s take was that some people had so many masks that they had forgotten their own true identity: hiding under multiple layers of masks.
I had seen similar things to what was described in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” but it just seemed “strange” to me, something not from the US. Here was a Nobel laureate author giving a rationale behind the creation of the “mask.” It wasn’t that people were being fake, they were merely continuing cultural actions in a completely new arena, a new country. How true this interpretation was to some of the actions of la familia, it stopped me from seeing some of their actions as “strange” and see them more as natural reactions based on their experiences.
The easiest place for us to make these transitions was at the local junior college, San Joaquin Delta College. I took advantage of the classes being offered and took a basic and then a Conversational Spanish class. The basic class was very simple, but did give me a grasp on the grammatical side of Spanish. The Conversational Spanish was what had the greatest impact on me, however. It was taught by Roberto Vallejo.
Mr. Vallejo took his job extremely seriously and loved what he was doing. His view was that you could not have a decent conversation without understanding the culture of the language that you were learning. He taught the class at a level above what most of the other classes at the junior college, but he saw his role as that of sort of a Pied Piper. He would pull his students, many of which were of Mexican background and whose parents had little education, up to a university level. He would push them, but in an enjoyable manner. Having already been at the university level, it was a nice continuation for me especially when many of the other classes I took reminded me of the classes that I would sleep through in high school. I thoroughly looked forward to his classes every day.
We would read a selection from a novel or a play, work out what the work meant and then discuss it and its impact on society, particularly for the Latinos within the US. There was also the opportunity to earn extra credit points by transcribing the lyrics to songs on cassettes that Mr. Vallejo would lend us. It was my first experience with the music and art of any country other than the United States.
Anyone who thinks that transcribing music is easy, doesn’t remember singing wrong song lyrics at the top of their lungs and getting embarrassed. I swore for years that the Rolling Stones had a big hit called, “Don’t leave your pizza burning” and not because I worked as a delivery driver for Dominoes. I have heard quite a few people singing about “butter dreams” instead of “life is but a dream” in “Row, row, row your boat.” Words are broken up differently in music than how it is while speaking, because you need to match with the music. Understanding lyrics, especially in a second language, is a difficult task. This was more complicated by the fact that Mr. Vallejo did not choose his cassettes based on the ease of transcription, but on the fact that he liked the music.
The best part of all the transcribing was the fact that I began to listen to, and like, the music in Spanish that Maria liked. We had one other thing to share as well, but it wasn’t positive for me. Now, she could make fun of the way I sang songs in Spanish, like I did when she tried to sing in English.
Mr. Vallejo challenged everyone to be precise in our writing as well. One of the simplest aspects of Spanish is that it is phonetic: each letter has one and only one corresponding sound. Unlike English where the same letter can be associated with different sounds (check the e’s in this sentence for an easy example), the sounds never change in Spanish. One of the most difficult aspects for many Spanish speakers who do not have a relatively high level of education has to do with accent marks. Accent marks in Spanish, mark where the pronunciation no longer follows the given rules. Once you learn the rules, any word pronounced differently would need an accent mark to show that difference. It would seem simple enough, but again it seems to be the easiest thing for people writing Spanish to forget about. Mr. Vallejo did not let us forget about accent marks at all.
“Are you speaking English or crotches?” he would ask.
The plural of crotch, crotches, is spelled ingles in Spanish. The first vowel is stressed (i.e. IN-glays). English, in Spanish, is spelled inglés with an accent mark because the second vowel is stressed (i.e. in-GLAYS). The small difference in writing is quite large in meaning, since I don’t know too many people who speak crotches. Mr. Vallejo would take 5 points off for every mistake with an accent mark. Unless we were writing an essay, each sentence was worth only 10, so a sentence needing only 3 accents marks could leave you in the negative, not a good place to be. I don’t know too many former students that don’t know how to place accent marks correctly.
One of the last assignments during the semester was one where we had to read a selection from an author and then enter into a discussion with others in the classroom. The trick was that we had to take upon the characteristics that the authors portrayed in their writing. We had to hold the discussion as if we were the authors themselves. This was a challenging task for many of the students, since most of us had never done anything similar before. As usual, Mr. Vallejo did not let us off the hook easily.
I had been assigned Octavio Paz. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Mr. Vallejo had done his doctoral dissertation with the nobel prize winning Mexican author while a student the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He knew Paz better than most people in the US, and better than most in Mexico as well. I read a brief essay written by Paz and went to class expecting to easily discuss with the other students.
“What do you think about how young women dress today?” asked Mr. Vallejo.
“What?!” was my response. Nothing along those lines appeared in what I had read.
“What do you think about how young women dress today?” he asked. “How about the way that they pluck their eyebrows? How about all the time they put into fixing their hair.”
One of the girls in the class with finely plucked eyebrows and heavily gelled hair, combed upwards in the style of the time (looking similar to a peacock’s tail), blushed.
I had no idea how to answer. The short essay that I read didn’t talk about anything remotely related to hair styles or plucking eyebrows. Luckily Mr. Vallejo saved me from getting too embarrassed, “What about you, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz? What do you think about the fashion styles of today?” By asking around the room, we saw that none of us were prepared for the type of discussions that Mr. Vallejo was pushing us towards. After class, I asked him for a more appropriate title to read.
“If you want to know and understand Octavio Paz, you need to read ‘The Labyrinth of Solitude.’” he suggested. “It is a little complicated to read in Spanish, but you can read the English translation and get the gist of what he would think.”
I was fascinated by reading “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” In the book, Paz talks about how he found out what it meant to be a Mexican by coming to the United States during the 50s and watching how the immigrants and their styles changed in the new country. At that time, the pachuco fashion with zuit suits and hats was what the Mexican males wore. The styles in Mexico were very different, but here it was something that allowed them to express their difference within the larger American culture. Paz wrote that he saw the true reflection of “mexicanism” in the reaction of the immigrants to their new surroundings. It was as if they were more Mexican by being outside of Mexico than they were by staying in it.
Paz spoke an awful lot as well about masks. He wasn’t referring to literal masks, but emotional or psychological ones that many people wear based on with whom are they are interacting. Appearance was important, and you have to maintain different appearances with different people. Paz’s take was that some people had so many masks that they had forgotten their own true identity: hiding under multiple layers of masks.
I had seen similar things to what was described in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” but it just seemed “strange” to me, something not from the US. Here was a Nobel laureate author giving a rationale behind the creation of the “mask.” It wasn’t that people were being fake, they were merely continuing cultural actions in a completely new arena, a new country. How true this interpretation was to some of the actions of la familia, it stopped me from seeing some of their actions as “strange” and see them more as natural reactions based on their experiences.
posted by Richard Braun | 6:41 PM
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