Photos by Lucía Camargo Rojas
By Lucía Camargo Rojas
Agustín Martínez and Ana Arévalo arrived ready to do battle at last Monday night’s Spanish-language spelling bee organized by the literacy organization CENAES.
Martínez, a D.C. taxi driver originally from El Salvador, won top honors in last year’s contest, which also tests the progress made by area Hispanic adults who are learning to read and write in Spanish.
Like many fellow competitors, Martínez never had a chance to complete his education as a child, a legacy of illiteracy that’s also made it more difficult for him to learn English as a second language.
“The problem is that when you don’t know how to read and write in Spanish, you learn a lyric English,” he says. “You are like a musician who learns to play without music notes.”
He failed several English classes at the Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School until his ESL teacher sent him to Mario Gamboa, director of CENAES, which stand for Centro de Alfabetización en Español (Spanish Language Literacy Center).
“Gamboa´s classes help me to open my mind. I didn’t know about adjectives, predicates, pronouns, prepositions, verbs, present, past or conjugations,” says Martínez, who has now finished six out of eight levels of English classes, an achievement he credits to his Spanish grammar lessons in the last two years.
So the taxi driver, who hopes to study law one day, was feeling pretty confident June 17 when he arrived at CentroNía to defend his CENAES spelling bee title.
“If you want the crown, you have to fight for it,” Martínez told Arévalo before the contest. “Let’s fight,” she replied. And they did fight. In fact, they spelled so many words correctly that members of the jury had to resort to a backup list of derivative words to keep the competition going. Eventually, though, Martínez missed a word and Arévalo, an aspiring nurse also originally from El Salvador, emerged victorious.
“I knew that I was going to win,” she said as she received her trophy.
In all, there are the nearly 24,000 “Limited English Proficient” individuals living in Washington D.C., according to the Migration Policy Institute’s analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009-2011 American Community Survey. The group estimates that more than half, or 13,700, are native Spanish speakers.
But Gamboa estimates there may be as many as 50,000 functionally illiterate Hispanics in the greater Washington region.
He says he first learned of the problem a decade ago when he worked in the construction industry. One day, he left his workers a note in Spanish with detailed instructions. When he returned and they hadn’t done anything, he says he was stunned to learn the reason: They couldn’t read or write. He started giving free Spanish classes after work and now directs a non-profit that has helped hundreds of local residents over the last decade.
There is a wealth of academic research showing that knowing how to read and write in one’s native language makes it easier to learn a second language. And Gamboa says his experience as a teacher suggests the opposite is also true: Hispanics without a grasp of how to read and write in Spanish struggle when it comes to learning English.
“We try to teach students Spanish first, and then we send them to other institutions that teach English,” says Gamboa, whose center offers basic, intermediate and advanced classes at several places around the Washington area including the Carlos Rosario International School, Meridian Public Charter School, the Latin American Youth Center (Centro Latinoamericano de la Juventud), and the Salvadoran Consulate.
Like Martínez, students are often referred to the Spanish literacy program by their English teachers. Ryan Monroe, principal of Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School, explains that when his English teachers notice Spanish speaking students struggling with their English, they often ask them how much formal education they had in their home country.
“If they hear that they didn’t finish high school or elementary school, they recommend they enroll in Spanish classes,” says Monroe, whose school offers literacy courses in Spanish as well as the “Plazas comunitarias” program, a partnership with the Consulate of Mexico that allows Spanish speakers to complete elementary and middle certificates in their native language.
Gamboa founded the Spanish spelling bee in 2006 as a fun way to end each academic year. The contest is modeled roughly after the Scripps National Spelling Bee that brings to Washington hundreds of youngsters from around the United States each year. The Spanish-language contest, however, is geared toward the goals of its adult contestants such as encouraging students to take the General Educational Development (GED) exam in Spanish, an equivalent to a high school diploma.
Carlos Rosario School offers the GED classes to 200 students per year. When the students finish their GED and come back to finish their English as a Second Language classes, they will learn English a lot easier and a lot faster because they will have strong skills in their native language, according to Monroe.
Ana Arévalo is studying for the GED in Spanish exam as one step toward eventually becoming a nurse.
“First I have to take the GED in Spanish. Then I have to take English classes,” she said.
She says when she started at CENAES, she didn’t know that a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a period, or where to put an accent or a comma. “I’m glad because now I can teach my daughters,” she said.
These days Arévalo is always practicing English, as well. She reads the signs around the city and uses her cell phone to learn their meanings and the pronunciation. She is confident that in the end she will master the language. After all, she already won the Spanish spelling contest. That was the first step.
Published in Hola Cultura on June 20, 2013
