Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border

Bilingual Research Journal, Summer 2003 by Castro, Mario

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, by Tomas Mario Kalmar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.129 pp. Hb. $29.95

Migrant workers from Mexico are placed at the bottom of many scales in the United States, the literacy ladder being but one. Therefore, using a group of mostly illegal Mexican migrant workers harvesting in Cobden, Illinois, to highlight language and literacy issues seems misguided. That is, it seems misguided if we do not liken migrant workers' language experiences to the experiences of a linguist fieldworker studying the utterances of an unknown language as Tomas Mario Kalmar does in Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border. Kalmar writes, "In the course of preparing this book I kept imagining in my mind's eye a sort of holy relic: the very first bilingual glossary jotted down by Boas or Sapir or Pike or Malinowski himself on their very first day in the field. What I saw in my imagination looked surprisingly like what I actually saw in the first handwritten glossaries jotted down by Jacinto, Alfonso, Cipriano, and the others in Cobden" (p. 89).

The Literacy Event

In Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy, Kalmar describes how migrant workers created glossaries. Like linguist fieldworkers, the migrant workers improvised a hybrid writing system and refined it by "letting letters of an alphabet take on values on a sliding scale between speech sounds in a known language and those in the unknown language" (p. 59). The workers used their knowledge of the Spanish alphabet to chart the speech sounds of the local English dialect. Thus, the local utterance for "Where do you live?" became, for Panchito, "JUELLULIB," possibly pronunced "xwe (as in jueves) . ju (as in yuca) . lib (similar to but with a marked difference from libro because, in Spanish, the "b" forms the beginning of the next syllable and would neither end a syllable nor a word)." When Panchito practiced it at a little park, on a speaker of the local dialect and was understood, he knew he had "crossed the language border" (p. 59).

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy documents other crossings, raising important and timely concerns about current approaches to literacy including, surprisingly, Freirean approaches. Freirean thought informs U.S. discussions on empowerment through literacy, but Kalmar finds terminological contradictions in Freirean discourse make it difficult for teachers in the United States to regard students as educators. Kalmar shows migrant workers cross between invisibility, mostly when they function in the role most of the community prescribes them, to visibility, when they deviate from expectations. "Many middle class citizens . . . [assume they are] doing the mojados ['wetbacks'] a favor by letting silence cover . . . their existence, their presence . . . [and] the economic importance of their work" (p. 14).

The workers, reportedly, first crossed over to the little park where the literacy event began on July 7, 1980. Later that week, a migrant worker died in what was officially called a hit-and-run accident. The migrant workers were invisible, as none was interviewed during the investigation, although the death occurred on the same day the chief of police called a meeting "because [in Kalmar's report of the chief's words] people were saying that the Mexicans were taking over the town" (pp. 10-12). Kalmar reports, "That night, around midnight, the bartender at the Country Cafe took a baseball club and attacked three of his Mexican customers," including the later deceased (p. 11). The migrant worker who was killed had been left at a migrant camp north of Cobden by police, but his body, run over a few times, was mysteriously found south of Cobden with no record of how it got there.

The migrant worker's funeral was held in a nearby town because visibility was not possible at the local church. On the day of the funeral, the "Mexicans aimed for invisibility" (p. 12). The migrant workers had deviated from their prescribed role and were in clear view to the community. As far as Kalmar knows, following the worker's death, the migrant workers and the local community mostly did not interact in their trailblazing ways for three weeks before finally meeting again.

A week after the funeral, freelance reporters arrived at the grocery store looking for material for an article about migrant workers. The migrant workers met with the reporters. The resulting article appears in Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy and includes a telling quote by a worker at a day care center that services migrant families: "This is the underbelly of the United States that people don't see. They don't want to see" (Sue Carmel, quoted by Bridget Walsh in "Migrants in the Midwest," Illinois Times, November 7, 1980, reproduced in Kalmar, p. 32).

It was at the meeting with the reporters that the migrant workers decided they needed to do something. They believed they needed to master English, and they decided to try by alphabetizing sounds because their main problem with the English language was difficulty in distinguishing distinct words in speech. The migrant workers' approach was not surprising given that the migrant workers had limited experience with written English, and words depend considerably on language in its written form (Coulmas, 1989). Alternative approaches to alphabetizing phrases were offered by the workers, with a final one selected collectively.