The brief McGraw-Hill guide

  English and Literature

Select one essay in The brief McGraw-Hill guide: Writing for college, writing for life: (2nd ed.) to summarize for this assignment. Choose from the following essays: “Se habla Espanol” by Barrientos; “Facing poverty with a rich girl’s habits” by Kim; “On becoming a writer” by Baker; “Farm girl” by Hemauer
Write a one and one-half to two (1½ - 2) page summary paper in which you:
1. Identify the source (writer and title of essay) and state his or her most important point in your own words.
2. Summarize the other main points and their supporting details in separate paragraphs.
3. Discuss the (1) writer’s purpose, (2) genre, (3) audience, and (4) tone (attitude),
4. Describe your emotional response to the essay.
5. Use quotations, paraphrase, and summary correctly.
Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:
• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.
The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:
• Recognize how to use quotations, paraphrase, and summary in the writing process.
• Apply the writing process to develop various writing genres.
Write clearly and concisely about selected topics using proper writing mechanics.

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“Se habla Espanol” by Barrientos

The man on the other end of the phone line is telling me the classes I’ve called about are firstrate: native speakers in charge, no more than six students per group.
“Conbersaychunal,” he says, allowing the fat vowels of his accented English to collide with the sawedoff consonants.
I tell him that will be fine, that I’m familiar with 3 the conversational setup, and yes, I’ve studied a bit of Spanish in the past. He asks for my name and I supply it, rolling the double r in Barrientos like a pro. That’s when I hear the silent snag, the momentary hesitation I’ve come to expect at this part of the ex- change. Should I go into it again? Should I explain, the way I have to half a dozen others, that I am Guatemalan by birth but pura gringa by circumstance? Do I add the humble little laugh I usually attach to the end of my sentence to let him know that of course I see the irony in the situation?
This will be the sixth time I’ve signed up to learn the language my parents speak to each other. It will be the sixth time I’ve bought workbooks and notebooks and textbooks listing 501 conjugated verbs in alphabetical order, with the hope that the subjunctive tense will finally take root in my mind.
In class, I will sit across a table from the “native speaker,” who won’t question why the Irish-American lawyer, or the ad executive of Polish descent, has enrolled but, with a telling glance, will wonder what to make of me.
Look, I’ll want to say (but never do). Forget the dark skin. Ignore the obsidian eyes. Pretend I’m a pink-cheeked, blue-eyed blonde whose nametag says Shannon. Because that is what a person who doesn’t innately know the difference between corre, corra, and corrí is supposed to look like, isn’t it? She certainly isn’t supposed to be earth-toned or be from my kind of background. If she happens to be named García or López, it’s probably through marriage, or because an ancestor at the very root of her family trekked across the American line three or four generations ago.
I, on the other hand, came to the United States at age three, in 1963, 7 with my family and stopped speaking Spanish immediately.
College-educated and seamlessly bilingual when they settled in West 8 Texas, my parents (a psychology professor and an artist) embraced the notion of the American melting pot wholeheartedly. They declared that their two children would speak nothing but inglés. They’d read in English, write in English, and fit into Anglo society beautifully. If they could speak the red, white, and blue without a hint of an accent, my mother and father believed, people would be forced to look beyond the obvious and see the all-American kids hidden inside the ethnic wrapping.
It sounds politically incorrect now. But America was not a hyphenated nation back then. People who called themselves Mexican-Americans or Afro-Americans were considered dangerous radicals, while law-abiding citizens were expected to drop their cultural baggage at the border and erase any lingering ethnic traits. Role models like Vikki Carr, Linda

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Ronstadt, and Raquel Welch1 had done it and become stars. So why shouldn’t we?
To be honest, for most of my childhood I liked being the brown girl who defied expectations. When I was seven, my mother returned my older brother and me to elementary school one week after the school year had already begun. We’d been on vacation in Washington, D.C., visiting the Smithsonian, the Capitol, and the home of Edgar Allan Poe. In the Volkswagen, on the way home, I’d memorized “The Raven,” and I’d recite it with melodramatic flair to any poor soul duped into sitting through my performance. At the school’s office, the registrar frowned when we arrived.
“You people. Your children are always behind, and you have the nerve to bring them in late?”
“My children,” my mother answered in a clear, curt tone, “will be at the top of their classes in two weeks.”
The registrar filed our cards, shaking her head.
I did not live in a neighborhood with other Latinos, and the public school I attended attracted very few. I saw the world through the clear, cruel vision of a child. To me, speaking Spanish translated into being poor.
It meant waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms. It meant being left off the cheerleading squad and receiving a condescending smile from the guidance counselor when you said you planned on becoming a lawyer or a doctor. My best friends’ names were Heidi and Leslie and Kim. They told me I didn’t seem “Mexican” to them, and I took it as a compliment. I enjoyed looking into the faces of Latino store clerks and waitresses and, yes, even our maid, and saying “yo no hablo español.” It made me feel superior. It made me feel American. It made me feel white.
It didn’t matter that my parents spoke Spanish and were successful. They came from a different country, where everyone looked alike. In America, fitting in with the gringos was key. I didn’t want to be a Latina anything. I thought that if I stayed away from Spanish, the label would stay away from me.
When I was sixteen, I told my father how much I hated being called 16 Mexican—not only because I wasn’t, but also because the word was hurled as an insult. He cringed and then he made a radical plan. That summer, instead of sending me to the dance camp in Aspen that I wanted to attend, he pointed me toward Mexico City and the Ballet Nacional.
“I want you to see how beautiful Mexico is,” he said. “That way when anybody calls you Mexican, you will hold your head up.”
I went, reluctantly, and found out he was right. I loved the music, the art, the architecture. He’d planted the seed of pride, but it would take years for me to figure out how to nurture it.
Back at home, my parents continued to speak only English to their 19 kids while speaking Spanish to each other.
My father enjoyed listening to the nightly Mexican newscast on television, so I came to understand lots of the Spanish I heard. Not by design, but by osmosis. So, by the time I graduated from college, I’d become an odd Hispanic hybrid an English-only Latina who could comprehend Spanish spoken at any speed but was reluctant to utter a word of it. Then came the backlash. In the two decades I’d worked hard to isolate myself from the stereotype I’d constructed in my own head, society shifted. The nation had changed its views on ethnic identity. 

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College professors had started teaching history through African American and Native American eyes. Children were being told to forget about the melting pot and picture America as a multicolored quilt instead.
Hyphens suddenly had muscle, and I was left wondering where I fit in. The Spanish language was supposedly the glue that held the new Latino American community together. But in my case it was what kept me apart. I felt awkward among groups whose conversations flowed in and out of Spanish. I’d be asked a question in Spanish and I’d have to answer in English, knowing that raised a mountain of questions. I wanted to call myself Latina, to finally take pride, but it felt like a lie. So I set out to learn the language that people assumed I already knew. After my first set of lessons, which I took in a class provided by the newspaper where I worked in Dallas, I could function in the presentense. “Hola Paco, ¿qué tal? ¿Qué color es tu cuaderno? El mío es azul.”2 My vocabulary built quickly, but when I spoke my tongue felt thick inside my mouth, and if I needed to deal with anything in the future or the past I was sunk. I suggested to my parents that when I telephoned we should converse only in Spanish, so I could practice. But that only lasted a few short weeks. Our relationship was built in English and the essence of it got lost in the translation.
By my mid-twenties I had finally come around to understanding that 24 being a proud Latina meant showing the world how diverse the culture can be. As a newspaper reporter, I met Cubans and Puerto Ricans and brown- skinned New Mexicans who could trace their families all the way back to the conquistadores. I interviewed writers and teachers and migrant workers, and I convinced editors to put their stories into print. Not just for the readers’ sake, but for my own. I wanted to know what other Latinos had to say about their assimilation into American culture, and whether speaking Spanish somehow defined them. What I learned was that they considered Spanish their common denominator, linking them to one another as well as to their pasts. With that in mind, I traveled to Guatemala to see the place where I was born, and basked in the comfort of recognizing my own features in the faces of strangers. I felt connected, but I still wondered if without flawless Spanish I could ever fill the Latino bill.
I enrolled in a three-month submersion program in Mexico and emerged able to speak like a sixth-grader with a solid C average. I could read Gabriel García Márquez with a Spanish-English dictionary at my elbow, and I could follow ninety percent of the melodrama on any given telenovela.
But I still didn’t feel genuine. My childhood experiences were different 26 from most of the Latinos I met. I had no quinceañera, no abuelita teaching me to cook tamales, no radio in the house playing rancheras. I had ballet lessons, a high school trip to Europe, and a tight circle of Jewish friends. I’d never met another Latina like me, and I began to doubt that they existed.
Since then, I’ve hired tutors and bought tapes to improve my Spanish. Now I can recite Lorca. I can handle the past as well as the future tenses. But the irregular verbs and the subjunctive tense continue to elude me.
My Anglo friends call me bilingual because I can help them make hotel reservations over the telephone or pose a simple question to the women taking care of their children. But true speakers discover my limitations the moment I stumble over a difficult construction, and that is when I get the look. The one that raises the wall between us. The one that makes me think I’ll never really belong. Spanish has become a pedigree, a litmus test showing how far from your roots you’ve strayed. Of course, the same people who would hold my bad Spanish grammar against me wouldn’t blink at an Anglo tripping over a Spanish phrase. In fact, they’d probably be flattered that the white man or woman was giving their language a shot. They’d embrace the effort. But when I fumble, I immediately lose the privilege of calling myself a full fledged Latina. Broken Spanish doesn’t count, except to set me apart from “authentic” Latinas forever.
My bilingual friends say I make too much of it. They tell me that my Guatemalan heritage and unmistakable Mayan features are enough to legitimize my membership in the Latino-American club. After all, not all Poles speak Polish. Not all Italians speak Italian. And as this nation grows more and more Hispanic, not all Latinos will share one language. But I don’t believe them. I think they say those things to spare my feelings.
There must be other Latinas like me. But I haven’t met any. Or, I should 30 say, I haven’t met any who have fessed up. Maybe they are secretly struggling to fit in, the same way I am. Maybe they are hiring tutors and listening to tapes behind the locked doors of their living rooms, just like me. I wish we all had the courage to come out of our hiding places and claim our rightful spot in the broad Latino spectrum. Without being called hopeless gringas. Without having to offer apologies or show remorse.
If it will help, I will go first. Aquí estoy.3 Spanish challenged and pura Latina

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