Juan Gonzalez

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This interview by David Barsamian appeared in the Progressive Magazine
originally)

Juan Gonzalez is an award-winning columnist with the New York Daily News.
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he grew up in a New York City housing project
and studied at Columbia University, where he got involved in the 1968
student strike.

"When I was studying at Columbia," he told me, "one of the great halls was
named after one of the big sugar barons who owned South Puerto Rico Sugar
Company."

A founding member of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group,
Gonzalez later served as president of the National Congress for Puerto
Rican Rights. Along with his daily newspaper column, he writes regularly
for the magazine In These Times. And for the past four years, he has been a
twice-weekly co-host on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now.

"Juan sees the world through the lens of an insider and outsider," says Amy
Goodman, the daily host of the program. "He brings a depth of national and
international experience to the program."

Gonzalez is the author of Roll Down Your Window: Stories from a Forgotten
America (Verso, 1995) and Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in
America (Viking, 2000).

In Harvest of Empire, I was particularly struck by a passage about his
public school experience in New York. "Most of us became products of a
sink-or-swim public school philosophy," he wrote, "immersed in
English-language instruction from our first day in class and actively
discouraged from retaining our native tongue. 'Your name isn't Juan,' the
young teacher told me in first grade at P.S. 87 in East Harlem. 'In this
country it's John. Shall I call you John?' Confused and afraid, but sensing
this as some fateful decision, I timidly said no. But most children could
not summon the courage, so school officials routinely anglicized their
names. Though I had spoken only Spanish before I entered kindergarten, the
teachers were amazed at how quickly I mastered English. From then on, each
time a new child from Puerto Rico was placed in any of my classes, the
teachers would sit him beside me so I could interpret the lessons.
Bewildered, terrified, and ashamed, the new kids grappled with my clumsy
attempts to decipher the teacher's strange words. Inevitably, when the
school year ended, they were forced to repeat the grade, sometimes more
than once, all because they hadn't mastered English. Even now, forty years
later, the faces of those children are still fresh in my mind. They make
today's debates on bilingual education so much more poignant, and the
current push toward total English immersion so much more frightening."

Gonzalez was named one of the nation's 100 most influential Hispanics by
Hispanic Business and has received a lifetime achievement award from the
Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences.

I caught up with him in Boulder on a sunny Friday morning during his
national book tour for Harvest of Empire. He was at the Tattered Cover
bookstore in Denver the previous night, and as soon as we finished, he was
off to Breckenridge in the high Rockies for yet another event.

Tell me more about the faces of those schoolchildren that are still fresh
in your mind.

Juan Gonzalez: I never forget the fear that these children had being in a
country where they didn't understand anything that was going on in school,
and yet somehow they were grappling to learn subject matter. I believe that
the whole question of the learning of a new language depends to a great
degree on how young you are when you begin the process. Since I was a
Spanish speaker when I entered kindergarten, I really began to learn
English from the very beginning and was able to dominate the language
fairly rapidly. You take children who come in when they've already spent
four years in school in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela--or worse, when
they come in as teenagers--at that point the mastery of another language
becomes a far more difficult and psychologically taxing process. You're not
only learning to speak another language; you're learning to think one, too.

Q: I grew up on East 87th Street in New York, not too many blocks from your
old neighborhood. My parents were immigrants from Armenia. When my mother
used to speak to me in Armenian in the street in front of my friends, the
American kids, I wanted to crawl into the nearest sewer, feeling this
enormous shame.

Gonzalez: That is the classic immigrant experience that is repeated over
and over in the U.S. My wife, who comes from the Dominican Republic, is a
Spanish-language teacher in a New York high school. She finds the kids who
most resist learning Spanish are the Latinos. To them, Spanish is a
negative--second-class. It pains her. She says she has to do much more
counseling of the Latino children just to get them interested in being able
to study Spanish as a foreign language. But Spanish is not a foreign
language in the U.S. The annexation of the Mexicans to the Southwest and
the Puerto Ricans meant that those groups did not come to the U.S. The U.S.
came to them and made them citizens, speaking their own language in their
original territories.

Q: What do you think of bilingual education?

Gonzalez: I think bilingual transitional education is a good idea. I don't
think it's the responsibility of the public schools to maintain another
language or culture, but I do think it is their responsibility to provide
enough transitional education so that people don't fall back in other
subjects. The important thing is that in those parts of the U.S. like South
Texas or California or New York where you have huge Latino populations
everybody should learn Spanish--the English population as well as the
Spanish-speaking population--and break out of monolingual ghettoes. Then
you will have more cultural understanding.

Q: There are thirty million Latinos in the U.S., a very fast-growing
population. What are the political implications of that?

Gonzalez: In another fifty years, one out of every four people in the
country will be Latino. By 2100, it could be half the population. If
something is not done to raise the economic level of Latin America,
everyone is going to keep coming. The implication is that the entire social
and cultural fabric of the U.S. is going to go through a transformation.

So you have a choice. Either you raise the economic level of Latin America
so that more people will want to stay in their own country, or you accept
the fact that the U.S. itself, like the old Roman Empire, will be changed
from within by the very people it conquered.

Q: What are you trying to do in Harvest of Empire?

Gonzalez: I talk about the whole process of Americanization or lack of
Americanization by Latinos, and what has happened psychologically as well
as socially on this assimilation road.

full: http://www.progressive.org/int0700.htm


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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