What really got me thinking though, was the theme of the campesino (person of the country) as he
exists in the life of the immigrant. “Los
Angeles is filled with people like us,” Tobar writes, “people who have Latin
American Villages and peasants hovering around their lives.” The section goes on to say:
“There are campesinos in our dreams, on our lawns cutting the grass, in the pickup
trucks next to us on the freeway, in the picture frames on the walls of our
living rooms. The peasants in the pictures
might come from the age of the Mexican Revolution, or they might be
twenty-first-century campesinos in villages
connected to California by bus lines and extended family relationships. We can
go down below María’s family home and hear roosters crowing at sunrise from
backyard chicken coops. In the newer
Mexican Suburbs of Watts and Compton, we can find stalks of corn growing in the
front yards, a crop from the old country seemingly about to burst from its cage
of wire fencing to populate all the other lawns, and a reminder to all that the
gardener or the mechanic inside was once a campesino,
and perhaps still longs to be one” (pgs 11- 12, 2005 edition).
Now what really got me thinking here was that as I read the
part about María’s family roosters, my brain immediately jumped to my time in
Puerto Rico (walking along streets with the local chickens), and to my own
family’s chickens roosting in the front yard.
Maybe, I thought, it is not so much the campesino that we long for, but what he represents. Maybe it is not the campesino, but the campo.
With the exception of the immigrant who
comes to work in agriculture, it seems that most end up looking for work in
cities. The homesickness that moves in
then might express itself as stalks of corn in a front yard, or as simple
longing for the views and sounds of a place left behind. We miss where we came from and we are haunted
by ghosts of its image.
And I say “we” because it is not just an ailment of
immigration across national borders, but one of simple moves across states as
well. You see, the further I get away
from home, the more I find my identity revolves around that place in the valley
where I grew up. Spanish seems to grasp
this concept better than English in the way it says “I am from __” as “soy de
__,” or literally, “I am of __,” because to be from a place is to be a product
of it and to be a piece of it. We have
not truly left that place and we are not “from” it, we are of it and we
carry it with us.
Often, I think all of this is one of the reasons it can be
so hard for some to leave a place, and yet why others do. For me, the decision to move started in early
Middle School when my parents told me they wanted me to go to college, but if I
wanted it too, then it was going to have to be something that I did for myself. And they gave me a cow. After that, the sale of Rosie’s yearly calf
went into my savings account for college and I began to think about funding
myself.
By the time I was a senior, my life pointed towards
college. I was being encouraged to go to
school and get a degree for something I could always have a job in. Looking back now, I never realized that the
hidden implication of the decree would be that if I pursued that job and that life
then I would be leaving. In an indirect
sense, a successful job meant going away from the life I grew up with. And, wrapped up in sports and school, I didn’t
notice for three years what it meant.
When I did, it felt like a decision I had never made and I noticed my
own campesino ghosts for the first
time.
Now, I say all this merely to discuss a challenging part
about growing up, one that my classmates who chose to stay in our hometown made
much sooner than I did; what do we do with our home when we move away and into
our own lives? To me, this seems to be at
the heart of many immigration struggles our nation faces today as cultures
struggle to find a way to simultaneously assimilate to a new country, and to keep
a grip on where they are from. The
product is the first and second generation “American,” still not yet totally
sunk into that identity, but far enough in to be unrecognizable to grandparents. In schools this manifests as the cafeteria
tables that end up divided racially, the tables that the staff stare at
wondering about the cliques, or the segregation, or why those ____ kids always
only sit with each other. These groups
are a totally new creation (which, tada!, is the point of Tobar’s whole book)
and no one totally understands what to do with them. How much to adopt? How much to move away to? How much to move back? How much to keep?
As a future English as a Second Language teacher, I see the
struggles as ones that all immigrants and first and second generation students,
and school systems are having. I will
have students that I need to get producing English successfully enough to be a
productive and satisfied part of society, but at the same time I need to
support the students’ first language and culture. Just like students from rural areas struggle
with identity in deciding whether to stay or go, ESOL students struggle with
identity in deciding how much of their new country to adopt. All of us are haunted by some kind of campesino ghost.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to any of this,
just a lot of questions about the way we long for our ghosts. I tried to ask Sherman how he felt, and what
generation removed he is from his southern Chihuahua roots, but he only woke up
long enough to give me a disapproving look… probably for writing blog posts and
not lesson plans for my work sample next week.
Yep, the work sample I’m so nervous for that I’m avoiding lesson plans
by writing two page blog posts. However,
I refuse to be made to feel guilty by someone who eats enough stuffing from his
toys that I often feel as though I am gathering brown teddies bears on our
walks. Not a chance.
Goodnight all!
Y, para que
sepas; soy del valle lleno de ovejas, al lado de un rio perdido.
Emma
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