Holding On To Hispanic Heritage

Program helps kids stay bilingual in face of assimilation

Thoroughly American in her Disney Store sweater and Puma sneakers, eight-year-old Maria Lopez took the chalk between her fingers and displayed a newfound knowledge of Peru.

In the Spanish threatened by a childhood of rapid assimilation, she filled in the blanks of a blackboard lesson to correctly situate the country “in South America; bordering Colombia and Ecuador to the north, Chile to the south, Bolivia to the east.”

Maria, born in El Salvador and raised in Long Beach, is one of 35 grade-school children sacrificing three hours of cherished play time each weekend to attend the Saturday Cultural Program run by Circulo de La Hispanidad, a nonprofit organization.

The program was threatened by the same Nassau County budget cuts that in January forced Long Beach-based Circulo to shut down its homework assistance program and choir, guitar and theater lessons. But Circulo administrators held firm to the culture classes, which for two decades have quietly served as a means for Long Island’s Latino children to retain their Spanish and heritage.

“Our children need to be in an environment where they are told their language and culture and who they are is fantastic,” said Gil Bernardino, executive director of Circulo, of his decision to keep the classes running on a shoestring budget of $ 3,500 a year.

Indeed, other communities have long banded together to create programs designed to hold on to their racial, ethnic, and national identities. Many Chinese-American children, for example, attend years of “Chinese school,” noted for its efficiency in handing down the traditions and tongue of past generations.

But such schools are rare in the Hispanic community, something Bernardino attributes to the historically working-class background of many Latinos, and a pre-civil rights era in which teachers admonished children for speaking Spanish in the classroom.

“They had to work Saturday and Sunday to survive,” Bernardino said of first-generation Hispanic parents.

“The second generation was told speaking their own language was sinful,” he said, referring to parochial and public school teachers who scolded pupils for turning from English to the language of home.

Sonia Nieto, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said Latinos would later use political and civic organizations to remove some of the stigma from Spanish use. Bilingual education and other programs were born during the civil-rights era, but they too were often skewed toward assimilation, she said.

Dual language programs, which exist in Long Beach and recently were implemented in Huntington schools, strike a much better balance with their equal instruction in Spanish and English, experts say. But an augmentation of cultural and language instruction offered by the Circulo program boosts the childrens’ ability to stay fluent in both languages. It also shapes positive self-attitudes, said Nieto.

“It’s not only their retention level but a certain un-self-consciousness among young children who are eager to try new things,” she said.

“And also, they have yet to pick up the negative messages about the language they speak…There are older youths who are bilingual but don’t admit it because of the messages sent about their background.”

The parents who have enrolled their children in the Circulo program say they want their children to overcome such hesitancy about using their native language. In a climate where English-only bills have been introduced, they also want their boys and girls to be empowered by bilingual abilities needed in a shrinking world. After all, Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language on the planet. Mandarin Chinese is first. English is third.

“She’s allowed to watch English-language TV for 30 minutes” a night, said Cesar Nuesi, 38, of his 6-year-old daughter, Deserit, who attends the program as a means of holding onto her Dominican roots. “But there’s no TV that night if she doesn’t use her Spanish” in daily conversation at home.

The program runs each Saturday from March to May at the West End Community Center in Long Beach. Pupils who don’t have transportation are brought in a van provided by Circulo. Taught by certified instructors Leonor Garavito DeFreitas and Patricia Guillen, the program includes the study of each country in Latin America.

The children start their study day at 1:30 p.m. with a lesson on a given nation, then move to another class where they do arts and crafts geared to that country. That is followed by a session where they are taught dances from the region. All instruction and homework is strictly in Spanish.

Administrators purposely avoid large- scale advertising of the program because word-of-mouth in the Hispanic community has already left them with a 20-name waiting list. Most of the pupils are Long Beach residents, though the program is open to all of Nassau County and, under hardship circumstances, Suffolk residents.

Bernardino said hundreds of children have participated in the program over the years and community interest has remained steady. It used to run throughout the school year, but as public funding gradually decreased, it was scaled down to its current 12-week schedule.

Those already in the classes are a study in the diverse national backgrounds of Latinos on the Island. Katherine Garcia, 12, whose family is from Peru, sat across classmate and Long Beach resident Gloriana Zzqiga, 11, whose family is from Costa Rica.

The two giggled as they squeezed glue onto construction paper and created renderings of the Galapagos Islands, which, the students explained, lie off the coast of Ecuador.

Katherine said she came to Long Island with her family at about three years old, knowing little English. The dual language classes she received in the Long Beach City School District, taught her the new language while allowing her to retain the old.

The Saturday Cultural Program polished her fluency in both, and offered something extra.

“I went back to Peru” recently, Katherine said. “They were different and everything, but I understood the way they think. Sometimes it’s hard because I want to sleep later on Saturday, but I like coming here.”



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