When I heard what state Rep. Douglas Bruce said in the Colorado House chamber Monday — that he didn’t think we needed “5,000 more illiterate peasants in the state of Colorado” — I thought his characterization of many Mexicanos was accurate. Illiterate, yes. Peasants, yes.
We are illiterate. And peasants. Or, rather, many of us were. Those who still are won’t be for long, if given even half a chance.
My father’s family was made up of peasants who could not read or write. They immigrated to America barely able to wobbly-ink their own names. Some just drew X’s. All their lives, they spoke “Ah-mare-ee- kahn” with such thick accents that I often had to translate.
I was the first person in my father’s family to complete grade school. Even though I had difficulty learning to read, I did learn, and became “the reader” for my family. I read their medicine bottles, telegrams from “the old country,” tax documents, legal documents business cards, milk bills — all before I was old enough to walk down to the end of the street by myself.
Every Sunday, my father would buy a newspaper and “read” the funnies to me. But when I was about 7, as we were laughing at the antics of Sluggo and Nancy, I suddenly realized what Dad was saying aloud was not what was written on the page.
My beautiful father could not read the funnies at all. He could only understand the spirit of the pictures. Thus, he tried to show off his pretend “reading skills” to his little child so they could share a laugh.
I grew up in a house that had only five books: a red Bible (preserved in tissue paper high on a closet shelf); a history of wars in pictures; three used book-of-the-month club novels a customer had given my father as “a tip”; and a dictionary.
I read Emile Zola almost before I finished “Dick and Jane,” then set out to memorize the Bible, as it seemed filled with mystery and science fiction stories. I challenged myself to read the dictionary, finding each word’s meaning a wondrous little story in itself.
Bruce may have been accurate in that some immigrants are illiterate peasants. But he is not accurate in his inference that these people — or any other people who are non-literate and who work the land and are poor — are ignorant. We are not.
To be non-literate might mean to carry a rich oral tradition of so many mythic, godly, diabolical and humorous stories that the repetition of these bind the families close and enrich the larger communities. These tales carried for generations fill the minds of all with goals and hopes beyond the merely facile.
Or it may mean one is likely to be wise, skilled in ways that cannot be learned from books alone, but rather from sharp observations.
Mexican consul general Eduardo Arenal and some of the state representatives who reacted to Bruce’s comment are, I think, correct in holding that it is less useful to define people by the least of what one warrants them to be, rather than by what gifts they might actually bring.
I know from spending many years being battered about — no kid from an immigrant family escapes taking unrelenting heat from those who despise us — that some who see us as the downfall of civilization will not be turned by my words. But I also think that sometimes, if people know better, they will do and say better. Sometimes warmth will turn a heart back to “on” more kindly than a slap.
The story of my non-literate family is only one story of millions wherein parents and children, each in their own ways, blossomed when given even slightest opportunities while rowing like crazy against a tide of public opprobrium.
My parents could not help me with higher education. I worked three jobs and carried my little daughter on my back to go to college. I gained my doctorate and my psychoanalytic training, and am a published author, having given hundreds of readings of my work around the world. I’m now so lucky to have many books instead of a few.
Yet, the one reading that still matters most is my late father’s “reading” the funnies to me after Mass on Sunday mornings — revealing the heartbreakingly decent and generous spirit in a man who lived to enrich his children’s lives any way he could.
Literate or not.
