Three lives and a literate city’s shame

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Julia Rodriguez, Juan Contreras and Mercedes Meza couldn’t read or write. For years they got by with the help of friends and good memories for the sorts of sights that differentiated streets, reports Hector Tobar.

There is a neighborhood in L.A. where you can hear people converse in the language spoken by the Aztec emperors Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc.

Julia Rodriguez lives there -- in Pico-Union, just west of downtown. She spoke only Nahuatl when she arrived in Los Angeles 15 years ago.

In L.A., she quickly taught herself to speak Spanish. But when she was growing up in a small village in Mexico’s Guerrero state, she never went to school. So she’d never been taught to read in any language.

‘They never sent me,’ she told me. ‘That’s how it is in the ranchos. People say, ‘What’s the use?’ But the truth is, it really is important.’
In Los Angeles, Julia found a job as a garment worker and eventually realized that bettering her future depended on learning to read and write. So did Juan Contreras, a cook at a downtown restaurant, who didn’t go to school as a child because his peasant father ‘rented’ him out as a farmhand starting when he was 10 years old.

Read on here. -- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City