Blacks, Latinos in Neighborly Effort : They Lend an Ear to Learn a New Tongue

“Yo estudio Espanol. Yo estudio Espanol en Watts.”

The young black women gathered around tables in a Watts living room repeated the phrases loudly, their Spanish accents less than perfect, but their enthusiasm for the language obvious.

“I am studying Spanish in Watts,” one of the students translated, as the class prepared to tackle another Spanish phrase. Outside, the yells of Latino children at play could be heard echoing in Spanish up and down the street.

Earlier that morning, young Mexican immigrants had been sitting at those same tables, practicing words like please and thank you and shyly trying out their newly learned English on each other.

A Chance to Learn

Blacks and Latinos are neighbors in Watts, but because they speak different languages, they have remained somewhat isolated from one another. Now, a group called Parents of Watts is trying to help change that by offering blacks and Latinos a chance to learn each other’s language.

“Most of my neighbors don’t speak English, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get along,” said Alice Harris, head of the group that offers the classes.

With instructors from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Jordan-Locke Adult School, Harris started offering the classes two years ago in the living room of a small, cluttered house two doors away from her own--a house she bought to serve as headquarters for Parents of Watts.

As many as 30 students attend the three-hour-a-day, four-day-a-week free classes--English-as-a-second-language in the mornings or Spanish in the afternoon.

Most of the students, black and brown, live on nearby streets, in an area of Watts known among its Latino residents as La Colonia-- the colony, or neighborhood.

Neighborhood Changed

The area--bordered by Alameda Street, Wilmington Avenue, 103rd Street and Santa Ana Boulevard--was originally settled by Mexican railroad workers at the turn of the century, then became predominantly black during World War II.

Today it has shifted back to predominantly Latino. But unlike the Chicano residents of years past, who had been in the area for 20 years or so, the community’s Latino residents are newcomers, often here illegally, who speak no English and have little to do with their black neighbors.

Now Spanish is the language most often heard on the streets, and the change has left many black residents uncomfortable with their inability to communicate with their neighbors.

“There’re a lot of Hispanics living around me and I want to learn to talk to them,” said Vanessa Roberson, 19, a neighborhood resident who attends Compton Junior College during the day and the Parents of Watts Spanish class in the evening.

“I want to understand (their language) better, so that we can understand each other better,” she explained. “Now, when I try to talk to them (in Spanish) on the street, at first they look at me a little strange, then they smile. If I don’t get it right, they’ll help me.”

Most of the Spanish students are young black women, and their enthusiasm for learning the language is matched by their eagerness to understand the Mexican culture.

Throughout the three-hour sessions they pepper instructor Anita Cangas with questions about Mexican customs and traditions and ask for translations of phrases they hear their Spanish-speaking neighbors frequently use--or phrases they want to learn to use.

“Guapo. That means handsome, right?” a student asks. The rest of the young women hurry to scribble the word in their notebooks. “Guapo. Guapo,” one teen-ager repeats, perfecting her pronunciation. “I know I’m gonna use that one.” Her classmates giggle and practice the word themselves.

Like the students in the Spanish class, the Mexican students in the morning English-as-a-second-language class are mostly young, many of them here illegally.

“I want to better myself,” 18-year-old Martin explained in Spanish. “I want to be able to get a decent job. I have high hopes, big dreams for myself. I realize I have to advance myself. This is only the first step.”

Like many of his classmates, Martin has discovered that his inability to speak English hinders him in his search for a good, steady job.

But his family’s resistance is the first hurdle he must overcome. Martin’s family, like the families of many of the other Mexican students, is disdainful of the hours the young man spends learning English--hours that could be spent working for meager wages to augment the family’s income. Attendance is nearly perfect despite that.

When Martin missed a few days of class, Harris visited his home to find out why. Despite the language difference--Harris herself speaks only a little Spanish in spite of her efforts and Martin’s family spoke no English--she learned that the family was living in poverty and needed to put Martin to work picking strawberries for a few dollars a day so the family would have money for food.

The next day, Harris went back to the family carrying packages of food and clothing she had collected from her own family and some of her neighbors. The next day, Martin was back in school.

“You see these boys trying so hard to grasp the language, but you know that unless their families are fed, they’re gonna be out in the fields picking strawberries instead of in here learning and preparing themselves for a better job,” she said.

So, whenever the financial pressure gets too heavy on her young charges, Harris sends them home with food packages--a necessary sort of bribe to persuade their families to let them stay.

Most of the food comes from Parents of Watts’ food pantry, which is stocked with staples such as rice, beans, bread, canned meat, butter and cheese. This year the group received its second $51,000 annual grant of federal and state emergency food funds from the Los Angeles City Community Development Department to buy and distribute food to hungry people in Watts.

Harris supplements that food with donated goods from neighborhood residents and businesses, and from her own refrigerator, if need be.

A longtime activist in Watts school and community affairs, Harris started Parents of Watts six years ago to counsel pregnant teen-agers. Today the group still offers prenatal and parenting classes for young women, along with language classes, counseling services, food giveaways and social activities for Watts teen-agers and their families.

“We don’t have a big budget to go around publicizing things, but everybody around here knows about us,” Harris said. “They hear through word of mouth,” and they flock to the cozy home, decorated with teen-agers’ pictures and baby clothes pinned to the wall “because it’s theirs,” she said.

Harris said most of the community has been supportive of her efforts to bridge the language gap, though some longtime black residents still resist the notion of learning Spanish.

“You hear that now and then: ‘This is an English-speaking country. Make them speak English,’ ” Harris said. “I tell them ‘If they did learn English, then they’d be better off than you because they’d be bilingual and you only speak one language.’

“We’d better wake up and realize that we live together and we need to talk to one another,” she said. “It’s not the language that matters anyway, it’s what you say. What we ought to say is ‘I care.’ ”