The Long Road to Literacy

Concepcion Castillo says it wasn’t so long ago that she felt humiliated and ashamed. She couldn’t read or write.

“Can you imagine how embarrassing it is to have someone write your checks for you?” the 74-year-old grandmother from El Salvador asked the other day. “I should have learned how long ago, but I never had the time. I was working since I was very young, and then I raised a family.”

After a year of three-days-a-week lessons, Castillo has learned the basics of writing simple sentences and understanding the signs she sees in her neighborhood. But in L.A., she knows she’s only halfway home in her battle with illiteracy because the language she’s barely learned to read and write is Spanish.

Beginning early next year, the grandmother begins the classes all over again, this time in English.

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To staffers with El Centro Latino de Educacion Popular, a nonprofit group that has established adult literacy programs in the largely immigrant neighborhoods near Downtown L.A., Castillo’s story is all too familiar.

In the blitz to get recent arrivals conversant in English, it’s easy to forget that many of them can’t even read or write in their own language.

According to Marcos Cajina, Centro Latino’s executive director, more than 300,000 adults in the county have less than a fifth-grade education. “In our experience,” Cajina said, “many of these adults never even made it to first grade because their families could not afford to send them on the bus or they needed them to do housework or work in the field.”

As a result, many are ill-equipped to learn to read their native tongue, much less English.

In Castillo’s case, although she has been in this country since 1970, she has failed to learn English despite several classroom tries at it. “I just couldn’t do it,” she remembered. “I kept trying, but I was getting nowhere.”

Centro Latino was formed in 1991 to offer classes in Spanish to help prepare adults like Castillo to make that jump to English. It gives reading, writing and math classes in Spanish. And, instead of using traditional subjects, the instruction involves the immigrants’ own experiences back home or in L.A. So in stressing themes like gangs, racism and poverty, Centro Latino’s literacy campaign fuses a little political activism with the basics of grammar.

It’s an approach that doesn’t find much favor in this Proposition 187 era, especially among educators who think the best way to learn English is total immersion. “Learning another language first, even if it’s that person’s first language, is a waste of time,” one language specialist at USC told me.

Cajina, however, makes no apologies.

“This approach works,” he said. “It does cause some problems with some potential funders, but it’s been worth it.”

The program’s results so far might seem marginal to some, but Cajina is enthusiastic about them. More than 100 students have completed the Spanish language classes and more are coming through the door each day, largely because of neighborhood canvassing. Arco has donated some computers to complement Centro Latino’s efforts.

Centro Latino relies on volunteers for the bulk of its program because its annual budget is a meager $25,000.

Recently, it got some free advertising, courtesy of the Pioneer supermarket in Echo Park. More than 40,000 grocery bags were printed with the stories of some of Centro Latino’s students. Among them was Castillo’s, told in her own words:

“I have made a big effort to improve myself and now I feel very confident and happy because I can read and write. People who do not know how to read cannot have any privacy and have to ask others for favors to write their letters. That is very humiliating. I have come out of that ignorance. . . . I now feel happy to be a woman.”

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I had one of those grocery bags on my desk here at The Times when one of the after-hours workers eyed it. He asked if he could have it. Sure, I said, figuring he needed it for trash. It turns out he did, but he looked puzzled.

“But what’s all this writing on it?” he asked in Spanish. “Is it for free food?”

“No, it’s for free classes to learn and write in Spanish,” I told him.

He stared at the bag and then at me. After a few awkward moments, he admitted he can’t read English or Spanish.

“I never had the time, too busy working,” he said finally. “I got somebody here to fill out my application for me.”

* More George Ramos : For a collection of recent columns by George Ramos, sign on to the TimesLink online service and “jump” to keyword “George Ramos.”