Father’s Challenge: to Put His Call for Help in English

Adrian Miranda has no trouble explaining in Spanish what’s wrong with his son, Alexis. But when he tries to speak up for his boy in English, this thoughtful, almost brooding immigrant father feels as if he’s the one with the speech impediment.

Alexis is a bright boy with mischievous brown eyes who seemed to teach himself to read as if by magic. He delighted in playing with letters and was speedy at spelling backward. Without hesitating, he’d arrange vowels and consonants in reverse--RAEYTHGIL ZZUB--to write the name of his favorite cartoon character, Buzz Lightyear.

But paradoxically, Alexis, the word whiz, had trouble communicating. He had reached the age of 2 without speaking. Not even to Mama and Papa. And when he did eventually speak, the words often didn’t come out right.

The boy would say unrelated things. His answers were non sequiturs. And he never simply asked for a sandwich. He’d list the ingredients--by the brand names his mother used.

“Mami, quiero pan con Best Foods y Oscar Mayer y Kraft,” Alexis would say, ordering bread with mayonnaise, meat and cheese.

The worst part was that other kids didn’t have a clue how to deal with Alexis. He’d just jump into their games without asking. He’d pick up the ball without waiting his turn. Or he’d just start reciting dialogue he had memorized from a video, acting out the parts for his puzzled playmates.

They’d ignore him, sometimes. Or they’d hit him and try to chase him away. Alexis didn’t cry, though, because he thought they were playing a game. He didn’t seem to know the others were being mean.

*

But his father did. Adrian was always with his boy, trying to shield him from the cruelties of childhood. In Mexico, he remembered, every small town had a village idiot who was often treated as subhuman. He wasn’t about to let Alexis be treated that way in the United States, where Adrian was now a citizen.

“Los ninos le hacian escarnio,” Adrian told me over cafe au lait at the new Barnes & Noble bookstore across from MainPlace, his favorite spot to bring Alexis, 6, and his little sister, Victoria Citlali, 3.

My Spanish is pretty good, but I had never heard that word--escarnio. Adrian, who loves fountain pens, spelled it for me and gave me a rough definition. The next day, the laid-off factory worker took the trouble of leaving a message with a more precise meaning from his Spanish-English dictionary.

Escarnio: Mockery, derision, ridicule.

Adrian wondered, without meaning to sound highfalutin, if that unusual word had stayed with him from reading Don Quixote the night before. The Cervantes classic sits on his chock-full bookshelf at his condominium in Orange, along with the biography of Leonardo da Vinci, science fiction by Isaac Asimov, and tomes about woodworking and calligraphy, his hobbies.

Adrian, son of a Mexican peasant and bracero from Jalisco, has no problem reading English, and his vocabulary is excellent. But his accent is heavy and his confidence is lacking, especially for speaking in public.

“That’s why I come here,” he said Wednesday morning at the weekly meeting of Los Amigos, an Orange County advocacy group where folks are urged to stand up and talk about their causes and community campaigns.

*

Adrian says he wants to improve his language skills so he can advocate better for his son, now a first-grader in a special education class in the Orange Unified School District. In special ed, parents are part of the school team that makes decisions for students with mental or physical impairments.

Adrian feels compelled to perfect his English so he can communicate more clearly on behalf of Alexis.

“For me, the first thing is to gain more fluidity in my speech, make it more free-flowing,” he said in Spanish. “To be more ‘articulate,’ as they say here.”

Adrian says he felt intimidated when he attended a team meeting in June while his son was still in kindergarten. (It didn’t help that he was scheduled for a hernia operation that same morning.) His uncertain English and his lack of expertise, he says, put him at a disadvantage with the experts--the teacher, school psychologist, speech therapist.

They know what they’re talking about and they know how to talk.

Recently, Adrian spoke with a district specialist on the phone. He said he was concerned his son had been placed this year in a first-grade class with children who were more severely impaired. He also worried Alexis wasn’t being “mainstreamed” enough, that is, not spending enough time in regular classes with normal kids.

At one point, Adrian says, the specialist slowed her speech and raised her tone, as if Adrian was having trouble understanding. The parents can’t pick the school for their children, she said. The district does the placement.

Adrian believes the official mistook his accent for ignorance.

“Yo me sentia apabullado,” said Adrian in his slow, soft voice.

That word sent me to the dictionary this time. Apabullado means he felt flattened, crushed, silenced.

A district spokeswoman said, somewhat defensively, that any parent can have a translator if needed. But that’s not what Adrian wants. He wants to communicate as an equal.

On the advice of a friend who works in special education for another district, Adrian and his wife, Maria, have requested another meeting of the school team next week.

“The idea is for the boy to learn to take care of himself,” says Adrian. “To be ‘self-sufficient,’ as they say here.”

The couple has requested copies of their son’s district documents to prepare for the meeting. The copy of the assessment from the June meeting is so faint in key parts it’s illegible.

“To be more involved, I have to know more,” he says, still in Spanish. “Our idea isn’t to try to fight with the school, but to try to contribute more from our side, to transmit our message more effectively. . . . They are all well-intentioned and professional people. But if you don’t prepare yourself as a parent, you can be a hindrance to their work.”

His model: Anglo parents who join support groups and share information from the Internet. “They’re more ‘proactive,’ as they call it here,” he says.

*

The problem is that Adrian and Maria have entered the world of special education, which has its own inscrutable language. The statement of parents’ rights is written in legalese, he says. And the clinical reports can be unfathomable, even to most native-born college grads.

“Alexis is often distractible, active, impulsive and strong-willed,” states a May report from his physical therapists. “He craves routines, proprioceptive play and vestibular stimulation.”

When I first started talking to Adrian a couple years ago, he was involved in parent protests against the district’s decision to do away with bilingual education. At the time, he wanted his children to learn both languages. He still does, but now he worries that bilingualism may be too much of a challenge for Alexis.

During my visit to their home, Adrian spoke mostly in English to his son. The boy spent a busy two hours, watching videos, building a puzzle, jumping and rolling against the couch (vestibular stimulation), and climbing a tree in the courtyard near the swimming pool.

His parents never let him out of their sight for an instant. They watched him from their tiny enclosed patio. If he darted around the corner, his mother went after him.

“No, Alex. Por alli no. Alex!”

Maria agonizes when her son comes home with a scratch. He rarely tells them how he got it. Once he showed up with a mysterious mark around his neck, but wouldn’t say a word about that either.

Maria would be at her boy’s side around the clock if she could. She wants her daughter eventually to attend the same school so she can look out for her older brother. But that’ll put a lot of pressure on the girl, she fears.

Besides, she wants her son to be independent. Maria wants the school to teach him to express himself properly.

*

Meanwhile, the mother from Michoacan also tries to overcome her shyness in speaking English at the school meetings. She can’t afford to be embarrassed when it comes to her son’s welfare: “Trato que no me de pena, porque son cosas de mi hijo.”

Since March, Maria, 35, is the only wage earner, holding down a job at the computer circuit-board factory where she met her husband. Adrian, 41, is collecting unemployment, looking for part-time work and planning to start training to operate computer-controlled milling machines.

Eventually, he wants to finish college and teach. He sees a great need for Latino professionals in special education.

“In Mexico, one is more accustomed to letting the institutions take care of everything,” he says. “But not here.

“Here, if one doesn’t speak up . . . “

*

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.