Breaking the Language Barrier

It’s a dreary Friday night in Oxnard, and instructor Noemi Quiros lays out her Spanish books, hoping the rain won’t keep all her students away.

It doesn’t. About 10 minutes later, two men whisper apologies for their tardiness as they take their seats.

It may be a typical night-school scenario, but this is not a typical class.

The students, Mixtec Indians from southern Mexico, came to the United States speaking only an indigenous language known as Mixteco. They work in Ventura County’s many farm fields, unable to understand either the Spanish of their fellow workers or the English of their bosses.

Recognizing this disadvantage, they’ve come to Quiros’ class to catch up.

“It’s difficult for them to walk around with any confidence,” said Antonio Flores, 24, a Mixtec outreach worker at California Rural Legal Assistance, who began running the classes in August with the help of several volunteers. “They’re scared of being robbed, of being stopped by police. They end up isolating themselves, essentially like birds in a cage.”

The classes, taught twice a week at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Elm Street, range from beginning Spanish to conversational English. The students learn to speak and write in Spanish first and then tackle English.

Farm worker Fidel Rivera, 24, remembers feeling isolated when he arrived from Oaxaca. He was scolded in English as he was learning how to work the fields but was unable to understand the problem. He felt embarrassed.

“People treated us like we were so strange,” Rivera said.

Mixtecs -- about 80,000 in California, according to some studies -- are younger, poorer and more likely to be in this country illegally than the rest of California’s low-wage farm workers. Their inability to communicate and the lack of Mixteco-speaking advocates make them vulnerable to dishonest growers.

Outreach workers estimate that there are up to 10,000 indigenous workers in Ventura County. Throughout the state, efforts to reach the Mixtecs are underway. California Rural Legal Assistance and other farm worker advocacy groups have expanded efforts to educate them about labor laws and their civil rights.

In Oxnard, dozens of Mixtecs go to Las Islas Family Clinic, where they are given food, clothing and other services. The clinic also offers a weekly Spanish literacy course.

Three years after arriving in the U.S., Rivera has worked alongside enough Spanish-speakers to pick up most of the language. But without English, he knows he’s only halfway to having a voice.

So he comes to the Oxnard church every weekend, joining other Mixtecs taking on their third language.

Next door, a beginning class attempts to sound out words from children’s Spanish books. Quiros patiently guides Maximino Lopez and Tomas Mendoza through various Spanish sounds and syllables. Neither knows how to read or write.

Paloma, the Spanish word for pigeon or dove, is causing them some trouble.

“Don’t guess,” she scolds them gently. “You’re supposed to be sounding out the words. Just play with the sounds we’ve learned and you’ll get it.”

“It’ll take me a half-hour,” Lopez said, joking.

During the last few minutes of class, Quiros gives a basic math lesson in the hope that the men will learn enough to recognize when they’re being cheated.

“I don’t want you guys to distrust people,” Quiros said after a lesson on counting money. “I just want you to be careful and be able to protect yourself.”

Lopez is from the impoverished Mexican state of Oaxaca, where he tended goats on a family farm before economic troubles drove him across the border to find work in Oxnard’s raspberry fields. He’s had his share of trouble with growers who took advantage of his limited language, he said. Once, he was given a bad check for a week’s worth of work.

“We went to cash it and there were no funds, but there was nothing we could do,” Lopez said.

He concentrates now on learning Spanish, so he can finally write a letter home. Someone in his village will translate, and his family, whom he hasn’t seen in four years, will know that he’s OK. In it, he’ll promise to return soon, although Lopez said that may be wishful thinking.

“I don’t think I’ll ever make enough money to go home for good,” he said.

Flores said he had no trouble recruiting volunteers to teach classes.

Quiros, a housecleaner from Oxnard, jokingly said she got involved because she’s “a busybody.” But she also was looking for a way to help Mixtecs, she said.

“I would always see them among themselves, speaking in their language, and I wondered how they could accomplish the simplest tasks,” Quiros said. “I mean, if your language is so totally different from ours, how do you get through a visit to the supermarket, the Laundromat? How isolated must you feel when you can’t even understand the signs?”

But Mixtec farm worker Rivera said he no longer feels so alone.

“I speak good Spanish now and can defend myself pretty well around Spanish speakers,” he said. “If I can learn Spanish, then English can’t be so bad.”