Last Updated: Wednesday, Mar 22 2006 4:11 PM
In a California classroom almost 30 years ago, a white teacher paddles a Latino student in front of his classmates.
The student’s crime? Not joining a gang, starting a fight or using drugs, but speaking Spanish.
The paddling scene was from the HBO movie “Walkout,” which chronicles the 1968 efforts of a group of students who organized a walkout to protest injustices in the East Los Angeles public school system.
Many people my age may have a hard time believing that only a few decades ago, some schools prohibited students from speaking Spanish. For my children, it seems impossible. But it happened.
So I took my wife, two children and 66-year-old mother to see the movie, which was screened for about 1,500 people at the Fox Theatre recently by the nonprofit Heritage of America Educational and Cultural Foundation. The movie was directed by actor/director Edward James Olmos.
For me, the movie was a glimpse into a strange past. Nobody ever warned me not to speak Spanish in school, and being bilingual always helped my career. But to catch a glimpse of a world where you could be punished for a friendly “Buenos días,” I didn’t have to look far.
“What did that scene remind you of?” I asked my mother, Consuelo Rodriguez, as she fixed herself a breakfast of scrambled eggs and potatoes the next morning.
My mom, who works as a cafeteria aide, glanced at the stove and literally shuddered.
“If they heard anybody speak Spanish, they would take you to the office, and you would be in trouble,” she said as she remembered going to class at a south Texas elementary school. “They would either paddle us or they would take away our recess.”
Bathrooms and water faucets in my mom’s hometown were reserved for white people or “colored” people. She doesn’t remember ever seeing a black student at school, and people stayed away from the only interracial couple in town.
“Nobody would even look at them,” she said.
The school was made up mostly of Mexican-American kids from farm-worker families who spoke Spanish as their first language. Nobody ever told the students why they couldn’t speak their native tongue. They just couldn’t. And the school designated badge-carrying students to patrol the playground and report anyone who did. “So everybody kept an eye out for them to make sure they were not around when we spoke Spanish,” remembered my mom, who learned English as a second language and worked the fields for most of her life. “We didn’t understand how they could turn against their own, but they did it.”
My mother was caught between two worlds. Nobody could speak Spanish at school, but if you spoke English among your Latino friends, you were considered arrogant.
“We felt that it was wrong,” said my mom, “but there was nothing we could do. We accepted it.”
This hidden part of American history still doesn’t show up in many textbooks, but it is well covered by “Walkout,” which is scheduled to be broadcast on HBO for the next several weeks. It would be a good movie to watch with the family.
But be prepared. After the movie, your children may ask: Did schools really punish students for speaking another language in America?
They did.
Martinez's column appears on Thursdays in The Bakersfield Californian..