Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border

142 Pages·2000·3.83 MB·English

by  Tomas Mario Kalmar

Illegal Alphabets
and Adult Biliteracy
Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border

Illegal Alphabets
and Adult Biliteracy
Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border
Tomás Mario Kalmar
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
Mahwah, New Jersey London
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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Copyright © 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any
other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, NJ 07430
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kalmar, Tomás Mario, 1942–
Illegal alphabets and adult biliteracy: Latino migrants crossing the linguistic border/
by Tomás Mario Kalmar
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-8058-3626-8 (c: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8058-3627-6 (p: alk. paper)
1. English language—Study and teaching—Spanish speakers. 2. English language—
Study
and teaching—United States. 3. Hispanic Americans—Education—Language arts.
4. Languages in contact—United States. 5. English language—Self-instruction.
6. English language—Adult education. 7. Hispanic Americans—Language.
8. Bilingualism—United States. 9. English language—Alphabet.
PE1129.S8 K28 2000
428’.0071’073–dc21 99–089851
The final camera copy for this work was prepared by the author, and therefore the
publisher takes no responsibility for consistency or correctness of typographical style.
However, this arrangement helps to make publication of this kind of scholarship possible.
ISBN 1-4106-0572-8 Master e-book ISBN
para mamacita
bruja letrada

CONTENTS
Gracias/Acknowledgments i
Foreword iii

James Paul Gee

Prologue 1
1 No Man’s Land 4
I Líricamente 4
II The Death of Leonardo 11
III DOLÓ DASNT PROTECT AS 13
2 The Cobden Glossaries 35
I Constructing a Hybrid Alphabet 36
II A Kind of Algebraic Notation 41
III New Contexts, New Texts, Same Moves 42
IV A Scene of Writing: The Village Hall 46
V The Cobden Glossaries 52
3 Some Laugh, Others Frown 56
I “Is This Text a Joke, or What?” 57
II Cracking the Ninth-Century Code 61
III Three Ways of Reading a Cobden Glossary 65
IV Freirean Dilemmas 68
V Wallerstein on the Case of the Codben Glossaries 73
VI Conclusion 81
4 Making It Legal: The Social Construction of Hybrid Alphabets 82
I Strictly Speaking: Emic vs Etic 83
II Writing in the No-Man’s Land Between Languages 89
III How to Legitimize a Hybrid Alphabet 94

Epilogue: A Game as Old as the Alphabet? 113
References 117
Author Index 123
Subject Index 125

Gracias/Acknowledgments
Into this book I have poured twenty years of life shared with friends and strangers. As it
goes to press I celebrate con mucho cariño y respeto the memory of my dear friend, the
late Alfred Schenkman. In 1983, just before he died, Alfred published five hundred
copies of The Voice of Fulano.
It took twelve more years to legitimize the conversion of that slim volume of
miscellaneous bilingual field notes into the doctoral dissertation which—with barely any
changes—you, dear Reader, now hold in your hand. I thank the many communities who
taught me to value the intellectual labor of alfabetización, and I thank the various
institutions that helped legitimize the tale I tell.
At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Joe Maxwell taught me integrity. Carol
Chomsky persuaded me not to omit the technical linguistic details. Jim Gee persuaded me
to Discourse the Harvard way. Donaldo Macedo helped exorcise my reluctance to do so.
And when the rites of passage got tough, Hanna Fingeret nourished my courage.
The Spencer Foundation blessed the production of this book with a generous Doctoral
Dissertation Fellowship. Deepest gratitude to Catherine Lacey!
The Illinois Times, the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St.
Louis, and the Southern Illinoisan kindly granted permission to reproduce the articles pp.
10, 27–28, and 29–35 respectively. Dover Publications granted permission to reproduce
the glossary on p. 96, and MIT Press the glossaries on pp. 103–104.
Lifelong gratitude to Silja Kallenbach, to Beatriz McConnie Zapater, and to Barbara
Newman. And gracias to all the other folks in the original fourteen ALIPs of the Boston
Adult Literacy Initiative, and to the people at UMass/Boston and Roxbury Community
College who supported the work of the Boston Adult Literacy Resource Institute in its
first five years. Also to the Lawrence Literacy Coaltion, and to Luis Prado of Alianza
Hispana, and all the folks there.
Peg and Steve Falcone and Joe Liberto first welcomed my family and me to
Carbondale. Jennifer FauntLeRoy provided a home for my two sons and me—and
Pobblesquatch—and, while tornados whirled us around, delivered babies in the
backwoods. The good people of Cobden and Anna and Carterville taught me what it
takes to desegregate a community poco a poco, one move at a time. Kaye Weatherford
persuaded me that I could choose to see what others see.
Alex Paull, Steve Baker, Cathy Signorelli and the rest of the Carbondale Leonard
Peltier Support Group taught me solidarity. And Patti and Kevin and Hugh and Bob and
Dave and the Oakland Avenue gang kept me yodeling. Y más que nunca, sueño con
todos los compadres y todos sus familiares, tanto en Cherán como en Illinois.
Primeramente con Kim y Steve Titus, y don Fidel y doña Concepción Bartolo y mi
ahijadita Margarita, y también Garth Gillan, y Pánfilo y Sara Queriapa y sus familiares, y
las familias de Catalina Roman, de don José Gomez, y de todas las pioneras de Su Casa
Migrant Head Start Day Care Center, y Salvador Tehandón, y Margarita Garcia, y
muchos muchos más que aqirĺ no se puede ni nombrar.
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