Breaking barriers

Under the freeway overpass at Pico and Sawtelle boulevards, a
trailer sits on the dirt floor, and a group of men wait for work
nearby under a white tent that shelters several old couches and a
television from the rain. This is the West Los Angeles Job
Center.

Inside the trailer, the noise from the freeway is dampened but
not blocked, and on Saturday mornings many of the jornaleros
““ as the day laborers are called in Spanish ““ crowd in
to receive English lessons from a group of UCLA students from the
Proyecto de Jornaleros.

“Nos gusta las clases,” said Sergio Lopez, a
jornalero who came from Guatemala a year and a half ago. In
addition to saying he liked the classes, Lopez said he has had
trouble finding work because he does not speak English, and
Saturday’s class taught him new words he can use.

Students from Proyecto de Jornaleros, whose name translates as
“the day-laborer project,” have been teaching English
to day-laborers since 2001 at the job center downtown and more
recently in West Los Angeles.

Many of the group’s members say teaching English is
rewarding.

“The most exciting part for me is going there on Saturday
and having discussions and seeing how much they learn and how much
they want to learn,” said Cristina López, who graduated
from UCLA in December 2004 with degrees in women’s studies
and Chicana/o studies.

Proyecto began when a group of students from Conciencia Libre, a
student social justice group concerned with Latin American issues,
needed to construct 600 crosses for a display about deaths at the
border.

They hired a group of day-laborers to construct the crosses, and
when the jornaleros incorporated their own experiences of
immigration into the display, they realized there was a need to
teach jornaleros English so they could defend themselves from
exploitation.

That year, several Conciencia Libre members began working with
the job centers, which are run by el Instituto de Educacion Popular
del Sur de California ““ the Southern California Institute of
Popular Education ““ commonly known as IDEPSCA. IDEPSCA is a
non-profit organization funded by Los Angeles and Pasadena, and has
been operating six job centers since 1997.

The centers aim to provide safe, neutral locations where
jornaleros can negotiate with potential employers instead of
waiting on street corners or in front of stores like Home Depot.
IDEPSCA has bilingual staff who help day-laborers communicate with
employers, and can help assure that the workers get paid. Employers
can request specific workers or skills, but most jobs are assigned
by pulling raffle tickets for as many workers as an employer asks
for.

In addition to providing space for Proyecto members to teach,
IDEPSCA gives a workshop for volunteers on popular education based
on the philosophy of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. Freire, who
wrote a book called “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,”
advocated a kind of active education where students and teachers
learn from one another.

And members of Proyecto say the mutual nature of education is
one of the most exciting parts of teaching.

“The most rewarding thing is we learn from them more than
they learn from us. It really is an exchange,” said
López, who is of no relation to Sergio.

But aside from the basic theory, UCLA students do everything on
their own. Every week they create a curriculum based on what the
jornaleros want to learn, and they organize field trips and
workshops on job skills and workers’ rights.

On Saturday, six UCLA students went to the West L.A. center, and
six went downtown. By 9:30 a.m. about 17 jornaleros had filed into
the small trailer at the West L.A. center. When everyone had
settled in, they began introductions in Spanish. Many jornaleros in
Saturday’s group came from Mexico, but some were from El
Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. They split up into introductory,
intermediate and advanced groups, and the lessons began.

Saturday’s curriculum was a little out of the ordinary.
Normally the lessons have themes like work, how to talk to
employers or globalization, but this week, the theme was
Valentine’s Day.

Each group had a small passage about Valentine’s Day,
printed in English and Spanish, and the Proyecto members helped the
jornaleros examine them at different levels. The beginning group
worked on vocabulary and pronunciation, the intermediate group
focused on reading and grammar, and the advanced group explained
sentences of the passage to one another, did more advanced
vocabulary exercises and worked on understanding the lyrics to a
romantic song.

Near the beginning of class the director of the center came in
with a plastic fishbowl full of raffle tickets and called names for
the available jobs. Several workers left and the classes
continued.

Luz Herrera, a fourth-year international development studies and
Portuguese student who has been working with Proyecto since it
began, said for the project to function, jornaleros need to know
they can leave class for work.

“Some worry they will miss a job because of class,”
Herrera said. “We try to make it very clear that they can
leave for a job, and they get more comfortable.”

The jornaleros listened attentively and discussed the activities
eagerly.

The class was conducted more in Spanish than in English.
Proyecto members and jornaleros traded knowledge of Spanish for
English, as the jornaleros learned the differences between
“were,” “we’re” and
“where,” and sometimes got stuck on the translation of
words like “however.”

At about noon the class took a break for lunch, and the Proyecto
members handed out sandwiches and sticky buns.

The teachers and students joked and chatted together, and most
of the jornaleros said the class was helpful.

“It seems good to me because I have learned to
differentiate prepositions,” said Remberto Galindo, speaking
in Spanish.

Galindo began learning English in 2001, but work prevented him
from going to school consistently. Saturday was his first time
sitting in on one of Proyecto’s classes. He said he liked the
egalitarian dynamic that the UCLA students used to teach the
class.

Others, like Walter Hernandez, who began taking Proyecto’s
Saturday English classes three months ago, said the classes were
helpful but the jornaleros also wanted materials to study during
the week.

The jornaleros were eager to share their political opinions as
well as their experiences with the class.

Luis Bravo, another one of the jornaleros, said he would like
people who are prejudiced against immigrants to remember that they
are the children of immigrants, and that they should not hold all
immigrants responsible for the errors of a few.

And Jorge Abraham Ramirez, who came from Mexico four years ago,
said immigrants do not agree with the president’s plan to
install a series of electric fences at the border. Ramirez added
that immigrants come to work honorably.

Herrera said making the jornaleros aware of their political
situation is part of the idea.

“We want to politicize them too. We want to teach them
English to defend themselves,” she said.

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