Ambiguities and tensions in english language teaching portraits of EFL teachers as legitimate speakers

Focusing on three EFL teachers and their schools in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, it documents how ordinary practices of language educators are shaped by their social context, an

AMBIGUITIES AND TENSIONS IN

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

The central theme of this book is the ambiguities and tensions teachers face as they attempt to position themselves in ways that legitimize them as language teachers, and as English speakers Focusing on three EFL teachers and their schools

in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, it documents how ordinary practices of language educators are shaped by their social context, and examines the roles, identities, and ideologies that teachers create in order to navigate and negotiate their specifi c context It is unique in bringing together several current theoretical and methodological developments in TESOL and applied linguistics: the perform-ance of language ideologies and identities, critical TESOL pedagogy and research, and ethnographic methods in research on language learning and teaching The author balances and blends descriptive reporting of the teachers and their contexts with a theoretical discussion which connects their local concerns and practices to broader issues in TESOL in international contexts Framing the teachers’ views of their work (and themselves) by the sociopolitical context in which they live and work, the book presents a richly textured representation that renders the teachers and their classrooms as multidimensional and allows readers

to appreciate the subtle complexities that give rise to the “tensions and ties” that are the central focus of the book

Peter Sayer is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESOL in the

Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio

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AMBIGUITIES AND

TENSIONS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

Portraits of EFL Teachers as

Legitimate Speakers

Peter Sayer

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

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registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sayer, Peter

Ambiguities and tensions in English language teaching : portraits of EFL teachers as legitimate speakers / Peter Sayer

pages cm — (ESL & applied linguistics professional series)

Includes bibliographical references and index

1 English language—Study and teaching—Mexico—Oaxaca (State)—Case studies 2 English language—Study and teaching—Social aspects— Mexico—Oaxaca (State)—Case studies 3 English teachers—Mexico— Oaxaca (State)—Case studies 4 English language—Social aspects I Title PE1068.M6S39 2012

428.0071’07274—dc23 2012012961 ISBN13: 978-0-415-89773-0 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-80371-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by Cenveo Publisher Services

deep commitment to social justice in Oaxaca; he was always

about paz y amor, y siempre buena onda

And in memory of Jaime Castro Leyva, English teacher, and all those who lost their lives during the 2006

confl ict in Oaxaca:

Que descansen en paz

CONTENTS

Preface xi Acknowledgements xv

3 Squeezing More Juice: Portraits of Local English Teaching in

5 So They Can Defend Themselves a Little: The Meanings

7 I Lasted One Day and Then I Was Gone:

8 Conclusions: (Re)legitimizing Through Tensions

The central theme of this book is the ambiguities and tensions that teachers face

as they attempt to position themselves in ways that legitimize them as language teachers, and as English speakers Within this broader theme, the book explores the question: why teach English in Mexico? The answer, on the one hand, is the same reason that is given for teaching English everywhere else, that is, aspiring to

be part of the developed world Conventional wisdom is that International English is the linguistic engine of globalization, and a country with lots of English speakers has more fuel for the engine, as it were English language education in developing countries like Mexico is predicated on the idea that creating more English speakers better positions them to participate in the global marketplace Pennycook (2007) argues that this is a “Malinowskian charter myth” that links learning international English to alleviating poverty in the “rather bizarre [ … ] belief that if everyone learned English, everyone would be better off” (p 102) The larger question, then, is what the real effects of English education are Does teaching English help people improve their material conditions? Or does it actually exacerbate existing social inequalities? The answer I suggest to both ques-tions is “yes,” although in rather surprising and unstraightforward ways As the title

of this book suggests, the role and impact of English language education, cially when zooming in to consider how ordinary teachers think about their practice at the classroom level, is best characterized as a set of interrelated contra-dictions Making sense of our daily activities is a basic human disposition, and EFL teachers naturally want to attach meaning to the task in which they invest so much energy The “ambiguities and tensions” that the title of the book refers to are those that arise as a result of the teachers’ meaning-making attempts For example, we shall see that one of the protagonists of this book, an EFL teacher named Rocío, when working with adolescents who are often keen to challenge

PREFACE

or even undermine her, needs to position herself as a legitimate speaker of English

If they perceive her as a speaker of “real” English, she will have their respect, and

as a young woman that respect will give her authority in the classroom However, she cannot draw on sources that typically confer legitimacy upon speakers: most often native speaker status or special cultural knowledge and linguistic ability gained from prolonged exposure to the “target” culture in a foreign country In fact, Rocío has never travelled outside Oaxaca and she herself learned English as

an additional language from Mexican teachers and speaks it with a Mexican accent Furthermore, several of her students have recently returned to the village after living for years in California and attending American schools, giving the class

a ready point of reference from which to critique their teacher’s communicative competence in English

In this book, we follow three teachers into their communities and classrooms, and see how teachers confront situations like this From a post-structural perspective, the analysis of these sorts of contradictions does not attempt to resolve them or explain them away Rather, they are interesting because they represent the seams or fault lines in our stitching together of our social reality As social scientists, we fi nd it compelling to study the places where the seams do not line

up very well, where the fabric is frayed or overlaps, because it tells us something unusual is happening there There is a place where we are likely to encounter a

“rich point” (Agar, 1996) that will point us towards some new understanding or way of looking at something The overarching problem this book explores, then, is the question of how individuals confront contradictions in teaching and using English as they endeavor to construct themselves as legitimate speakers and teachers

This study is an interdisciplinary effort located across the fi elds of education, applied linguistics, and anthropology The initial question going into the fi eldwork

was simply: ‘ Why teach English in Oaxaca?’ The premise of this question is the

suspension of the taken-for-granted assumption that all English teaching is good for everyone everywhere and that teaching English automatically equates to greater social opportunities Instead, I use ethnography as a tool to examine the actual social conditions of TESOL as seen through the eyes of three classroom teachers So, I reframe the question as an ethnographic one:

What does it mean to the teachers to teach English in Oaxaca?

I frame the exploration of this question within a sociocultural approach to applied linguistics and TESOL that take a critical and post-structural view towards explaining language learning and teaching Within this framework, language learning/teaching contexts are seen as sites that exist as contested historical, social, cultural, and political spaces Therefore, I foreground not only the teachers’ own

“insider” perspectives and meanings but also how those views make sense within the particular context where they live and work

How this Book is Written and Organized

Ethnography is fi rst and foremost about describing people doing things, and ondly about interpreting and explaining what it means that they do those things

sec-In keeping with the tendency to move from description to interpretation, I have organized this book along the same ethnographic progression

Chapter one lays out the main purposes, locates the study in the social context

of Oaxaca, and includes background information about English language tion in Mexico Chapters two and three provide a “thick description” of the teachers, their communities, and classrooms These descriptions are written in a creative non-fi ction style to engage the reader and sustain the interpretive analysis presented in chapters four to seven

Chapter two looks at the protagonists of this book: the three focal teachers, Carlos, Rocío, and Hilario All three were novice language teachers at the begin-ning of the study, but had worked hard to learn English and get a degree in teaching English from the local university The chapter presents a biographical sketch of each teacher: how they decided to get into language teaching, their personal struggles and triumphs with the language, and their views on speaking and teaching English

in the classroom Carlos’ and Hilario’s views were infl uenced by their experiences

as undocumented migrants in the United States, where they had gone after ating with the hope of earning money and improving their language skills Rocío had managed to get into the teachers’ union, ensuring her a stable job in a public school, but with the requirement to work in a far-fl ung village in the mountains Chapter three presents a “typical day in the life of … ” portrait of the schools where the teachers work The narratives of the chapter take the reader through ordinary lessons, the activities the teachers use, and their interactions with stu-dents Rocío and Hilario teach in lower secondary schools in indigenous villages: one is a public school and the other is a Catholic boarding school Carlos teaches

gradu-at two different small privgradu-ate colleges in the city

Chapter four presents the theoretical framework, and expands on the notions of legitimacy and symbolic competence that were introduced above I outline a soci-ocultural approach to language studies, and connect interrelated post-structural theories of language practices, performativity, identity, and fi gured worlds Chapters fi ve, six, and seven each use a different aspect of symbolic compe-tence to consider the “why?” question posed at the outset

In chapter fi ve, I examine how English comes to be associated with particular values or social meanings Consistently, Oaxacans saw English as a metonym for the United States and US culture In particular, the experiences of teaching English were shaped directly or indirectly by migration The values of English, I argue, are characterized by contradictions, and I describe four contradictions that the teachers confront in their practice

In chapter six, the values of English are articulated in terms of language ologies The ideologies of English are located with the complex language ecology

ide-of Oaxaca I explore both how language ideologies frame the practice ide-of teaching English as well as why the teachers take up particular ideological stances, and the ambivalence the teachers face within the push-and-pull of competing language ideologies

In chapter seven, I develop further the concept of legitimacy as a key concern

for the teacher Through their narratives, I analyze their framing of their symbolic competence in terms of identity positions that will allow them to lay claim to being legitimate speakers and legitimate EFL teachers

I conclude the book by suggesting that tensions and ambiguities, although certainly unique in their present form to the local context and practices of the teachers in Oaxaca, are nevertheless present in one form or another for EFL teachers anywhere Crucially, these tensions and ambiguities (expressed through the contradictions and ambivalence of English) can provide discursive spaces through which teachers can contest dominant language ideologies and express their agency

in ways that allow them to reascribe the conditions of legitimacy

This book is intended for scholars in the fi eld of applied linguistics and guage studies It will be of particular interest to scholars interested in critical applied linguistics and language pedagogy, sociocultural approaches to language learning including identity and language ideologies, international or lingua franca English and World Englishes, EFL teaching in marginalized contexts, and ethnog-raphy and narrative analysis in TESOL Because of the range of issues that it covers that are connected to teaching English in Oaxaca, it will also be of value to those who are interested in “critical” concerns related to language and education in related fi elds: literacy studies, linguistic anthropology, cultural and post-colonial studies, foreign language teaching, immigration and transnationalism, education in Latin America, and comparative educational studies The appendix is intended for graduate students who are interested in carrying out an ethnographic or qualita-tive study of their own, or are interested in using narrative analysis or incorporating creative non-fi ction into their writing It also provides a detailed account of the procedures of data collection and analysis, which will be instructive It gives insights into the ethnography-as-process that went into the ethnography-as-product, and is therefore particularly suited for use in seminars on qualitative research methods in language, literacy, culture, and education

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I want to thank Carlos, Rocío, and Hilario, and the other teachers and students in the schools in Oaxaca, Tlaxcaltepec, and Matagallinas and elsewhere across the state for opening your doors to me and selfl essly allowing me

to bumble around asking questions and sticking my nose in things, not to mention for feeding me and giving me a place to sleep

The other fi rst and foremost thanks goes to my wife, Gabriela Santiago, who not only put up with me being around to ask a million questions about every little aspect of Oaxaca and was a super-insider expert, but she also put up with me not being around for long stretches while I was doing my fi eldwork She also gave me honest feedback on the many drafts and early versions of this, added her insights, checked my Spanish, and caught my many grammatical mistakes in English as well

In Oaxaca, I want to thank the administrators who gave me access to the schools and generously gave of their time to be interviewed This includes espe-cially the Salesians and Father Eloy in Matagallinas, the principal in Tlaxcaltepec, and the Ministry State Coordinator for English in the capital Thanks to the strong and smart women in my life who helped this book along and helped me keep my head on straight: Gaby Santiago, Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Ángeles Clemente, Margrethe Gregg, Carol Edelsky, and Olga Santiago Many people generously took the time to read and respond to my initial ideas and proposal drafts while the focus of the study was coming together: Michael Higgins, Joe Tobin, Terri McCarty, Jeff MacSwan, Patricia Friedrich, Vai Ramanathan, Bonny Norton, and especially Suresh Canagarajah Many others gave me professional and personal guidance along the way, including Christian Faltis, Terry Wiley, Wayne Wright, Juliet Langman, Robert Milk, Rebeca Tapia, Donald Kissinger, Ruth Ban, Rosamel Benavides, Vilma Huerta, Alba Miranda, Mario López, Maria Dantas-Whitney, Scott Sayer, Greg Gregg, James Cohen, and Victor Begay Thanks to Eli Hinkel, the

editor of the Applied Linguistics and ESL Professional Series , for including this work

in such a fi ne collection of books The proposal for this work was supported by

my editor, Naomi Silverman, who “got it” and mentored and encouraged me throughout The two anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and critical evaluation of the original manuscript were instrumental in pushing me to develop and sharpen this fi nal product

I received funding support during the fi eldwork from the ASU-Spencer Discipline-based Scholarship in Education program, as well as from a Graduate Fellowship from Arizona State University, and a Dissertation Award from the

journal Language Learning Thank you to Joe Tobin, Alistair Cumming, and the

ASU College of Education for helping make that support possible Subsequent

fi eldwork was supported by the College of Education and Human Development

of the University of Texas at San Antonio The fi nal stages of writing have been supported by a Fulbright-COMEXUS grant and the UTSA Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies Previously published material drawing on the same larger ethnographic work appears in M Mantero, P Miller, and J Watzke (Eds.),

Readings in language studies, vol 1: Language across disciplinary boundaries (International Society for Language Studies) , M Dantas-Whitney & S Rilling (Eds.), Authenticity

in the classroom and beyond (TESOL, Inc.), and S Marshall, Á Clemente, and

M Higgins (Eds.), Shaping ethnography in multilingual and multicultural contexts

(Althouse Press)

Master Charlie, Hiä’juü, and Bik’wah’et: por ahora, pues ya platicamos Espero que

entre estos renglones hayan encontrado algo que les agrade Mil gracias por haber sido mis teachers también y mucha suerte a cada uno de ustedes Ha sido un placer

AIDS Acquired immune defi ciency syndrome

APPO Asemblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (The Popular Assembly of

the Oaxacan Peoples)

CDI Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas

CLT Communicative language teaching

CoP Community of practice

EAL English as an additional language

ECA Ethnographic content analysis

EFL English as a foreign language

EIL English as an international language

ENL English as a native language

ESP English for specifi c purposes

EZLN Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

INEGI Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geográfi ca e Informática

IRE Initiation-response-evaluation

LEP Limited English profi ciency

NBA National Basketball Association

PNIEB Programa Nacional de Inglés en Educación Básica

PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party)

Q&A Question and answer

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

RIES Reforma Integral de la Educación Secundaria (Integrated Lower Secondary

Education Reform)

SEP Secretaria de Educación Pública: Ministry of Public Education

SLA Second language acquisition

TEFL Teaching English as a foreign language

TESOL Teaching English to speakers of other languages

1

EXPLORING THE CONTRADICTIONS

OF LANGUAGE TEACHING

Setting the Scene

The bus grinds and lurches as the driver gears down to coax it up one more hill

Outside, it’s total blackness except for the beams of the headlights bouncing through the dust Through the cracked side window, we peer into nothing; the narrow dirt road drops immediately into the pitch dark over the cliff ledge Soon, lights appear ahead, dogs are barking, and the people on the bus start to stir as we lumber into the village

of Tlaxcaltepec Six hours of bumping and jostling are suddenly over as the old rig pulls up next to the cement basketball court in the middle of town Even before the bus stops, the passengers are gathering their bags and bundles, speaking in Spanish and the local language, Chinanteco Rocío announces: “We’ve arrived.”

Rocío is the English teacher at the local lower secondary school in Tlaxcaltepec Each week, she takes the long bus trip up into the mountains from her house in the capital city of Oaxaca in the southern Mexican state of the same name The village is isolated; there is only one dirt road in, and only a few phone lines The children walk down steep mountain footpaths to get to the local lower secondary school located near the bottom of the village They arrive chatting in Chinanteco, and switch easily to and from Spanish during the day Every student receives three English as an additional language (EAL) lessons per week, taught from the gov-ernment-issued textbook The book presents English as an international language,

as a medium for exploring cultural practices in diverse countries The words and worlds presented in the book are foreign and distant Yet the village is globally connected; there is a small cyber-café open now: it has three dusty machines with dial-up modems and there are plastic chairs and an unfi nished concrete fl oor

The village is transnational, and even those who have never physically left the region talk frequently to sons and fathers and brothers who come and go from the United States The lessons Rocío teaches move between Chinanteco, Spanish, and English, and are experienced by the students and teacher through not just the offi cial curriculum but also the connection between Tlaxcaltepec, Oaxaca, and places like Long Beach, California, where many of the villagers now live

Central Questions

This book explores the question: why teach English in Tlaxcaltepec? The answer,

on the one hand, is the same reason that is given for teaching English everywhere else that is aspiring to be part of the developed world Conventional wisdom is that international English is the linguistic engine of globalization, and a country with lots of English speakers has more fuel for the engine, as it were English lan-guage education in developing countries like Mexico is predicated on the idea that creating more English speakers will better position them to participate in the global marketplace Pennycook ( 2007b ) argues that this is a “Malinowskian char-ter myth” that links learning international English to alleviating poverty in the

“rather bizarre [ … ] belief that if everyone learned English, everyone would be better off” (p 102) At a broader level, we can see that international English is a linguistic commodity that has some special characteristics Unlike other resources, using it does not use it up, but rather increases its value: the more it is used in diverse domains and the more widespread it becomes, the more value it has (in this sense, the ecological metaphor does not fi t languages particularly well [Myers-Scotton, 2006 ]) Second, its value as symbolic capital in a country like Mexico is actually inversely proportional to how many can speak it That is, if everyone knows English, then for a given individual speaking English doesn’t make you special or open any new doors of opportunity that others don’t have access to Yet paradoxically it is precisely the fact that lots of people do use it around the world that makes it an important form of cultural capital for emerging markets

The larger question then is what the real effects of English education are (Pennycook, 2007b ) Does teaching English help Mexicans improve their material conditions? Or does it actually exacerbate existing social inequalities? The answer

I will suggest to both questions is “yes,” although in rather surprising and unstraightforward ways As the title of this book suggests, the role and impact of English language education, especially when zooming in to consider how ordi-nary teachers think about their practice at the classroom level, are best character-ized as a set of interrelated contradictions Making sense of our daily activities is a basic human disposition, and teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) naturally want to attach meaning to the task in which they invest so much energy The “ambiguities and tensions” the title of the book refers to are those that arise

as a result of the teachers’ meaning-making attempts For example, we shall see

that Rocío, who works with adolescents who are often keen to challenge or even undermine her, needs to position herself as a legitimate speaker of English If they perceive her as a speaker of “real” English, she will have their respect, and as a young woman that respect will give her authority in the classroom However, she cannot draw on sources that typically confer legitimacy upon speakers: most often native speaker status or special cultural knowledge and linguistic ability gained from prolonged exposure to the “target” culture in a foreign country In fact, Rocío has never travelled outside Oaxaca and she herself learned EAL from Mexican teachers and speaks it with a Mexican accent Furthermore, several of her students have recently returned to the village after living for years in California and attending American schools, giving the class a ready point of reference from which to critique their teacher’s communicative competence in English

In the following chapters, we will see how teachers confront various situations like this From a post-structural perspective, the analysis of these sorts of contradic-tions does not attempt to resolve them or explain them away Rather, they are interesting because they represent the seams or fault lines in our stitching together

of our social reality As social scientists, we study the places where the seams do not line up very well, where the fabric is frayed or overlaps, because it tells us something unusual is happening there There is a place where we are likely to encounter a “rich point” (Agar, 1996 ) that will point us towards some new understanding or way of looking at something The overarching problem this book explores, then, is the question of how individuals confront contradictions in teaching and using English

as they endeavor to construct themselves as legitimate speakers and teachers

The Theoretical Approach

This book presents an account of teaching, learning, and coming to terms with English in southern Mexico, as told through the experiences of three EFL teach-ers: Carlos Gutiérrez, Rocío Arroyo, and Hilario Santibáñez The stories, descrip-tions, and analysis in the following chapters are the result of prolonged ethnographic

fi eldwork, or “deep hanging out” as Rosaldo is said to have called it (Wolcott,

1999 ), over six years from 2005 to 2010, with most of the events related here taking place during the 2006–07 school year My main purpose was to gain insights into the everyday lived experiences of Oaxacan English teachers from their own points of view, and to reframe questions of second language (L2) learn-ing and teaching through the perspective of these classroom teachers The account

is therefore a particularly local one; however, as we will see, the teachers selves demonstrate the critical “capacity to ‘shunt’ between the local and global” (Luke, 2004 , p 14) The narratives do not neatly separate theoretical issues from practical ones Also, while I do hope to tell the reader something about how people confront problems related to learning English, I will for the most part ignore the controversies in applied linguistics between competing views

them-of what constitutes the proper object them-of study them-of L2 acquisition research

(cf Larsen-Freeman [ 2007 ] for a “taking stock” overview of the debate) So I will refrain, for instance, from trying to distinguish certain problems in the ethnographic data as being an issue of language learning or of language use as Watson-Gegeo ( 2004 ) argues, and instead offer this work as a contribution to the growing body of literature that brings a “social turn” to the study of L2 learning

(Block, 2003 ) I characterize this work simply as a sociocultural approach , which as

explained in chapter four encompasses language ecological (Leather & van Dam,

2003 ), L2 socialization (Duff, 2008 ; Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002 ), and ical applied linguistic perspectives (Pennycook, 2001 ; Norton & Toohey, 2004 ), as well as those that seek to connect concerns in language learning and teaching in local settings to wider social concerns (e.g Canagarajah, 2005 ; Higgins, 2009 ; Pennycook, 2010 )

I should caution that this book does not focus on the outcomes of English teaching so much as the processes I have not measured, for example, how much English profi ciency a typical student in Tlaxcaltepec acquired as a result of EAL classes and whether that afforded her greater social mobility That would be a fi ne but completely different way to look at the “why teach English?” question Rather,

I have approached the “why?” of teaching English from the vantage point of the EFL teachers From this perspective, the question may be better phrased as: “What does it mean to teach English in Oaxaca?” When posed in this way, the question can best be studied by watching and listening carefully to the teachers themselves

I began this close observation of teachers and their teaching with two tions I started from the idea that teaching English is a social practice the meaning

presupposi-of which is embedded within the language ecology presupposi-of the social milieu Next,

I conceptualize the milieu or context of language teaching and learning as a site that exists as a contested historical, social, cultural, and political space

In order to understand how teachers engaged with the contradictions of English and teaching EAL, I use two main theoretical concepts These concepts and the theoretical framework to which they belong are implicit in the descrip-tive chapters (two and three) in that they informed how the portraits of the teach-ers and classrooms are represented In the subsequent chapters, I use the framework

more explicitly in the analysis The fi rst concept is legitimacy The notion of

legiti-macy and legitimate speakers draws on the work of the French sociologist Pierre

Bourdieu and provides a powerful lens for looking at the contested nature of

lan-guage learning To say that lanlan-guage learning is contested means that for a given situation not all the social actors involved agree on what things mean, or how power should be exercised and by whom For instance, as we will see in subse-quent chapters, adolescent students of English in Oaxaca may judge the legiti-macy of their teacher’s English based on their perception of her accent, her displays

of cultural knowledge like how to cross the border in the Arizona desert, or her ability to translate and explain the meaning of popular American song lyrics One’s legitimacy as a language user (and in this case as a language teacher) is

closely associated with one’s identity, or what Bourdieu calls habitus Since the

late 1990s and drawing on cultural studies and post-colonial theory, applied guists have recognized that an examination of L2 learning needs to expand beyond a view of interlanguage development and contemplate the central part that identity plays in shaping the processes and outcomes for L2 users (cf Block, 2007a ; Clarke, 2008 ; Norton, 2000 ) Canonical concepts in second language

lin-acquisition (SLA) and language teaching, most notably the dichotomy of native/

non-native speaker , have been interrogating, with a view towards replacing fi xed

categories like nativeness with ones that recognize the negotiate and emergent nature of language learning and use: language expertise and language affi liation (Leung, Harris & Rampton, 1997 )

The second concept is symbolic competence Kramsch and Whiteside ( 2008 )

situ-ate a theory of symbolic competence within the broader scholarly concern for developing a language ecological perspective for researching multilingual con-texts They defi ne symbolic competence as “the ability to play with various lin-guistic codes and with the various spatial and temporal resonances of these codes [It] is the ability not only to approximate or appropriate for oneself someone else’s language, but to shape the very context in which the language is learned and used” (p 664) They explain that symbolic competence is distributed, in the sense that language use is a social encounter that is inter-subjectively constructed, and hence one’s linguistic ability does not operate independent of her interlocutors They identify four characteristics of symbolic competence: (1) subjectivity or subject-positioning, (2) historicity, (3) performativity, and (4) reframing While the conceptual framework will be developed in chapter four, it should be clear that casting learning and teaching EAL in terms of legitimacy and symbolic compe-tence is an attempt to understand how the process is profoundly shaped by the complex interactions between an individual and her local context

I use context throughout this book with some reservations, because it seems

that the use of this term is one place in particular where applied linguists from different theoretical approaches tend to misunderstand and talk past each other

Pennycook ( 2010 ) suggests the term locality , and argues that

being local is not only about physical and temporal locality; it is also about the perspectives, the language ideologies, the local ways of knowing, through which language is viewed [ … ] Locality is thus far more than context, and language as local practice is very different from language use in context, which rests on the questionable assumption that languages are akin to tools employed in predefi ned spaces Looking at language as a local practice implies that language is part of social and local activity, that both locality and language emerge from the activities engaged in (p 128)

Both legitimacy and symbolic competence become useful concepts for tualizing context as locality, and for recasting language use as local language prac-tices The quote also reminds us that language practices are framed within a

reconcep-locality, but the various ways that people act up their world through language also shapes their locality The reciprocal relationship between the individual and her locale, and the mediating role of language in this relationship, is a theme that returns at various points The notion of performativity, for instance, casts the relationship between one’s identity and her language practices as mutually consti-tutive That is, we fi nd that the teachers’ use of English in Oaxaca refl ects their identities as EAL professionals who have had access to advanced language training, while at the same their identities are continually being (re)formed by the ways they use English Again, the dialectic view of the relationship between people, practices, places, and language allows us to account for both the ways in which institutional and ideological structures constrain people’s ability to act upon the world in their own interests, as well as how individuals can exercise agency and (albeit limited) change despite those constraints In the most general sense, we need to account for how power tends to reproduce the social conditions of the

fi eld, but also understand the mechanisms that allow for meaningful change

Locating the Study: a Brief Background on Oaxaca

It should be clear then that place is important in this book Oaxaca is a remarkable

place Geographically, culturally, linguistically, it is diverse and complex It has captured the imagination of writers like Italo Calvo and D.H Lawrence, and pro-duced both the most revered president in Mexico’s history, Benito Juárez, as well

as one of the most vilifi ed, Porfi rio Díaz During the later part of the 18th century, Oaxaca enjoyed a brief period (1750–1810) as a major regional economic power, thanks to the vibrant red dye produced by harvesting the cochineal insect from the prickly pear cactus (Dalton, 2004 ) Since then, however, its geographical isola-tion has largely relegated it to a colonial backwater, with the exception of the petroleum refi neries in the isthmus and the recent efforts to put the city of Oaxaca and the coastal resort town of Huatulco on the map as major tourist destinations Oaxaca is located in southern Mexico, bordering the states of Puebla and Veracruz

to the north, Guerrero to the west, and Chiapas to the east, and it has a lengthy and picturesque coastline on the Pacifi c Ocean to the south The capital city, properly called Oaxaca de Juárez, was founded in 1521 shortly after the Spanish Conquest, and in 1529 most of the state was granted by the Spanish crown to

Hernán Cortés under the new arrangement that created the hacienda system that

lasted until the Mexican Revolution in 1910–1920 The capital is almost exactly

in the middle of the state, and lies at the convergence of three valleys called the

Valles Centrales It is an area that has long been inhabited On the hills above the

city are the ancient ruins of Monte Albán, and valleys are dotted with numerous archaeological sites dating back 3,500 years The state of Oaxaca has eight regions, ranging from the tropical coastal and isthmus areas, to the impossibly rugged north and south branches of the Sierra Madre mountains, to lush canyons and rivers in the northern part of the state

FIGURE 1.1 Oaxaca in Southern Mexico

FIGURE 1.2 The state of Oaxaca with three focal communities indicated

Oaxaca had 3.5 million inhabitants during the 2005 census (Instituto Nacional

de Estadística Geográfi ca e Informática [INEGI], 2006 ), about 10 % of whom live

in the capital Historically, the population has grown and shrunk during the cycles

of social and economic booms and upheavals (Murphy & Stepick, 1991 ) The rest

of the population is dispersed in middle-sized towns throughout the state, and

many live in small pueblos and rancherías (villages and ranches) Oaxaca is amongst

the poorest of Mexico’s 31 states, along with its neighbors Chiapas and Guerrero Not coincidentally, these are also the states with the highest indigenous popula-tions and the most social instability The political organization of Oaxaca is highly convoluted All states in Mexico are divided into municipalities, and most states in Mexico have between 20 and 40 municipalities; Oaxaca has 570 Furthermore, nearly 80 % of these municipalities are governed in a semi-autonomous fashion by

the usos y costumbres system, also called the cargo system, a fusion of pre-Hispanic

social organization overlaid with Catholic social/religious duties The particular

form that usos y costumbres governance takes is a little different in each community, and even in other towns or the capital many of the usos y costumbres practices (such

as cooperative, communal work projects called tequios ) are commonplace The

state government had been tightly controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for 80 years, although within the last few years more towns as well as the mayor of the city of Oaxaca have swung to alternate parties There was a seri-ous social confl ict in 2006 that lasted for much of the year between the PRI governor and a coalition of leftist social groups ranging from university students, the local acquired immune defi ciency syndrome (AIDS) prevention organization,

to armed indigenous Marxist rebels and including the main public teachers’ union After the governor ordered a violent break-up of the teacher’s strike camps in June 2006 that failed, this broad alliance of groups, called the APPO in Spanish for the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan Peoples, took control of the city, erected barricades, and became the de facto government During 2006, many people were injured and several dozen killed in sporadic clashes between the APPO protestors and paramilitary groups Tourism, on which Oaxaca depends, stopped altogether and the economy was crippled Arguably it still hasn’t recovered Although the immediate goals of the movement were largely frustrated, the ripple effects were felt for years, and the governorship was won by a candidate backed by this coalition in 2010 The state is relatively stable now and has so far been spared much of the narcoviolence plaguing many other parts of the country

The stories of the three teachers told in this book took place during and shortly after this period of social unrest in Oaxaca Even though the three focal teachers

in this study come from similar working class backgrounds, the social confl ict, like many of the aspects we shall see in this book, was seen somewhat differently by each Carlos did not support the movement, because his family depends on their small pottery workshop that sells to the tourist markets, and because there were

no orders the entire family subsisted on Carlos’ teacher’s salary Hilario had tried unsuccessfully to get into the teacher’s union, and although he regarded the union

FIGURE 1.3 A barricade in the historical city center behind a church

FIGURE 1.4 Public teachers talk near a barricade made of burnt-out cars during the strike

FIGURE 1.5 A message to tourists in the main plaza during the confl ict

FIGURE 1.6 Graffi ti during the confl ict at the Language Department of the main public university, showing resistance slogans in English and Catalán

leadership as largely corrupt and selfi sh, he did sympathize with the broader goals

of the movement Rocío, who was a public school teacher in the union and had narrowly missed being caught in the strike camp when the police arrived with their Billie clubs, was the most ambivalent about the movement:

What can I say about the magisterial Movement? Like I said before, you know, it’s full of contradictions And sometimes we even lose sight of what we’re supposed to be struggling for, or I think a lot of us we didn’t even really understand all the issues in the fi rst place, but they tell us: “There’s a march at 3 o’clock! You have to be there!” So we show up with signs and chanting and yelling … but why? Some of the comrades are really commit-ted, but a lot of us are just going along with it, because if not, you know, there’ll be repercussions [ … ] But then, you know, these things are happen-ing [globalization and privatization of public education], and here in Oaxaca

it seems like we are the only ones standing up to that Maybe the Movement has a lot of problems, but we’re the ones standing up, and maybe something will change …

So, the echoes of the confl ict serve as the sociopolitical backdrop of this study The confl ict in Oaxaca was not a case of random spontaneous combustion, but rather

a progression of events that had their genesis in the political organization and historical inequalities in the state In a lucid statement that predates the APPO Movement by 15 years, Murphy and Stepick ( 1991 , p 16) observe:

We [ … ] have come to appreciate and understand Oaxaca as a set of seeming paradoxes Behind its attractive appearance and quaint charm the city and the valley are a crucible collecting all the forces buffeting modern Mexico, the forces of change and continuity, confl ict and peace, and most important, rising and falling material standards of living and evolving socioeconomic inequality

Like its politics, the language ecology of Oaxaca is complex There are 17 nous ethnolinguistic groups recognized in the state, and indigenous language speak-ers make up 38 % of the population, ranging from 777,253 Zapotec speakers (the third most spoken indigenous language in Mexico after Nahuatl and Maya) to 351 speakers of Ixcateco (Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas [CDI], 2007) The percentages of indigenous language speakers also vary by region, from 82 % in the Sierra Norte, where the two communities in this study are located,

indige-to less than 10 % in the capital city Except for the very old and very young, almost all indigenous persons also speak Spanish, although often an accented and stigma-tized variety Indigenous languages and customs are strongest in the poorest and most isolated communities; however, in many places this general characterization does not hold true, because, on the one hand, religious missionaries (initially

Catholic and recently Evangelical, Mormon, and Jehovah’s Witness) have trated and had a signifi cant infl uence in many remote villages 1 Respect, power, and

pene-infl uence in the village are won by competently carrying out different duties ( cargos )

of increasing responsibility Non-Catholics are excluded from many of these cargos ,

and so must look to gain infl uence in other ways, which often creates disunity and confl ict within the village (cf Alcántara Núñez [ 2004 ], an auto-ethnographic account by a former mayor of a small Mixe town, as well as Barabas & Bartolomé [ 1999 ] and Hernández Díaz [ 1998 ]) On the other hand, even towns a few minutes from the capital city, such as the Zapotec rug weavers of Teotilán del Valle, and many families in the city of Juchitán in the isthmus, still socialize their young children primarily in their indigenous language Generally, the trend is increasingly towards the loss of indigenous languages, and this tendency has accelerated rapidly since the 1950s (INEGI, 2002 ), presumably because of a combination of increased school attendance and literacy in Spanish, the expansion of roads and increased transporta-tion to and from outlying towns, mounting failures of subsistence-level farming and resulting diaspora, and, signifi cantly for this study, the dominant language ide-ologies that feed into and motivate micro-level language planning choices that families and individuals make to adopt Spanish, and increasingly English, for their own economic and social well-being

FIGURE 1.7 The ethnolinguistic diversity of Oaxaca

Oaxaca also has a very high rate of migration, both to other parts of Mexico

(primarily Mexico City and the maquiladora factories in the northern states), as

well as the United States (formerly concentrated in California but increasingly dispersed throughout the country) This diaspora, as one could expect, dispropor-tionately emanates from the poorest regions, although, as we will see when we meet the protagonists of this study, many Oaxacans of various backgrounds aspire

to go to the north The government takes an ambivalent approach to migration,

sometimes responding to American demands to ebb the tide of people crossing the border, and sometimes subtly facilitating the journey (Grimes, 1998 ) Migration relieves the strains on Oaxaca’s inadequate infrastructure; the state faces chronic water problems, unemployment, and doctor shortages Recently, remittances sent from the United States surpassed tourism as Oaxaca’s number one source of income (Cohen, 2004 ) Although almost no migrants upon leaving plan to stay indefi nitely in the United States, many do end up staying and setting up perma-nent homes, and many more stay much longer than the two or three years they had originally envisioned, often bringing their wives and having children born in the United States Even in these cases, however, strong ties are maintained to the

villages, giving rise to an ever-growing trend towards transnationalism , as people

move back and forth across the border, creating hybrid cultural and linguistic forms (Smith, 2007 ) For example, in the village where Rocío works in the open-ing vignette, there is an intimate connection between “Lanvich” and “Tlaxca”, that is, Long Beach, California, near Los Angeles, and the remote Chinanteco vil-lage of Tlaxcaltepec, where ethnically indigenous, English-speaking adolescents streetwise in urban America must learn to interact in Chinanteco in ways that are

culturally appropriate in the village Although this phenomenon links the pueblos

to the outside world, the local to the global as it were, and provides a modicum of economic security, it also exacerbates many social problems, and undermines the intergenerational transmission of traditional cultural and linguistic practices As is

the case with many contemporary indigenous villages, most of Oaxaca’s pueblos

are caught somewhere between the loss of the coherence of values of the past, and the many obstacles that they face in acquiring access to dominant Mexican forms of material and symbolic capital

English Language Education in Mexico

In the public education system, English has been taught as an offi cial part of the Ministry of Education curriculum at the secondary level since 1954 (Secretaria de Educación Pública [SEP], 2010 ) All public school students take three years of

EAL classes in lower secondary from 7th to 9th grade (called secundaria ), and

instruction is usually organized into three 50-minute lessons per week The

cur-riculum and textbooks were reformed in 1994 to mandate the use of a

communica-tive language teaching (CLT) approach It was reformed again in 2006 to integrate a

constructivist learning approach (SEP, 2006 ) However, the many educators

admit that the reforms did not produce a signifi cant increase in the quality

of teaching, and although the textbooks may be “communicative,” some teachers continue to assign students to translate pages from the book, or send the students out to play soccer The main problem is with the profi le of the teachers, because

in many schools teachers who need to be given a certain number of hours ing to their contract are assigned to teach English as “fi ller hours,” regardless of knowledge of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) meth-ods or English profi ciency Undoubtedly, the recent, albeit gradual, trend towards recruiting EFL teachers who can speak English and know how to teach a foreign language will have a greater impact on educational outcomes than the curricular reforms did

Public students who continue on to high school ( bachillerato or preparatoria )

take an additional three years of foreign language study, and most choose English (although French or other options may exist in larger schools) For most students, the results of their three to six years of English study is negligible; despite the investment of time and resources it is common for many students to fi nish high school and claim they know “nothing” of English beyond the basic numbers, colors, and the verb “to be.” To be sure, despite the relative importance of English

in Mexico and its presence in many aspects of daily life, the level of English

pro-fi ciency of most Mexicans, even university-educated persons, is minimal Although compulsory basic education in Mexico continues up until 9th grade (i.e., through

secundaria ), the average level of educational attainment is still low; in Oaxaca,

where the teachers in this study live, only 54 % of the population has completed primary school (up to 6th grade), meaning that because EAL starts in 7th grade, only about half the population has had any English classes at all The proportion

of Mexicans who are functionally profi cient in English is probably about 6 % –8 % , amongst the more affl uent class who attend English-medium schools (elite bilin-gualism) and migrant returnees from the United States (folk bilingualism), who often do not have suffi cient educational credentials to be able to get the kind of jobs in which they would be able to use their English

English is also being required increasingly at tertiary levels, although most public universities do not have an English medium-of-instruction policy, because

it would exclude most students who have come through the public system and hence do not have much English Instead, in the universities English continues to

be taught as a foreign language, either with a general communicative approach or

as English for specifi c purposes (ESP) classes designed for particular degree grams: nursing, chemistry, computer science, and so forth However, as we will see with the story of Carlos, even students who have contact with English in their

pro-fi eld of studies (for example, the English commands used in computer ming) often have no idea what the words mean outside their function as a set of computer instructions Since the early 1990s, undergraduate and masters’ degrees

program-in Teachprogram-ing English as a Foreign Language (BA and MA TEFL) are program-increasprogram-ingly being offered through modern language departments The number of “native”

English speakers from the United States and elsewhere teaching EFL in Mexico

is relatively small, so graduates of BA TEFL programs, like the three teachers

pro-fi led in this book, can generally pro-fi nd work However, most of the best paying and

most stable jobs teaching English are in the secundaria schools, and because of the

politics within the teachers’ unions these positions are generally reserved for uates of the Normal (teacher training) Schools, again who may or may not speak any English

A major shift in language education policy came in 2009, when the Ministry

of Education initiated a new program to introduce English teaching starting in

kindergarten and continuing through 6th grade of primary school, the Programa

Nacional de Inglés en Educación Básica (PNIEB) When it is fully implemented in

2013 or 2014, this program will signifi cantly extend English teaching across the country, and entail the hiring of 99,500 new English teachers Even though each state is putting the program into practice somewhat differently, the Ministry has defi ned an “ideal profi le” and a “basic profi le” that a new hire must fulfi ll in order

to ensure the quality of teaching As of the 2011–12 school year, and although the program had only been 10 % implemented in most states, many coordinators observed that they were already encountering diffi culties fi nding candidates who met the basic profi le to fi ll vacant positions

About 10 % of Mexicans attend the private education system In order to tinguish them from what the public system offers, almost all private primary schools advertise “English and computing” as one of their main selling points Many schools include the word “bilingual” in their title, even though for most this often amounts to only a few lessons in English per week The quality of edu-cation in private schools varies greatly, for instance, from the small working class college where Carlos works in the mornings to the elite school across town where

dis-he goes in tdis-he afternoons In general, English teaching in private schools tends to

be good, and the best universities in central and northern Mexico conduct many

of their classes in English

Ethnography, Representation, and Relationship

of the Participants and Researcher

My interest in the research was motivated by my own biography, what brought

me to Oaxaca, how I got involved in language teaching, and my personal tion to the community I had arrived in Oaxaca in 1996 and began teaching in what was then a new BA TEFL program with the fi rst cohort groups Although English in Mexico is largely a phenomenon of “elite bilingualism” restricted to those who can access and accumulate linguistic capital, the idea of working with EFL teachers and learning about how they approached and framed their practice appealed to me because of my desire to fi nd ways that English language teaching can open new discursive and material possibilities for Oaxacans, and be a means for ameliorating rather than exacerbating social inequalities My approach to

connec-address the refl exive, ethical, and moral exigencies of my research was twofold: by approaching my work with great humility, and by approaching it wherever pos-sible as a collaborative effort The teachers who agree to work with me do so because they feel there is value in being able to express themselves and “have their voices heard,” but also because they hope to get something out of it that will improve them professionally One participant wanted to do the interviews com-pletely in English, and even although this slowed things down and may have lowered the quality of the interviews, I could see it was more important for her

to have the opportunity to practice her language skills Another teacher wanted

me to focus only on her grammar teaching and to give her a detailed evaluation

of her pedagogy Although the request for evaluative feedback did not align with ethnography, which by and large tries to suspend judgment about participants’ behaviors in favor of understanding how the participants make sense of their practice, I felt it was worth compromising that aspect of the research in order to let the teacher engage with the project in a way that was more personally relevant

to her Throughout my fi eldwork, I tried to be attentive to what the participants think the point of the research is, and what they hoped to get out of it (Kamberelis

& Dimitriadis, 2005 )

This is not to say that my relationship with the teachers and the research was unproblematic On the contrary, like any ethnographic research in the fi eld, it suf-fered from the contemporary polemic confrontation with the crisis of representa-tion The inherent problem with ethnography, that someone has the authority to represent and speak for others, was further complicated by my identity as a White,

Anglophone Canadian As a gringo researcher (although gringo can be used

depre-ciatively, in Mexico it generally just means a White person, and in particular an Anglo-American), my presence certainly had an impact on the social scene I was studying Since participant observation is, after all, participatory, I generally stuck

my nose in things whenever it seemed appropriate, and certainly accepted an invitation from the teachers to be involved in the classroom or community goings-

on As I recount in chapter six, this sometimes was directly relevant to themes and issues I was investigating, as when the teachers would ask me to speak to them in English as a means of showing their students that they could talk “real” English with a native speaker Because the teachers’ relationship with the ideology of native speakerism is something I was exploring, my interaction with the teacher became part of what I was studying In the appendix, I offer a fuller exploration

of the researcher’s identity and positionality in ethnographic work, and detailed description of the fi eldwork and analysis

A Note about Creative Non-fi ction

An overriding concern in this book is to tell a good story Admittedly, this, may seem like an odd aim in a scholarly book; these books on the whole are less interested in storylines and more focused on the theoretical implications

However, I enjoyed doing the fi eldwork that I report on here And, for the most part, I enjoyed writing about it, and I want to convey that to you, the reader Early

on I decided I wanted to write the book in a way that you might even enjoy ing it Also I see Rocío, Carlos, and Hilario and their students as real people and hoped to write about them so you could see them that way too I am making the argument in this book that abstract concepts like legitimacy and ambiguity are important to the teachers, and for researchers are worth worrying about, and it works better if I can get you to empathize with them Many years ago, before I

read-knew much about what ethnography was, I read George Orwell’s The Road to

Wigan Pier ( 1937 ) and was greatly impressed by his ability to explain the conditions

of poverty in northern England by showing the ordinary lives of the people who

lived it so that you cared about what happened to them I was also infl uenced by

the excellent writing of Henry Wolcott’s A Kwakiutl Village and School ( 1967 ) , and wished I could write half as beautifully as Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places:

Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (1996) These writers said

impor-tant academic things and yet said them in a way that appealed to my creative side that likes a good story Later when I looked into how it was actually done, I dis-covered that it was called “creative non-fi ction” (CNF) Agar ( 1990 ) explains that CNF was spawned by investigative journalists of the likes of Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Hunter S Thompson As it has been adopted and adapted by ethnographers, it attempts to blur the line between scientifi c and artistic genres (Richardson, 2000 ) CNF, says Agar ( 1990 ), remains loyal to what actually hap-pened, but draws on fi ctional techniques including the scenic method, character development, plot, and authorial presence, which are generally absent in academic

writing Nelson ( 2011 ), in her contribution to the TESOL Quarterly special issue

on narrative research (Barkhuizen, 2011 ), argues that “analysis through narrative is increasingly combined with analysis of narrative That is, the who and the what of

narratives are increasingly examined in tandem with the how” (p 467) This comes out in the descriptive chapters two and three, and to a lesser extent in the analysis and interpretation chapters: fi ve, six and seven Albeit, my foray into the more creative aspects of ethnography has been a modest one, and I feel the fi nal product still errs on the side of scientifi c-writing genre, what Van Maanen ( 1988 ) calls the

“realist tale,” which conforms to the main generic conventions of ethnographies However, I do hope that I’ve been able to present a tale with verisimilitude (that

I got it at least mostly right) and that the readers will fi nd value in the teachers’ stories and that the teachers recognize themselves and feel they are fairly represented

Adelante

2

THREE ENGLISH TEACHERS

But to make a lot and be able to send it back to Mexico you have to work double shifts And in Florida just working one shift I was already seeing the Devil closing in on me Ooooh there you have to work the whooole day and … damn, that’s real work, and that’s when I saw the reality of things, the reality of what it’s like there

Hilario, recalling his experience as an undocumented migrant worker

This chapter introduces the three focal teachers of this study: Carlos, Rocío, and Hilario I present a biographical portrait of each teacher, drawing from life history interviews, focusing on what they view as the important events in their lives that have contributed to how they approach their teaching and confront the chal-lenges and contradictions of language education These portraits, and their descrip-tive accounts of their investments and purposes with English, give us our fi rst insights into the ambiguities and tensions that affect how they see their work, and how they see themselves as English speakers, anchoring the theoretical discussion

in the second part of the book This biographical background information also serves the important role of helping us see where the teachers are coming from, and what their investments are both with English and with teaching, which in turns allows us to perceive how their views, even contradictory ones, make sense from an insider’s or “experience-near” vantage point (Geertz, 1983 )

I constructed the narratives based on several life history interviews I conducted with each of the teachers early in the fi eldwork (Seidman, 2006 ), as well as other things I learned as I got to know them better during the course of our working together My choice of using portraits to represent the teachers’ biographies is part

of the creative non-fi ction approach, and is inspired by similar efforts using nographic case studies in education and applied linguistics that strive to present

eth-their participants as real people (Kouritzin, 1999 ; Le Ha, 2008 ; Pope, 2001 ; Valdés,

2001 ), and to make the work more multivocal by including the teachers’ own voices (Clifford, 1983 ) One potentially distorting effect of presenting the por-traits in this form is that it gives the impression that it is possible to capture an individual’s “real” life history We should keep in mind that the sketches convey those aspects of themselves that the teachers wanted to reveal and highlight, and furthermore those aspects that I as the researcher found most salient and interest-ing in representing them The teachers, on reading their own stories as I had composed them based on their telling, were sometimes surprised by what sorts of things I had decided to emphasize but, after some editing and fi xing some factual errors, they were satisfi ed that I had basically gotten it right

Portrait 1 (Carlos): “Now nobody can tell you what it’s like”

Carlos is from San Bartolo Coyotepec, a town 20 minutes outside the Oaxacan capital He is the youngest of four children and lives in his family compound with his mother, older brother and sister, and his in-laws and nephews In pre-colonial times, the town served as an important center of pottery production; the distinc-

tive San Bartolo barro negro (black pottery), especially the round-bottomed cántaros

used for carrying water and irrigating fi elds, has been found in the ruins of the city of Monte Albán and archaeological sites within and beyond the Oaxacan central valleys When Carlos’ parents were young, the Pan-American highway was built through the town, and along with it came a fl ood of consumer goods Plastic

buckets replaced clay cántaros, effectively wiping out the local pottery market in a

few short years As a child, Carlos remembers San Bartolo as a sleepy farming

vil-lage His father is a campesino peasant farmer , growing corn and raising animals on

family land However, the town has changed drastically in the last 20 years Water shortages, environmental degradation, the encroachment of the city into outlying farmlands, and competition from commercial-scale farmers have continuously eroded the ability of Oaxacan families to maintain themselves on subsistence farming (Grimes, 1998 ; Murphy & Stepick, 1991 ) Although Carlos’ father still

maintains a yunta (team) of oxen and several milpas (cornfi elds), he also works now

as a security guard at the local water-bottling plant (“They take our water, put it

in a jug, and sell it back to us!” explained Carlos.) In many Oaxacan communities, these factors increase the pressure for out-migration northwards (Cohen, 2004 ) However, in San Bartolo they may ironically have enabled Carlos to study a BA TESOL degree at the main public university to become a language teacher, rather than following his father into the fi elds

The proximity of San Bartolo to the capital allows many people from the town

to make the commute into the city to work, study, or sell goods As well, after the pottery market crashed, people discovered that if the clay was fi rst burnished, and then fi red at a slightly lower temperature, the result was a pot with a silvery sheen Although porous and non-utilitarian, the shiny San Bartolo black pottery became

popular with tourists, and small serviette-holders and fl ower vases are often given

as favors at weddings and quinceaños parties (a girl’s 15th birthday) in the city Being from the village and participating in the traditional cargo system (civil–

religious hierarchy), Carlos’ family has the right to take clay from the river When Carlos was in lower secondary school, his family decided to set up a pottery workshop; they sold part of the family’s compound where the animals had been kept, and dug a pit-kiln Carlos recalls 1 :

We worked really hard, all of us While I was studying [the BA TESOL], I often missed my morning classes, because if there was a large order, all of us had to stay up ‘til midnight, you know, one o’clock, to make sure it was done At the beginning, it was a disaster: the pots cracked in the oven, or they came out dull with no shine, but little by little we fi gured it out, you know, trial and error Each pot only sells [wholesale] for a few pesos, but it’s

a helluva lot of work They have to be scaled and burnished by hand [using

a piece of broken TV antenna tube] Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I

am a hard worker, and you know, that’s how it was then Everything my family has we have because we all know how to work hard

Carlos and his sister were the fi rst in the family to continue their education past primary school Thanks to the family’s increased economic mobility and income generated from the pottery workshop, his father’s extra job, and an older brother

who migrated to northern Mexico to work in a maquiladora factory, Carlos was

able to fi nish his undergraduate degree in English teaching The degree was a relatively new one, and was not at all an obvious career for someone with Carlos’ background However, Carlos explained that since he was a young boy he had always been fascinated by English, and by the images of the United States he saw

on TV

[When I was young] I saw on the news those big cities, Chicago, Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles I saw all those cities and I thought: “Wow! Why isn’t Oaxaca like that?” I remember I saw an interview with Michael Jordan after the Bulls [basketball team] won the championship, and I heard him talking about the game The translator’s voice came on, but she sounded so differ-ent, like it didn’t seem to correspond to what he was saying, and I thought

“I wish I could know what Jordan’s really saying.”

Carlos was especially attracted to American music and sports stars, which he attributes to the infl uence of his older brother He postered his walls with Vanilla Ice and Joe Montana (a White rapper and football quarterback, respectively, who were big stars in the United States during the 1980s) At the same time, as a teen-ager Carlos actively participated in a local folkloric dance group, even giving up his aspirations to become a fi rst-league soccer player in the city to master the

traditional Zapotec Danza de la pluma (Feather Dance) and travel with the village

dance group to several other states to perform He also participates actively in the

usos y costumbres ( cargo ) system in his village, a local semi-autonomous form of

governing that is still practiced in about 80 % of rural towns in Oaxaca (Alcántara Núñez, 2004 ) Recently, Carlos completed his two-year duty as a community policeman, and is now eligible for other positions in the local government like serving on the water commission

He recalls his fi rst interaction with foreigners when he was a young boy: Sometimes we would see foreigners, you know, tourists here in San Bartolo,

it was pretty common but they looked so … like I don’t know what, but we heard them talking and I just never imagined you could actually communi-cate with them One day we were coming back from playing soccer, I think

I was 10 or 11, a group of us boys We saw two of them, foreigners, they were taking a picture of old Don Placido with his ox cart full of cornstalks

or something You know how they like to take pictures of that stuff, it looks

very pueblo [picturesque village] to them So when they saw us they

indi-cated like they wanted something We were all curious but my friends were

a little scared Well, me too but I went up to see what they wanted, and I could understand they wanted to take our picture So they took our picture, and I even told them the address, you know, because they said they were going to send us the pictures when they got home … ehm, I don’t remem-ber where they were from And sure enough, some two or three months later some photos arrived! So that was when I realized, you know, it’s not that hard to communicate with foreigners!

Carlos entered the BA in TESOL at the Language Center of the main public university in Oaxaca in 1997, and fi nished the fi ve-year program in 2002 Initially,

he was interested in studying just English; he didn’t have any intention of ing a teacher Like most of his classmates, he thought the major was just to study languages, and it was regarded as easier and cheaper than the engineering or law programs He didn’t even realize until well into his second year that the program was specifi cally to become an English teacher Carlos’ family was supportive of his decision to study his degree in English language teaching 2 After graduating, he was hired to teach two intensive courses in the Language Center’s community extension English classes He got on well with the coordinator of the intensive courses, and she was short of a teacher for the summer courses She decided to give him a chance He lasted one day The students had had foreign teachers before, and Carlos admits he made the mistake of showing them his nervousness

bein front of the group He feels a combbeination of his moreno (dark-skbeinned)

com-plexion and inexperience doomed his fi rst effort at teaching before he got started:

on the second day that he showed up, the students had gone to the director to demand a change of teacher