*What I like about this story is the narrative-changing, uplifting, feel good side. It flies in the face of everything mainstream America believes about Latinos and Latino immigrants. This is the best of who we are, and have been. Share the truth! VL
Maria Onate had not read a book until her son started high school.
Her illiterate parents ended her schooling when she was 15, informing her that she had to get ready for marriage and work to help support the family in their rancho in Puebla, Mexico.
More than two decades later, she was shocked when the parent center coordinators at her son’s new high school, Bravo Medical Magnet, suggested she join a book club. She was there for her child’s education. She thought it was too late for her own.
“I hated to read,” Onate, 44, said in Spanish. “I read in elementary school, but I never read on my own.”
On a recent morning, however, the mother of two was among the most outspoken of 15 Latina women energetically discussing a 600-page novel in a basement classroom at Bravo.
Twice a month the school’s club de literatura meets as a way to encourage immigrant parents to become more involved in their children’s education.
“Writer and activist Lucha Corpi was four-years-old when she started first grade with her older brother, who refused to go to school without her. The director of the small school in Jáltipan de Morelos in the Mexican state of Veracruz knew the family, and he gave permission for the young girl to accompany her brother “just for a while.” She was given a desk in the back of the classroom, where she sat quietly in her little corner. Just as quietly, she learned to add and subtract, to read and write.
In this moving memoir, Corpi writes about the pivotal role reading and writing played in her life. As a young mother living in a foreign country, mourning the loss of her marriage and fearful of her ability to care financially for her son, she turned to writing to give voice to her pain. It “gave me the strength to go on one day at a time,” though it would be several years before she dared to call herself a poet.
Corpi’s insightful and entertaining personal essays span growing up in a small Mexican village to living a bilingual, bicultural life in the United States. Family stories about relatives long gone and remembrances of childhood escapades combine to paint a picture of a girl with an avid curiosity, an active imagination and a growing awareness of the injustice that surrounded her. As an adult living in California’s Bay Area, she became involved in the fight for bilingual education, women’s and civil rights.”
By Daniela Gerson, The Los Angeles Times
