Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part LVIII)

¡Que cerca y que lejos
estan nuestras almas..!
Silencia - Eddie Velez

(so close and so distant/are our souls)

When I arrived in September of 1986 at the Harlem site of the Puerto Rican Association of Community Agencies (PRACA), Oprah Winfrey was on the TV in the administrator’s office. Her new nationally syndicated show was helping minorities talk openly about their lives in an America, to which inner-city kids could relate. Raul Seda, the site administrator, enjoyed the TV and promise of technology. He envisioned bringing more tech into the classroom, and spoke to me about the emerging digital divide between middle class adolescents and the poorer students from the community that came to PRACA. He complained to me that Vanna White was paid thousands of dollars for smiling at a TV audience while the impoverished parents of his students couldn’t make enough money to keep it together in the city.

Raul wanted the students to learn how to use the computer. He saw the city forcing out the poor, the students he worked with. Manhattan was becoming a place for only the very wealthy. His students were “undesirables”. They would be arrested and sent away. It seemed to be happening. Could we effect the economy by teaching the students to be poets? They may learn to use words, but poets famously starve in the name of their craft.

Publishing a small press magazine may have meant different things to the agencies I visited. Many saw the publications as opportunities to promote their programs. They wanted to use magazines to help generate funds from beneficent donors. Barbara and I saw our school based magazines as vehicles to motivate students to write and read peer writing. They would also serve as models for the agencies demonstrating how they could use available inexpensive technology to do their own publications. That was our project. We felt that all students had an intrinsic desire to write, create and compose. We would provide these small sites with a vehicle for students to present their creative writing and art through small press publishing.

We saw our work as a catalyst. We visited newly opened alternative program sites with small budgets. Many were transition classrooms, preparing students who had not been attending school to return to school. We hoped to show students and teachers how they could use the tools on their premises to create magazines and to pass on the skills that would inspire more publications.

In November of 1986, PRACA’s first site based publication came out. It would continue for many years under the title Expressions.

In that first issue Pierre wrote:

My name is Pierre. I got this name because of my father. He named me Pierre because a long time ago he had a French girlfriend. When he was 20 he was full of love for this girl. After a few years passed, the girl got pregnant. They were going to have the baby and then get married.
Months passed and she was ready. My father took her to the hospital in his car. A truck driver crashed into the side of my father’s car. The girl that he loved so much died in the crash. As my father went though her personal things. He found a letter that said if she didn’t make it while giving birth, he should name the child Pierre.

A few more years passed and my father met my mother. They went out for three years and then got married. Then they had me, and named me Pierre.

I grew up a good kid, but I started to mess up. I went to jail for trying to kill someone and I spent three years of my life in jail because I’d been doing something crazy and stupid. After I got out of jail I went out on my own, got a job, started to go to school again, and I’m learning a lot of new things.

I have a son named Pierre and a nice girlfriend named Lise. I care for her a lot. My goals for the future are to become a police officer for the courts, to buy a nice house, and to live a nice, rich life with my wife and kid.