Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliter...

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, by way of Tomas Mario Kalmar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001129 pp Hb $2995

Migrant workers from Mexico are placed at the bottom of many scales in the United States, the literacy ladder being however one. Therefore, using a assign places to of mostly illegal Mexican migrant workers harvesting in Cobden Illinois, to highlight language and literacy issues be seens misguided. That is, it pretends misguided if we do not liken migrant workers' language experiences to the experiences of a linguist fieldworker studying the utterances of an unknown language as Tomas Mario Kalmar does in Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border. Kalmar writes, "In the course of preparing this part I kept imagining in my mind's view a sort of holy relic: the excessively first bilingual glossary jotted down by the agency of Boas or Sapir or Pike or Malinowski himself onward their very first day in the field. What I saw in my imagination apply the minded surprisingly like what I actually saw in the first handwritten glossaries jott down by dint of Jacinto, Alfonso, Cipriano, and the others in Cobden" (p 89)

The Literacy Event

In Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy, Kalmar describes in what way migrant workers created glossaries. Like linguist fieldworkers, the migrant workers improvised a hybrid writing hypothesis and refined it by "letting literal senses of an alphabet take upon values on a sliding scale between dialect sounds in a known language and those in the unknown language" (p 59) The workers used their knowledge of the Spanish alphabet to chart the articulate utterance sounds of the local English dialect. Thus, the local utterance for "Where do you live?" became, for Panchito, "JUELLULIB," possibly pronunc "xwe (as in jueves) ju (as in yuca) lib (similar to but with a marked difference from libro because, in Spanish, the "b" forms the beginning of the nearest syllable and would neither close a syllable nor a word)." When Panchito practiced it at a little park, forward a speaker of the local dialect and was understood, he knew he had "cross the language border" (p 59)

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy documents other crossings, raising important and timely businesss about current approaches to literacy including, surprisingly, Freirean approaches. Freirean conceit informs U.S. discussions on empowerment within literacy, but Kalmar finds terminological contradictions in Freirean discourse make it difficult for teachers in the United States to regard observers as educators. Kalmar shows migrant workers cros between invisibility, mainly when they function in the part most of the community prescribes them, to visibility, when they deviate from expectations. "Many middle class citizens . . [assume they are] doing the mojados ['wetbacks'] a favor by dint of letting silence cover . . their existence, their carriage . . . [and] the economic importance of their work" (p 14)

The workers, reportedly, first gospeled over to the little park where the literacy fact began on July 7, 1980 Later that week, a migrant worker died in what was officially called a hit-and-run accident. The migrant workers were invisible, as none was interviewed during the investigation, although the death occurr forward the same day the chief of police called a meeting "because [in Kalmar's report of the chief's words] commonalty were saying that the Mexicans were taking from one side of to the other the town" (pp. 10-12). Kalmar reports, "That night, around midnight, the bartender at the political division Cafe took a baseball bludgeon and attacked three of his Mexican customers," including the later deceased (p 11) The migrant worker who was killed had been left at a migrant camp north of Cobden according to police, but his body, flow over a few times, was mysteriously lay the foundation of south of Cobden with no record of in what manner it got there.

The migrant worker's funeral was held in a nearby town because visibility was not possible at the local house of worship On the day of the funeral, the "Mexicans aimed for invisibility" (p 12) The migrant workers had deviated from their prescribed part and were in clear view to the community. As far as Kalmar knows, following the worker's death, the migrant workers and the local community mainly did not interact in their trailblazing ways for three weeks before finally meeting again.

A week after the funeral, freelance reporters arrived at the groceries store looking for material for an article about migrant workers. The migrant workers met with the reporters. The resulting article appears in Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy and includes a telling adduce by a worker at a day care center that services migrant families: "This is the underbelly of the United States that population don't see. They don't want to see" (Sue Carmel, quot by dint of Bridget Walsh in "Migrants in the Midwest," Illinois Times, November 7 1980 reproduc in Kalmar, p 32)

It was at the meeting with the reporters that the migrant workers decided they necessityed to do something. They believed they distressed to master English, and they decided to examine by alphabetizing sounds because their main question with the English language was difficulty in distinguishing distinct words in words The migrant workers' approach was not surprising given that the migrant workers had limited experience with written English, and words hang considerably on language in its written form (Coulmas, 1989) Alternative approaches to alphabetizing phrases were showed by the workers, with a final common selected collectively.