On Inequality and Freire

Class of 23 September 2010

The activity outside the classroom was a very revealing one for me. Even if the statements on race and class were from twenty-some years ago, most of them are still valid. In my case, some of the statements did not apply to me, either because I grew up in Mexico, or because I would not have any problems applying for a job as a Spanish teacher. I believe that most Mexicans in Richmond would suffer racial and class problems. It's not that I'm rich and blond, it's that I belong to three census classifications that allow me to have more choices when thinking about race, for example. I'm native American because I'm part Mayo (not Maya; Mayos are from Nortwestern Mexico, didn't have an advanced cilization like the Mayas, and are supposed to be taller! Ha, ha!). Even if I don't like it, I'm Hispanic—a term that I do not like, since it sounds like the word “hispanico,” which in Spanish means “from or related to Spain,” and I'm from Mexico. Since I'm half European (Spanish, and a pinch of Greek), I can claim myself as “white.”

During the activity, this situation made advance more than other classmates and it made me feel uncomfortable. But at the same time, I realized that I usually don't think too much about race. Most of the time, I pay attention to academic, handicap and economic status.

Freire

I have read a few articles by Freire, some of them in English, one in Spanish and one or two in Portuguese. In class, I mentioned that I was taught how to write using the Freire method. Of course, it didn't have the conscientization/conscientizaçãon part, but it was the same. In the first grade—I didn't attend kindergarten, the reason I'm so shy and antisocial--, the teacher made us filled up pages and pages of syllables: consonants plus vowels, like

b ba be bi bo bu

c ca ce ci co cu

d da de di do du

Spanish and Portuguese are easy that way. Unlike English, one syllable or group of letters has one sound and no more.

I have always seen Freire as the guy who took the European linguists idea of communication (Jakobson and Saussure) and expanded it. The speaker tells the listener a message made out of code in a certain context.

speaker → message → listener

teacher → knowledge → student

But for Freire, the speaker/teacher must allow the listener/student to make it a two-way dialogue. In the same way, Europeans came to the Americas and the rest of the world, and imposed their message on the native cultures, the anthropologists, teachers and other researchers were imposing a European-only, Portuguese-only points of view on the Brazilian tribes. All that knowledge that the non-European and literate had was discarded, lost.

I like Freire. He's still a good source when we talk about colonialism and post-colonialism.