Juan Maldonado is suffering the same culture shock as many other children of Mexican immigrants: He’s out of place at school and hasn’t mastered the language.
The difference? The U.S.-born Maldonado feels like an outsider in Mexico.
With their job prospects bleak and worried about bad influences on the street, Maldonado’s parents sent the 15-year-old back from West Chicago to this central Mexican town last fall. Almost immediately, he was fighting with classmates who mocked his accented Spanish. He could barely read or write in the language, so his homework was impossible.
After two frustrating months, he dropped out. Now he works occasional hours at a factory that makes Christmas ornaments as he plans a return to the only country he has ever really known.
“Every day was the same: feeling stupid,” said Maldonado, in an interview in English because he requested it.
Just as American teachers struggle to integrate foreign students into their classrooms, Mexican teachers are finding it a challenge to incorporate students who might share the same last names and heritage but are American in their mentality and experiences.
Zinapecuaro principals and officials with the state Public Education Department in Michoacan say the number of returned American students is increasing as Mexican immigrants in the U.S. get deported or voluntarily return home because of the economic crisis.
The fate of these children also has become a political issue in the U.S., as activists argue that the government should stop deporting parents because their children will suffer by returning to Mexico. That was a main claim by Elvira Arellano, who took sanctuary in a Humboldt Park church for a year with her young son before being deported with him to a town about 30 miles east of Zinapecuaro. Her son now is attending a private school in Michoacan.
In response to the uptick in returning students, education officials are treating these newcomers as at-risk students and have launched new initiatives to ease their transition, including roving bilingual instructors who know English and have studied in the U.S.
This town about three hours northwest of Mexico City has sent many of its brightest youths to Chicago’s western suburbs and California. Many would return home for a few months around Christmas, attend school briefly and then go back to the U.S.
In a sun-splashed school courtyard where elementary school students assemble in brown uniforms, 6th-grade teacher Noemi Guevara looks on with pride but also worry.
She talks of brothers who returned from Chicago and already seem like they are slipping. The older brother, Jonathan, was forced to repeat a grade. Sure enough, he skipped school this day.
The younger brother, Felix, says he prefers conversing in Spanish. But even basic questions yield blank stares.
Guevara said teachers have been forced to be flexible by allowing parents to translate their children’s completed assignments from English to Spanish and by letting several returned students sit side by side for support in the back of the classroom.
Laura Bibiana Moran, state director with the government Binational Migrant Education Program, said teacher training is critical because many instructors aren’t as flexible as Guevara with students who might be used to U.S. schools where they could grow long hair and challenge teachers openly.
“Teachers here see it as a test of wills,” Moran said. “These are students who grow up with an American educational culture even though their family’s folklore, food and customs might be Mexican.”
The state education department estimates that several students return to Michoacan each week. Gustavo Lopez, a researcher at the College of Michoacan who has studied binational families, said education officials have not done enough to integrate these returned students.
One state education official acknowledged that schools often diverted students with limited Spanish skills into special-education tracks, although he says that practice is less common now.
Lopez said students enjoy different ranges of success, often based on the same factors that drive U.S. performance. He said the best cases are when entire families return home. More challenging are students who return home on their own to live with relatives.
Interviews with about a dozen students also reveal diverse views. Some are glad to be reunited with relatives and for the chance to walk to school and play outside freely in the more relaxed atmosphere of a small town.
Others, like 12-year-old Omar Aguilar, miss the comforts of the U.S. He says his school in California had soccer fields. In Zinapecuaro, he usually plays in a concrete courtyard. Class sizes in Zinapecuaro often top 40, nearly twice as large as those in their U.S. classrooms.
Omar said his teacher shot down his plea to dress up for Halloween, rarely celebrated in Mexico. When he brings up life in the U.S., his classmates tease him as a gabacho, a pejorative word for Americans.
“I try not to speak English anymore,” he said.
Alejandra Cardiel, a social worker at the high school, said she is most haunted by Maldonado, the student who dropped out. She recalls that he would often come into her office to talk about his rough childhood in Illinois and his struggles in Mexico.
“He suffered there,” she said, “and he suffered here.”
His aunt and guardian, Leticia Mendoza, said English was “the only class he could pass. He probably knew more than the teacher.”
Maldonado realizes life won’t be easy if he goes back to Illinois. He has already lost a year of high school, which makes him a prime dropout candidate in the U.S. He admits being a member of a gang, although he says he is trying to get out — another goal that won’t be easy.
Even with that uphill climb, the slight teen with the sad eyes is sure of one thing: “I’m ready to go home.”
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oavila@tribune.com
An American in Mexico
Images from Juan Maldonado’s new life at chicagotribune.com/student
