My Cuban father got up very early every workday, usually at 4am. He’d wash up, get dressed and hurriedly gulp a “buchito” of black coffee, expresso, and down a “ponche” of two raw eggs scrambled hard in a cup with sugar, vanilla and milk. Gulp and out…to catch the subways snaking from the South Bronx to Long Island, where for 25 years he worked for the Canada Dry Bottling Company. Although he was always very quiet doing all this in the kitchen of our one bedroom 4th floor apartment in the South Bronx, I would sometimes nonetheless wake up and witness this abrupt switch. My much older brothers and I shared a bunk bed set up in a large closet in Mami and Papi’s bedroom, so it was pretty
easy to hear and see whatever happened in our home from any corner.

After a day of scrubbing the sides of huge metal tanks where the chemists at the factory mixed the syrup for all the sodas and thanking God that the ladder dripping with the soap and water he had to use, hadn’t slipped that day as it had so many other days before, he’d be home. Barely walking in with a tiredness that could sap not only his energy and body but his spirit, he’d get into bed to rest for a couple of hours, until Mami got back home from her job at the neighborhood button factory to make dinner and get me and my brothers ready for the following day. We, my brothers and I, were sworn to quiet so Papi could rest.

It never even occurred to us that this routine wasn’t usual, or that, as someone pointed out to me the first night in my college dorm, I grew up “poor”. You see, being “poor” in my mind, wasn’t and isn’t about just money. It’s feeling like you have no power over your own life or the right to do anything in this world. Feeling like economic security and personal safety are luxuries for others. Gratefully, my parents never allowed me or my brothers to feel like this. They pushed and expected us to master English while not forgetting where we came from through our Spanish. They hadn’t had the opportunity to get schooling past elementary level and they were determined that their children would have the gift of English and education. The three of us “kids” succeeded and in succeeding our parents succeeded.

I am selfish in saying that I love tutoring English. Not because English, especially the neutral and universal form of English, in the language books we must use, is so wonderful. It’s not. Many times it makes little sense; its rules can contradict themselves; in its vocabulary it has limits on expression. It is easy in tutoring English to unintentionally imply that English is “better” than the rich array of languages the folks coming to the DLC use effortlessly. But remembering that my students have already mastered a kaleidoscope of languages and dialects, keeps me in check. I have at my finger tips a core way to say that I belong, that I have the authority to express an opinion, and the right to express it. And I want badly for each of the individuals I am gratefully paired with to feel the same.

By Irma Milagros Almirall-Padamsee, Ph.D. (Cornell University, 1984, Spanish Linguistics)