Letter from the Rio Grande Valley
Dear Friends,
I remember two years ago, after I made the decision to join Teach For America's Rio Grande Valley corps, I spent some time just trying to find my new home on a map. I had to look south - way south, until I found the black line at the bottom of Texas. The Rio Grande Valley is the border, la frontera, the line (or river) in the sand. This is a place like no other, and while my experience in the Valley is shaped by everything I bring - my goals and dreams for my students - I think almost everyone in the RGV corps would agree that living here is an experience like no other.
I always thought of a border as a division between two separate entities, but after moving to the Rio Grande Valley, I found this particular border to be more a place of blurs, of all things indistinct and interwoven. My front yard is sometimes a roadrunner-cartoon desert and sometimes a temple-of-doom jungle. I've gone back in time (cowboy hats, boots, and a main street that looks like it's on loan from a spaghetti western) and I'm seeing the future (immigration, emigration and transmigration). Tofu meets chorizo. I have learned what hip-hop accordion music sounds like.
I always thought of a border as a division between two separate entities, but after moving to the Rio Grande Valley I found this particular border to be more a place of blurs, of all things indistinct and interwoven.
These blurs and contrasts are all around, in the classroom and out. Some of my students' families have lived on the same ranchos since before Texas was a country, and some families migrate like butterflies chasing seasons, from over there (Mexico), to Garciasville (where my roommates and I live and teach), to up north (the rest of the U.S.). I get my American news in Spanish on the Mexican radio station, and when I drive close enough to McAllen, I listen to Mexican news in English on the American station. The Valley is booming with new waves of NAFTA consumerism and, at the same time, it is struggling with entrenched generational poverty. There's a running path in Rio Grande City that twists through the mesquites along the river, and its worth the extra few meters even in the hundred-degree heat to find a certain clearing along the banks. From there you can see the other side, and say to yourself, "That's it?" I always thought the river would be wider. Of course, I also thought that tacos weren't a breakfast food.
Whatever currents of change and stasis reel around us, they reel around our students, too. Many of us in elementary classrooms have seen the bittersweet progress of a nine-year-old blooming into a mastery of English, the language she will need to survive and succeed in the educational system, while at the same time slipping away from the Spanish that is her parents' only language. The goal of bilingual, bicultural, biliterate students is sometimes difficult to envision, let alone achieve. Yet there are moments when the outcome of all of this work is apparent, when the student who has no words to describe his world in any language-he calls his pencil, his notebook, the quail scuttling around the schoolyard, all simply esa cosa (that thing), suddenly realizes he has the power to put a name to all these things around him, to claim his part of this world.
In other classrooms around the Valley, different issues take the forefront. I hear high school teachers straining to divide time between re-teaching the basics many students somehow missed in elementary school and still moving forward to achieve goals that would be ambitious for any classroom in any school. I hear one special education teacher forced to fit several classes worth of subject matter into forty-five short minutes, while another spends patient weeks laboring to teach his students eye contact. Despite the challenges, I see successes everywhere. Johnny Warren's AP Physics students construct a solar-powered car for competition. Molly Arevalo's home visits take education into the living room of surprised second-graders and empowered parents. The ideas are full of electricity and innovation, from Angie Snapp's economic system of classroom management to Dennis Davis's interactive giant-sized multiplication table. Teaching here, we all find resources in ourselves that we didn't know we had, and, more importantly, we see our students find resources in themselves that they did not anticipate.
This is not to say there are no doubts. There are days when I miss my newspapers and my indie films, and on rare occasions I question my sanity for moving here. There are days when I struggle with school administrators, or fellow teachers, or my students - days when I feel like I've been throwing marshmallows at a brick wall trying to knock it down - and I question my ability to ever do a good job. If this were an easy job, there would be no Teach For America; there would be no need for one. As I think about the potential force my fifth-grade students have and about all the obstacles that lay before them, there is the one thing I do not doubt: I am needed.
We're all going to be needed to make headway against the obstacles that deprive Luís and Nabil and Tanya and José and all the other children I see each day of the same chance that a child born in Westport, Connecticut or Edina, Minnesota has of realizing her or his big, hairy, audacious goal. By "we," I mean not just Teach For America teachers, but all of the teachers, parents, administrators, and everyone else shaping our schools today. Urgency is too slow a word. The students have their dreams already, and in the morning eighteen will be waiting with a net of eleven-year-old smiles to lure me into another day. Somewhere in the Valley, if you can see them through the palm trees and the cacti and the Wal-Marts, if you can hear them over the rush of the trucks on Highway 83 and the tejano music waltzing over from the neighbor's barbecue, somewhere there's a classroom full of students ready to meet you. We can't wait.
Best wishes,
Lisa Newstrom '01
Our corps members
Placement regions
Corps and Alumni
