Allá en las montañas, There in the mountains,
para entrar no necesitas to enter you don’t need
papeles, estás libre. papers, you are free.
Adriana’s steady gaze accompanies her sharing of her poem during our Aquí/Allá (here/there) poetry unit. Her words are met with silence and sighs, nods and bright eyes. She gets it, I think. In this verse of her poem, Adriana suddenly pushes beyond a contrast of the smells of pine and the cars of the city streets. She voices her critique of the world through her poem, contrasting two important places in her life—the city and the mountains.
The opportunity and space to find our voices—to see, name, analyze, question, and understand the world—is an invitation I work to create again and again in our 5th-grade dual language classroom about 30 minutes south of Portland, Ore. Labels and statistics define our school as 80 percent Latino, 70 percent English language learners, and more than 90 percent free and reduced lunch. My students spend 50 percent of their academic day in Spanish and the other half in English. Cultures, however, are not so easily equalized. The dominant culture—one in which much of my own identity was formed—can too easily shutter and silence the multifaceted, complex cultures of students’ lives. My daily challenge is to pull up the details and experiences of their lives so that they become the curriculum and conversation content of our classroom.
Our Aquí/Allá poetry unit did just that. It surfaced the layers and parts of lives often overpowered by a common classroom curriculum. It created spaces where students could analyze and name the details of their lives.
In the past few years, the bilingual poetry and stories of Salvadoran writer Jorge Argueta have been an invaluable resource in my classroom. I’ve used poems from Talking with Mother Earth for homework and class analysis during a study of ecosystems, the story Xochitl and the Flowers to lead into persuasive writing, and Bean Soup to teach personification, similes, and beautiful poetic language. As I scanned books for a poem that would raise the level of vivid imagery in my students’ narrative writing, I returned to this trusted source. Argueta’s poem “Wonders of the City/Las maravillas de la ciudad,” from his book A Movie in My Pillow/Una película en mi almohada, has the potential to pull the everyday details of students’ lives into a place of power. It is a tightly packed representation of the tension of bridging cultures and places, something most of my students negotiate on a daily basis.