BOTHELL — María Bermúdez was born in Mexico, but until the 13-year-old Everett girl began attending a class on Mexican heritage this month, she knew almost nothing about her homeland.
Now María can’t wait each day to tell her parents about the history and traditions of a country she hasn’t seen since she was 3.
“I thought this class would be boring, but it’s so cool,” María said. “We get to do all these fun things like learn about the Aztecs and their calendar. No one ever taught me this before.”
Like many Mexican immigrant parents in Snohomish County, Arnolfo and Guadalupe Bermúdez are worried that their daughter has little connection to her cultural roots.
That’s why they enrolled María in a 12-day summer camp where Mexican and Mexican American kids learn about everything from Mayan mathematical achievements to how to make a pinata.
The goal is not to fight against U.S. cultural influences but to add to them and create a sense of identity for kids who often feel isolated from their American friends and their parents.
“If you don’t feel you belong to any group, it’s hard to be comfortable with who you are,” said Elizabeth Ramírez, program coordinator of Familias Unidas, the Everett-based Hispanic group co-sponsoring the program.
This is the first year for the camp, called Mágico País, or “Magical Country.” Ramírez hopes to make it an annual event and expand it to include the children who’ve immigrated from other Latin American countries.
The need for such programs is growing in Snohomish County, she said. The county’s Hispanic population surged 168 percent between 1990 and 2000, to more than 28,000, according to the U.S. Census.
Mágico País came about after officials from Monterrey Technological University in Mexico told Familias Unidas they wanted several of their students to work with Mexican immigrants here. Familias Unidas then developed the summer camp with Monterrey Tech and Cascadia Community College in Bothell, where the class is held.
Five Monterrey Tech students and 10 Cascadia students teach and play with the four dozen children and teenagers, who range in age from 6 to 17. Most are from Snohomish County.
With only 36 hours of class time to cover 3,500 years of civilization, the teachers can do little more than give a brief overview of Mexican culture. But for students who learned little or nothing about Mexico in their regular classrooms, it’s their first real connection with their heritage.
When Rocio Villaseñor of Monterrey Tech asked students what they knew about the Mexican independence movement and revolution, a long pause followed.
“Do you know who Pancho Villa was?” she asked later, referring to the Mexican revolutionary hero.
“Yeah,” María Bermúdez said. “He’s a singer.”
María now knows who Pancho Villa is, how many people live in Mexico and what kind of art the Olmec civilization created.
David López’s newfound knowledge about the pyramids of Teotihuacán outside Mexico City will help the Edmonds boy when he visits the ruins this week as part of a trip to Mexico with his mother.
“I want to touch them and climb on them so I can feel how the Indians’ feet hurt when they went up the stairs,” David, 9, said as he ate a slice of sausage-and-cheese pizza during a lunch break, which on other days featured Mexican food such as enchiladas. “I like to find out about ancient stuff and learn how the people lived.”
Beatríz López said she had planned the visit to Teotihuacán weeks ago. Now, she said, it will have more meaning.
Before he started the camp, David — who was born in Los Angeles and has only visited Mexico twice — knew little about the country where his parents were born.
“The only thing I knew about Mexico was my family lived there and their house was made out of bricks,” he said. “I want to learn more about Mexico because I want to know more about my mama and papa.”
Elisabeth Guzmán said she’d like to teach her sons Sergio and Damián about Mexican history. But, like many Mexican immigrants, the 28-year-old Everett woman grew up in a poor rural family and never learned much Mexican history herself.
She left school in the third grade to help her parents milk cows, and to make tortillas for them and her 10 brothers and sisters.
Seeing little hope for her children if she stayed in Mexico, and desperately wanting them to receive the education she never got, Guzmán immigrated to California in 1994. Sergio was six months old and Damián was 2. The brothers haven’t been back since.
Guzmán said her sons want to know more about Mexico, but she’s frustrated that she can’t help them because she quit school when she was so young.
“They ask me questions that I can’t answer,” she said. “There are wonderful stories about my culture that I’ve never heard, but I want them to know about. I don’t want them to forget their roots.”
Guzmán now eagerly awaits her sons’ return from the camp so she can learn from them. She enjoys telling them stories about her life in Mexico to complement what they discovered in class.
That type of bonding between immigrant parents and their children is one goal of the program, said Ramírez, of Familias Unidas.
As Mexican-American children grow up listening to rap instead of ranchera, chat with schoolmates in English instead of Spanish, and watch “The Simpsons” instead of “Sábado Gigante,” they often grow apart from their tradition-bound parents, Ramírez said.
“This program makes the kids identify more with their parents,” she said. “If they can talk about Pancho Villa together, right there you open up a channel of communication.”
Although much of the material in the class was new for the students, even the most Americanized kids knew a few rudimentary facts about Mexico before the camp began. Almost all immediately identified the Mexican flag when Monterrey Tech teacher Mauricio Welsh pointed to it. But no one guessed what the eagle and the red, white and green on the flag signify.
“Red means blood, the blood of our antepasados,” Welsh said, sprinkling in the Spanish word for ancestors.
During the camp, the teachers alternated between English and Spanish and relayed some key facts in both languages. Some of the more recent immigrants speak little English while some of the U.S.-born children speak little or no Spanish. Most are bilingual.
Cecilia Chairaz of Everett speaks relatively little Spanish, and one reason her mother Leticia enrolled her in the class was so she can pick up more.
Leticia Chairaz, 39, was born in Texas to Mexican parents who forbade her to speak Spanish at home and passed down few Mexican traditions. When Cecilia asks her questions about Mexico, Leticia Chairaz usually responds with a blank face.
Cecilia sometimes asks her mother why she is different from her classmates at Eisenhower Middle School — where few other students are Hispanic — and from relatives who follow Mexican traditions.
Although Cecilia, 14, wants to learn more about Mexican culture, she finds excuses not to go to Mexican parties in Mount Vernon with her cousins. She fears she won’t fit in, because she doesn’t recognize most Mexican music and doesn’t know how to dance to it.
The summer camp is a way for the Chairaz family to reconnect with its Mexican roots, so Cecilia can escape from the sense of cultural alienation that her mother has always felt.
“I regret not knowing more about Mexican culture, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to my daughter,” Leticia Chairaz said. “I want her to learn something I never got to learn.
“It’s so important to me that she knows where she comes from, and that she’s proud of who she is.”
David Olsonn is a reporter for The Herald in Everett.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
