Conquistadores, Coffee and Student Visas

I find it comforting, strangely, to be bogged down with papers and reading in December–it feels normal to me. The cycle of newness, stress, projects, sudden ends–the semester way of life. Of course, it all happened so quickly in this pre-Master’s boot camp.

It’s not over yet, but I’m in the final stretch. I’ve been learning about things I wouldn’t seek out on my own, but the information will help me be a better researcher, I hope. The theory and philosophy behind “social science” isn’t riveting, but it also is something I’d never really pondered until now. I wrote an essay last week about a Spanish conquistador who wreaked havoc on Western Mexico in the 1530s, based on a colonial-era account of his adventures. Although it was hard to understand (imagine reading 16th century English…in Spanish!), it reminded me of why I love history so much: the detective aspect, and the idiosyncrasies that make you feel connected to people who died centuries ago. In the colonial text I mentioned–a letter to the King of Spain–the final sentence read, “Everything I say here is true, and to prove so, I sign my name here.” And the below, the editor comments “[There is no signature].” So we actually don’t know who wrote the letter! How mysterious, strange and wonderful! Of course, besides the geeky pleasure of history, there’s also the uncovering of horrors. The conquistador in question tended to torture and kill, both indigenous people and his fellow Spaniards.

I still have three more essays to write: a book review, to be crafted in perfect, succinct prose to prove that I listened in Advanced Writing; an interpretation of a document–I picked a speech given by an indigenous student at a ceremony a few years ago; and a comparison of various theories and approaches to social science (I plan to write this one hyped up on coffee, pretending that I care).

Besides academic endeavors and sitting around not accomplishing things, I’ve been in the process of getting a student visa. So far, I’ve been to the National Institute of Migration (the government office where these things happen) a total of four times. The first time, I got the information about what paperwork I needed to file–it wasn’t online. The second time, I turned in the paperwork. The third time, I returned to pick up the visa, but I was given a letter saying that the bank statements I’d provided weren’t in my name. Except they were. So I waited for two hours to speak with an official, who agreed with me that the statements were indeed in my name, and told me to come back the following day, Friday, to pick up my visa. I went on Monday instead to give them a little more time, but I was informed that the document still wasn’t ready. Since it’s about a 45 minute bus ride to reach the office, I was pretty unhappy about this, especially since the delay was in no way caused by an error of mine. I hope that the fifth visit will finally yield a visa. It seems particularly unfair that Paco and I, as a couple, have to wrangle with two different countries and their bureaucracies! But as Paco reminds me, they ARE going to give me the visa. That’s the difference.

The Migration office is an interesting place, though. I don’t see foreigners very often in my day-to-day wanderings, but there are plenty to be found at the Migration office. I saw a group of blond Mormons (telltale short sleeve dress shirts), and American businessmen. A young, pregnant woman, apparently East Asian, listened to her Mexican lawyer ramble. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I noticed his gold chain, white socks, brown loafers, pale blue jeans, and his mouth, chewing gum as if the pace of his jaw could expedite the bureaucracy.

One benefit of making the trek to downtown Guadalajara is the Café Estancia. It has Wifi and a place to plug in my laptop, so I can write in my favorite work environment: caffeine fueled, consuming something with sugar, not tempted by the distractions of home, the cat, or other people. It’s not quite the same as my favorite American coffee shops–no weird music or muffins (instead, they serve “brawnies”–brownies!).  There’s a poster on the wall that says “Una mujer es como una buena taza de café: la primera vez que se toma, no deja dormir.”  I think I preferred the bizarre local art that adorned my usual haunts in the States. Still, it helps me revive the glory days of college, the mornings and afternoons spent in coffee shops writing my senior essay.

Unfortunately for me, I can’t continue this blog post, since I actually have to write those essays I mentioned. Luckily for you, your reading ends here!

Learning to write good (in Spanish!) with my bootcamp “frendos”

Our recent addition to the Boot Camp schedule is Advanced Writing, an intensive workshop-style class. The teachers want us to write concisely, clearly, and concretely, in Spanish, of course. Spanish grammar, though much more reliable and more often logical than English grammar, so easily becomes a wordy, convoluted mess when trying to explain something complex. This grammar, paired with the over-reliance on jargon and pretentious stock phrases that taints academic texts in all languages, makes bad writing in Spanish just as incomprehensible as bad writing in English.

Of course, I’m at a serious disadvantage in any writing situation here because my native language is English, not Spanish. My vocabulary is smaller, my grammatical instincts less certain. Yesterday, the teachers told us to use verbs related to carpentry, listed on the board, in a short paragraph. I didn’t know the meaning of half of the verbs on the chart! We never had a “carpentry vocab unit” when I took Spanish in college–and as long as topic doesn’t come up often, it’s easy to never learn whole sets of words that are irrelevant to my daily life. As I attempted the exercise, I realized that all the words I did know, I had learned from Paco as we fixed up our apartment in August–sanding shelves, using the screwdriver, painting the walls. You do something, you learn the words for the tools you use. “Can you hand me that thing? You know, the stick thing with the rolly-thing on the end?” doesn’t get the point across nearly so well as asking for the paint roller (rodillo, for those of you keeping score).

On the other hand, I have an enormous advantage when trying to write in Spanish–I don’t have all those bad habits picked up over years of schooling in a language. The Spanish equivalents of phrases like “heretofore” or “as such” or “be that as it may,” phrases that slow down a sentence and add little meaning, don’t even occur to me when I’m writing. Their uselessness is precisely why they aren’t on my radar. Every phrase I use in Spanish is deliberate because I produce it consciously.

Grammatical topics are especially bizarre to encounter in this setting. Many of my classmates are extremely confused by passive voice, for example, and they can’t identify it or produce it accurately. But for me, it’s very easy–it was only a few years ago that I was in Spanish class explicitly being  taught how to form passive voice (bonus point if you caught the passive voice in this sentence!). Hearing the professors enjoin us not to use the passive voice, so soon after having learned it, is amusing. I got the grammatical foundations in Spanish before ever approximating anything like fluid speech. No Spanish grammar is innate to me: it’s all patterns, rules, and memorization that are sort of natural, but only enough to help me talk faster.

The entire course of a lifetime of learning how to write in English, starting simple (elementary school), learning complexity and structure (junior high and high school), then unlearning confusing flourishes and rigidity (college)–it’s all happening so fast in Spanish! The Spanish transitional phrases I so dutifully looked up and proudly added to my essays just a year ago, like “consequently” and “nevertheless” and “in conclusion,” are turning out to be only crutches, clichés and redundancies that I’m supposed to avoid. My classmates insert these phrases out  a habit they now have to break. I inserted them with pride!

But more than my classmates, I can question the necessity of phrases and constructions in Spanish because they aren’t natural to me. Familiar, perhaps, but nothing is sacred in a language that only occasionally appears in my dreams.  Of course, that lack of an “ear” leads me astray, too, when I write or edit. Though much of this class’s content reminds me of lessons in English grammar long since burned into my brain (thanks, Mom!), I incorrectly identified a “misplaced modifier” in last night’s class–turns out that in Spanish, you CAN put modifiers next to things they don’t modify. I felt stupid afterward for having prefaced my wrong comment with “well, in English it’s like this, so I wondered…” Or maybe I just don’t like being wrong (pretty sure I don’t like being wrong, actually).

My classmates tell me that their English class is hard, that English is hard, that I’m lucky not to have to take English. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them because they get to speak their native language all day long, unlike me! I know exactly what their struggle is, but I also know that if they’d had opportunities like I did for immersion, they’d be doing better and like it more. Of course, I also have the ultimate motivation: my fiancé speaks Spanish. Even with all that, it’s still difficult.

I have many hopes for this master’s program (#1: get accepted!). But the challenge of being intellectual, academic, theoretical and comprehensible in another language–that is something I’d like to achieve, and I think the rigor of a master’s program could guide me toward that goal.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write off my deficiencies as entertainment for the rest of the class. Today, the class elected me to read aloud a text in Spanish called “Anglicismos” (English-isms).  It phonetically tried to approximate English using pronunciation suggested by the Spanish spelling: a Spanish speaker’s rendering of the sound of English. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult to sound out English in Spanish, and the attempt about broke my brain. I also could not stop laughing after reading aloud the word “frendo” which no one else found particularly funny. This happened after I thought I’d successfully avoided the teacher’s pointing hand to make me read aloud–I should have gone for the actual Spanish selections while I had the chance. But I’m fine with humor at my own expense. It’s the only kind of humor I generate, so I’ll take what I can get.

After one week in class

I’ve made it through my first week of Master’s degree Boot Camp, and I’ve enjoyed both of  the classes so far–Text Interpretation and Introduction to Social Sciences. I’ve been very hesitant to speak, though, because I know that I’m nervous, and nervous Rachel (no, not Ranchel…as I’m STILL listed on the attendance sheet) speaks pretty bad Spanish. Luckily, we’ve got a few of what my mom likes to call “red hots”–those folks who eagerly will volunteer any thought that comes into their head, for the benefit of the rest of us (if you missed the sarcasm, I actually find this behavior rather irritating). But I think that as I feel more comfortable with the program and my classmates, I’ll participate more. I know it’s hard to imagine that I could be shy, but as I’ve said before, speaking a language that’s not your own is a pretty quick way to lose your confidence.

There are some new things to get used to, of course, besides the language barrier. Basically, we are responsible for obtaining the readings–getting the copies made, that is. Since there’s no system in place, for every new reading, we either make a plan that someone will make copies for everyone, or we don’t make a plan, and then it’s every student for his or her respective self. So far, this has meant two extra trips (from home) to the campus library to get copies made. I find it to be a very inefficient system, but there is some benefit to shifting the burden from professor to student–we will take the effort to do it cheaply. The “course packets”  of photocopied articles that we had to buy in college were exorbitant–far more expensive than a book. And when the professor provided copies, I’m guessing that our sky-high tuition was paying for that in some way. So even though it’s annoying, spending a few dollars a week and some extra schlepping on copies is still saving a lot of money in the long run.

Another change is that the content that we’re learning is very structured. Because we are all in the same program (Regional Studies) and taking the same classes, it is actually possible to start everyone with the same foundation of the most basic basics! We are learning about the scientific method, the most mundane details of exactly how to conduct an investigation–it seems overly formal to me, but it’s also making me realize how different a U.S. education is. Since we had so much freedom in our selecting our classes, any given group of students came to the table with a huge range of previous experience. Very little time was spent on HOW to do things–you just had to figure it out as you went along. Even the academic books I was reading at the end of college, though they were organized, they were not rigidly structured. Being forced to adopt these structures is probably good for me, even if it doesn’t end up being the way I do things forever.

However, the structure we’re asked to maintain in our academic work does not correlate to a well-organized program. In general, we’ve been kept very much in the dark about what classes we will have, and when, and only one professor has provided a syllabus, which was instantly out of date when the administration made schedule changes. Not to mention that classes started almost a month late! This makes it really difficult to plan things in advance: there is no yearlong academic calendar, no indication of when final papers will be due, or when vacations will be. Paco’s experienced similar things in his program, so I know that it’s not unique to my (potential) school. I’m trying to go with the flow instead of being frustrated about something that’s totally out of my control. One week at a time!

“Here come the new chickens”

As I walked into the small research institute where I’m beginning M.A. Boot Camp, someone called out to a professor entering ahead of me, “the new chickens are already here.” She was referring to the new students who, like me, had made it past the preliminary selection rounds and now had to make it through the pre-Master’s course to gain full admission. Fowl-like, we entered a classroom, avoided eye contact, and waited for something to happen. Then our first teacher walked into the door. The subject? English.

I was feeling extraordinarily nervous of how I would explain that I was actually a native English speaker and might not need English classes. I hadn’t said anything yet, so no one knew that I wasn’t Mexican. The teacher asked us to say what our undergrad degrees were in and what our level of English was. The teacher called out my middle name, and I said, “no, it’s Rachel.” “Oh,” she answered, “it says Ranchel here on the paper.” I said that I had a degree in Latin American Studies and I was from California, and my native language was English. “Oh,” said the teacher, “well, I’ll find out if you actually have to take this course.” But first, I had to take a section of the TOEFL, just to prove that I really didn’t need a brush up in English reading comprehension.

I finished the test a good half an hour before my classmates. It was pretty easy, but not that much easier than reading comprehension on the SAT or GRE. Later, the teacher told me that she had indeed gotten permission to excuse me from the class, and that she’d graded my exam. “Well, you did miss two,” she explained, “but I’ll write you a letter saying that you have English proficiency.” I nodded. This means that I am spared from 6 hours of class each week during boot camp, which is definitely a good thing.

But it was such an emotionally confusing series of events. I felt embarrassed to be a native speaker, and then I felt indignant that I had to take a test of English as a Foreign Language administered by someone who isn’t a native speaker herself. I certainly didn’t put up any fuss, but it seemed silly, and since the rest of the classes will be conducted in Spanish–not my native language–and I’ll always be at a disadvantage, it would be nice if people trusted that there was a language I actually do speak fluently and without a foreign accent. But it’s also not necessary to take it personally: I think that it’s more that there isn’t a bureaucratic protocol for dealing with foreign students, so the professors don’t really know what to do with me and my different background. Even knowing that, I still didn’t like feeling singled out and different on the first day of school.

After English class, we had a 3 hour long class on research methods. We spent about two hours talking about everyone’s projects, and then an hour talking about how to cite sources. I can’t sit in class for more than two hours without becoming absolutely desperate to escape, and I was starving, so the discussion on where to put hyphens, what to underline, how to list multiple authors, and other fascinating intricacies of the Bibliography, was pretty much lost on me. Fervently hoping that no one would ask me any questions or otherwise detain me as I left the classroom, I raced to the store, bought a pack of cookies, and introduced Almighty Sugar into my bloodstream as I rode the bus back home.

Before classes started, I had expressed my doubts about the program to Paco. In September, I went to another program’s boot camp for three days, and I hated it so much that I never went back. He said, “you expect things here to be the same as what you’re used to, but they aren’t going to be. If you want to learn about education in Mexico, doing a Master’s program here is a good way to learn.” I think this makes a great deal of sense. But if I miss the way things worked in college, is that because I can’t adjust to a different country’s way of doing things? Is it a sign of ra-ra pro-Americanism? If I can’t sit through five straight hours of class, is it because I’m too impatient, or because two hour lectures were the longest classes given in college?

Seeing my limitations laid bare, struggling to coax initiative or motivation out of myself, and grappling with uncertainty about what I want to be doing–according to Paco, “this is just what happens after college.”  I always thought that I wasn’t going to be one of those lost souls with a B.A.! Never say never.

I told Paco that the most fun part of the day had been the children’s puppet show I saw in the city’s main plaza while killing time before classes started. I talked about the laughing schoolkids, the colorful puppets, the funny skits. “Maybe you should watch puppet shows instead of getting a Master’s,” he teased me. “Or maybe I should sign up for elementary school instead of grad school,” I added.

If you understand Spanish, check out this little documentary on the puppet theater group I saw: