Mesa Community College Leave Your Name at the Border Article Questions Directions: This week we are starting Unit 2 on Cultural Borders. As we have talked

Mesa Community College Leave Your Name at the Border Article Questions Directions:

This week we are starting Unit 2 on Cultural Borders. As we have talked about a little bit now, language can create a cultural border. The way we perceive and pronounce names can contribute to that. We are starting this unit by reading “Leaving Your Name at the Border” by Manuel Muñoz. While you are reading the article please consider the following questions. You do not have to answer them, but they may help you as you annotate the reading.

What does it mean to “anglicize” a word, a name?
Why, according to the writer, do many people in California’s Central Valley, “regardless of the speaker’s background,” Anglicize the pronunciation of Mexican names? Consider his explanations regarding the demographics of the small towns in the region and the prevailing perceptions of Spanish.
Munoz claims that the Anglicization of his stepfather’s name “ties into something bigger than learning English” (par. 14). Explain what he means by “something bigger.” How does this relate to the idea of cultural borders within the same physical space/border?
In paragraph 8, Munoz mentions the stigma associated with speaking Spanish, saying that “Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion.” Do you agree that there is stigma with speaking Spanish in the United States? Why or why not? How is that a reflection of Spanish culture within the physical borders of the U.S?
In paragraph 9, what does Munoz realize about what it means to be “white: and “American.” What is his realization? Why is it significant?
STEP 1:

Carefully read through “Leaving Your Name at the Border” by Manuel Muñoz. Read it slowly! Read it twice! You can ignore the questions at the bottom of the scanned document for this assignment.

Leave Your Name at the Border.docx attached below

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STEP 2:

Fill out an annotation worksheet for the reading.

Blank Annotation Worksheet here. (DOC) attached below

Blank Annotation Worksheet here. (PDF)

(You can download it, type in your responses, and save your file or you can print it out, write your answers on the worksheet, and post a scan of the document.) Leave Your Name at the Border
By Manuel Muñoz
Aug. 1, 2007, The New York Times
DINUBA, California — At the Fresno airport, as I made my way to the gate, I heard a name
over the intercom. The way the name was pronounced by the gate agent made me want to see
what she looked like. That is, I wanted to see whether she was Mexican. Around Fresno, identity
politics rarely deepen into exacting terms, so to say “Mexican” means, essentially, “not white.”
The slivered self-identifications Chicano, Hispanic, Mexican-American and Latino are not part
of everyday life in the Valley. You’re either Mexican or you’re not. If someone wants to know if
you were born in Mexico, they’ll ask. Then you’re From Over There – de allá. And leave it at that.
The gate agent, it turned out, was Mexican. Well-coiffed, in her 30s, she wore foundation that
was several shades lighter than the rest of her skin. It was the kind of makeup job I’ve learned to
silently identify at the mall when I’m with my mother, who will say nothing about it until we’re
back in the car. Then she’ll point to the darkness of her own skin, wondering aloud why women
try to camouflage who they are.
I watched the Mexican gate agent busy herself at the counter, professional and studied. Once
again, she picked up the microphone and, with authority, announced the name of the missing
customer: “Eugenio Reyes, please come to the front desk.”
You can probably guess how she said it. Her Anglicized pronunciation wouldn’t be unusual in a
place like California’s Central Valley. I didn’t have a Mexican name there either: I was an
instruction guide.
When people ask me where I’m from, I say Fresno because I don’t expect them to know little
Dinuba. Fresno is a booming city of nearly 500,000 these days, with a diversity – white,
Mexican, African-American, Armenian, Hmong and Middle Eastern people are all well
represented – that shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s in the small towns like Dinuba that surround
Fresno that the awareness of cultural difference is stripped down to the interactions between the
only two groups that tend to live there: whites and Mexicans. When you hear a Mexican name
spoken in these towns, regardless of the speaker’s background, it’s no wonder that there’s an
“English way of pronouncing it.”
I was born in 1972, part of a generation that learned both English and Spanish. Many of my
cousins and siblings are bilingual, serving as translators for those in the family whose English is
barely functional. Others have no way of following the Spanish banter at family gatherings. You
can tell who falls into which group: Estella, Eric, Delia, Dubina, Melanie.
It’s intriguing to watch “American” names begin to dominate among my nieces and nephews and
second cousins, as well as with the children of my hometown friends. I am not surprised to meet
5-year-old Brandon or Kaitlyn. Hardly anyone questions the incongruity of matching these
names with last names like Trujillo or Zepeda. The English-only way of life partly explains the
quiet erasure of cultural difference that assimilation has attempted to accomplish. A name like
Kaitlyn Zepeda doesn’t completely obscure her ethnicity, but the half-step of her name, as a
gesture, is almost understandable.
Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion: Always the language of the vilified illegal
immigrant, it segregated schoolchildren into English-only and bilingual programs; it defined you,
above all else, as part of a lower class. Learning English, though, brought its own complications.
It was simultaneously the language of the white population and a path toward the richer,
expansive identity of “American.” But it took getting out of the Valley for me to understand that
“white” and “American” were two very different things.
Something as simple as saying our names “in English” was our unwittingly complicit gesture of
trying to blend in. Pronouncing Mexican names correctly was never encouraged. Names like
Daniel, Olivia and Marco slipped right into the mutability of the English language.
I remember a school ceremony at which the mathematics teacher, a white man, announced the
names of Mexican students correctly and caused some confusion, if not embarrassment. Years
later we recognized that he spoke in deference to our Spanish-speaking parents in the audience,
caring teacher that he was.
These were difficult names for a non-Spanish speaker: Araceli, Nadira, Luis (a beautiful name
when you glide the u and the i as you’re supposed to). We had been accustomed to having our
birth names altered for convenience. Concepción was Connie. Ramón was Raymond. My cousin
Esperanza was Hope – but her name was pronounced “Hopie” because any Spanish speaker
would automatically pronounce the e at the end.
Ours, then, were names that stood as barriers to a complete embrace of an American identity,
simply because their pronunciations required a slip into Spanish, the otherness that assimilation
was supposed to erase. What to do with names like Amado, Lucio or Élida? There are no English
“equivalents,” no answer when white teachers asked, “What does your name mean?” when what
they really wanted to know was “What’s the English one?” So what you heard was a name
butchered beyond recognition, a pronunciation that pointed the finger at the Spanish language as
the source of clunky sound and ugly rhythm.
My stepfather, from Ojos de Agua, Mexico, jokes when I ask him about the names of Mexicans
born here. He deliberately stumbles over pronunciations, imitating our elders who have difficulty
with Bradley and Madelyn. “Ashley Sánchez. ¿Tú crees?” He wonders aloud what has happened
to the “nombres del rancho” – traditional Mexican names that are hardly given anymore to
children born in the States: Heraclio, Madaleno, Otilia, Dominga.
My stepfather’s experience with the Anglicization of his name – Antonio to Tony – ties into
something bigger than learning English. For him, the erasure of his name was about deference
and subservience. Becoming Tony gave him a measure of access as he struggled to learn English
and get more fieldwork.
This isn’t to say that my stepfather welcomed the change, only that he could not put up much
resistance. Not changing put him at risk of being passed over for work. English was a world of
power and decisions, of smooth, uninterrupted negotiation. Clear communication meant you
could go unsupervised. Every gesture made toward convincing an employer that English was on
its way to being mastered had the potential to make a season of fieldwork profitable.
It’s curious that many of us growing up in Dinuba adhered to the same rules. Although as
children of farm workers we worked in the fields at an early age, we’d also had the opportunity to
stay in one town long enough to finish school. Most of us had learned English early and
splintered off into a dual existence of English at school, Spanish at home. But instead of
recognizing the need for fluency in both languages, we turned it into a peculiar kind of battle.
English was for public display. Spanish was for privacy – and privacy quickly turned to shame.
The corrosive effect of assimilation is the displacement of one culture over another, the inability
to sustain more than one way of being. It isn’t a code word for racial and ethnic acculturation
only. It applies to needing to belong, of seeing from the outside and wondering how to get in and
then, once inside, realizing there are always those still on the fringe.
When I went to college on the East Coast, I was confronted for the first time by people who said
my name correctly without prompting; if they stumbled, there was a quick apology and an honest
plea to help with the pronunciation. But introducing myself was painful: already shy, I avoided
meeting people because I didn’t want to say my name, felt burdened by my own history. I knew
that my small-town upbringing and its limitations on Spanish would not have been tolerated by
any of the students of color who had grown up in large cities, in places where the sheer force of
their native languages made them dominant in their neighborhoods.
It didn’t take long for me to assert the power of code-switching in public, the transferring of
words from one language to another, regardless of who might be listening. I was learning that the
English language composed new meanings when its constrictions were ignored, crossed over or
crossed out. Language is all about manipulation, or not listening to the rules.
When I come back to Dinuba, I have a hard time hearing my name said incorrectly, but I have an
even harder time beginning a conversation with others about why the pronunciation of our names
matters. Leaving a small town requires an embrace of a larger point of view, but a town like
Dinuba remains forever embedded in an either/or way of life. My stepfather still answers to Tony
and, as the United States-born children grow older, their Anglicized names begin to signify who
does and who does not “belong” – who was born here and who is de allá.
My name is Manuel. To this day, most people cannot say it correctly, the way it was intended to
be said. But I can live with that because I love the alliteration of my full name. It wasn’t the name
my mother, Esmeralda, was going to give me. At the last minute, my father named me after an
uncle I would never meet. My name was to have been Ricardo. Growing up in Dinuba, I’m
certain I would have become Ricky or even Richard, and the journey toward the discovery of the
English language’s extraordinary power in even the most ordinary of circumstances would
probably have gone unlearned.
I count on a collective sense of cultural loss to once again swing the names back to our native
language. The Mexican gate agent announced Eugenio Reyes, but I never got a chance to see
who appeared. I pictured an older man, cowboy hat in hand, but I made the assumption on his
name alone, the clash of privileges I imagined between someone de allá and a Mexican woman
with a good job in the United States. Would she speak to him in Spanish? Or would she raise her
voice to him as if he were hard of hearing?
But who was I to imagine this man being from anywhere, based on his name alone? At a place of
arrivals and departures, it sank into me that the currency of our names is a stroke of luck:
because mine was not an easy name, it forced me to consider how language would rule me if I
allowed it. Yet I discovered that only by leaving. My stepfather must live in the Valley, a place
that does not allow that choice, every day. And Eugenio Reyes – I do not know if he was coming
or going.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of “The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue.”
Annotation Worksheet
Source:
I.
Rhetorical Context (Who wrote it or created it? Why was it written? What is
it trying to do to or for its readers? What is it? Where does it appear? When
was it published? What is its genre?)
II.
Summary (What does the text say? What are its main points? What did you
find most interesting or important?)
III.
What are THREE golden lines from the text? (Quotes that stood out the most.)
Quote 1:
Evaluation/Significance of the Quote (Why did you choose it?):
Quote 2:
Evaluation/Significance of the Quote (Why did you choose it?):
Quote 3:
Evaluation/Significance of the Quote (Why did you choose it?):
Annotation Worksheet
IV.
Evaluation (Is the text convincing? Why or why not? What new knowledge
did you get from reading this text?)
V.
Questioning (What questions do you have about the text? What would you ask
the author if you could speak to him or her directly? Do you have any
questions to ask your fellow students or the instructor?)

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