Laboring by Day, Learning by Night

Workers Help Each Other in Spanish Literacy Class

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Laboring Toward Literacy
Hispanic day laborers are teaching other day laborers to read and write in Spanish at an Arlington County library.

They are grizzled men with cold-chapped hands and paint-splattered sweat shirts. They are wise in the ways of the world, experienced in the art of survival. They are also kindergartners, starting from scratch.

"Attention, companions! Here we go. Va, ve, vi, vo, vu."

That's Roberto Villaroel, the teacher, pointing with his plastic ruler. He, too, has work-scarred hands and wears a hooded jacket. He, too, spends his good days hammering drywall and his bad days killing time outside a 7-Eleven. But he has something many of his fellow Hispanic laborers lack: an education.

The students hunch over their writing tablets, the kinds that have triple lines for capital and small letters. They grip their pencils too firmly. They frown in concentration, forming the unfamiliar stems and circles of the alphabet. No spitballs. No snide comments.

"We do not make fun of each other in this class. We are all equals," Villaroel reminds them at the start of each class.

Jose Rivera always sits in the front row. He is 51, graying, old enough to wear reading glasses. He has three children, all educated in the United States. Most mornings, he rises at 4 and drives to his construction job, even on icy winter days.

But two nights a week, along with 20 other men, he reports to the free Spanish-language literacy class at the Woodrow Wilson Library in the Culmore area of Fairfax County, sponsored by a Methodist church.

"I can't write my letters very fast," Rivera says with an apologetic laugh. His tablet is half-filled with the word paquete, or package, copied on line after line. Younger men on both sides of him have already filled their pages.

"Don't worry; take your time," Villaroel reassures him. In another life, he taught sociology back home in Bolivia. He has a college vocabulary, a dignified demeanor and a passion for change. He organized the class with a Guatemalan friend, Leonardo Garcia, and they share classroom duties.

Along with Spanish, these teachers try to impart self-respect to men who are often alone and far from home, scratching out a living at the margins of a society that is deeply ambivalent about their presence.

The teachers pass out fliers and cards at day-labor sites, urging workers to come to class, but they say many are too shy or ashamed to attend. According to private literacy program directors in the region, thousands of Hispanic immigrants in the area are past school age but have no formal reading or writing skills. Becoming literate in Spanish first, they say, paves the way to learning English.

"Let's try the letter Q. That's Q, as in ri-que-za na-tu-ral," Villaroel says, rolling the Spanish R and whistling the Z. "Who can tell me what that means?"