Laboring by Day, Learning by Night

"My father's house had mud walls and a straw roof," she says. "To me, this is like magic."

The Rivera children speak English with no accent. Jose Alberto, 10, gets straight A's in math and wants to be a lawyer. Eduardo, 8, is into soccer and video games. Karina, 16, has a cellphone and a room with pink walls.

She spent her adolescence translating at PTA meetings for her parents. Now she is taking formal Spanish at school, partly at her mother's insistence. Her vocabulary homework is on the dining room table. Amistad. Infierno. Feliz. Several words are the same ones her father is learning.

"I want her to learn our language," Reina says.

"It's an easy A," Karina shrugs.

Another bitter winter night. The library classroom is empty. Villaroel lays out pencils and rulers, confident the students will appear. Several young men shuffle in, all in baggy

jeans and sweat shirts, ball caps twisted backward to give them confidence.

"Any preparation?" Villaroel asks politely. They shake their heads. One shy, sinewy man mumbles that he can write a few numbers, but that's all. "The school was so far from my village," he explains sheepishly. "Is it true this class is free?"

"Even the pencils," Villaroel answers.

The students pull up chairs around a small table. They will spend the entire class in silence, laboriously copying letters into workbooks. Standing by the quick-erase board, Garcia is teaching the letter J tonight. J as in Julia, justo, jaula, jornalero, he says. The last word means day laborer.

J as in mujer, which means woman, he adds.

Again the lesson takes on a larger dimension. Garcia tapes up newspaper photos of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan rights activist. "Your wives need to learn to read and write, too," he says. "That way they can provide more moral support and help the family succeed."

Johnny Reyes, a gangly man of 32 from El Salvador, wants to tell a story. He applied for a driver's license but could not perform the written test. While he was working, he would call his wife on the cellphone, and she would practice the questions with him, over and over. "I passed the test, and now I have been driving for four years," he says proudly.

Rivera, sitting in the front row, bends over his writing tablet, adjusts his reading glasses, scratches his head. He is still struggling with the letter Q. Instead of writing querer, to want, he writes guerra, war.

"I'm stuck," he confesses, laughing at himself. His dream is to become a U.S. citizen, but he has failed the test twice because his English was not good enough.

"Don't worry," Garcia says. "You have all the time in the world."