Nina and the Third Grade

She had just come from Mexico and I sat at a small desk behind her. She was not at all like the girls from Las Vegas, New Mexico where I lived before we moved to El Paso. Even her name seemed exotic. 

Nina had long, dark brown hair. It draped her shoulders like a shawl and she did not slouch.  She sat upright and was more possessed than the rest of the kids. 

They spread themselves over the desks and chairs in this third grade classroom of the Zach White School as if those were not set in tight rows. The others belonged to a strange world of their own, one that did not draw me. 

Nina’s did, though I did not know anything about her, yet, but that she had just come from Colonia Juarez or maybe Dublán, Mexico where her family ranched.

My family now lived close to the border. On one side of the often dry river everything seemed charged. It smelled different and was filled with sounds and tastes unlike those of my home or my neighborhood in El Paso. 

And El Paso was not at all like Las Vegas. It was much larger and dryer. The sun beat intensely most days of the year and instead of piñon clad hills, the mountains were baked by the sun and dry while around them stretched deserts of creosote, cactus, and ocotillo. 

Downtown, a small tangle of tall buildings guarded the plaza where they had a fountain with baby alligators. To the north stretched streets with established families, while to the south was the river and the slums. On the East a massive military base, Fort Bliss,  spread into the desert as if the creosote made weapons.  On the other side of the purple Franklin Mountains, to the west, between them and the river was another town of ranch houses, cotton fields, cane patches, big irrigation ditches, towering trees—cottonwoods and wild pecans, and occasional small workers' homes of adobe. Where the mountain caused the river to turn, in the middle, a smoke stack rose into the sky above mounds of black slag from the smelter. As if keeping guard it stood above a small bowl in the mountains with Bhutanese-style buildings that formed Texas Western University where my father worked. 

Unlike in Las Vegas, where the campus of New Mexico Highlands was only a couple of blocks away from our home in a stretch of row houses with Elm Trees and Lilacs, near the mounded bridge that crossed the Gallinas River, the entrance to Old Town, our house in the Upper Valley was miles distant from campus. It seemed impossible to walk. My father and his work seemed far removed and we began not to see him as much as before, nor know his colleagues, their families, and the students like we had in New Mexico. 

There, our home bounced with students most evenings. Someone would turn over a trash can to make an impromptu drum and students would dance and sing, my brother Daniel and I, two blond headed, fair skinned boys, weaving among them. In El Paso, students seldom came. There was just us in the ranch-style home my parents bought on a dirt road across from the country club’s hedges. 

I went to Zach White Elementary. It was a low slung mass of purple brick on the other side of the railroad tracks and across Doniphan drive, a two lane stretch of asphalt named after a Coronel in the US Army who commanded forces against the Mexican Army in the battle of El Brazito near El Paso. Doniphan prevailed and went on to capture El Paso and even take the regional capital, Chihuahua City. 

While the the street was named after the invading American Army that made El Paso part of the US and brought English as the now dominant if minority tongue, our school took its name from Zacharia Taliaferro White. He was a local grandee in the late nineteenth century. Born in Virginia he came west and made a fortune in Texas before settling in El Paso. He owned much of the land and grew cotton in the upper valley, the area from where the Rio Grande bends around Mount Franklin and becomes the Mexican Border.  

I quickly learned his name which sounded quaint and foreign, domesticated by the telling name White at the end. It rolled of the tongue. Still, I did not yet know Mr. White’s story nor that of Alexander Doniphan, though I did learn he did something to protect my parent’s people, the Mormons, in Missouri. 

To me they were just names. I was only seven and only knew this was not the four room Gallinas School I went to in Las Vegas. It was much larger and kept students through eighth grade. Each grade had multiple classes, A, B, C.  I was in 3rd grade C, with Mrs. MacDonald as our teacher. 

At school she was Mrs. MacDonald and at church held in the Fairlyland Preschool across from her house and only a long cross-street-less stretch from Zach White, she was Sister MacDonald.  She was my teacher in Sunday School too and made sure we knew that we Mormon boys and girls were different, though we did not really know what that meant.

She was stern, but somehow maternal, a mound of graying hair over a firm face and rounded belly. She kept us well disciplined and in place, both at church and at Zach White where our classroom was in a separate building from the main school, a stretch of first through third grades. She warned us that if we did not behave ourselves we would have to go to the principal’s office where the paddle, named Matilda, awaited us.  

Occasionally, one boy or another (they were always boys) had to make the walk of shame across the hot and dry dirt to the other building for their meeting with Matilda. It never happened to me, somehow. 

I understood Mrs. MacDonald’s English enough, though it sounded different. It reminded me of the Utah sounding speech of my parents and others at church and was different from the flatter and less nasal West Texas and New Mexico speech of El Paso. 

Nina was my guide, though she never new it, as I learned the ways of this big school, new city, and different set of languages. 

For some reason I cannot remember, three days a week I did have to cross that dust patch of shame. I had to go to speech therapy with kids from other classes who had issues with their speech. 

Somehow, I got the idea it was because I had a different accent than the other kids, or maybe it was just because I was shy and quiet. I do not know. I only know that three times a week, torn up with embarrassment, I stood up from my desk behind Nina and left the classroom when called. 

I and the others called went to a small room on the side of the main building where the therapist drilled us on proper pronunciation and such, “how now brown cow.” Then we returned to our classes, me wishing I were invisible.  For some reason I shall never understand I was not good enough in speaking English, my parents’ native language, named after my mother’s mother’s homeland.

One period a day, Mrs. Salas Porras would work with us; the r’s of her last last name tightly rolled like a drum beat. She taught us Spanish.  Almost all the kids got what she was saying. I did not.

It may have been because she taught in Spanish. Though I never before had classes in that language, it had been all around me in Las Vegas. That Spanish was gentle and it did not sound the same as the taught Northern Mexican standard Mrs. Salas Porras spoke. 

That may have been why I did not understand. Her accent, grammar, and speed of delivery was strange. Though I did not get a lot, it was attractive, as was she, a thin regal woman who wore beauty as something that belonged to her by right. She had dark hair, light skin and was powerful, like Nina. To me Nina seemed a younger version of Mrs. Salas Porras, though Nina was Anglo, I gathered, and not Mexican even if she and her family was from Chihuahua,  Mexico. Not only did she and the Spanish teacher look similar, they also spoke the same. 

The other kids understood.  Still, the Anglo kids spoke weird it seemed to me. They could not seem to pronounce the sharp and precise vowels and consonants of that tongue that we were told belonged to El Paso, since our city was founded by the Spanish before English got to Virginia. The city just did not belong to Mexico on the other side of the Rio Grande where the river’s name changed to Río Bravo. 

El Paso was the pass to the north, we were told, where Spanish conquerors marched through, metal helmets in place and lances in hand, to march up to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico.  We learned about pilgrims and George Washington, but there was always Coronado, the conquistador. The high school up North Mesa Street on the side of the mountain was named for him and kept him and the Spanish in our minds. 

We watched TV in English, played in English, went to the store in English, and had school mostly in English. Even church was in English—there was a Spanish congregation but they met at a different time. We did speak Spanish in Spanish class, on the play-ground, to talk to the women from Ciudad Juarez who lived in our homes and cared for us, as well as to the men who tended out yards, and when we went to Ciudad Juarez on weekends or other times to buy in the markets, eat in restaurants, get the car repaired, have a family portrait taken, and more. 

Spanish was the majority language of El Paso, but our neighborhood was more Anglo. Near the Country Club there were only a few small houses where Mexican families lived. Though US citizens, they were Mexican to us and I had classmates who came from those families and spoke Spanish, as well as English.  

Somehow there was a feeling that Anglo boys and girls needed to know Spanish but did not need to speak it as well as Mrs. Salas Porras. She had probably gotten a University degree in Mexico somewhere and read books in that language. We did not need to do that, it seemed. We only needed to know enough to get what we needed from the people who worked for our families or when we visited Mexico.  

Anglos and Mexicans seemed different people.  One day, the school’s Janitor—a thin spigot of hard work, wiry like a knotted mesquite, Elías, was working on the other side of the school yard’s fence cleaning up trash the winds had blown in. My grade was in recess and the boys  had gathered around a spinning piece of playground equipment. When the Anglo boys saw Elías working with his rake they all ran to the fence and started yelling “Chuy,” “Chuy,” “Chuy,” “Chuy,” “Chuy.”

Later I learned that was the common nickname for Jesús. But in the boys’ mouths it was an epithet, a slur. They were not Mexican and so could name Elias a Chuy. They mangled the meaning of the name and turned it into something foul. They drew a strong line there along the chainlink fence that separated Anglos from Mexicans.

Nina knew Spanish and English. She could speak and even more, she could write both. She had just come from Mexico and was Anglo. I wanted to know how to write it and speak it like she did. 

Mrs. Salas Porras would tell us stories in Spanish and have us write things down. Sometimes she gave lessons about grammar or maybe even conjugations. I understood some but not enough, and I did not know how to write. I had only learned to spell in English.  

Nina’s hand flowed with letters and words in Spanish. She did not have to hold back like the kids labeled Mexican. She did not try to show off, but the perfection of her pronunciation and her skill at writing since she went to school in Colonia Juarez, or maybe Dublán, made her stand out, elegant, exotic, and able. 

So I would not fail, I peeked over Nina’s shoulder most days to see what she was doing, how she formed in her notebook the words that Mrs. Salas Porras spoke. I too was Anglo, though my parents were from Utah, and not Mexico. I wanted to know. I wanted what she had.