Memories from Our School Days

As I always do, I rely on books. So I brought a couple of books and one of them is a book that I wrote called Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools. And it was one of my first books and an exciting one for me to write because we had been written about before, but mostly by non-Puerto Ricans.

And the very first thing that I included in the book was a poem by my sister, Lydia Cortés. I was a Cortés too until I was married. And she's a published poet and she wrote this book. So I'm going to just read a little bit of it so that you can sense what it meant to start school when we began school and also what it was like to move from Fort Green to Flatbush where my parents bought the house.

So the poem is by Lydia Cortés. It's called “I Remember”, and I'll just read two excerpts from it.

“I remember kindergarten.

I remember having to say goodbye to Mami.

I remember crying.

I remember not understanding the teacher.

I remember the English lessons with pretty Ms. Powell who made the boxy words fit just right in my mouth without pain.

I remember the teachers who said, ‘You don't look Puerto Rican,’ expecting to hear me say, ‘Thank you very much.’”

Ms. Powell, by the way, I should explain was one of the first sort of experimental ESL teachers because before that point there were no services or very few services for immigrant students who spoke a language other than English. And by the time I got to the school a year later, she was no longer there. So it was just sink or swim for me.

And then this is about the move ,also in the same poem.

“I remember moving to Flatbush from Fort Green, from a fifth floor walk up to our very own house.

I remember going from Girls High to Erasmus Hall.

I remember going from smart to borderline in one day.”

While we had been thought of as smart girls in our previous schools, it took a lot for us to adjust to a school with very high expectations for students. We had not had that before and so it was rough going for a while, but we did well. We did well in school and were able to go on to college, something that I doubt I would've had the privilege of doing if we had not moved. And so that old truism of ‘Zip codes matter’ is absolutely true.

And I just want to highlight another book that I brought. This is called Words Were All We Had, which is edited by de Maria de la Luz Reyes and in it there are essays, I have one in here about what the experiences of Latino and Latina educators and researchers were when they were children, of how words were all they had. And luckily, almost all of us have remained bilingual, even though it was a struggle many times to do so.