Workforce Language Services

A school in Southern California, Grupo Educa, is working hard to keep Spanish alive in a young generation for whom English is the first language. Even in a region where almost everything seems bilingual, a constant wave of English from television and school is creating a gap between Spanish-speaking parents and their children.

Monica Robles, a 29-year-old Guadalajara native and teacher at the school, has seen this among her L.A. relatives from Mexico.

“I have all these cousins who are basically monolingual in Spanish,” Robles told me. “But all their kids are monolingual in English. They can barely communicate with each other.”

It actually takes a certain stubbornness to pass on Spanish to your kids in L.A. A lot of people here can say they understand the language — thanks, in part, to the proliferation of Spanish media — but struggle when forced to speak it.

The Grupo Educa weekend language school uses tactics like the “Spanish-language bear,” a stuffed animal who only speaks Spanish. Even though the teddy bear stays quiet, all the children must speak Spanish so he doesn’t feel left out.

Even in California, there can be a stigma associated with speaking Spanish. It was discouraged for many generations in many schools and communities, and even today English is viewed as the language of power. Writes Hector Tobar in an LA Times column, “Here, English is the language of success, while Spanish is the language of hard labor. Some people run away from it as fast as they can.”

But at the Grupo Educa school, the kids are proud of their Spanish-speaking skills, and their parents too.

Read more about the school in the LA Times article here.