A Critical Auto/Ethnography of Learning Spanish

Intercultural competence on the gringo trail?

Phiona Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138898950
• eBook ISBN: 9781317482239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The premise that intercultural contact produces intercultural competence underpins much rationalization of backpacker tourism and in-country language education. However, if insufficiently problematized, pre-existing constructions of cultural 'otherness' may hinder intercultural competence development. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which wide disparities of power, wealth, and privilege exist, and where such positionings may go unproblematized. This study contributes to theoretical understandings of how intercultural competence develops through intercultural contact situations through a detailed, multiple case study of three conceptually comparable contexts in which Western backpackers study Spanish in Latin America. This experience, often 'bundled' with home-stay, volunteer work, social, and tourist experiences, offers a rich set of empirical data within which to understand the nature of intercultural competence and the processes through which it may be developed. Models of a single, context-free, transferable intercultural competence are rejected. Instead, suggestions are made as to how educators might help prepare intercultural sojourners by scaffolding their intercultural reflections and problematizing their own intersectional identities and their assumptions. The study is a critical ethnography with elements of autoethnographic reflection. The book therefore also contributes to development of this qualitative research methodology and provides an empirical example of its application.

1
Becoming interculturally competent in ‘Spanishtown’?

Crossing cultures is not only an intellectual process. It is not even mainly intellectual. It is thoroughly embodied. Here in highland Guatemala, where I’m interviewing other ‘gringos’ about their experiences in the cottage-industry, Spanish-language schools, I come to understand culture crossing as a feast of all the senses. Culture crossing here is not something that can be accessed by the ‘usual’ ways of researching. Here it is necessary to feel in order to understand.

I’m researching in Xela, pronounced SHELL-ah. Officially ‘Quetzaltenango’, its Mayan name was Xelajú. Although the Maya have been systematically abused, silenced, and exterminated for centuries, both they and their city live on, defiant. Xela is high altitude, high octane. Its air is sharp with traffic fumes and the narrow streets fill with the cries of ayudantes from the little buses into which people crowd. ‘Zunil’, they shout, ‘Retalhuleu, Coatepeque, Sololá’. These are place names far from the familiar ‘San this’ and ‘Santa that’ of the Latin America that I know and love.

It smells different here, too. Xela smells of the black, choking diesel smoke that issues from ancient vehicles. After the rains, it also smells loamy and earthy, although always with a top note of dog poo. Also, it is mango season, and in Xela, the mangos smell of heaven.

Xela tastes of carbohydrates. Every lunchtime, in the comedor where I have a nodding relationship with the staff, I count the carbohydrates that make up a single meal. There is rice, pasta, tortillas, and potatoes with pollo pepian today, and there were tamales, rice, potatoes, and maize with jocón yesterday.

Xela sounds like firecrackers, roosters, traffic, cumbia, and street dogs howling in the night. When I take weaving classes at a Mayan Indigenous women’s craft cooperative, Xela sounds like the breathy K’s and Ch’s of Kaqchikel.

Xela looks like cobbled streets and belle epoque architecture but also razor-wire fences, broken bottles cemented into the tops of high walls, and concrete-box stores with crude murals advertising the businesses. But Xela is an ugly picture in a beautiful frame: all around are verdant, vertiginous volcanoes.

On the weekends, I take myself to the places with the unfamiliar names. It is here that I experience how Xela feels, because to my large gringa body, the buses – retired, US-American school buses – feel so very cramped. Seats designed for primary children have been taken out and put back in, closer together, adding another few rows and leaving only a ten-inch-wide (25 cm) aisle and no legroom. Coming back from Zunil, I exchange smiles with a señora who is carrying a live hen on her lap. I ask where she is going, and she says Xela.

‘And the hen?’

She laughs. ‘Also Xela, but don’t tell her. She would rather go home. But I’m making a caldo, a soup’.

This feels sad, although it shouldn’t. I eat meat. I just don’t usually ride buses with homesick chickens. Xela feels closer to reality, sometimes.

I notice that I walk differently in Xela. People move so damn slowly, and on narrow pavements alongside fast-traffic roads you have a choice: fall into step with the meandering or get squashed flat by a delivery truck. I walk and seethe. Obviously, I say nothing (except, occasionally, ‘con permiso’, as the traffic calms, and I squeeze around the dawdling walkers with my gringa air of annoyance). I feel myself inhabiting this stereotype, the rushed, stressed gringa, but I’m not. I’m really not. I’m just not used to walking so slowly.

And, unlike many of the people of Xela, the quetzaltecos, I have stuff to do, places to be, a research project, and a ticket out. Today I am interviewing students and visiting schools, and yesterday I facilitated a teachers’ discussion group. Last week I clocked up fifteen interview hours, and today I’m writing. My busyness makes me ‘other’ too. There is far too much unemployment and even more underemployment here, and it riles me when I see job advertisements for gringos in the tourist places:

Weekend staff at Black Cat Hostel. Free food, cheap drinks. 3 months minimum commitment.… Evening and weekend bar staff needed at the Old School bar. Guaranteed fun. Give José a call.

(Classified Ads, ‘Xela Who’ Magazine, April–June 2015)

Why, I ask the gringos working here, do they think that the bars and the hostels hire them, the gringos, rather than locals? And one – let’s call her Amber – (as with all the participants in this book, this is not her real name) tells me:

I got a job as a waitress. I joined a band. Like, either one I wasn’t qualified to do in the US.… Here, I literally just walk up to people and [I’ll] be like, ‘Hey I think you need a waitress’, ‘alright’, ‘good, that’s me’.… I’m also very go-getter, yeah, and I’m very active and have a lot of ideas. So maybe that’s partially just me. I think, yeah, there’s just a lot of opportunities to start working on projects [here].… I think [local people in Xela] could [do the same] if they wanted to, yeah.

(Amber, late twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

Hearing this, I realize that crossing cultures is more than feeling and sensing my way around Xela. Crossing cultures is also crossing discourses, crossing paradigms. Every critical bone in my body jolts when I hear the entitlement and implied racism of some of the gringos. Is it really just that Guatemalans are insufficiently ‘go-getter’, that they lack ‘a lot of ideas’? Is this why Xela has so much underemployment and why the bars and the hostels hire unqualified grin-gos? I don’t think so.

I do like a lot of the gringos that I meet. And I like a lot of quetzaltecos too. This is not about liking or disliking. Instead, I realize that the biggest culture crossing I’m negotiating is the one where my gringo interviewees casually fall into social imaginaries that disparage Xela, and Guatemala, and sometimes Latin America more generally, perhaps without meaning to and often without considering the gringo privilege that puts them on a pedestal here. This is the culture crossing I’m experiencing here in Xela. It is the crossing of discourses and paradigms: ways of seeing and being and ways of imagining Latin America.

(Phiona, adapted from ‘field notes’, Xela 2015)

What this book is about

This book is about tourists, often longer-term backpackers, who study Spanish in Latin America. It describes how adult students, mostly in their early twenties and mostly from North America but also from Europe and Australasia, might become interculturally competent as a result of travelling in Latin America, taking a few weeks’ worth of Spanish lessons, and perhaps also doing some volunteer work. Not all do become interculturally competent, though, and this book looks at why that is.

The idea that intercultural contact necessarily produces intercultural competence underpins a lot of the literature in international and in-country language education. Perhaps this is because it is easier to measure the extent of an individual’s intercultural (or more usually international) experience from which to infer, albeit erroneously, their intercultural competence. However, in this book, I show that not all border crossing does, in fact, result in the kind of skills and attributes that comprise intercultural competence. Indeed, if language travellers do not adequately question their own pre-existing ideas about cultural ‘others’, they may not acquire intercultural competence at all, no matter how much or how far they may travel. Instead, they may simply confirm what they already ‘know’ about Latin America. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which wide disparities of power, wealth, and privilege exist. This is why my research has been in contexts like Xela, which is poor, industrial, and majority Indigenous. Xela is where travellers like Amber, cited earlier, might feel they are ‘above’ local people. And this is where local people may be too polite, or perceive that they are too powerless, to critique the discourses of gringos in their midst.

But in order to examine whether intercultural competence is being learned, we must ask what is intercultural competence? In Chapter 2, I explore this literature, and throughout the study, I discuss ways in which it is evidenced, or not, by the participants. The other question that frames this book is: how is inter-cultural competence acquired through international experience? In particular, I consider the intersection of intercultural engagement and power: how do we acquire intercultural competence when, as Amber experienced, people put us up on a pedestal for who they think we are? I bring a critical framing to this question, and in Chapter 2, I also explain what this means and why it is needed. This study, therefore, contributes to theoretical understandings of how intercultural competence develops through intercultural contact situations in which there are significant power imbalances.

This is why the context for this research is not high-status university language programs. In these, there are fewer disparities of power. Instead, my focus is on the ‘cottage-industry’, Spanish-language schools and non-government organizations (NGOs) that proliferate across Latin America. There is some slippage between these organization types: most schools offer to arrange volunteer opportunities for Spanish-language students, and many NGOs offer some form of Spanish-language instruction for volunteers. Because it is often impossible to separate sojourners’ Spanish-language learning aim from their volunteer-tourism aim, I discuss both types of organization in this book.

Xela, described earlier, offers tourists a lively scene of at least twenty language schools to choose from. There, it is possible to study twenty-five hours per week of one-to-one Spanish lessons, including full-board homestay accommodation and a social/cultural program, from as little as USD$130 per week. Students often start from beginner level and many progress to conversational fluency in a few weeks. Many other similar ‘Spanishtowns’ exist across Latin America, and to give a sense of the phenomenon more generally, I consider three contrasting locations in which this book is ‘set’. They are Xela (Guatemala), Granada/Masaya (Nicaragua), and Lima (Peru). Whereas Xela is far from the mainstream tourist circuit, conceptually contiguous Granada and Masaya, which are majority non-Indigenous, are firmly on the gringo trail. And in total contrast, Lima is a major city of ten million people with an up-and-coming trendy reputation but very little tourism compared to places like Machu Picchu or Cuzco. While Lima is not a traditional Spanish-language-learning destination, it has a significant volunteer-tourism ‘scene’ with many NGOs. Together, these places give a broad sense of what the immersion-Spanish and volunteer work experiences are like across Latin America. But many other ‘Spanishtowns’ exist and are ripe for study. The academic literature has, to date, hardly touched this phenomenon at all. So this study also aims to document this little-studied part of the international education industry with a view to mapping the territory for future studies.

Who this book is for

This is absolutely not ‘just’ a book for Spanish teachers. Indeed, my own professional background is in TESOL – Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages – rather than the teaching of Spanish. Why then is it worth my, and readers from TESOL and other disciplines, reaching into the teaching of Spanish to engage with this project? This book is about critical intercultural competence, which necessitates a research setting in which there are complex, multifaceted power relations along multiple, sometimes contradictory, axes of identity.

Unfortunately the English-language industry and international education that focuses on ‘periphery’ (usually East Asian) students in ‘centre’ contexts (usually United Kingdom/United States/Australasian universities) is problematically monochrome in terms of power and intercultural relations. In those settings, teachers and institutions have most of the epistemological, cultural, linguistic, and symbolic capital. The students (whether framed as having agency or as victims of a system that treats them as cash cows) bring economic capital but often struggle. Not only is the situation unbalanced, with almost all the power stacked on the side of the teachers and institutions, but also this kind of setting has also been much more comprehensively researched.

In contrast, very few academics have looked at the Spanishtown phenomenon. How does power work in these kinds of settings? Who is high or low status, and how does status work? Teachers can be seen as more powerful (as teachers, as repositories of cultural and linguistic capital, and as employed and sometimes older adults) or as less powerful (as Latin Americans, as less well educated than many of their students, sometimes as Indigenous, and usually as non-transnationals). Against this much more complex set of power relations, critical intercultural competence is rather more interesting, as it allows for intersectional identities to play out and for allegiances and differences to be formed along multiple aspects of identity. Whether or not readers are involved in the teaching of Spanish, these Spanish-language-teaching settings offer incredibly valuable insights to all applied linguists, language teachers, intercultural and tourism scholars, sociologists, human geographers, and others.

Nevertheless, this book is somewhat difficult to locate in the literature. It is a study of language learning in immersion settings. In these, some students have specific purposes, such as medical Spanish for North American doctors and nurses, and many such students combine language immersion with volunteer work placements in medical and other settings. And/or this book is a study of backpacker enclaves in which language learning is one of the key tourist activities: many tourists undertake ‘survival’ Spanish courses before embarking on Latin American travels. This book, then, is about the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language to adult non-native, usually non-heritage, speakers across a range of demographics and purposes. But it is also a study of international education, because some of the students are on programs organized by North American educational institutions and may earn credit for their studies in Latin America. So it is a study of language education, but much more besides.

It is also a study of student and teacher identities, in contexts somewhat comparable to those of language-school TESOL. Like the soft underbelly of the TESOL industry (Stanley, 2013), not all the ‘teachers’ in this study are qualified language teachers. Further, the institutions, which comprise private businesses and not-for-profit projects, may be far from language teaching’s ‘best practice’. Certainly none have the notional legitimacy conferred by the presence of applied linguistics researchers and curriculum planners, as would be expected in a university language centre. The ‘product’ they offer is a hybrid of language learning and, very often, the opportunity to volunteer in a range of community projects such as after-school childcare or environmental clean-ups.

This latter discourse, of tourist volunteering, goes largely unproblematized among participants and is one of ‘helping’ and ‘skills sharing’, with troubling echoes of the neocolonial ‘white man’s burden’. Some mention is made, perhaps more honestly, of volunteering as an opportunity for language immersion. But as many volunteer tourists speak only basic Spanish, the range of activities in which they participate is often limited to unskilled work. So the ‘skills sharing’ discourse is perhaps idealistic. That said, some participants described projects in which unskilled, unqualified, and sometimes unsupervised volunteers delivered babies or gave injections. Some taught high school classes. Some built houses or irritated turtles on coral reefs. Such activities, discussed in Chap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Becoming interculturally competent in ‘Spanishtown’?
• 2 Theorizing intercultural competence
• 3 Research processes and intrigues
• 4 Learning Spanish in Latin America
• 5 Discourses of others: Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’
• 6 Learning from and negotiating with cultural ‘others’
• 7 Voluntourism: Practicing on the community?
• 8 Theorizing: Doing and developing intercultural competence
• 9 Revisiting methodology
• 10 Suggestions and teaching activities
• References
• Index