Cultural Specificity at CLUES

CLUES attempts to bridge the cultural gap between mainstream public school education and Latino immigrants. It takes place in an English-Spanish bilingual school on the West Side, a largely Latino neighborhood. CLUES facilitates what in Spanish I think would be called "capacitaciones," capacity-building workshops. Last week someone from the local branch of the Saint Paul public Library talked to the parents about Spanish and English opportunities and resources, and this week a woman from La Clinica, a sliding-scale clinic serving primarily lower-income Latino families located in the West Side, came to speak about reproductive health, La Clinica and other health resources. All of these meetings are conducted in Spanish. That part of the program is explicitly intended to introduce Latino parents to resources and methods of parenting that will make their children more successful in this school system. While it is respectful of the parents' backgrounds (I believe the majority of them are originally from Mexico and Central America), it does not celebrate their culture so much as attempt to mediate and facilitate its intersection with mainstream United States institutional culture.

This approach is definitely committed to working within the system, rather than attempting to address underlying systems that cause students from Latino families to be less prepared for school, such as the parents’ job instability or lower earning potential (many parents are seasonal workers) in the exosystem, or larger political and cultural processes in the macrosystem. But in the work that it does to integrate Latino families into the school culture, albeit without much celebration of family culture, the program acknowledges a more immediate need than ones that could be addressed on the policy level; kids are not going to do as well in school if their parents have unstable employment, are unaware of access to affordable healthcare, or do not know how to use the free resources offered by the public library. I would argue that these are basic connections to be made and relatively unassociated with cultural practices. However, the next week’s theme is discipline, and I think this may implicitly address a cultural difference. While language or socioeconomics may prove to be barriers to the earlier topics, I think that discipline is a highly subjective and culturally informed style of parenting. And while perhaps the behavior of these children, unmitigated by the more dominant behavioral norms, is detrimental to their social relationships and ability to learn in the classroom, teaching parents how to discipline their kids necessarily privileges one culturally bound style over another. Perhaps this is what children need to succeed in the context they are given, but I think it needs to be interrogated more extensively.

My job is to provide childcare for the children while their parents participate in these workshops, and often discipline creates conflict. For example, last week, a 5-year-old boy was kicking some other children, and when reprimanded, dissolved into tears. His older siblings rushed to comfort him and his father even left the adult meeting to intervene. While childcare generally necessitate deferring to the parents’ preferred style of discipline, I felt this may have been an interaction informed by our different cultural experiences. I am eagerly anticipating the next session to see how the more theoretical topic navigates culture.