One day last November I spent a Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn Bridge Park at a picnic. The cool fall weather had partially broken, and it promised to hover in the mid-fifties throughout the day, warm in the sun and cold in the shade. I had planned the event, and in my obliviousness had not considered the effect weather would have on attendance, so I spent the morning anxiously attuned to the weather as I scrambled around Brooklyn Heights to put the finishing touches on the picnic: bagels from Montague Bagel and a whole stack of blankets (and unzipped sleeping bags) from my apartment.
By 11 am I was seated on one of those sleeping bags with the early arrivals – Peggy, a New York “native” who had lived in the city for the last 30 or so years, and Massoumeh, an Iranian woman who had brought along her German husband, whose job had led them to move to the US and who she had met while living in Germany. The four of us ate bagels and talked primarily of the city, with Peggy and I recommending some must-do things to the newly arrived couple: walk the high line, visit the MET, take the Staten Island Ferry (or even better, the East River Ferry).
The others trickled in as we spoke – May, the only true NYC lifer in the group and a second-generation Chinese immigrant, Paul (France), Omar (Peru), Cristian (Ecuador), David (Mexico), Tete (Togo) and Clare (UK) – and our blankets gradually filled with crossed legs and a variety of treats. At a certain point, between side conversations on the best pizza in New York, the superiority of scallion cream cheese to regular, and the unrest in Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador, Omar pointed out to the group how truly unique we were: out of the eleven people at the picnic, there were ten countries represented, five or six different languages, and a handful of religions. With so little commonality, it seemed to him, we should all be challenged to speak to each other, and yet we weren’t finding it challenging at all. English was bringing us together, and making it possible for Tete, who grew up in a francophone West African country, to explain his village’s superstitions to an Iranian woman who grew up in Germany, and for Omar to tell a Frenchman from Normandy how his wife had made him give up carbs and stop eating the white rice he loved.
What felt at times like a social science experiment was in fact a picnic sponsored by El Centro de Trabajadores, a non-profit language school based in the city that has been bringing groups like the one described above together since 1975. Currently tucked away on the Upper West Side, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues in the Goddard Riverside Community Center, Centro teaches both English and Spanish classes to adult students looking to improve their skills in either language. Originally intended as a way to help working class immigrants get by in this country and to help them find work, Centro has seen its student body gradually shift from fully working class to a mix that includes professionals, students, long-term travelers and retirees.
Among the organization’s current students are a Chinatown-based lawyer specializing in legal document translations, a Russian pharmacist and her economist husband, and a Libyan engineer. Centro has taught a Brazilian ship-builder, a Mexican sound technician, a Guatemalan baker and a Chilean au pair, not to mention the hundreds of New Yorkers who have come through the doors to learn Spanish in their free time. Each student brings not only their nationality to the classroom, but a personal goal that drives them to spend multiple nights a week in a classroom learning a foreign language: to get admitted to an American master’s program, to further develop as a university professor, to become an international flight attendant, to improve their customer service, to become a better salesperson.
I have often thought, since joining the group of Centro volunteer teachers two and a half years ago, how it is anyone could hold a negative view of immigrants. To me, the Lady Liberty maxim, “give me your tired, your poor…” becomes “give me your driven, your tireless, your inspiring…” when you spend even one night among this group of students. To sit among them as a teacher is to be amazed at the lengths people will go to improve their circumstances, the holidays spent away from family, the years reacquiring degrees they already have, and the hours spent on the subway commuting in from the outer boroughs. One student, Luis, in my first semester in 2017, spent his nights painting apartments and his days on construction sites. Yes, you heard that correctly – he spent his nights painting instead of sleeping. You might think that he wore his work ethic like a badge on his sleeve, but I didn’t learn about his second job until the end of the semester, when another student had a question about kitchen cabinetry, which Luis also happened to dabble in while the rest of us were sleeping. To Luis, it wasn’t his work that was a challenge, but his wife’s recent conversion to evangelical christianity, which was keeping them both out of bars and which was keeping Luis from going out dancing to his favorite Norteño music.
These type of conversations are commonplace at Centro. What starts as something innocuous – the question, “who here likes to dance?”, for example – becomes something much more special. “I love to dance,” says Mercedes, an Ecuadorian who cleans people’s apartments and wears cheetah print clothing. From there everyone chimes in, from Jorge, a Queens florist who invites me to stay with his son if I ever visit Bogotá and who loves to dance Flamenco with his wife, to Yelena, an Uzbek woman living in New York while her son attends Columbia University. Even Hamid, a Lebanese man working in a Turkish kebab restaurant, dances, and before we know it everyone is playing their traditional music on their smartphones. The only ones hesitant to speak up are myself and Carlos, another Colombian who is trying to become a personal trainer, and while Carlos’ excuse is his overt masculinity, mine is just an absence of dancing in my life. I feel jealous of my students, who all seem to have so much fun in their home countries. “What would I miss about the United States,” I think, “would I miss having fun?”
The hardest part about Centro is how transitive it all is. People’s lives change, and as a result Centro is hardly ever a constant for too long. With two and a half years of tenure, I have become one of the more veteran presences at the organization, and with each new semester comes another round of goodbyes, both to students and volunteers. It’s an interesting problem to have: on the one hand, being happy for your students and their progress, for their new job that keeps them from attending classes or their graduation into a more robust, intensive English course, and on the other being sad to see them go, to lose the conversations about cuisine, and cultural differences, and politics.
What makes Centro possible is its abundance of hope. It’s our students’ willingness to respond to a flyer, or to a Facebook post, and show up at a random location in the city, after a long day of work, to learn a new language. It’s our volunteers putting up with spotty resources, limited oversight and no WiFi. It’s Deyanira asking “should I say ‘what do you like?’ or ‘what would you like?’ to my customers at Juice Press?”, and Cristian waiting excitedly to see his first winter snow. It’s a student’s ability to laugh at themselves when they mix up kitchen and chicken, or when they accidentally say they love to eat dog instead of duck. It’s Peggy returning to volunteer year after year and never losing an ounce of enthusiasm or faith in the importance of what she’s doing.
The nature of such an organization is that it will never seem perfect. With no full-time staff or permanent location, it is difficult for us to strategize for the upcoming semester and to stay organized. We charge just enough to break even each semester, so investments in equipment, events and celebrations are few and far between. In essence, we are scrappy, and sometimes it shows a bit more than we would like – sometimes we have too few photocopies, a malfunctioning Bluetooth speaker, stale pretzels.
Luckily for us, our students largely appreciate our scrappiness. Riding the subway home with one student in particular, Lucia, I asked whether she had enjoyed her semester with us. “Yes, I loved it,” she replied. “Sometimes it is weird because the class is unstructured, but it is so much fun. And we learn what we need to speak English.” That sentiment has echoed throughout other informal “exit interviews” that my colleagues and I have had with our students. Many applaud the school’s focus on the practical uses of language, on the classes we spend writing professional emails, or pretending to order food in restaurants. Often our students seem to appreciate the relative lack of pure grammar instruction and structured curriculum; we don’t so much move from point A to Z as we do zig zag back and forth between our students’ needs. In a class full of Hispanics, we teach the difference between “make” and “do”, something that might be omitted altogether in a class of Eastern Europeans. And when that somewhat patchwork approach doesn’t work, when a student comes to Centro with a more traditional idea of language learning, we are happy to point them in the direction of other courses they can take.
If anything, what we need “more” of is simply a continuation of our existing pipeline of students and volunteers, and luckily for us there is never a shortage of either in New York. Every semester, when we take stock as a board of our recruitment efforts, and of the gaps we have in our teaching staff, we seem to forget this, only to find on Day 1 a plethora of new students and hopeful volunteers who want to be part of what we’re doing. I often wonder whether the simple act of getting together in classrooms, the groups of twelve, ten, eight, sometimes even four of us that sit together to learn a language, would be enough to keep students coming back for more. It typically is, after all, the side conversations and distractions that yield the most powerful results, and it’s everyone’s natural curiosity that drives those, instead of any curriculum.
So if you are in any way interested in teaching English, or Spanish, or helping us to sustain Centro in any way (and we’re constantly being shown new ways we can improve), please let us know. Reach out to [email protected] or find us at www.centronyc.org and tell us how you would like to help. We are open to suggestions and are always looking to grow our special community in new ways.