An author, poet and Regents professor at ASU shared his personal experiences involving cultural connections and the use of language at the ASU Downtown campus’s Center for Community Development and Civil Rights Thursday.
Alberto Álvaro Ríos presented “Amexica: Tales of the Fourth World,” titled after a play on which he and ASU Faculty Associate James E. Garcia are collaborating. The play draws off Ríos’ experiences and reflects on the cultural significance of a language.
“The dictionary is not where you learn a language,” Ríos said. “You’ve got to live and learn a language through its culture.”
Ríos grew up in Nogales, Mexico, speaking a mix of Spanish and Yuki, a mostly extinct Indigenous American language. As an elementary student in the first grade, Ríos was required to learn English.
“Everyone meant well, but there was one thing,” Ríos said. “When I got to first grade, the first thing the teacher said to us was, ‘You cannot speak Spanish. If you do, we are going to swat you.’”
At the time, Ríos was just a child, and he was excited to learn and play with the toys in the classroom.
“As a kid, no one cared,” Ríos said. “All we wanted were the toys and clay. As first graders, we wanted the things that were there. The teacher said we could have them, but we couldn’t do certain things or we would get hit in the process. We were hit for speaking a language that sustained us and brought us life.”
Ríos said the people during his generation had a problem with accepting languages and did not know how to fix that problem.
“It was like riding a linguistic bicycle,” Ríos said. “If you learned English you found balance and were good. If you were to learn and speak Spanish, you would lean over, fall and get hurt.”
By the end of elementary school, Ríos believed he could not speak Spanish anymore. It was not until he began college that he relearned his attitudes and feelings about speaking Spanish.
Ríos said there is a difference between English and other languages. He referred to languages such as Spanish and French as romance languages because they give things genders, whereas the English language does not.
Giving a word a gender is romantic and sexual, Ríos said, and gives that language a “spark.”
“This is where education fails us,” Ríos said. “The solution of the mind is to take one good class or read one good book and you will learn Spanish. This is not true; you must learn the dangers of the language with your mind and body.”
Ríos believes that the acceptance of languages is just one part of the problem in today’s society and that the borders that divide countries and people should be what join us together, not what keep us apart.
Patricia Bonn, executive assistant at the Center for Community Development and Civil Rights, admired Ríos’ outlook on language.
“What he has to say is very profound,” Bonn said. “Looking for reasons to stay apart when we should be looking for reasons to stay together is something a language can overcome.”
Ríos said he and Garcia hope their play further explores languages and issues similar to the ones Ríos endured in Nogales as a child.
“I hope to evoke a human response and not a political response,” Ríos said. “People live real lives there, they aren’t cut outs. It’s a real place and a real life and I would love for the play to speak to that notion.”
Alejandro Perilla, director of the Center for Community Development and Civil Rights, believes Ríos’ message is one that many people are familiar with.
“I could really relate to what he said, and I think that speaks to the universal nature of what he was talking about,” Perilla said. “We are all humans, and we need to communicate together rather than as separate individuals.”
Contact the reporter at rlcohen2@asu.edu
