Book Review for Con Respeto

Con Respeto is an excellent book by Gualalupa Valdes. Valdes traces the conflicting demands and expectations that are placed on immigrant Hispanic children as they interact with the white school culture. The challenges often migrant families emanating from
El Paso in Mexico who have come to the United States in search of better pastures are revealed through Con Respeto (Valdes, 1996). With a particular focus on the challenges that the young Hispanic children face as they go through the public school system in America, we get to grasp issues such as culture clash and environmental dialogs.
The plot for the book is set between 1983 and 1986 and revolves around Mexican families living close to the U.S. border. As the Hispanic families struggle to understand their new life in the United States, they are reminded of their cultural practices, and how they are different from their adopted country. The research contained in the book was conducted some 30 years ago, so it is important that we treat the evidence with circumspect to avoid making generalized conclusions.  The political, social and economic climate around the U.S. border town of El Paso was different then.  The Mexican families and their children participating in the study came to the U.S with different values and beliefs, and it takes a toll on both sides trying to appreciate each other.
A professor of Education at Stanford, Guadalupe Valdes has a distinguished career in Linguistics. Attached to the Center for Applied Linguistics, Prof. Valdes has researched extensively on the bilingualism of English-Spanish Latinos. She has focused most of her research on how migrant communities interact with different languages in a bilingual culture. Centrally focused on U.S. based Latino immigrants, Prof. Valdes is an icon in her field. In Con Respeto, Prof. Valdes follows the English habits of K3-English students together with their families (Good, Masewicz & Vogel, 2010).  She has written a host of other critically acclaimed books, including Learning and not Learning English, Expanding Definitions of Giftedness as well as Bilingualism and Testing.
 She has been passionately involved in maintaining the literary heritage of many a minority culture, especially during the 1970s (Lee & Bowen, 2006). In the book, we are exposed to the contrasting philosophies of survival used by most Mexican families. In the Mexican experience, most large families tend to look for cheap labor with which to support their families. Since the concept of La Familia is sacred in Mexico and other Hispanic communities, families end up stretching themselves working to send money home. This almost becomes unviable in the U.S. since the economics do not just add up.
As the migrant families come to realize, their concept of what constitutes success is quite different from the White idea of “success.” From the book, we learn of the cultural drift that the Mexican kids experienced as they blend in U.S. society. Most of them were clearly intrigued by the process involved in decision making in schools. Some kids could not comprehend the rationale behind certain policies as well as understand the institutional details of American life. Things such as acquiring a driver’s license, American voting procedures and immigration red tape all seemed new to the Mexicans. The processes worked in a different manner back in Mexico, and this was enough to capture the attention of the students.
The kids who participated in the study expressed some surprise with the way in which things were done in U.S. public schools. In the American school culture, it is normal for teachers to reward pupils with praise whenever they get something right, and vice versa (Valdés, 1996). The culture in Mexico did not place a lot of premium on this. As the kids interact more and more with the system, they are exposed to more practices that are different from their native culture. Some of the parent who participated in the survey revealed that they did not expect the U.S. public schools to offer services that went above and beyond what was provided in the Mexican education system (Valdes, 1996). Other parents expressed a lack of knowledge in effective communication with education personnel. The parents were exposed to a lot of information about school programs such as scholarships and talent camps (Pohan, 1996). Such knowledge was not out rightly forthcoming, and the parents had to learn of it as they got familiarized with the U.S learning environment (Lee & Bowen, 2006).
All these data point to the fact that there is need to bridge gaps between cultures that are diverse and adrift if we are to successfully a community into a strange culture. The case may be that our cultural experiences are different and the way we appreciate phenomenon is ultimately affected by cultural biases. To redress this, we must seek out and understand the cultural nuances of people before purporting to incorporate their lifestyle into the dominant culture (Good, Masewicz & Vogel, 2010). It is only by looking at these ethnographic biases that we can appreciate how another culture may flourish in a new place. As Con Respeto demonstrates, it takes time to understand and appreciate these cultural nuances. Only by successfully learning another culture in detail will immigrant families have a chance to experience success in their new domiciles.



References
Good, M. E., Masewicz, S., & Vogel, L. (2010). Latino English language learners: Bridging achievement and cultural gaps between schools and families. Journal of Latinos and Education, 9(4), 321-339.
Lee, J. S., & Bowen, N. K. (2006). Parent involvement, cultural capital, and the achievement gap among elementary school children. American Educational Research Journal, 43(2), 193-218.
Pohan, C. A. (1996). Preservice teachers' beliefs about diversity: Uncovering factors leading to multicultural responsiveness. Equity and Excellence in Education, 29(3), 62-69.
Valdés, G. (1996). Con respeto: Bridging the distances between culturally diverse families and schools. New York: Teachers College Press.