Education: A 400-Word Start

Until he was 14, squat, jolly, Texas-born Felix Tijerina could not speak a word of English. He was like thousands of other Mexican-American children: his mother taught him to read and write in Spanish only. And had he gone to school, he might still not have learned English. At the time (1920), Texas segregated Mexican-American schoolchildren on the basis of language—a discrimination usually as enduring as skin color. According to the odds, Felix seemed doomed to stagnate behind the language-discrimination barrier for the rest of his life.

Felix was made of sterner stuff. When he went to work as a restaurant bus boy in Houston, he started with the word “catchup,” painfully taught himself to speak, read and write excellent English. Today, at 54, Felix Tijerina owns a chain of thriving Texas restaurants, is president of the nationwide League of United Latin American Citizens. But civic-minded Restaurateur Tijerina has not stopped there. In his spare time, busy as a platoon of pedagogues, he has launched an assault on the language barrier. By last week Tijerina had worked out a method that may spread among Spanish-speaking children throughout the nation.

Pointing the Finger. Texas has long since dropped separate schools for Mexican-American students. But this is no full solution. When Tijerina tackled the problem two years ago, he discovered that as many as 200,000 Texas five-year-olds still could not speak English. The inevitable result: the children enter first grade normally at six, make no headway in school, and eventually drop out. Tijerina found that in five Texas counties alone, where the population is 90% Mexican-American, the state spent $3,000,000 a year to support dependent children.

Tijerina pointed the finger squarely at his own people, who refuse to speak English at home: “When a Latin American boy gets to the third grade, after failing the first and second a couple of times, he finds that he’s eleven and the other kids are eight. He rationalizes by saying his skin is darker and that’s why he’s being failed. He doesn’t blame Daddy and Mother. He doesn’t ask why they didn’t teach him English. He quits school and blames you, because your skin is lighter.”

In 1957, with his own money, Tijerina launched two tuition-free “Little Schools of 400” in the neighboring towns of Ganado and Edna near Houston. Purpose: to teach 400 words of basic English to 42 five-year-olds, all of whom spoke Spanish only. After 3½ months the “graduates” entered first grade in the town’s public schools—where more than half the Mexican-American first-graders had failed the year before—and all passed with flying colors.

Paying a Little Back. Tijerina soon opened nine more schools, got strong support from Texas Governor Price Daniel, who appointed him to a top-level committee studying the state’s educational needs. This spring, of dozens of appropriations urged by the committee, the only one passed by the frugal state legislature was a $1,300,000 bill to set up Tijerina-style schools throughout Texas. Reason: hundreds of five-year-olds have now had the Tijerina treatment, and less than 5% have flunked the first grade.

By last week 70 Texas communities were ready to start Tijerina schools this fall, in a grand attack aimed at smashing the language barrier forever. Already Latin Americans are trying to launch similar schools in New York City, Buffalo, and Elizabeth, NJ. Last week Tijerina himself was hard at work stumping Texas to sell Mexican parents on the scheme, broadcasting urgent appeals in Spanish on 38 radio stations. Good Citizen Tijerina will not say how much of his own money he has spent so far: “I’m just paying a little back from what the people of the community have done for me.”