Carlos Ovando

Carlos J. Ovando is Professor in the School of
Transborder  Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, at
Arizona State University. He is also the Faculty Honors
Advisor. He received his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and
International Comparative Education from Indiana University.  A
former high school Spanish teacher, his research, teaching, and
service focus on factors that contribute to the academic achievement
of language minority students and ethnically diverse groups. His most
recent research focuses on south-to-south international migration in
Central America, school reform in Mexico, English as world language in
Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru, the limits and possibilities of doing
qualitative research in non-western sociocultural and linguistic
contexts.  He has served as guest editor of two special issues of
Educational Research Quarterly, and contributed to the
first and second editions of the Handbook of Research on
Multicultural Education.  He has also published in the
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Educational
Researcher, Peabody Journal of Education, Bilingual
Research Journal, Phi Delta Kappan, Educational
Leadership, Kappan Delta Pi Record, World Yearbook
2003:  Language Education, Race, Ethnicity, and
Education , the Harvard Educational Review, and the
Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education (Sage, 2008).  His
books include: (with Mary Carol Combs and Virginia P. Collier)
Bilingual and ESL Classrooms:  Teaching in Multicultural
Contexts, 4th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2006); (with Peter
McLaren) The Politics of Multiculturalism and Bilingual
Education:  Teachers and Students Caught in the Cross Fire
(McGraw-Hill, 2000) and (with Colleen Larson) The Color of
Bureaucracy:  The Politics of Equity in Multicultural School
Communities (Thompson/Wadsworth, 2001).

During his sabbatical leave during the Fall of 2007, he continued a
qualitative research investigation on Nicaraguan economic refugees
that he conducted in Costa Rica in 1998.  The focus of that
investigation was the socio-cultural and educational issues faced by
undocumented Nicaraguan students in rural middle schools in Costa
Rica.  He also conducted a follow-up qualitative study in the
states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, Mexico, with two cohorts of
indigenous leaders who participated in the Cooperative Association of
States for Scholarships (CASS) at Arizona State University during
years 2005 and 2006.  This study sought to gauge the approximate
costs and benefits of the program for the students’ personal and
professional lives vis-à-vis the stated objectives of the CASS
grant funded by USAID. 

In partnership with the Paulo Freire Institute at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Professor Ovando is currently involved
with a research initiative examining the impact that globalization is
having on educational reform in P-K-12 public schools, universities,
and adult education systems in selected countries in Latin America,
North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. To date, the 19
participating nations are: Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Canada, China,
Egypt, Finland, France, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico,
Mozambique, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United States.

Sponsored by the Fulbright Commission, the U.S. Embassy, and the
Peruvian Ministry of Education, in 2010 Professor Ovando served 
as a consultant to Peru on the topic of English as a world
language.  In 2006 he served as a consultant to the U.S. Embassy
in Mexico and the Secretaría de Educación Pública
(SEP) in a Mexico/United States initiative promoting the acquisition
of English from pre-school to the high school level. To date, 26 of
the 32 states in Mexico have signed agreements to emphasize the
teaching of English as an additional language P-K-12 in the public schools.

Prof. Ovando is currently engaged in a study involving Mexican-origin
families and their children who have recently returned to Mexico from
the United States because of draconian anti-undocumented legislation
(cf. SB 1070 in Arizona) and the prevailing economic crisis in the
United States. The objective of the study is to examine the societal
and schooling dynamics associated with this reverse migration into
Mexican society and the educational system.

Professor Ovando has given presentations in Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba,
Egypt, England, Guam, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Netherlands,
Perú, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, and
the United States.  He has been a professor of Education at
Indiana University at Bloomington, Oregon State University, the
University of Alaska at Anchorage, and the University of Southern
California.  He has also been a visiting scholar at the
Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (Instituto de Estudios
Latinoamericanos) and the University of Washington, Seattle.  He
has worked with Chicanos, Mexican Nationals, Athabascan Indians, Asian
Americans, Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Southwestern Indians,
Chamorros, Costa Ricans, and Nicaraguans.  He is the recipient of
two Teaching Excellence Recognition Awards from the School of
Education at Indiana University.  He is the recipient of the 2010
Distinguished Latino Alumni Award from Indiana University. He has
served as a Discipline Peer Review Committee member for the Fulbright
Specialists Program as well as on the selection committee for the
Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.  He is a former member of the
Editorial Boards of the American Educational Research Journal
(AERJ), Bilingual Research Journal (BRJ),  and The
International Multilingual Research Journal (IMRJ). Born in
Nicaragua, Carlos Ovando immigrated to the United States in his pre
teen years and has therefore experienced first-hand many of the
academic, sociocultural, and emotional issues that confront language
minority students in the United States.  He is a naturalized
citizen of the United States.  In sum, Professor Ovando research,
teaching and service intersect language policy, educational
leadership, culture, curriculum and instruction, and increasingly
south to south migration in the global village.

CARLOS’ STORY:

The oldest of nine children, I immigrated to Corpus Christi, Texas,
from Nicaragua with my family in 1955, after a three-year residency in
Guatemala and about a year in Saltillo, Mexico. There, my paternal
grandmother, a younger brother and sister, and I waited for my father,
who had left us behind while he and another part of his family
preceded us to the United States. As for many other immigrants from
Latin America, Mexico for us was a stepping-stone to the richer and
freer United States. According to my father, the primary reason for
our move was freedom of religion and better economic and social
conditions for the family. In other words, necessity and opportunity
were the push-and-pull forces that propelled us to the United States.

As a member of this family, I not only shared the primary cultural
and linguistic patterns from Nicaragua, but also had values from both
the Catholic and Protestant faiths. Nicaraguan language, food, and
other cultural patterns continued for many years to dominate the
socialization practices in my home. I did not, however, experience a
deliberate push from my parents to achieve academically in my new
country. For example, I do not recall my parents ever asking to see my
report cards or expressing interest in visiting my school to talk to
my teachers about which classes I should take or to find out how I was
doing in my classes. As is the case with many other newly arrived
immigrants, it may be that while my parents were tacitly interested in
my academic well-being, they did not know how or were apprehensive to
enter the unfamiliar American school. It could also be that because
they were so involved in their own economic, linguistic, emotional,
and economic survival, they entrusted their children’s academic
and peer socialization to school personnel—los maestros son los
padres de los estudiantes afuera del hogar/teachers serve as in loco
parentis (Larson & Ovando, 2001).

In those years, schooling practices in south Texas for language
minority students like myself were of the sink-or-swim variety.
Although already about 14 years old, I was placed in the sixth grade
upon arrival in Texas. Unable to make sense of what was going on in
the classroom that year, I was retained. I also received my first
paddling from the school principal, Mr. Hamshire, for speaking Spanish
to an Anglo female student sitting next to me. While I was beginning
to pick up English for social purposes after a few months of being
exposed to it, my expressive skills were virtually nonexistent.
Moreover, I was having a great deal of difficulty mastering the more
abstract academic English that is necessary to do well in
school—a process that some second-language acquisition
researchers claim may take up to seven years in optimally supportive
sociolinguistic and schooling contexts (Cummins, 2000).

Such troublesome initial contact with the U.S. cultural experience in
the schools made me question who I was and why we had left the
cultural and linguistic safety of Nicaragua and Latin America for a
strange and at times cold and hostile society. Why was I punished for
speaking Spanish on school grounds? Why did many of my Mexican
American schoolmates seem ashamed of speaking Spanish or reluctant to
do so? Why did many such students only speak English? Why did Mexican
Americans, African Americans, and European Americans (commonly
referred to as Anglos in south Texas) live in segregated neighborhoods
and attend segregated schools? Why were there separate drinking
fountains for “Coloreds” and “Whites,” and
which fountain should I use? Was I stupid for not appropriating the
English language quickly enough to keep up with my classmates? Why was
I in classes with students who were much younger and more immature
than I was? Oh, how I longed to show my teachers and classmates what I
knew in Spanish in those days! I wish I could have been able to answer
my teacher’s questions in class to let my classmates know that I
was intelligent and liked class discussions and ideas.

Feeling alone in a strange world, having flunked sixth grade, I
withdrew into a shell and began to entertain self-doubt about my
intellectual abilities and my Latin American heritage. Slowly,
however, I rediscovered within myself the primary cultural,
linguistic, cognitive, and athletic gifts that I had brought with me
to the United States. I remember reassuring myself that I had once
been an able student who had many friends and was good in sports. As I
came to grips with who I was in this new sociocultural and linguistic
reality, a big change occurred when my family moved from south Texas
to Defiance, Ohio, about two years after entering the United States.
In the new setting, suddenly the Spanish sounds and Latin American
cultural patterns so ubiquitous in south Texas took a backseat to the
English and European American norms of northern Ohio. Now I had no
choice but to choose my friends from the English-speaking world, and I
felt simultaneously afraid and excited.

Increasingly, I saw myself becoming integrated socially,
academically, and linguistically into another world that I did not
fully understand but which pulled me to its epicenter. I made the
varsity baseball team as a high school freshman in a competitive
sports program, and it felt good to be recognized for doing something
well. As it turned out, organized sports became a great peer equalizer
and a source of ego strength for me. Academically, however, most
teachers appeared color-blind and insensitive to my newcomer status to
the United States (see Nieto, 2004). I often felt invisible in the
school environment (Olsen, 1997).

My academic career took a different path when somebody in the
Mennonite church congregation saw me coming out of a pool hall and
told my father. Soon after that, in the hope of saving me from a life
of sin, my father sent me to a private Mennonite high school in
northern Indiana. There, I worked for my room and board, improved my
conversational skills in English, and learned important lessons from
the Mennonite community about the work ethic and about caring. One
very culturally and linguistically sensitive teacher at the Mennonite
school encouraged me to maintain and improve my Spanish, and this
encouragement eventually led to my receiving second place in a
statewide competition in Spanish. I subsequently received several
scholarship offers from colleges and universities, and suddenly I
envisioned myself in the world of ideas. I later majored in Spanish in
college, taught it at the high school level, and then went on to
receive a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, Latin American Studies,
and International Comparative Education from a major research
university in the Midwest.

THE PAST CATCHES UP WITH CARLOS: AN EPILOGUE

In the third edition of this book, my story ends with my having
received a Ph.D. from Indiana University. Unfortunately, I left out an
event in my life that has forced me to take stock of my cultural,
socioeconomic, and linguistic identities: in 1992, while on a visit to
Nicaragua to speak to the Ministry of Education, I stumbled onto the
whereabouts of my mother, whom I had not seen in more than three
decades.(I lost track of my mother because she and my separated when I
was little. I later learned in the United States that the common-law
relationship didn’t last because Mother wanted Dad to leave the
priesthood, marry her, adopt a secular life, and raise their three
children. Apparently, my father didn’t want to follow that path.
Following the separation, Dad and my abuelita/gFriday, September 22,
2006randmother Elena raised the three children, I being the eldest.)
Here is the story.

While participating at a TESOL meeting in Vancouver, British
Columbia, I received an unexpected phone call from my former Ph.D.
thesis director at Indiana University inviting me to go with him to
Managua. To further entice me, he assured me that I could address the
Nicaraguan Ministry of Education during the visit. I accepted the
invitation, and we left for Managua on Wednesday of the following week
via Houston, Texas, arriving at Augusto César Sandino
International Airport at about 8:30 pm the same day. There we were
greeted by a man who had been contracted to drive us around for the
next few days. On our way to the place where we would be staying, I
mentioned to him that I had not seen my mother for many years, that
there was a good chance that she might still be living in Nicaragua,
and that it would mean a lot to me if we could track her down during
this trip. My comments piqued his interest, and he asked me for her
name. I told him that her name was Marina Méndez.

The next day, as we were on our way to deliver a package to a
relative in Managua, our driver suddenly pulled the dilapidated and
dusty jeep to the side of the road, flagged down a truck driver going
in the opposite direction, and motioned for him to come over. Aware
that the trucker was familiar with many of Nicaragua's rural and urban
sectors, our driver asked him whether he knew where we could find the
Méndezes in Nicaragua. The truck driver paused and then
suggested that we drive to San Rafael del Sur, the town where my
father had started his career as a priest and where he fell in love
with my mother.

Filled with a sense of adventure and trepidation, the three of
us—the chauffeur, my ex-thesis advisor, and I—drove a
rented car on Saturday to San Rafael del Sur. There, with instructions
from the truck driver, we stopped at the plaza central/central plaza
to look for a butcher named Méndez who conceivably might be of
help in locating my mother. He was not there, but others gave us
directions to his wife’s residence. We drove to her house and
knocked on the door, and an attractive middle-aged woman came out
followed by her little daughter. I introduced myself and told her that
I was looking for relatives of my mother, Marina Méndez, who
might know her whereabouts. She smiled, went back into the house, and
then reemerged with a huge mango as a gift. She told us that her
daughter would take us to a close relative nearby who might have more
information about my mother. By this time we were being followed by a
large group of children, who seemed happy to have visitors in town.
Eventually we arrived at a hut with a dirt floor and no door. Inside
we were greeted by a grandmother figure, two younger females, and
several small barefooted children wearing T-shirts with English
sayings on them. Chickens, dogs, and small pigs wandered in and out.

I explained to the family that I was Carlos Ovando, eldest son of
Marina Méndez. The elderly woman said that we should go to the
pulpería/small grocery store near the church, where we would
find Lola, my mother’s sister-in-law, who had taken care of me
during my early childhood years. Feeling nervous, I told my companions
that I wanted to be the last person out of the car. Once inside, I
greeted the family, and when Lola saw me, she jumped out of her seat,
hugged me, and called me Chalito—my nickname as a child. After
recovering somewhat from the emotional episode, I asked her if she
knew anything about my mother. She told me that that my mother lived
in Brooklyn, New York, and that for the past several years she had
sent Christmas cards, which Lola kept in a safe place. She then asked
a granddaughter to bring the stack of dusty cards. I carefully
examined them, and discovered that the last card, dated Christmas
1988, had a return address in Brooklyn. I copied the address, hoping
to put a tracer on it after I returned to the United States the
following week. Suddenly, Lola suggested that I contact her son who
lived in Managua to see if he had seen my mother more recently, for
according to her, my mother sometimes visited her two sisters in
Managua without stopping in San Rafael del Sur. When I returned to
Managua that evening, I called Lola’s son, left a voice mail
indicating who I was, and asked him to please call me collect in the
United States if he had fresh information about my mother’s whereabouts.

Monday evening of the following week, while I was having dinner with
my family at my home in Bloomington, Indiana, the phone rang. I picked
it up, and a male voice said that Marina Méndez, a friend of
his family, wanted to speak with me. The moment I heard her voice, I
knew that she was my mother. We compared notes about our lives, and I
invited her to visit me in Bloomington shortly thereafter. It turned
out that she had arrived in Nicaragua from San José, Costa
Rica, to visit her two sisters the same day that I arrived there from
Houston, Texas. She was staying at this friend’s house in
Managua, where Lola’s son found her and told her that I was
looking for her. In fact, not only did we arrive in Nicaragua the same
day some thirty years later, but we discovered that our respective
flights from San José and Houston had arrived some forty
minutes apart.

For me, finding my mother has meant having to reexamine in a more
complex manner the essence of my personal and professional life. As I
continue to be a culture-bearer and a culture-maker, I must now factor
into my life surprising extended family kinship patterns and
socio-cultural realities. Life for me has come full circle—the
past has caught up with me.

Source:

Ovando, C.J., Combs, M.C., & Collier, V.P. (2006). Bilingual
and ESL classrooms: Teaching in multicultural contexts (4th
ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Linkedin |  Facebook