When it comes to your experiences with language (speaking and listening) and literacy (reading and writing), what specific moments in your life can you recall that are particularly vivid or that emerge as being significant to you? Yes, it could be an example from your earliest memories of learning to speak, read, and write (in school or elsewhere), but it doesn’t have to be. It could be a memorable encounter—a moment of tension, confusion, or triumph. It could be about experiences developing additional dialects/languages and advanced literacies (i.e., learning to speak/write in different peer groups, at school, at work, with family, online, in different locations across the nation or world, etc. Please select 3 moments to describe. Then, explain why each is interesting or significant.
| The first moment and space where I connect my memory with the exercise-reading habit, I establish it in my early childhood years. I couldn’t specify how old I was, but it was probably around 4 to 6 years old. My houses, where I grew up with my family and later my own, have always had a special space for books. I cannot distinguish a space without them. But not only because of the almost ritualistic exercise and care of “building a library”, building in terms of knowing “what you read” and “who you read to”, those two questions-answers say so much about who one is, but also reading in terms of the habit of reading the newspaper daily, reading magazines, reading opinion articles. I always saw my dad doing that. My mother is 74 years old and she checks the newspaper daily. |
| A second moment that I register in my background memory, looking it in terms of long duration, is the beginning of my years of primary school. I was educated in a private Salesian School, of quite good quality, considering the possibilities of Chile at the end of the 70’s. I would dare to say that I value study, learning and reading, for the value in itself that this human activity implies and as a result of having been exposed and motivated by a family and school environment that valued knowledge in itself, know, discuss, reflect, talk. I particularly remember my first teacher, in first or second grade, who definitively marked my assessment of knowledge, in terms of the assessment of study, as a sublime human attitude. Then many other teachers will come who did nothing but complement that idea, in HS as in college. I strongly defend the need for good learning in the first years of life, because, if as a society we achieve that, we obtain much better citizens, much better people. |
| A third moment that I would choose, among many other possibilities, is the reading of my first book. I read independently, not just listening to what others read to me. I was probably between 9 and 11 years old, El Nino que Enloquecio de Amor, which is a short novel, writer by Chilean novelist Eduardo Barrios. The book was first published in 1917. It is a simple story, for any teenager. There I had, I think, that notion, without theorizing that the book talks with whoever reads it. It is rewritten, a thousand times. It is like looking at a work of art and always getting fresh reflections. After that book, I have read many more. |
What specific materials or artifacts (i.e., objects, writing, learning materials, pictures, video recordings, etc.) from your past can you locate/recall and that in some way represent a meaningful moment in your reading/writing development? This can be something like a journal or book, but also anything at all (e.g., a toy, piece of furniture, cereal box, art supplies, etc.) What memories and feelings can you extract from these examples you’ve gathered/recalled? Explain.
| For me, in a categorical way, they have been diaries of life and journals. I keep them to this day. All of them, I have traveled with them to different parts of the world and for many years, until recently, I did the exercise of writing regularly. I am always with some journals in my handbag. I have memories of them forever, being still very small, I wrote, I wrote every day. I thought writing, I dreamed, I invented. For me it has always been a good therapy for rest and reflection, for respite. I have the image of having been writing in very difficult moments and also in others, just to leave the record of good moments. |
For better or worse, who and what impacted how, when, and why you developed your languages and literacies? Who in your family, at school, among your peer group, or in your community played a part? How did your particular situation or experience shape your literacy? That is, what sorts of issues, experiences, organizations, or life circumstances played a part? What kinds of languages and literacies did you gain from those people and your particular situation? How? Why? Explain.
| I think I have already touched on the question in the first part of question one. I do not have bad experiences in the process, development and consolidation of my writing and communication process and the people who at an early age, had the greatest influence on the cultivation of this practice as well as the entire learning process, was in the first place, my family direct. |
In what ways do you see your language, reading, and writing capabilities as having social consequences or impacting your life circumstances—that is, what advantages did/do you have and what disadvantages did/do you face as a result of your language and literacy learning?
| Very briefly, I could never have been the person that I am, without the reading that I had access to from a very young age and throughout my life. Impossible to imagine it. I grew up with a clear notion of the importance of books, of the value of taking care of them and reading them, talk about them. In my early adulthood I understood that a good part of life was reflected in what one could think and transmit. I have developed my entire life in that professional and personal world. |
How might your experience with language and literacy connect to larger social realities (e.g., of your life, family, generation, gender, race, culture, nation, geographic location, historical moment, etc.)?
| When I finished HS in Chile, I went to college to study Literature, in the middle of a violent and repressive military dictatorship, finishing Literary, continue with History, teaching young people who were entering college. I worked in spaces of political organizations, human rights organizations and Christians for Socialism, for many years, to contribute to the end of the dictatorship. Once democracy arrived, I worked for 15 years with a group of lawyers residing in Brazil and NYC who defended foreign detainees, lacking resources and legitimate defense. My role was principally, to be a connection between them and their families and to ensure that their processes were properly addressed in the relevant courts. Now, I went back to college to finish my bachelor’s degree in History. With absolute certainty, if it weren’t the result of the environment and characteristics in which I grew up, my life options would have been different. |
