Talking Up English First

SANTA ANA —  Gloria Matta Tuchman, the poster teacher for the English-first movement in California, jokes that she was born on neither the right side nor the wrong side of the proverbial tracks.

As an infant, the story goes, Matta Tuchman often traveled in a boxcar while her father worked as a laborer on a train crew in southwest Texas. Hence her punch line: “I was born on the tracks.”

Her humor has a point besides self-deprecation. Seeking to win Latinos to her cause--or at least blunt their opposition--the Santa Ana elementary school teacher is saying: I am one of you.

Along with Ron K. Unz, the maverick multimillionaire Republican from the Silicon Valley, she is spearheading the drive for a June 1988 ballot measure that would require instruction in English for California’s 1.4 million children who are not fluent in the language. In effect, it would dismantle bilingual education.

As the campaign gains national attention, Matta Tuchman has quickly become known as the quotable Mexican American teacher who prescribes English, English and more English for a school district where most children grow up speaking Spanish.

Matta Tuchman thus plays much the same role in the “English for the Children” initiative as Ward Connerly, the African American regent of the University of California, played while championing the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. For bilingual education in California, where most students who aren’t fluent in English come from Spanish-speaking families, is clearly identified as a Latino political issue--and Matta Tuchman is on the other side from most Latino leaders.

Like Connerly, she must endure barbs that she is a “fanatic” selling out her people, in her case by exploiting racial and ethnic tensions that blossomed in the state with 1994’s anti-illegal immigrant initiative, Proposition 187, and continued with Proposition 209.

“For Latinos, we see this as three in a row,” said Theresa Bustillos, of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which opposes the anti-bilingual education initiative. “You can’t help but think this is going to continue to divide the state.”

But to Unz, who is underwriting the initiative and recruited Matta Tuchman as a co-sponsor, his fellow Republican’s background is a major plus. While he might be an easy target for critics as a rich white businessman, it’s harder for them to attack a Latina teacher with three decades in the classroom.

“Gloria is the best possible spokesperson for something like this,” Unz said. “Her ethnicity, her gender, her geographical location because she’s from Southern California--all of those things play an important role.”

Matta Tuchman understands that role. “We get blasted all the time. It hasn’t been easy,” she said. “But I have given people courage to stand up.” She insists that “more and more” Latinos are coming to her side.

Now 55, Matta Tuchman was born in Pecos, Texas, to parents who earned a living as migrant laborers and later started a restaurant. She says she learned early about discrimination, seeing how Mexicans and Mexican Americans were shut out of the best schools, the best restaurants and the public swimming pool.

Her parents, though native Spanish speakers, insisted on speaking English with her as she was growing up, she said, in part to help her avoid the discrimination they had endured. She had to pick up conversational Spanish from a grandmother--and recently has taken classes in Mexico to improve her fluency.

“I love being bilingual,” she said. “I think it’s a true asset.”

Backers of bilingual education say that many students who grew up without English need lessons in their own tongue while learning the nation’s dominant language. But opponents such as Matta Tuchman say that approach shunts students into a segregated track that fails to give them critical English skills.

Matta Tuchman said has never used Spanish textbooks or anything more than bits of oral Spanish in the classroom during her 30 years in the Santa Ana Unified School District--despite always asking for students who have the least background in English.

She teaches them through “sheltered immersion,” meaning that the students are given visual or other aids to help with English words they don’t know--for instance, pictures of coins in a math lesson or pictures of mountains in a geography lesson. She relishes showing visitors how soon her students learn to read English that way.

“What I’m saying is true,” she concludes. “I have not been lying.”

In 1985, she and colleagues at Taft Elementary School refused a principal’s order to convert to a bilingual format. Spurred in part by Matta Tuchman, parents mobilized to keep the school as is. The teacher stayed, and the principal left.

“He spun and crashed and burned,” said Bill Hart, Taft’s principal for the past eight years.

Matta Tuchman stumped relentlessly against bilingual education from 1985 to 1994 as a school board member in the Tustin Unified School District. One political opponent, Tustin trustee Jonathan Abelove, recalled his surprise when she showed up on his doorstep, smiling, to hand him a stack of anti-bilingual documents on Mother’s Day 1994.

That year, she also was a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, finishing fifth in a field of 12.

Though widely identified as an “English only” advocate, Matta Tuchman dislikes that label because of the connotation that “you cannot speak any other language than English.” Instead, she calls herself an advocate for “literacy.” In English, of course.

Such positions have earned her enemies in Santa Ana, where bilingual education is a cornerstone of school policy. Officials there have cringed when Matta Tuchman has given interviews on her campus while showing off her English-reading students.

“She basically smears our district and all that we’re trying to do,” said Santa Ana schools trustee Audrey Yamagata-Noji. “I’m not saying bilingual education is perfect the way we’re doing it. But there are a lot of challenges.”

With school out for the summer, Matta Tuchman receives visitors these days at her Lemon Heights home in the foothills overlooking Santa Ana and Tustin. It’s a reminder that, whatever side of the tracks she came from, she’s definitely on the upscale side now.

Matta Tuchman and her husband built the 4,500-square-foot house in 1975. There is a billiard table in the living room and a basketball court in the backyard.

Her husband, Terry Tuchman, is an elementary school principal in the Mountain View School District in El Monte. He says he shares his wife’s views on teaching English. But unlike his wife, he sticks to district policy: His school offers bilingual classes.