Pampas Style of Learning Down USC Way

9:25 a.m.

Here they come, as on nearly every Saturday morning, dozens of cars and vans driven by cultural need and pride, streaming through the gates of the USC campus, to unload their precious cargo--the students of La Escuela Argentina de Los Angeles.

They’re here to pursue an academic program conducted entirely in Spanish by this unusual nonprofit organization, which is both recognized by the state of California and by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Argentina. While other kids are watching Saturday morning cartoons, getting ready to play ball, or blissfully enjoying a few extra hours of sleep, these bright-eyed kids--white, brown, black, Latino, Asian and Anglo, of many origins and nationalities--are dressed in their blue and white uniforms, and are lugging their books, backpacks and lunches, setting out for what amounts to a sixth day of school.

It’s a school with a difference, of course--all instruction is in Spanish, and these kids are learning the curriculum of an Argentine school. It’s as though they have been magically transported to somewhere down Argentina way, to the land of the gauchos, pampas and hot mate tea, a subversive notion in these anti-bilingual times, and the kids seem to enjoy knowing they are at the forefront of a cultural movement. But still, it is Saturday, and, boy, going to that practice sure would be good . . . or another round of “Scooby Doo” . . . or just kicking it in bed . . .

“We try for them to become bilingual and bicultural,” says Edgardo Spik, one of the school’s administrators, speaking in a borrowed classroom in the university’s Von KleinSmid Center, where La Escuela holds its classes. With an enrollment of 130 students and an average student-teacher ratio of 10 to 1, the school takes children from preschool through high school and follows the curriculum mandated by Argentine law. Upon graduation, students are considered to have graduated from an Argentine high school and can apply for admission to universities throughout Latin America and Spain. Though Escuela teachers have, as a minimum, a certified teaching degree from Argentina, many also have the California equivalent.

“We concentrate on the humanities,” adds Spik, speaking in the peculiarly cadenced accent of Buenos Aires. “We don’t study science, since science is studied in English in their other schools. Fifty percent of the time is devoted to language, and the rest to geography, history, politics, sociology, philosophy.”

9:35 a.m.

Most of the students are now in their classrooms, although a few will continue to trickle in for the next half an hour.

“We know that coming here on Saturday morning is a hardship for the students and the parents,” says Elsa Bonini, La Escuela’s director. “But they come because it’s very important for them. We had a doctor who drove his children every weekend from south Orange County. It took him two hours to get here and longer to get back, of course.”

The hallway’s once-barren concrete walls have been adorned with posters, prints and symbols of native culture--drawings of 19th century heroes Gen. San Martin and President Domingo Sarmiento, the baby blue-and-white-striped flag of Argentina. At Maria Nella Hermosilla’s first-grade class, the room is alive with the sound of 6- and 7-year-olds chattering away in Spanish as they color and cut out figures. Incongruously, three older kids sit at the far end of the room--they are new students, ages 11 and 12, who speak no Spanish.

“You learn stuff and it helps,” says Shariah Barendi, a 12-year-old of Iranian descent who speaks Persian and English. “In the Californian population, Spanish people are growing more and more, so I think it’s helpful to communicate with them.”

Sitting next to him, Danae Ellison, 11, is also a fan of the school, even if she does miss soccer practice. “It’s kind of hard, but it’s going to be good in the long run because I’m going to learn Spanish. It’s really important to me.”

“My mom and dad were born in a Spanish country,” says Victoria Calix, sitting next to Danae. “And they really want me to come here so I can communicate with my family so I can go visit them during Christmas time. I’m really enjoying it.”

In the second-floor hallway, Michelle Garcia, a single mother, sits at a school desk filling out a registration form for her two children, ages 9 and 5. A native of Guatemala, Garcia has lived in the U.S. for 18 years and works as a secretary. “I would like my children to learn Spanish as well as some Latin American culture. The more that children know, the more opportunities they have. Here they teach them the culture, while in other schools they just teach them the grammar.”

This particular mix of cultural pride and language skills has other parents singing the praises of the school. “If they come here, they get peer pressure that it’s kind of cool, you know, to speak this other language that about 170 million other people speak,” says Roberto Calix, whose five children attend La Escuela.

Adds Joseph Charney, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, “We just decided this would be a wonderful gift we could give our children living in California, to be able to allow them to freely speak with so many individuals they otherwise wouldn’t be able to speak to.”

Not all the families who send their children to La Escuela know the language. Kathy Wood, whose 5-year-old daughter Elena attends, says neither she nor her husband speaks any Spanish, and she feels it’s in their daughter’s best interest to learn the language. “It’s good for her, and she enjoys it too. She needs to do more than what’s in regular school.” But not speaking Spanish does present a problem for parents such as Wood. “Everything that gets sent home is in Spanish, so I need help--just to help her get her homework done.”

Parents such as Wood represent a challenge for the future of La Escuela. Now, at the preschool level, about half of the children speak no Spanish, so the school is taking extra steps to make them fully comfortable with the language before proceeding with the normal course of instruction.

“I tell the parents they need the 15 minutes a day to review their lesson whether they speak the language or not,” says Adriana Spik, wife of the director and a preschool teacher at La Escuela. “This is not a day-care center.”

10:45 a.m.

In one of the second-story classrooms, history professor Graciela Barila is leading a class discussion. The strapping teenagers, all seniors, have written essays on liberty and its meaning. This morning they will discuss ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the U.N. Charter and the difference between faith and doubt. Maria Lujan speaks eloquently of freedom and what it means to her.

“It means the right for me to do whatever I want as long as I don’t infringe on the rights of others,” she reads from her essay in perfect Spanish. “Without human rights, there is no liberty.”

Barila explains later, “The students went onto the Internet and downloaded articles from Spanish-language newspapers, such as La Opinion here in Los Angeles and El Clarin from Buenos Aires, to buttress their arguments. It’s something we do all the time.”

During recess, 17-year-old Lujan explains her attachment to La Escuela: “I’ve been coming here since I was 3, and right now our class, we’ve been together since kindergarten, we get that bond and it’s, like, man!”

Bonini has been the director of La Escuela since its inception. “The idea for the school came during a luncheon held by the Argentine consul general in 1983. No one else was doing this job,” she says. The school opened later that year on the campus of San Marino High School with 90 students. Three years later, Samuel Mark, then director of the undergraduate Hispanic program at USC, invited La Escuela to move to the campus.

“Our future ambassadors are going to come from here,” Bonini says, a firm tone in her voice, “because they know the culture and the language.”

“It’s a great project and certainly needed,” says Mark, now a USC assistant vice president and for several years a member of La Escuela’s board of directors. He adds that the school has no financial backing from the Argentine government and that USC’s support extends to only lending its classrooms. The school is supported only by the monthly tuition fee of $85 per student and the occasional fund-raiser thrown by the Parents Assn. “It’s a miracle the Escuela has lasted all these years. It’s truly a labor of love.”

*

OK . . . time for a personal note. One of those kids in La Escuela is mine. Veronica Abella, 8, has been regularly devoting her Saturday mornings to bicultural enrichment since she was 4. Which is to say I, too, think that having a bicultural bilingual education is an advantage in life.

I should know; that’s why I became a writer.

I was born in Cuba to parents of northern Spanish descent. When I was 10, we moved to New York, where my brothers and I attended public school. Like most foreign kids back then, I learned English the hard way--sink or swim--or as we call it today, total immersion.

I vividly recall my senior year at New York’s George Washington High School, when my English teacher deemed me practically illiterate because I disagreed with his interpretation of a Leonard Cohen song lyric and packed me off to a remedial English class. Not only did I score the highest grade that semester in the class--a 99--I also received a four-year Pulitzer scholarship to Columbia University. But then, I had a lifetime advantage, which kept me from dropping out of school or from indulging in the drug-induced bouts of self-destruction that afflict so many minorities. I knew who I was and where I came from.

And I was proud of it.

I knew that long before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the Spanish were already here, and that when Anglo-Saxon tribes men were still painting themselves blue and living in straw huts, my Latin forebears had built the greatest empire of the Western world. I also knew that Cervantes was every bit the equal of Shakespeare, if not greater, and that no nation or culture can claim superiority over another.

So this is what I also want my daughter to learn: that in a nation and state that at times xenophobically disparages the Spanish language and Latin American culture, she has much to be proud of. And that she should never be apologetic because her last name ends in a vowel or because her abuela in Miami has roast pork and black beans for Thanksgiving dinner instead of roast turkey and pumpkin pie. We are, all of us, Americans.

“I always tell parents, if we don’t know where we came from, we don’t know where we’re going,” says Adriana Spik. She says children must know “where their grandparents came from, and that mixture we all have, that’s what makes people great. Take what’s good from the Latino world and take the best from this land, which is so good and has given us so much.”

1:45 p.m.

All the Escuela students line up curbside in front of the Von KleinSmid Center, waiting to be picked up by their parents for the long haul home though busy Saturday afternoon traffic. Veronica climbs into our car, and, as always, I ask her how her day went.

“Fine,” she answers in Spanish and proceeds to tell me what great grades she got and how the teacher gave her a star for effort. And as I pull away, heading out to Figueroa, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I have another child, Nicolas, who’s turning 4 this month. Next year, he, too, will be going to La Escuela on Saturday mornings. Hopefully, they’ll cut me a break on the tuition.

*

Alex Abella is an author and journalist. His latest novel, “Final Acts,” was just released by Simon & Schuster.