Cruz Medina's "Sanctuary"

Cruz Medina is an award-winning teacher-researcher and Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English department at Santa Clara University. He also serves as faculty with Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. Previously, Medina was an Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at Santa Clara University, and was also Pre-doctoral Fellow at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Medina applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sanctuary describes some of the specific challenges that migrant English language learners experience such as varying levels of literacy and linguistic abilities within the classes they have access to. These obstacles are compounded and often come as a result of few public resources and an ideology in the US that expects migrants to “learn the language” in spite of under resourced educational environments that contribute to perceptions of migrants as deficient or not working hard to learn English.

The quote below underscores how Indigeneity can be ignored when it comes to teaching English as another language:

At the Sanctuary 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women report speaking Mam as their first language. Teaching English at the Sanctuary, I considered my ability to speak Spanish and explain some of the workbook exercises in Spanish to students as something that made me an especially qualified volunteer; however, during those first several months, I fell victim to assuming I knew the linguistic backgrounds of all students.

The Page 99 Test is relatively effective in terms of identifying major issues at the Sanctuary that reveal concerns with teaching in both privileged and under resourced teaching environments. The diversity of needs students come to learning contexts with can be difficult to discern and dominant expectations about the English language continue to erase these issues.

Volunteering at the Spanish speaking church that I call the “Sanctuary” revealed assumptions about migrants who are often misrepresented in political rhetoric. The historical context of the Guatemalan “civil war” and enduring violence against women serve as exigencies for articulating what I outline as decolonial critical race theory: decolonial theory serves to account for issues of Indigenous displacement outside the US connected to transnational business while CRT helps to explain some of the struggles that individual migrants experience in the US and what the Spanish-speaking Sanctuary church goes through with their lease and potential eviction.

Visit Cruz Medina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue