A new elementary school is opening in Las Cruces this fall. Called Raíces del Saber Xinachtli Community School, the dual language charter school will teach students about indigenous culture.
There’s a small, peach and beige building under construction on North Valley Drive. It doesn’t look like much now, but it will be transformed into a dual language charter school. Students will learn in English and Spanish, and they’ll study the indigenous language Nahuatl as a way to connect with their heritage.
“We are more than Cinco de Mayo and chile and enchiladas,” says co-founder Lucia Veronica Carmona. She grew up in the borderlands.
“My parents, my grandparents are Raramuri people, indigenous from the mountains in Chihuahua,” she says.
But she wasn’t taught to embrace her family’s history and roots. If anything, she learned to reject them.
“Our parents were living in the border just telling us to be ashamed of who we are,” she says.
That led to a sense of disconnection.
“When you don’t have that belonging sense, you don’t know where to go,” Carmona says. “You’re in the middle of nowhere. You’re just floating up there in the air.”
Carmona doesn’t want other children to go through the same experience. That’s why she jumped at the chance to start - as the brochure puts it - a bilingual, biliterate, culturally responsive school.
Emma Almendariz chairs the school’s board.
“The ideas are exciting and they’re very much what our current population of students really needs in order to be challenged and to join the rest of the world in being at least bilingual if not multilingual, like most of the world is,” she says.
Almendariz is retired now, but worked as a bilingual teacher and administrator for decades. She explains the school will follow what’s known as the 90/10 model. Students won’t simply take one block of Spanish, the way they would an art or science class. They’ll learn core subjects in Spanish.
“The way it works is kinder and first you teach 90 percent of the time in Spanish, 10 in English,” she says. “Second grade it’s 80/20. Then 70/30. Up until 8th grade when it’s 50/50.”
Jennifer Haan is executive director of bilingual and migrant education for Las Cruces Public Schools.
“The dual language model really emphasizes the two languages as vehicles for instruction,” she says. “Not just to learn how to speak or to read and write, but actually using the Spanish language and the English language in order to impart content knowledge for our students. So they learn in both languages.”
Haan says this is proven model. But it can be hard to implement. New Mexico and the country as a whole are facing a bilingual teacher shortage. That’s partly because the position can be more demanding than other forms of teaching, without extra pay or other incentives. There are additional certification requirements, and bilingual teachers sometimes have to prepare curricula in two languages.
“It’s pretty rare that a person is equally proficient in both languages,” Haan says. “It happens but it’s pretty rare. So we as dual language teachers have to make sure that, ‘oh my gosh I really need to be able to use the correct terminology when I’m describing the water cycle to my students. I really need to understand the correct academic vocabulary for describing geometric concepts to students.’ So it does take a lot of studying, a lot of preparation.
The district is trying to provide some incentives for bilingual teachers, like a $1,500 stipend.
“It really isn’t that much when you think about the work that goes into being a bilingual teacher,” Haan says. “But it’s something. It’s a start.”
The district is partnering with New Mexico State University to provide tuition reimbursement for students who want to pursue bilingual education. Haan hopes the district can help elevate Spanish.
“I see that there’s almost a reluctance to put front and center the Spanish language, which is ironic because we are just steps away from the border with Mexico and this used to be Mexico, and most of our citizens are of Mexican descent,” Haan says. “But I think the effects of historical trauma, of colonialism, of annexation of this area has kind of marginalized the Spanish language in a way that shouldn’t be. But I really do feel there’s a resurgence of pride in the Spanish language that we as a school district can really enhance and perpetuate and spread.”
The founders of Raíces del Saber school hope they can elevate indigenous language and culture. They’ll introduce Nahuatl as an enrichment language. Co-founder Lucia Veronica Carmona says Nahuatl can expand children’s understanding of language as a whole.
“Every indigenous language, they define concepts instead of objects or name things,” Carmona says.
Take the word Xinachtli, she says. It describes the moment a seed germinates, reaching its bursting and in between point - no longer a seed, but not yet a plant.
“Just mention Xinachtli, you are getting to a whole world of concepts,” she says.
Carmona hopes the school instills students with a sense of pride in their culture - the pride she herself longed for as a child.
