His Parents Arrived In LA Educated, In Spanish. How Their Experience Is Shaping Community College Classes
Since last spring, Los Angeles community colleges have been rolling out a number of classes in Spanish — not classes to learn Spanish, but classes where Spanish speakers can learn other subjects.
The expansion of “in-language” classes is part of a national effort to better serve community college students whose first language isn’t English. This population is “a large and growing segment of the community college student population,” whose educational needs have not been widely evaluated.
And in California, the movement is also a reversal of nearly a century and a half of policy that has minimized Spanish, since the state’s constitution was ratified in 1879.
To understand the reversal at LACCD, though, one must start with a family’s move to Los Angeles.
Educated, but not in English
On a recent visit to his childhood home in South Los Angeles, 50-year-old Gabriel Buelna heard his parents talk at the dinner table about one of the biggest challenges they faced when they came to L.A. in the mid-1960s.
“I understood a little bit of English, not a lot,” his mother Lilia Buelna said. She had taken office skills classes in Mexico for four years and worked for an engineering firm in Tijuana before moving to L.A.
Her search for English classes had as much to do with navigating life in her new home, she said, as it did with continuing her education.
“[I wanted] to earn my high school diploma and from there study something else, like business,” she said.
She and her husband, Enrique Buelna, moved into the South L.A. house after they married in 1963. He’d lived there for about five years and also struggled to find classes beyond the rudimentary language skills. They said the classes they found at the local church, high school, and community college didn’t build on the education both already had.
“They didn’t teach well. I wasn’t satisfied [with the classes]. [Teachers] would tell you ‘Write dog 20 times,’” Enrique Buelna said.
In Mexico, he’d also taken office skills courses and worked in Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. In the United States he worked for a furniture manufacturer that was eventually bought and run by the employees, including him. He said he wishes he could have overcome the English language barrier to take business administration classes, because that would have prepared him for the kind of decisions he’d have to make at the furniture business.
“Knowing what to do if someone gave you a bogus check or how to deal with vendors. I had little knowledge of buying and selling [at that level],” Buelna said.
It ended up costing him and the other owners of the company a lot.
“We forgot to buy insurance,” Enrique Buelna said. A fire, he said, destroyed most of the business.
Their son, Gabriel Buelna, hears these stories differently now than he did when he was a kid. He practices family law, holds a doctorate in political science and teaches Chicano studies classes at CSU Northridge.
“Their capacity was hindered. There was an immigrant ceiling … they come from Mexico with some level of education … they're trying to enter the business class, they're trying to do that and the language component is the biggest anchor,” he said.
But it’s the hat he’s been wearing since 2017 that he’s used to turn his parents’ experiences, and his opinions and views of the immigrant experience, into change for public higher education. That’s when Buelna was elected trustee for the L.A. Community College District board, the policymaking body for nine campuses that enroll over 200,000 students.
“The narrative has shifted from [my parents’ time], which was ‘too bad, so sad, learn English … you're in the United States’ to where now I think the question is, do we as leaders have an obligation to allow all of our citizens to hit their maximum capacity … for folks to do that in a way that works for them,” he said.
Last year, in a one-year term as board president, Buelna expanded the number of career and technical classes offered in foreign languages, the vast majority in Spanish, and called them “in-language” classes.
Buelna and district administrators sidestepped a state requirement that students enrolled in these classes also be enrolled in English as a second language classes. They justified the action by saying that their institution should remove barriers that exist for students to enroll in career education classes, and if English is one of those barriers, then the classes should be offered in the students’ native language.
By the numbers
Classes are mostly in Spanish, but some are taught in both English and Spanish while others are in Armenian, Russian, Mandarin and Korean, Buelna said.
The classes first rolled out on a small scale this past winter, with 313 students enrolled in 15 language classes. Enrollment grew to almost 1,500 students in 59 classes in spring. Enrollment in this fall semester’s 30 in-language classes hit a high of 1,572 students as of Sept. 6, according to Buelna.
The classes have ranged from automotive, culinary, and sewing to a variety of office skills classes, such as intro to spreadsheets.
