A Critical Auto/Ethnography of Learning Spanish: Intercultural competence on the gringo trail? 9781317482239, 1317482239

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A Critical Auto/Ethnography of Learning Spanish

The premise that intercultural contact produces intercultural competence underpins much rationalization of backpacker tourism and in-country language education. However, if insufficiently problematized, pre-existing constructions of cultural ‘otherness’ may hinder intercultural competence development. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which wide disparities of power, wealth, and privilege exist, and where such positionings may go unproblematized. This study contributes to theoretical understandings of how intercultural competence develops through intercultural contact situations through a detailed, multiple case study of three conceptually comparable contexts in which Western backpackers study Spanish in Latin America. This experience, often ‘bundled’ with homestay, volunteer work, social, and tourist experiences, offers a rich set of empirical data within which to understand the nature of intercultural competence and the processes through which it may be developed. Models of a single, context-free, transferable intercultural competence are rejected. Instead, suggestions are made as to how educators might help prepare intercultural sojourners by scaffolding their intercultural reflections and problematizing their own intersectional identities and their assumptions. The study is a critical ethnography with elements of autoethnographic reflection. The book, therefore, also contributes to development of this qualitative research methodology and provides an empirical example of its application. Phiona Stanley is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her research is primarily about intercultural-identity constructions in international education. She has written about Western teachers in China, English-language schools in Australia, qualitative research methods, and the lived experience of doing a PhD. She is now researching ‘language grading’, in which native English speakers attempt to make their own English more internationally intelligible. Dr Stanley’s professional background is in English-language education, and she has worked in Peru, Poland, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, and Qatar.

A Critical Auto/ Ethnography of Learning Spanish Intercultural competence on the gringo trail? Phiona Stanley

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Phiona Stanley The right of Phiona Stanley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Stanley, Phiona, author. Title: A critical auto-ethnography of learning Spanish : intercultural competence on the gringo trail? / by Phiona Stanley. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016023175 | ISBN 9781138898950 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315708232 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Intercultural communication—Latin America. | Spanish language—Latin America—Conversation and phrase books—English. | Spanish language—Spoken Spanish. | Spanish language—Self-instruction. | Communication and culture—Latin America. | Language and culture—Latin America. Classification: LCC P94.65.L29 S83 2016 | DDC 306.442/61—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023175 ISBN: 978-1-138-89895-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-70823-2 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements 1 Becoming interculturally competent in ‘Spanishtown’?

ix x 1

What this book is about 3 Who this book is for 4 Research methods 7 Where I’ve been is where I’m coming from (1984–1994) 8 Notes on terminology 11 Background information: Guatemala, Peru, Nicaragua 12 Navigating the text 17 2 Theorizing intercultural competence

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Yearning for ‘windswept and interesting’ (1993–1994) 18 Linguacultural competence 20 Developing intercultural competence in language education? 23 Researching the inter/cultural 25 Critical intercultural competence 30 Intercultural competence as it relates to this study 32 3 Research processes and intrigues On subverting ‘the academy’ 36 Contexts 39 Doing the research 41 Negotiating access 43 Autoethnography and ethnography as method 44 Data analysis 46 Falling in love with Spanish (1994–1996) 47

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4 Learning Spanish in Latin America

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Spanish-language schools: The curriculum 51 Grammatical competence 56 Communicative competence 59 Native speakers and teacher power 63 Power and purpose in Spanishtown 68 5 Discourses of others: Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’

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Students’ imaginaries of Latin America 72 Local imaginaries of Spanish-language learners 76 Portrait of a ‘conferencia’ 79 Learning in Lima (1994) 84 6 Learning from and negotiating with cultural ‘others’

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Benign ‘cultural’ content in Spanish classes 87 Contested ‘cultural’ content in Spanish classes 89 Handling intercultural encounters 92 Powerful/not powerful 93 Discourses of ‘helping’ the ‘poor’ 95 In Spanish, on the back foot 102 Learning to be Limeña (1995) 103 7 Voluntourism: Practicing on the community?

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Contesting voluntourism discourses 107 Medical ethics and discourses of volunteering 114 Foreign teacher (1995) 120 Checking my privilege 122 8 Theorizing: Doing and developing intercultural competence

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Vignettes of crossing cultures (1994–2015) 124 What is intercultural competence? 126 Doing intercultural competence 128 Learning to see cultural richness 130 Teaching culture in Spanish classes 134 Developing intercultural competence 135 The Testimonio of Don Carlos 139 Perceiving power 140 9 Revisiting methodology Going back to Lima (2015) 142 On not being American: My positionality 144

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Ficciones, paradigms, and accessible writing 147 Reflections on participating in the study 150 10 Suggestions and teaching activities

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They know more than we do (about many things) 156 The world is unfair 156 Discourses may be destructive 158 How to facilitate intercultural competence development 160 How (and why) to teach culture in Spanish class 164 Conclusion 168 References Index

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Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Autoethnography in action Notice board in Pasaje Enríquez, Xela Class in progress in Xela, Guatemala Whiteboard in an intermediate-level class Advertisement for Spanish-language-teacher training course Beginner student’s Spanish notebook Mural at ‘La Cooperativa’ Advertisement for a Spanish-language school Advertisement for a volunteer project at a coffee farm Carga Máxima postcard illustrating chicha lettering style

9 39 52 54 55 58 88 97 98 133

Acknowledgements

UNSW Australia School of Education ECR research grants (2013–2015) covered some of the fieldwork costs for this project. ¡Muchas gracias! Huge thanks to the people that I met throughout Latin America and beyond who let me bang on about this project long enough to glean important nuggets of insight from each of them. In particular, conversations with the following have been very important in shaping this book’s content and its writing: Josh Allsup, Marleny Castillo, Sophie Fitzmaurice, Adolfo López Serrano, Melisa Llontop Valdivia, Josh Mintanko, Wilmer Rojas López, Lucy Reyes, Marlene Reyes, Doris & Ed Stanley, Simon Walters, and E.V. Wright. I am also indebted to these fellow scholars and writers for casting their critical, expert eyes over drafts, sections, and ideas at various stages: Simon Behenna, John Hudson, Ryoko Kubota, Tina Neyer, Gabrielle Piggin, Sam Rodgers, Jeremy Ross, Farzad Sharifian, Marie Stevenson, Anthony Swofford, William Vandegrift, and Pamela Zapata-Sepúlveda. Obviously, though, the views expressed here are mine and not necessarily those of this phenomenally talented mob.

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Crossing cultures is not only an intellectual process. It is not even mainly intellectual. It is thoroughly embodied. Here in highland Guatemala, where I’m interviewing other ‘gringos ’ about their experiences in the cottage-industry, Spanish-language schools, I come to understand culture crossing as a feast of all the senses. Culture crossing here is not something that can be accessed by the ‘usual’ ways of researching. Here it is necessary to feel in order to understand. I’m researching in Xela, pronounced SHELL-ah. Officially ‘Quetzaltenango’, its Mayan name was Xelajú. Although the Maya have been systematically abused, silenced, and exterminated for centuries, both they and their city live on, defiant. Xela is high altitude, high octane. Its air is sharp with traffic fumes and the narrow streets fill with the cries of ayudantes from the little buses into which people crowd. ‘Zunil’, they shout, ‘Retalhuleu, Coatepeque, Sololá’. These are place names far from the familiar ‘San this’ and ‘Santa that’ of the Latin America that I know and love. It smells different here, too. Xela smells of the black, choking diesel smoke that issues from ancient vehicles. After the rains, it also smells loamy and earthy, although always with a top note of dog poo. Also, it is mango season, and in Xela, the mangos smell of heaven. Xela tastes of carbohydrates. Every lunchtime, in the comedor where I have a nodding relationship with the staff, I count the carbohydrates that make up a single meal. There is rice, pasta, tortillas, and potatoes with pollo pepian today, and there were tamales, rice, potatoes, and maize with jocón yesterday. Xela sounds like firecrackers, roosters, traffic, cumbia, and street dogs howling in the night. When I take weaving classes at a Mayan Indigenous women’s craft cooperative, Xela sounds like the breathy K’s and Ch’s of Kaqchikel. Xela looks like cobbled streets and belle epoque architecture but also razor-wire fences, broken bottles cemented into the tops of high walls, and concrete-box stores with crude murals advertising the businesses. But Xela is an ugly picture in a beautiful frame: all around are verdant, vertiginous volcanoes. On the weekends, I take myself to the places with the unfamiliar names. It is here that I experience how Xela feels, because to my large gringa body, the buses – retired, US-American school buses – feel so very cramped. Seats designed for primary children have been taken out and put back in, closer together, adding

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another few rows and leaving only a ten-inch-wide (25 cm) aisle and no legroom. Coming back from Zunil, I exchange smiles with a señora who is carrying a live hen on her lap. I ask where she is going, and she says Xela. ‘And the hen?’ She laughs. ‘Also Xela, but don’t tell her. She would rather go home. But I’m making a caldo, a soup’. This feels sad, although it shouldn’t. I eat meat. I just don’t usually ride buses with homesick chickens. Xela feels closer to reality, sometimes. I notice that I walk differently in Xela. People move so damn slowly, and on narrow pavements alongside fast-traffic roads you have a choice: fall into step with the meandering or get squashed flat by a delivery truck. I walk and seethe. Obviously, I say nothing (except, occasionally, ‘con permiso’, as the traffic calms, and I squeeze around the dawdling walkers with my gringa air of annoyance). I feel myself inhabiting this stereotype, the rushed, stressed gringa, but I’m not. I’m really not. I’m just not used to walking so slowly. And, unlike many of the people of Xela, the quetzaltecos, I have stuff to do, places to be, a research project, and a ticket out. Today I am interviewing students and visiting schools, and yesterday I facilitated a teachers’ discussion group. Last week I clocked up fifteen interview hours, and today I’m writing. My busyness makes me ‘other’ too. There is far too much unemployment and even more underemployment here, and it riles me when I see job advertisements for gringos in the tourist places: Weekend staff at Black Cat Hostel. Free food, cheap drinks. 3 months minimum commitment. . . . Evening and weekend bar staff needed at the Old School bar. Guaranteed fun. Give José a call. (Classified Ads, ‘Xela Who’ Magazine, April–June 2015) Why, I ask the gringos working here, do they think that the bars and the hostels hire them, the gringos, rather than locals? And one – let’s call her Amber – (as with all the participants in this book, this is not her real name) tells me: I got a job as a waitress. I joined a band. Like, either one I wasn’t qualified to do in the US. . . . Here, I literally just walk up to people and [I’ll] be like, ‘Hey I think you need a waitress’, ‘alright’, ‘good, that’s me’. . . . I’m also very go-getter, yeah, and I’m very active and have a lot of ideas. So maybe that’s partially just me. I think, yeah, there’s just a lot of opportunities to start working on projects [here]. . . . I think [local people in Xela] could [do the same] if they wanted to, yeah. (Amber, late twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Hearing this, I realize that crossing cultures is more than feeling and sensing my way around Xela. Crossing cultures is also crossing discourses, crossing paradigms. Every critical bone in my body jolts when I hear the entitlement and implied racism of some of the gringos. Is it really just that Guatemalans are

Becoming interculturally competent 3 insufficiently ‘go-getter’, that they lack ‘a lot of ideas’? Is this why Xela has so much underemployment and why the bars and the hostels hire unqualified gringos? I don’t think so. I do like a lot of the gringos that I meet. And I like a lot of quetzaltecos too. This is not about liking or disliking. Instead, I realize that the biggest culture crossing I’m negotiating is the one where my gringo interviewees casually fall into social imaginaries that disparage Xela, and Guatemala, and sometimes Latin America more generally, perhaps without meaning to and often without considering the gringo privilege that puts them on a pedestal here. This is the culture crossing I’m experiencing here in Xela. It is the crossing of discourses and paradigms: ways of seeing and being and ways of imagining Latin America. (Phiona, adapted from ‘field notes’, Xela 2015)

What this book is about This book is about tourists, often longer-term backpackers, who study Spanish in Latin America. It describes how adult students, mostly in their early twenties and mostly from North America but also from Europe and Australasia, might become interculturally competent as a result of travelling in Latin America, taking a few weeks’ worth of Spanish lessons, and perhaps also doing some volunteer work. Not all do become interculturally competent, though, and this book looks at why that is. The idea that intercultural contact necessarily produces intercultural competence underpins a lot of the literature in international and in-country language education. Perhaps this is because it is easier to measure the extent of an individual’s intercultural (or more usually international) experience from which to infer, albeit erroneously, their intercultural competence. However, in this book, I show that not all border crossing does, in fact, result in the kind of skills and attributes that comprise intercultural competence. Indeed, if language travellers do not adequately question their own pre-existing ideas about cultural ‘others’, they may not acquire intercultural competence at all, no matter how much or how far they may travel. Instead, they may simply confirm what they already ‘know’ about Latin America. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which wide disparities of power, wealth, and privilege exist. This is why my research has been in contexts like Xela, which is poor, industrial, and majority Indigenous. Xela is where travellers like Amber, cited earlier, might feel they are ‘above’ local people. And this is where local people may be too polite, or perceive that they are too powerless, to critique the discourses of gringos in their midst. But in order to examine whether intercultural competence is being learned, we must ask what is intercultural competence? In Chapter 2, I explore this literature, and throughout the study, I discuss ways in which it is evidenced, or not, by the participants. The other question that frames this book is: how is intercultural competence acquired through international experience? In particular, I consider the intersection of intercultural engagement and power: how do we acquire intercultural competence when, as Amber experienced, people put us up

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on a pedestal for who they think we are? I bring a critical framing to this question, and in Chapter 2, I also explain what this means and why it is needed. This study, therefore, contributes to theoretical understandings of how intercultural competence develops through intercultural contact situations in which there are significant power imbalances. This is why the context for this research is not high-status university language programs. In these, there are fewer disparities of power. Instead, my focus is on the ‘cottage-industry’, Spanish-language schools and non-government organizations (NGOs) that proliferate across Latin America. There is some slippage between these organization types: most schools offer to arrange volunteer opportunities for Spanish-language students, and many NGOs offer some form of Spanish-language instruction for volunteers. Because it is often impossible to separate sojourners’ Spanish-language learning aim from their volunteer-tourism aim, I discuss both types of organization in this book. Xela, described earlier, offers tourists a lively scene of at least twenty language schools to choose from. There, it is possible to study twenty-five hours per week of one-to-one Spanish lessons, including full-board homestay accommodation and a social/cultural program, from as little as USD$130 per week. Students often start from beginner level and many progress to conversational fluency in a few weeks. Many other similar ‘Spanishtowns’ exist across Latin America, and to give a sense of the phenomenon more generally, I consider three contrasting locations in which this book is ‘set’. They are Xela (Guatemala), Granada/ Masaya (Nicaragua), and Lima (Peru). Whereas Xela is far from the mainstream tourist circuit, conceptually contiguous Granada and Masaya, which are majority non-Indigenous, are firmly on the gringo trail. And in total contrast, Lima is a major city of ten million people with an up-and-coming trendy reputation but very little tourism compared to places like Machu Picchu or Cuzco. While Lima is not a traditional Spanish-language-learning destination, it has a significant volunteer-tourism ‘scene’ with many NGOs. Together, these places give a broad sense of what the immersion-Spanish and volunteer work experiences are like across Latin America. But many other ‘Spanishtowns’ exist and are ripe for study. The academic literature has, to date, hardly touched this phenomenon at all. So this study also aims to document this little-studied part of the international education industry with a view to mapping the territory for future studies.

Who this book is for This is absolutely not ‘just’ a book for Spanish teachers. Indeed, my own professional background is in TESOL – Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages – rather than the teaching of Spanish. Why then is it worth my, and readers from TESOL and other disciplines, reaching into the teaching of Spanish to engage with this project? This book is about critical intercultural competence, which necessitates a research setting in which there are complex, multifaceted power relations along multiple, sometimes contradictory, axes of identity.

Becoming interculturally competent 5 Unfortunately the English-language industry and international education that focuses on ‘periphery’ (usually East Asian) students in ‘centre’ contexts (usually United Kingdom/United States/Australasian universities) is problematically monochrome in terms of power and intercultural relations. In those settings, teachers and institutions have most of the epistemological, cultural, linguistic, and symbolic capital. The students (whether framed as having agency or as victims of a system that treats them as cash cows) bring economic capital but often struggle. Not only is the situation unbalanced, with almost all the power stacked on the side of the teachers and institutions, but also this kind of setting has also been much more comprehensively researched. In contrast, very few academics have looked at the Spanishtown phenomenon. How does power work in these kinds of settings? Who is high or low status, and how does status work? Teachers can be seen as more powerful (as teachers, as repositories of cultural and linguistic capital, and as employed and sometimes older adults) or as less powerful (as Latin Americans, as less well educated than many of their students, sometimes as Indigenous, and usually as non-transnationals). Against this much more complex set of power relations, critical intercultural competence is rather more interesting, as it allows for intersectional identities to play out and for allegiances and differences to be formed along multiple aspects of identity. Whether or not readers are involved in the teaching of Spanish, these Spanish-language-teaching settings offer incredibly valuable insights to all applied linguists, language teachers, intercultural and tourism scholars, sociologists, human geographers, and others. Nevertheless, this book is somewhat difficult to locate in the literature. It is a study of language learning in immersion settings. In these, some students have specific purposes, such as medical Spanish for North American doctors and nurses, and many such students combine language immersion with volunteer work placements in medical and other settings. And/or this book is a study of backpacker enclaves in which language learning is one of the key tourist activities: many tourists undertake ‘survival’ Spanish courses before embarking on Latin American travels. This book, then, is about the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language to adult non-native, usually non-heritage, speakers across a range of demographics and purposes. But it is also a study of international education, because some of the students are on programs organized by North American educational institutions and may earn credit for their studies in Latin America. So it is a study of language education, but much more besides. It is also a study of student and teacher identities, in contexts somewhat comparable to those of language-school TESOL. Like the soft underbelly of the TESOL industry (Stanley, 2013), not all the ‘teachers’ in this study are qualified language teachers. Further, the institutions, which comprise private businesses and not-for-profit projects, may be far from language teaching’s ‘best practice’. Certainly none have the notional legitimacy conferred by the presence of applied linguistics researchers and curriculum planners, as would be expected in a university language centre. The ‘product’ they offer is a hybrid of language learning and, very often, the opportunity to volunteer in a range of community projects such as after-school childcare or environmental clean-ups.

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This latter discourse, of tourist volunteering, goes largely unproblematized among participants and is one of ‘helping’ and ‘skills sharing’, with troubling echoes of the neocolonial ‘white man’s burden’. Some mention is made, perhaps more honestly, of volunteering as an opportunity for language immersion. But as many volunteer tourists speak only basic Spanish, the range of activities in which they participate is often limited to unskilled work. So the ‘skills sharing’ discourse is perhaps idealistic. That said, some participants described projects in which unskilled, unqualified, and sometimes unsupervised volunteers delivered babies or gave injections. Some taught high school classes. Some built houses or irritated turtles on coral reefs. Such activities, discussed in Chapter 7, are problematic as, in some cases, volunteers seem to be practicing on local people rather than learning from them or, more neutrally, spending time with them. Volunteer work, which is an integral part of many language travellers’ experiences, is thus an important aspect of how the intercultural operates in these spaces. But why, if the ‘teachers’ are not necessarily teachers and the ‘language schools’ are not particularly legitimate, if the product is a hybrid, and if learners are rarely called to account for their sometimes troubling discourses and practices – if all this is the case, why is it valuable to examine Spanish teaching in these contexts? Rather than hoping to frame these cases as examples of ‘best practice’, I conceive this project as an interdisciplinary ethnography of education tourism. The situation is examined for the insights it provides, including, in some cases, examples of ‘what not to do’. I also aim to shed light on this little-studied type of context that nevertheless constitutes many thousands of young people’s early experiences of going abroad and engaging with the world. For all that we may wish it were otherwise, the depictions in this book are the experiences of many gringo sojourners in Latin America. And indeed, some North American universities give college credit or medical school admissions to the very students whose practices and discourses I critique for their ‘practicing on’ stance! As this kind of context in Latin America is important to many young language learners/travellers, it should be important to researchers, too. This is not to say that Spanish-language teaching does not matter in and of itself. It does. The teaching of Spanish is on the ascendency in most regions of the world (Mar-Molinero, 2013), not least as its importance in the USA grows: Spanish is by far the most widely used second language there (Furman et al., 2010). Meanwhile, in the United States and Canada, Spanish-language teaching has a very secure position in compulsory and post-compulsory educational sectors, many of which send students to study abroad. Some of these programs are, in fact, based at the very schools studied in this book. So I anticipate that this book will appeal to teachers as well as scholars. In particular, Chapter 10’s teaching suggestions will be well received by those engaged in preparing students for study-abroad programs, as is often the case in North American high schools and universities. That said, researchers across the social sciences are my target audience, in particular for the more theoretical sections on intercultural competence. In addition, this book’s methodological contribution should interest those using qualitative

Becoming interculturally competent 7 research methods, particularly auto/ethnography. I hope, then, that this book will contribute to two academic conversations: the intercultural-competence conversation and a conversation about how we can research ‘hidden’ phenomena like intercultural competence in part by drawing on our own experiences.

Research methods This book is a worked example of a critical, discourse-focused, less-individual approach to intercultural competence that uses a blend of evocative and analytic autoethnography and critical ethnography to source insights and ground theory. What is autoethnography? And, indeed, what is ethnography? What is the value of studying the places I described earlier, or the experiences of particular people that I met there, if they are not necessarily representative of anything but themselves? As outlined in Chapter 3, [T]he defining characteristic of analytic social science is to use empirical data to gain insight into some broader set of social phenomena than those provided by the data themselves. This data-transcending goal has been a central warrant for traditional social science research. . . . [this means] using empirical evidence to formulate and refine theoretical understandings of social processes. . . . Analytic ethnographers are not content with accomplishing the representational task of capturing ‘what is going on’. (Anderson, 2006, p.387) This means that the places I research in, the people I interview, and my own stories that I tell in the book are valuable for the insights that they offer to our understanding more generally what intercultural competence is, how it can be developed, and how we might research these questions. Ethnography is a Greek-origin blend of ethnos (‘people’ or ‘culture’) and graph (‘writing’). Blending these ideas, ethnographers write about cultural phenomena. I conceptualize the ‘ethnos’ that I am studying not as Guatemala or Nicaragua or Peru but as the ‘ethnos’ of sojourners learning Spanish and sometimes also travelling or volunteering in Latin America. By looking closely at the ‘world’ of the Spanishtowns and the people in them, I want to make sense of what is going on at a deeper level: (how) do these experiences result in sojourners’ developing intercultural competence, and what does it look like when they do? Autoethnography adds another Greek word into the mix: auto (‘the self’). This is an introspective method that considers the researcher’s own experiences for the same end: to understand the cultural. An inward focus allows researchers to access hidden data. Autoethnography is written in more ‘evocative’ ways than some academic writing, so as to cause readers to feel in a more visceral way too. So, for instance, in the first section of this chapter in which I described my sensory, embodied experiences among gringos in Xela, this is autoethnography. Also autoethnographic is my own story that I tell in this book. It starts twenty years ago, when I first went to Latin America, and tracks my own experiences of

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negotiating ‘the intercultural’ in comparable settings. The autoethnographic sections appear in italics for ease of differentiating them from the formal 2013–2015 research study, which is the main focus of the book. This is a study based on three years of going back and forth to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru, taking Spanish courses in a range of cottage-industry language schools, talking to different kinds of people in each of the cities, conducting interviews, and analyzing data. But it is also a reflection on half of my life: twenty-one years in which I learned Spanish in Latin America, lived in Latin America, travelled there, made mistakes, made friends, and made myself into who I am today. I have no Latin American ancestry. My Spanish is proficient, and on a good day, I sound Peruvian. In 2000, I passed the Diploma Superiór de Español como Lengua Extranjera (DELE), the higher diploma in Spanish as a foreign language, which is at level C2 on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Over twenty years, in Latin America and then in Europe, I spent thousands of dollars on improving my Spanish: lessons, books, films, exams. Speaking Spanish is a huge part of my identity, and when I accidentally ‘pass’ as Latina, I feel a rising blush of pride and acceptance. In Latin America, often I feel I am culturally at ‘home’. But when I am reminded of what I know intellectually, that I have no legitimacy whatsoever to claim any kind of Latina identity, I feel it viscerally. My thinking, therefore, orbits around these ideas: identity, language, culture, and what it means to be or become intercultural in Latin America. This book is therefore both an academic study and a ‘passion project’. This combination is shown in Illustration 1, in which I am taking a break from fieldwork in Copán Ruinas, Honduras, which was one of the other ‘Spanishtowns’ I considered for this study. In the picture, I am spending time in nature at an animal sanctuary just outside town, laughing and talking in Spanish, and hanging out with a Mexican friend who took the photo. This picture illustrates, for me, just some of the reasons that Latin America has gotten under my skin. And in the next section, I provide the background to my understanding of what and why that has been.

Where I’ve been is where I’m coming from (1984–1994) When I was eleven, I was the fat, smart kid, and I was badly bullied by a couple of girls at primary school. The ringleader – let’s call her Jenny – had golden ringlets and blue eyes. She was sweetness, lightness, and a hellish bitch. Jenny and her girls, they tortured me. They stabbed my hands with compass points and locked me out of the classroom. They snorted when I answered the teachers’ questions and made up lies to spread. In a year, I went from confident and feisty to cowering and afraid. And then we had a school trip to the Netherlands (I was at primary school in Edinburgh, and Europe is pretty small. It’s like going from Chicago to Washington, DC, or Adelaide to Canberra. It’s far, but not crazy far.) There, I felt intimidated by

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Illustration 1 Autoethnography in action.

the world. There, I learned I was a foreigner. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t belong. I was trapped. Inexplicably, the school put me in a room with Jenny and her cronies. In the back of a notebook were my calculations of the hours until home. I counted them down,

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sobbing and thinking about running away. But everything was so very foreign, so very Dutch, and so unfamiliar. For a fat kid, I felt very small. Overwhelmed. I knew nothing other than to follow, to obey, to conform to the tight schedule of the trip. We saw clog making and a dolphin show. We visited Rotterdam market and bought tulip bulbs to bring home to our mums. In the evenings and on the bus, Jenny and her chums would whisper and giggle and turn my shower water to freezing and hide my shoes. They invented rumours. They said I didn’t wash. They said I had lice. They said I wet the bed. They said I thought Karma Chameleon was native to Madagascar. (Actually, this last one was true.) I sat alone and walked alone, and I didn’t whisper or giggle with anyone. The teachers wilfully didn’t see any of this and did nothing. ‘Kids can be horrible’, I expect they told each other, soothing guilt over their own inaction. Or perhaps they didn’t see it. Or perhaps they believed it. Or perhaps Jenny got a break as her parents were messily divorcing. I don’t know. I know it happened, and that’s enough. Anyway, I didn’t run away. Somewhere in me was still the confident, feisty ten-year-old I had been, and I remember forming the clear thought, ‘I never want to feel so lost, so incapable, so at sea, so outsider, and so “other” ever again’. This is the clearest, earliest sense of my purpose that I remember from childhood: the world must not intimidate me. I would not let it. Languages, cultures, places. I wanted to learn about them, to inhabit them. I needed to build around me fences made of words and confidence, initiative and ease. The worldliness of feeling at home anywhere, I needed it. The world would be my own, my home. At thirteen, I signed up for extracurricular Russian lessons: 8:00 a.m. every day before school. I didn’t learn much. I had no idea how to learn a language. Looking back, it is easy to critique those lessons: grammatical and orthographic chicanery and very little using the language in any meaningful way. But I tried, and along the way became fascinated by the stories told by our elderly teacher, a man with red, frostbitten hands, who was, I recounted in hushed tones to my indifferent friends, a real, live Russian. This was the Cold War and real, live Russians were still special. He told stories of birthday parties without cake, summers spent at dachas, swimming in rivers, earning pocket money for standing in queues on behalf of the neighbours, and his first illicit taste of Coca Cola, all recounted in minute detail. Wrapped in exoticism, rapt by the stories, I was sold. Exposure to languages, cultures – isn’t it strange that what started as building fences opened me up to the world? At sixteen, I travelled to London then Belgium. By then, I was history-and-politics obsessed, and I stumbled upon a group trip funded by Eurocracy to the European Parliament. The departure point was Paddington station, which meant travelling alone to and across London. Our days were spent watching parliamentary sessions and listening to Eurocrats who knew everything, had done everything. Nothing intimidated them. Our evenings were spent around the Grand Place, where we drank cold beer and ate mussels (in Brussels, which was obviously hilarious). Coming from a schoolgirl world of who made the hockey team, this was a revelation. I remember feeling very grown up, very accomplished. I narrated the trip in my head in the

Becoming interculturally competent 11 third person, although I was its subject. We had some free time, and while I made friends on that trip, I also took time to walk around alone. Being alone in a foreign city felt like the pinnacle of sophisticated and worldly. On that trip, I realized that the world was so much bigger than my small life. I came back to Edinburgh and fast-tracked a university application. I was bored of school, bored of smallness: desperate to go places, desperate to make myself into one of the worldly, go-anywhere people I had glimpsed at the European Parliament. I left school at sixteen and enrolled in a politics degree that promised African, Latin American, and Russian politics. Being the smart kid does have its advantages. During my student years, I read Milan Kundera in Prague, called home for my degree results from the Algeciras bus station, and figured out the Cyrillic-only Moscow metro, remembering enough Russian to buy the right tokens. I met Colombians, shared a flat with Japanese women, and went on exchange to Germany. My sweet tooth was gradually replaced by a hankering for dhal, avocado, and couscous. Slowly, slowly, I became more like the adult I had imagined in Brussels. As Michelle Morano (2007, p.90) puts it, [When I travel] I love being destabilized, seduced, made to fall in love with details I couldn’t anticipate . . . Above all, I love feeling my vulnerability lessen as my store of experience swells and the foreign slowly becomes familiar. And then, at twenty-one, I went to live in Lima. I learned Spanish, met people, worked, and travelled. From there, I lived in Poland then Mexico, Oxford then Qatar, China then Australia. And in between, I went around the compass: NorthEast Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, South Asia, West Africa, Central America, the Middle East, South-East Asia. And so my comfort zone, now, is that buzz, that newness of being in a totally foreign place. It energizes me. That Netherlands trip and that awful girl: they were the grit in my oyster. The pearl it formed became my identity. Being out of place doesn’t intimidate me now. If I am proud of anything it is this: I took something that could have shut me down and used it to open me up. But those who were much more worldly still silenced me. Independent-ish tourism aside, my world was still locked in culture-bound, middle-class-ness: friends with jobs in insurance, golf-playing parents, drinking snakebite in student union bars. I needed to travel because I had something to prove. Initially, crossing cultures was about making the world familiar. I needed it to lessen my vulnerability.

Notes on terminology This book is about what happens interculturally when ‘Westerners’, from Europe, North America, and Australasia, study Spanish in Latin America. While the student interviewees were predominantly US-American, they were also Canadian, Quebecois, British, German, Dutch, Danish, and Australian. And, although a handful of East Asians also study Spanish in the contexts, notably Taiwanese and Koreans according to school directors, none volunteered as participants for this

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study. So, like it or not, this is a study of ‘Westerners’ in Latin America. However, ‘Westernness’ is a problematic concept (Stanley, 2013, pp.10–13), hence my use of scare quotes. Westernness, particularly White Westernness, may also be labelled in Latin America. Gringo/a is most common, although other terms include chele/a (light skinned), guero/a or rubio/a (blond/e), and blanco/a (White). But gringo/a is ubiquitous and is rarely negative. Boudin (2012, p.1) writes, I’ve been called gringo dozens of times. My first day in Latin America I stepped out of the airport in Guatemala City and baggage handlers, taxi drivers, money changers, and beggars greeted me with a cacophony of ‘oye gringo, mira gringo, vamos gringo, compra dólares gringo, ayúdame gringo, yo te llevo gringo, buen precio para mi amigo gringo.’. . . I wasn’t sure how to interpret my new nickname: was it offensive, racist, disrespectful? Over the years, gringo became a second name but rarely employed with malice or ill will . . . . Since the word was generally used as a friendly nickname . . . I decided that it didn’t bother me. Usage was key. Latin America is another problematic term, as is ‘Hispanic America’. Latin America comprises most of the American continent south of the USA-Mexican border as well as the Caribbean islands where Spanish and Portuguese are used. Thus ‘Latin America’ includes Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the Caribbean Dominican Republic, but not the Dutch or English-dominant Surinam and Guyana, for instance. ‘Hispanic America’ or ‘Spanish America’, much less common, refer specifically to the places in the Americas where Spanish language is used. This is problematic too, however, as Indigenous languages overlap with Spanish across the continent, both in official language policy and everyday use. ‘America’ is also problematic, as it tends to refer, in English, to the USA (the country) rather than ‘America’ (the continent), which is what it refers to in Spanish. Spanish has an adjective for citizens of the USA – estadounidense – that translates as ‘United-States-ian’. But in English, ‘America’ is an awkward homonym. For this reason, throughout this book, I use ‘US-American’ as the adjective meaning ‘from the USA’, although many of the participants, perhaps tellingly, omit the ‘US’ prefix. This omission offends some Latin Americans. As these labelling problems suggest, there is no entirely accurate term that unites the places that this study is about. I have used ‘Latin America’ throughout, but I acknowledge that it is not entirely accurate, as I am referring to places where Spanish, not Portuguese, is used and taught to foreigners, which may also be places in which Indigenous languages are used too.

Background information: Guatemala, Peru, Nicaragua Exhaustive overviews of the three contexts are well beyond the scope of this book. However, as a basic knowledge of historical and cultural contexts is needed for readers to make sense of participants’ experiences, I provide very

Becoming interculturally competent 13 brief overviews here. More comprehensive accounts include Close (2010) and Williamson (2009) on Latin America generally; Booth et al. (2014) on Central America; Grandin et al. (2011), Menchú (2009), Schlesinger et al. (2005), Way (2012), and Wilkinson (2004) on Guatemala; Starn et al. (2005), Thorp and Paredes (2010), and Vasquez de Aguila (2014) on Peru; and Belli (2002), Brentlinger (1995), Unferth (2011), and Wade and Walker (2011) on Nicaragua. The following summary is based on these sources. Ancient and modern, Latin American histories tend to be covered in blood: The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role. (Galeano, 1971, p.1) Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European – or later United States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centres of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources. Production methods and class structure have been successively determined from outside . . . always for the benefit of the foreign metropolis of the moment[.] (Galeano, 1971, p.2) Five hundred years after the sinking of European teeth into Indigenous throats, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru still suffer from the open veins of colonization. In Guatemala, this takes the form of an ongoing struggle, political and cultural, between the urban, Spanish-descended elite and the vast majority of poor working people, both Indigenous (Maya) and Ladino (people of mixed ancestry). This is not a new state of affairs and, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, the ancestors of today’s workers toiled under brutal, exploitative labour conditions, most notably for the US-American-owned United Fruit Company, which held a virtual agricultural monopoly. From 1944, however, Guatemala experienced a ten-year period of ‘springtime’ under presidents Arévalo and Árbenz. This ‘Guatemalan revolution’ saw unused United Fruit Company lands nationalized, with compensation granted for the land value that the company itself had (under-)declared. Land reforms and other progressive labour policies, however, caused upset at the United Fruit Company, which was well connected to the US government. Worried about its business interests and the threat of Westernhemisphere communism, the USA sponsored a 1954 coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government and installed a military regime. Within six years, Guatemala descended into civil war (1960–1996) in which two hundred thousand people were killed, the majority in massacres in 1982–1983

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(Truth Commission, 1999). The majority of these were Indigenous civilians killed at the hands of government paramilitaries. Efrían Ríos Montt, the president during the massacres, was sentenced in 2013 to eighty years imprisonment for genocide of the Maya Ixil and crimes against humanity. Only ten days later, however, the Constitutional Court overturned his conviction. His trial is set to continue in January 2016, although as he is now aged eighty-nine, there is a strong chance he will never be brought to justice. In the meantime, the same small, urban elite continues to exploit ordinary Guatemalans. A series of corruption scandals in 2015 resulted in the resignations of numerous government functionaries and ministers, including President Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti. But while privileged Guatemalans steal tax revenues, services for ordinary people languish underfunded. This affects all poor Guatemalans but ordinary life is particularly hard for Indigenous Mayans, particularly women, whose economic suffering is compounded by ‘the burden of contempt that goes with being an Indigenous woman’ (VelásquezNimatuj, 2011, p.526). While Indigenous Mayan women commonly wear the traditional ‘traje’, this may result in casual racism and aggression, such as being barred from public places by ‘the small oligarchy that has controlled our country economically, politically, and culturally for centuries’ (ibid., p.525). The story is similar in Peru, where Indigenous identities may be considered ‘a ruinous deficit’ (Niño-Murcia, 2003, p.125) and where wealthy descendants of the Spanish conquistadores continue to enjoy unearned power and privilege (Vasquez de Aguila, 2014). Peru’s recent history is slightly less bloody than Guatemala’s, but it, too, has suffered plenty of violence in recent years. Paradoxically, Peru’s suffering has its roots in its lucky geography. Spanning three geographic zones – coastal desert, Andean altiplano, and Amazon basin, Peruvian territory includes almost every climate. Unfortunately, this means that its Yungas region, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, is ideal for coca cultivation, and Peru is the world’s largest grower of coca leaves, the raw material used to make cocaine (Associated Press, 2015). This has made Peru a target both for US-led eradication campaigns and also for the drug and gang violence between narcotraficantes and rural insurgency movements including Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru). In the 1980s and 1990s, and on a smaller scale from 2002, a three-way struggle ensued between the narcotraficantes, the revolutionaries, and (US-supported) Peruvian government efforts to eradicate coca. Peasant farmers whose crops are destroyed may understandably turn to insurgent groups, and the narcotraficantes may also ally themselves with revolutionaries to protect against government eradication attempts. The result is bloodshed. The Truth Commission, Peru (2003) estimates a body count of about seventy thousand people killed by political violence in the twenty years from 1980 to 2000. Although the Yungas region is far from Lima, the effects were felt everywhere. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Sendero Luminoso regularly bombed civilian targets in Lima. And hyperinflation rampaged, caused by government borrowing and resultant austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

Becoming interculturally competent 15 Sendero Luminoso’s regular attacks on infrastructure compounded the chaos to the extent that, by the last years of Alan García’s presidency, annual inflation was over 7,500 per cent. Peruvian currency could not keep up: in 1985, the Inti replaced the Sol at a rate of one thousand to one, and six years later, the Nuevo Sol replaced the Inti at a million to one. Pledging to regain control, neoliberal president Alberto Fujimori took over in 1990 and is credited with successfully controlling both hyperinflation and the Sendero Luminoso. However, the price of peace and prosperity was death squads, corruption, and an autocratic presidency in which Fujimori changed Peru’s constitution to run for unlimited terms in office. In 2000, however, he was forced into exile and stripped of the presidency, later being convicted of crimes against humanity, embezzlement, and bribery in five high-profile trials from 2007 to 2015, in which he was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment. But Alberto Fujimori may yet walk free: his daughter, Keiko, was presidential runner up in 2011 and now leads opinion polls for the 2016 presidential election (El Comercio, 2015). She has critiqued Humala, the current president, for declining to pardon her father. The biggest effect on Lima from the turmoil of the past few decades has been demographic. Lima’s population has more than quintupled since the early 1960s, rising from 1,846,000 in 1961, to 4,608,000 in 1981, to almost 10,000,000 today (INEI, 2015). The result is massive unemployment, underemployment, and extensive low-income settlements around Lima called pueblos jóvenes. In these areas, there may be no running water or sewerage, no mains power, few transport links, and only informal infrastructure such as roads, schools, and health care. To compound these difficulties, most settlements are of tenuous legality. And there is significant social stigma (Riofrío, 2003, p.7). The violence, turmoil, poverty, and corruption have thus given Lima a large, insecure, internal-migration population. Culturally, these areas are very far from wealthy areas such as Miraflores and San Isidro, resulting in a deeply class-ridden city. Nicaraguan political history, although similarly bloody, is a different narrative. The story starts the same way: Indigenous people were decimated by the Spanish and then foreign commercial interests exploited Nicaragua. But then, in the early 1930s and again in 1979, insurgency movements enjoyed some success in resisting, respectively, an overt US occupation and the US-supported Somoza regime. Under the latter, workers had few rights and the environment had suffered degradation at the hands of US-owned agricultural corporations. The two insurgencies, although separated by some fifty years, are linked by the name of Agosto César Sandino, who was the 1930s revolutionary leader whose name was then used in the ‘Sandinsta’ insurrection of the 1970s. This is where Nicaraguan history is rather different: its insurgencies were more successful. In 1979, the Somoza regime collapsed and Daniel Ortega became the leader of Nicaragua libre – free Nicaragua. Indeed, Ortega is again the president of Nicaragua today. So far, so different. But the years between the 1979 ousting of the Somoza dictatorship and the 1990 general election were nevertheless soaked in blood. As in Guatemala and

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Peru, the US government was suspicious of communist-leaning movements in what it saw as its Cold War sphere of influence. So the USA funded and supported the right-wing Contras that opposed the Sandinistas. Importantly, despite the Contras’ terrorist tactics, Ortega, nevertheless, won a landslide victory in the 1984 general election, which was evaluated as ‘free and fair’ by United Nations observers. Despite the fighting throughout the 1980s, Ortega’s government also managed to improve literacy, health care, workers’ rights, and education. But the war dragged on, and by 1990, about thirty thousand Nicaraguans had been killed (Lacina, 2009, p.404). Daniel Ortega lost the 1990 election to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, a former Sandinista supporter. Her conciliatory style and bringing together of a rainbow of opposition groups are credited with bringing peace to Nicaragua. But her success is as much attributable to the United States’ decision to stop interfering. After 1990, Ortega’s attempts at re-election to the presidency were tainted by corruption and other scandals. So when Ortega was re-elected in 2006 it was with rather less enthusiasm than previously, not least because he is critiqued for watering down the Sandinista legacy (e.g. Cortés-Ramos & Cranshaw, 2012). Further, like Fujimori in Peru, Ortega altered the Nicaraguan constitution to allow unlimited presidential terms. So although the Sandinistas do prevail in Nicaragua libre, the human cost has been enormous, and the revolution is rather less revolutionary than was once imagined. What are we to make of these three hundred thousand people’s lives, the corruption, the political dynasties, the struggles, and all this blood? I end, as I started, with Galeano: The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them. (Galeano, 2010, p.276) For all that Latin America has suffered, and for all that we must mourn these lost lives and lament the spilled blood, we must also remember that life is not about death. The recent histories of these three Latin American countries are sobering, and the ongoing racism, oppression, and corruption that mutes and steals from ordinary people are a depressing legacy of colonialist-imposed oligarchies that pervade. And yet the music will never stop. As shown here, Latin America is a land of death. But much more so it is a land of life, so much life. This book is, I hope, a tribute, perhaps something of a guide, and certainly a love song to Latin America’s great richness and to its people. Against brutal, bloody backgrounds, I want to highlight the magic. Latin America is a land of colour, incredible cultural richness, infinite variety, and, above all, human dignity. Applied linguists and international education scholars often pay lip service to the importance of cultural ‘others’ while silencing the ‘periphery’ and focusing squarely on English-language ‘centre’ contexts. This book refocuses that gaze.

Becoming interculturally competent 17 It asks not how can ‘they’ adapt to ‘us’, but how can ‘we’ learn from and adapt to ‘them’ in ways that are equitable and that do not perpetuate past violence. That starts with awareness, and my hope is that this book will interest and inform readers, even though they may know little about Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Peru.

Navigating the text This book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 has sketched the study in broad brushstrokes. From here, Chapter 2 goes much deeper, establishing where this book fits into the academic literature. For this reason, it is the most theoretical of the chapters. Chapters 3 and 9 then work together as before and after ‘bookends’ that discuss the research project as an example of a study that blends ethnography with autoethnography. These chapters include discussions of technical aspects of the process and politics of doing and of presenting research including, for example, issues of negotiating access to participants and analyzing data. Chapter 3 also gives a contextual overview of the three Spanishtowns and the six institutions discussed in the study. Between the ‘bookends’, Chapters 4 to 7 are the ‘data’ chapters. In these, I lay out the participants’ stories, interspersing their voices with my interpretations and critique. Also spread throughout these chapters, and also interpreted and critiqued, are episodes of my own story, which are italicized for ease of reader navigation. These chapters are broken down in content as follows. Chapter 4 examines Spanish lessons in the context, while Chapter 5 considers the discourses about cultural ‘others’ that frame the intercultural engagements in these spaces. Chapter 6 then goes on to look at specifically ‘cultural’ content in Spanish classes and associated spaces, including homestay experiences and volunteer-tourism experiences. These are imbued with power relations, and this is a theme that is also discussed in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 then delves deeper into the issues and contested discourses of volunteer tourism, which for many language travellers is a big part of their experience in Latin America. Chapters 8 and 10 then form the thesis statement of the book, divided into the findings and resultant theorizing (Chapter 8) and my suggestions about where we go from here and how these findings may be used to improve practice (Chapter 10). Specifically, Chapter 8 defines intercultural competence as it relates to this study and describes the processes through which it appears to be acquired by some sojourners, although not all. Chapter 10 then makes concrete suggestions primarily for teachers, both those teaching in the Spanishtowns but also those in US-American and other schools and universities whose role it is to teach Spanish and/or to prepare students to undertake study abroad in Latin America. Suggestions are also made here for ways in which these findings may be useful beyond the Spanish and Latin American contexts for readers working in other fields such as TESOL, other languages, or international education more generally.

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Theorizing intercultural competence

Few aspects of intercultural competence are uncontested, and much has been written on the definition, development, evaluation, and comparison of culture/s, intersectional identities, and intercultural competence through a variety of disciplinary lenses, including communication, education, health, tourism, law, and business (e.g. Jackson, 2012) and within a variety of theoretical paradigms (Martin & Nakayama, 2010; Martin, 2015). The field is complex. The opening chapter of Deardorff’s (2009) The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, for instance, lists no less than 140 sources and 21 complex models of what intercultural competence is, how it works, and how it might be developed. In the present chapter, I aim to find a way through this complexity in order to prepare the theoretical ground. In it, I explain and justify the framing theories that are used in this project, bearing in mind that in any research, a theoretical model is only as useful or as ‘right’ as its utility in explaining the participants’ experiences in this context. As the theoretical ‘what’ of Chapter 2 is necessarily connected with the ‘how’ of the research, Chapter 3 then discusses the research methods used in this study. I begin by continuing my ‘story’ from Chapter 1, in which I consider how I viewed people who I thought were ‘windswept and interesting’ – that is, welltravelled, confident transnationals who embodied for me then a type of global citizenship and/or perhaps ‘intercultural competence’. This vignette serves to evoke possible motives an individual may have for developing intercultural competence and illustrates how the competence looked, to me, from the ‘outside’, as someone who was ‘pre-competent’ (that is, not interculturally competent at all). The discussion then moves onto linguacultural competence, its place in language education, research on the cultural and intercultural, and the place and nature of a critical model of intercultural competence. Finally, I discuss how discourses affect and are affected by culture and intercultural contact, including the notion that ‘cultural’ difference can be found along any axis of identity, not necessarily ethnic or national differences.

Yearning for ‘windswept and interesting’ (1993–1994) It is curious, in hindsight, what turns out to be important to our lives’ storied retellings. That I would go somewhere far away to reinvent myself as a savvy, go-anywhere

Theorizing intercultural competence 19 world citizen was never in doubt in my mind. But why did I choose Peru in particular? In faraway Edinburgh, three small cheers started my personal Andean avalanche. The first was talking to a friend whose father had worked, years before, in Ecuador. The whole family had gone, and these were tall tales, half remembered from childhood, of guinea pigs roasting on spits and him brushing his teeth with Fanta as the water was so undrinkable. To me, South America sounded so very ‘windswept and interesting’, as Scottish comedian Billy Connolly puts it. I had no stories like it. The second was another friend who wore a great, stripy T-shirt. I said, ‘nice’, and he said, ‘I got it in Greece’. He had taught English there, and I quizzed him on exactly how. How can you just up and leave? Do you need to speak Greek? How did you set it up? What do I need to do? Tell me everything. It was thanks to the ensuing conversation that I signed up for a four-week, English-teaching course in Edinburgh in the summer of 1993. This was the necessary key to this world of wonders: to do what was then called the University of Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults, the ‘CTEFLA’. It is now much more snappily named ‘CELTA’ and has since undergone many revisions, but it was then and is now a four-week, English-teaching course involving a bit of grammar awareness and terminology, some teaching methodology, and afternoons spent teaching real live ‘guinea pig’ students who come for the free English lessons. That course was another new world. Fellow trainees casually dropped into conversation that they had lived in Bangkok or had met a girl in Barcelona. I met students from places I could barely locate on a map: Togo, Ekaterinburg, Mongolia. As newly minted ‘teachers’, the world would be ours. But I still had to do my fourth year of university, during which came the final cheer that triggered the avalanche. The Berlin wall had fallen a couple of years earlier, and the McCarthyist bogeyman of Communism was waning as a plausible mandate for US foreign policy meddling. Did the USA need a new baddie to wrap the flag around, to rally public opinion? For my honours thesis I wrote, ‘The War on Coke: The Real Thing?’ This meant dreaming about South America, cloaked in a study of the discourses and inevitable inefficacies of the war on drugs in the Andes. One of the books I read that year was The Fruit Palace (Nicholl, 1986), which is a ‘wacky, Hunter Thompsony’ piece about getting sucked into playing go-between and translator in a dodgy cocaine deal at a ‘small, white-washed café . . . a couple of blocks up from the waterfront in Santa Marta, a hot, scruffy sea-port on the northern coast [of Colombia]’. . . . The Fruit Palace . . . [is a] rollicking – “slightly vaudeville” . . . – account of infiltrating the lower end of the Colombian cocaine trade in the mid-1980s. (Jones, 2011) I was hooked. I desperately wanted to go there, anywhere, somewhere Latino, to live, to teach, whatever it took. My wish for ‘somewhere Latino’, I realize now, lazily reproduced ‘translatinidad’ and the ‘tropicalisation of difference’ (Lewis, 2009). I had elided the heterogeneity of an entire continent. Nicholl’s Santa Marta was, to me, conceptually indistinct from Ushuaia, Quito, Managua, or Oaxaca. The professor who supervised the thesis tapped me on the shoulder about possible PhDs, and said that, of course, I would need to learn Spanish first. His own research

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was on West African trade unions, and his French had been honed through many years of teaching in Benin. So the idea that one could simply turn up in Peru or Benin or Greece or anywhere else and live and work there was never one that I questioned. All of this eliding and assuming was part of the entitlement and ignorance that middle-class Britishness gave us, my friend, my professor, and me. The idea remained that one could dole oneself out to the locals, who were basically the same everywhere we called ‘third world,’ and make a living doing so. Living somewhere exotic was simply a question of going there and making it happen. And so, in my last year of university was born the idea that I should go to South America, teach English, learn Spanish, and come home. That I would go back to the United Kingdom was never in doubt, as Peru was not a real country, just a playground – an exotic backdrop to my adventures. Then, perhaps, I would do a PhD, or get a job, or something. The future was vague, but it was clear that South America existed mainly for what it could do for me and for my résumé. I think, at the time, I dressed up my ‘year out’ in the language of development. I was going to ‘help’, to ‘get involved with education’, for the sake of ‘doing good’. This was long before Angelina Jolie and others made aid work de rigueur, and volunteer tourism was still in its infancy. But I was a politics student, steeped in the discourses of these things. I had not thought through the entitlement of my own positioning and my British passport that let me go wherever I wanted. I didn’t really question just who I would be ‘helping’ by teaching English in what turned out to be an uppercrust, for-profit language school in Lima. I just went. I needed to prove something to girls like Jenny, and I needed to stop feeling intimidated by the world. Charles Nicholl’s capers would be my capers. Exotic stories of exotic provenance, those would be mine. Among people who lived worldly lives, I would hold my own. This was, at first, what drove me.

Linguacultural competence Why learn a foreign language? The purpose is sometimes very clear. For the Syrian refugees arriving in Germany (as I write this chapter in August 2015), the German-learning goal is obvious: to participate in their new society. For others, the purpose may be more vague. It may be because foreign-language exams are educational gatekeepers or because learners are implicitly conceptualized as future tourists or businesspeople. Depending on learners’ purposes, different aspects of the language will be relatively more or less important. However, if the goal is to be able to communicate – to understand and be understood – in the target-language society, then the goal is communicative competence. Proposed initially by Hymes (1972) and defined by Canale and Swain (1980), communicative competence comprises four areas of knowing in the target language. These are grammatical competence (being able to use the grammatical and lexical systems of the language), sociolinguistic competence (appropriateness of language use to social context), strategic competence (getting meaning across when there are communication breakdowns, such as by asking for clarification), and discourse competence (knowing how oral and written texts are structured

Theorizing intercultural competence 21 and how they work within social contexts). This model has since been problematized and extended (e.g. Byram, 2009; discussion follows), but the four-part framing, nevertheless, offers insight into the likely goals of language learning. ‘Culture’ exists in all four areas, although is typically conceived as primarily part of sociolinguistic competence. Culture can be embedded in language itself with words and grammar being ‘cultural’ to some extent. For instance, the Arabic phrase inshā’Allāh’ used by Muslim and non-Muslim Arabic speakers, although it invokes Allah, mitigates statements about or hopes for the future (Clift & Helani, 2010). Similarly, grammatical systems may embed culture, such as the way space is organized and labelled. For example, unlike English, in which location relates to the speaker, the Mexican Mayan language Tzotzil organizes space by cardinal compass points (de León, 1994). So, for example, to a Tzotzil speaker, ‘the wasp is on my south leg’ rather than ‘my left leg’ if facing west. Strategic, discourse, and, particularly, sociolinguistic competence perhaps more obviously involve cultural knowledge, as repair strategies, text organization (including knowing conversational turn-taking and the uses and meaning of silence, for example), and contextual appropriateness are all governed by cultural norms. However, although acquiring the four aspects of communicative competence in a given language also means necessarily acquiring something of its culture, there is also a need to acquire a more explicit type of cultural competence as related to target-language culture/s. Sharifian and Jamarani (2013, p.237) exemplify this with a story in which Roya, an Iranian user of English, draws upon her Persian cultural schema of sharmandegi, ‘being ashamed’, which is associated with the speech act of thanking. She ‘thanks’ her Australian neighbour for regularly mowing her front lawn by saying this ‘makes her ashamed’. He stops doing it, which was not Roya’s intended effect. This example can be understood as a misreading of the semantic borders of the word ‘ashamed’ (a grammatical competence problem), as a failure of strategic competence (although, to be fair, the misunderstanding was not discovered until the neighbour stopped mowing the lawn), or as a sociolinguistic competence problem in which the notion of ‘ashamed’ does not fit the function of ‘thanking’. Or perhaps it is all three, and more besides. Sharifian (2013, p.69) attributes this problem to ‘a mismatch of cultural schemas’ – that is, a problem extending beyond communicative competence into intercultural competence. This suggests that there is also a need in language education to teach intercultural competence. This bundling of language and culture in language education has been called linguaculture, sometimes languaculture, and refers to the interface between language and culture (Risager, 2012). This, for Byram (2009, pp.322–323) is the fifth competence, which he terms ‘critical cultural awareness’ or savoir s’engager, the ability to engage. This he defines as ‘an ability to evaluate critically, on the basis of explicit criteria, perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries’. In Roya’s case, according to Byram’s expanded communicative competence framework, what is missing is the awareness that while sharmandegi connotes thanking in Persian, this is not the case in English and that telling her neighbour she is ‘ashamed’ he is mowing her lawn will likely

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be interpreted differently, perhaps as a gentle rebuke or a complaint, and that he will stop doing it. It is necessary, then, when learning a language also to learn enough intercultural competence to enable navigation of misunderstandings such as this one. This is not to say that learners of a given language must (or, indeed, that they can) adopt wholesale the culture of the people who use that language. There is plenty of debate about linguistic relativity – that is, the extent to which language shapes worldview (see Risager, 2012 for a review of this literature). So, for example, while English does not differentiate formal and informal ‘you’ pronouns and their accompanying verb forms, the tú/ustéd, informal/formal distinction in Spanish is important. Scollon et al. (2012, p.57) cite the case of an Englishdominant learner of Spanish who struggled with this and therefore employed the strategy of using only the informal ‘tú’ form, with the result that he was perceived to be insulting people by taking a superior position. As in Roya’s case, a language problem, insufficiently analyzed as a cultural issue, caused a well-intentioned but ultimately unshared sign to be misread. This points to the importance of engaging with target-language culture/s, even though it will be natural to build on the linguaculture developed in relation to the first language. Personal connotations to words and phrases will be transferred, and a kind of language mixture will result . . . even when the learner reaches a high level of competence, his/her linguaculture will always be the result of an accumulation of experiences during his/her entire life history, some of which will have taken place outside the target-language community. (Risager, 2012, p.109) This is to say that while part of the task of language learning is to acquire savoir s’engager, the ability to engage across cultures, it is not the case that language learners should try to acculturate themselves into the target culture, or that they should try to ‘forget or put aside [their] own culture and to adopt that of [the target culture]’ (Scollon et al., 2012, p.163). This is relevant to language education in classrooms as well as in immersion settings and Kramsch (2013), for example, shows how German-language-education textbooks may engage with historical discourses in ways that either compound or disrupt learners’ existing cultural schema. While it is not a legitimate aim of foreign-language education to erase home culture schemata and acculturate learners into target-language cultural viewpoints, it is necessary for language educators to equip learners to engage with contextually normative cultural schema and cultural ‘rules’ in the target linguaculture. (And, in the case of Spanish, as with English, these will be varied and multiple as both languages are used in myriad cultural contexts.) This may involve exposing learners to texts that disrupt and challenge their own cultural norms in order to help them build the type of ‘critical cultural awareness’ that Byram defined earlier. How can this be done in language education? The next section considers this issue.

Theorizing intercultural competence 23

Developing intercultural competence in language education? Teaching ‘culture’ in language education rests on an understanding of what culture is. As this may not always be clear, there is an unfortunate tendency in language education for ‘culture-teaching’ to resort to the superficial learning about of what Kramsch (2013, p.23) calls ‘food, fairs and folklore’ and Holliday (2013, p.122) calls ‘food and festivals’. Familiarity with superficial cultural ephemera may motivate learners integratively by helping them develop positive affect towards target-language cultures. Further, this approach to culture teaching may help learners understand text deixis, which is where target-language users refer to cultural phenomena outside texts assuming that this knowledge is shared. And, certainly, this type of cultural ‘knowing about’ is easy to teach and to test, which may appeal to teachers and curriculum developers. However, a ‘knowing-about’ approach to surface-level ‘cultural’ artefacts does not necessarily help learners build the type of critical cultural awareness that would enable them to engage across cultures. And, more problematically, the ‘Italians-eat-pasta-and-ride-Vespas’ approach to teaching culture necessarily essentializes ‘Italian culture’ as homogenous, deterministic, and fixed in time. The same issue applies to putative national characteristics, such as the supposed ‘easy-going’ nature of Latin Americans (e.g. Baud & Ypeij, 2009; Fant, 2012). Referring to the way Latinos are constructed in USA social imaginaries, Dominican writer Junot Díaz calls this problem the ‘discursive Latino’, describing superficial ‘Salsa-level’ latinidad [Latinness]: Which is to say you can talk about music and food and other charming Latino cultural simplifications that an outsider can connect with and consume ahistorically, but that simultaneously discourages any practical Latinidad that recognizes and engages with progressive political projects, with immigration reform, with [Latin American] oppressive social realities, with activism, with the neocolonial umbra that define in large part the Latino reality. (Díaz, n.d., cited by Hanna et al., 2016, e-book loc. 1025) But appealing to ‘safe’ stereotypes, such as Salsa-level latinidad, paradoxically detracts from the very goal of teaching culture in the first place. This is because, while ‘teaching culture’ aims to help learners engage with cultural others, this approach actually decreases learners’ intercultural competence. Stereotypes are reified rather than problematized. Attributing culture deterministically and seeing ‘culture’ as homogenous and static are the short steps between food-andfestivals approaches and a problematic essentialism of human beings reduced to safe, predictable, and ‘charming’ cultural others. A similar, more subtle, phenomenon in ‘culture teaching’ as part of language education is the hidden cultural curriculum in teaching materials, particularly where these originate in target-language countries and are foreign to students of

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the language. For instance, Gray (2010, p.714) analyzed representations of work in English-language textbooks, finding that students are repeatedly interpellated in these materials to the subject position of white-collar individualism in which the world of work is overwhelmingly seen as a privileged means for the full and intense realization of the self along lines determined largely by personal choice. This is a very particular cultural construction that draws upon the neoliberal capitalist discourses as well as ‘Western’ norms of the role of work in one’s life. By way of illustration of the particularity of this view of work, I contrast it with Hessler’s (2009) description of a city in Zhejiang, China, in which migrant workers hand paint scenes of Venice and Paris for tourists markets in Europe: Chen was in her early twenties, and she had grown up on a farm near Lishui; as a teenager, she learned to paint at an art school. . . . I asked her which of her pictures she liked the most, and she said, “I don’t like any of them.” She didn’t have a favourite painter; there wasn’t any particular artistic period that had influenced her . . . . Once, not long after we met, I asked her how she first became interested in oil painting. “Because I was a terrible student,” she said. “I had bad grades, and I couldn’t get into high school. It’s easier to get accepted to an art school than to a technical school, so that’s what I did.” “Did you like to draw when you were little?” “No.” “But you had natural talent, right?” “Absolutely none at all!” she said, laughing. “When I started, I couldn’t even hold a brush!” “Did you study well?” “No. I was the worst in the class.” “But did you enjoy it?” “No. I didn’t like it one bit. . . .” The more time I spent in the city, the more I was impressed with how comfortable people were with their jobs . . . very little of their self-worth seemed to be tied up in these trades. There were no illusions of control . . . If a job disappeared or an opportunity dried up, workers didn’t waste time wondering why . . . When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn’t expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs. The fact that her vocation was completely removed from her personality and her past was no more disorienting than the scenes she painted – if anything, it simplified things. Chen’s pragmatism, opportunism, and reluctance to expect her job to match her personality or abilities constitute a very different ‘ideology’ of work to that constructed by English-language textbooks (Block et al., 2012; Gray 2010), in which one’s career is ostensibly the result of choices and passions and which

Theorizing intercultural competence 25 is supposed to confer the self-actualization that would result in subjects’ selfdefining by their profession (as, indeed, is common in some social ‘worlds’). Each of these is a very particular ‘cultural’ construction of the role of work. But is one cultural context the Anglophone ‘West’ and the other ‘Chinese’? Is it the case that ‘Westerners’ expect work to define them as people, but Chinese people do not? Drawing on Hessler’s depiction of Chen, there are many identity axes along which differences may be found. Chen is young, rural, female, and working class. She is not educationally accomplished. To pick her Chineseness as her most salient identity is arbitrary. For this reason, nation-comparing ‘cultural’ depictions are highly misleading and are indicative of an important area in which culture teaching may be problematic in language education. Where ‘culture’ is attributed to nationality or broader geographical origin, and generalizations and comparisons are made, stereotyping necessarily ensues. There is a silo of research literature in which this occurs too, and this is contextualized against the wider ‘story’ of research on intercultural competence in the next section. Meanwhile, this kind of generalization and deterministic attribution of supposed cultural traits by nationality, region, language, and/or race also happens in teaching materials and in classroom discourse. While language teachers may faithfully believe they are ‘doing culture’ in class, they may nevertheless fall into the traps of essentializing and homogenizing (Starkey, 2007). In the context of English teaching at a Canadian university, for example, Lee (2015) shows how everyday discourses result in the re/production of supposed ‘cultural’ differences. Lee reports that ‘culture and cultural identity were talked into being through everyday discourses of cultural difference’ (p.6). This included collapsing individuals’ perspectives into representations of ‘the Asian way’ and wellmeaning, ostensibly inclusive questions like ‘do you guys think like that in your country?’ At the root of these issues are two problems: the attribution of ‘culture’ by nationality or some other identity label and the drawing of inferences about groups’ generalized ‘culture’ from isolated facts, artefacts, individual behaviours, or broader cultural stereotypes. These serious issues of trying to teach ‘cultural’ content in language education debunk the notion, widely assumed, that foreign-language learning necessarily results in learners’ acquiring intercultural competence. How then can the type of intercultural competence that Byram (2009) proposes be developed? In order to address this, it is necessary to consider models of what intercultural competence actually comprises, and indeed, what culture itself is. These issues are the subject of the next section.

Researching the inter/cultural Intercultural research is complicated by a proliferation of labels, models, and disciplinary affiliations, as well as by its location within competing paradigms and research traditions. In addition, there is simply a lot of it. For instance, Spitzberg and Changnon (2009, p.45) are scathing in their analysis that ‘many conceptual wheels are being reinvented at the expense of legitimate progress’. They cite

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more than three hundred terms and concepts, arguing that ‘[s]ocial processes and systems are very complex, but it seems implausible that they need to be this complex’. A comprehensive overview of research in the field is therefore at least a book-length project, as indeed is suggested by the recent appearance of weighty handbooks on the subject (e.g. Bennett, 2015; Deardorff, 2009; Jackson, 2012, Paulston et al., 2012). My intention here is therefore modest: to provide a brief overview of the field, including a sense of where critical intercultural competence fits into the literature and an explanation for why it is used in this study. A problematizing of terminology and assumptions is first necessary. The term ‘intercultural competence’ (or ‘intercultural communication competence’; Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009, p.5) generally denotes a set of qualities, skills, and/or knowledge types that individuals may ‘have’, to a greater or lesser degree, and which enable them to communicate with people from other ‘cultures’. This raises immediate questions of what kinds of people are seen as being culturally ‘other’, and therefore, how might we conceptualize ‘a’ culture, in the singular (e.g. Holliday, 2013; Scollon et al., 2012). Additionally, does intercultural competence ‘belong’ to individuals as something they ‘have’? Or is intercultural competence a phenomenon more properly located in interactions, or in discourse communities, or somewhere else? Questions are also raised about cultural particularity: if intercultural competence is, indeed, an individual thing, is it specific to a particular ‘other’ culture with which the individual interacts, or is it a generalized competence that transcends context? So, for instance, does my time in Latin America, my proficiency in Spanish, and my likely resultant intercultural competence among those Latin American discourse communities with which I’m familiar help me ‘cross cultures’ if I go somewhere like Iran or Sri Lanka where I don’t speak the language, where I have never been, and about which I have little background knowledge? Other questions are important in this space too, although they are much more commonly asked in the literature: (how) can intercultural competence be taught? And tested? And how can and should we research the intercultural? All these questions recur and are addressed in this book. A further terminological issue is raised when the focus is the phenomenon of intercultural connections rather than the competence enabling them. This may be called ‘intercultural communication’ (e.g. Holliday, 2013; Nakayama & Halualani, 2013) or ‘interculturality’ (e.g. Kecskes, 2012; Medina López-Portillo & Sinnigen, 2009; Rozbicki, 2015). Rozbicki (2015, p.1) defines interculturality as a phenomenon that occurs ‘when people come into contact with cultural otherness’, while Medina López-Portillo and Sinnigen (2009, p.250) emphasize its contextual particularity: In Latin America . . . the preferred term is interculturality, and the difference between the two terms is conceptual. Intercultural competence refers to an individual set of skills that can be acquired and learned; interculturality refers to a historical condition. . . . Interculturality points to the radical restructuring of historically pronounced uneven relations of wealth and power . . . [it is

Theorizing intercultural competence 27 also] used to describe the necessary conditions for a new social configuration that allows historically marginalized [groups] . . . to pursue cultural, political, and economic equality. This emphasis is traceable to Andean philosophies of alli kawsay, good living, which ‘stresses reciprocal, complementary, and cooperative relations’ and questions Western norms of ‘individualism, colonialism, and modernity’ (ibid., p.251). While Medina López-Portillo and Sinnigen’s focus is within Latin American countries, particularly on relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, they cite Alvaro García who stresses anti-imperialism and an interculturality ‘that extends to all the peoples of the world’ (ibid. p.252). How, then, are we to navigate the complex ‘intercultural’ academic field? Leeds-Hurwitz (2013) provides an overview of the various tensions, paradigms, and perspectives by tracing the intellectual history of intercultural communication research. She begins with the early twentieth-century anthropologists who travelled the world to describe mainly ‘primitive’ cultures in ways that they thought were objective. Theoretical concepts underpinning this work included ‘national character’, which was described in order to understand and predict behaviour, assuming that ‘everyone in a particular nation shares certain core characteristics’ (p.24). Leeds-Hurwitz notes that this kind of work relies on an assumption of homogeneity within a given ‘culture’, usually defined as a nation state, and that this assumption ‘was assumed to be reasonable until surprisingly recently by the vast majority of researchers’ (p.29). Indeed, the legacy of positivism and putative ‘objective’ inter/cultural research is still widely seen in the literature. For example, Hofstede’s (1991/2005) work, which lies entirely within this tradition of describing and classifying national ‘cultural’ characteristics that are then compared to those of other nations, is the single most cited work in social sciences (Jones & Alony, 2007). Similarly, Hall’s (1976) dichotomy of high- and low-context cultures continues to inform intercultural research; for example, Feghali (1997, p.351) critiques intercultural research in the Arab world that has ‘relied heavily’ on Hall’s work. As I have discussed elsewhere (e.g. Stanley, 2013, pp.16–19), this kind of thinking is reductive, essentialist, deterministic, and problematic. It is little else than national stereotyping legitimized through (a highly problematic) positivism that pretends objectivity even as it project[s] concepts of a culturally superior Centre-Western Self and an inferior Other onto the rest of the world, and . . . represents a discourse of political interference – a mandate for correcting and changing the imagined indolence of the cultures of the East and the South. (Holliday, 2009, p.148) This is why Moon (2013, p.35) strongly critiques intercultural communication research as ‘a tool of imperialism’ that is ‘infused with a colonial purpose’. Similarly, Ono (2013, p.88) critiques the tendency of the literature to homogenize the ‘diversity of ideas, opinions, lifestyles, and behaviours’ found across all nations,

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problematizing this as a practice that ‘serves to reify notions of difference and commonality’ (ibid.). This is comparable at a regional level to Zaharna’s (2009, p.180) critique of the homogenizing shorthand of ‘the Arab world’ and ‘Arab culture’, and at the level of global economic relations to Spivak’s (1985, p.243) critique of the ‘worlding’ of the ‘third world’ as a discursive trope that produces a Self/Other relationship not unlike that critiqued in Said’s work on Orientalism (1979; 1986). With these paradigms and problems in mind, Holliday (2013, pp.109–110) provides a framework of six distinct discourses of culture. One is an ‘essentialist’ paradigm, which he says is ‘seductive not only because it claims logical and systematic insider knowledge, but also because it is present in the academic literature which claims objective knowledge’ (p.116). However, as in his 2009 quote noted earlier, he firmly critiques this orientation towards culture as the product of a particular discourse: that of Western academics (p.117). A similar paradigm underpins another discourse, which Holliday calls ‘West as steward’. This he characterizes as the view that ‘modernity and progress reside in the West’ and which he traces to colonial origins and the ‘excuse for invading others so that they can be educated’ (p.110). Similarly, the framing labels – the ‘centre/West’ and ‘the periphery’ – inform a related discourse, which Holliday calls ‘West versus the rest’ (p.110). This paradigm champions normative Western discourses that come to define what is (globally) considered ‘normal’, ‘desirable’, ‘proficient’, and ‘deficient’ (p.109). Although this view is more pluralistic in its recognition of some periphery voices, it nevertheless falls back on essentialism both in its structural attribution of centre/periphery identities and power and also in the outcome of ‘[e]xaggeration of non-Western cultural traits and values through recourse to the ‘essentialist culture and language’ discourse’ (p.109). Holliday analyzes as similarly essentialist the paradigm underpinning yet another discourse of culture, which he calls ‘Liberal multiculturalism’. This is the view that cultures are essentially and exotically different from one another and that the expression and sharing of such exotica as food and costumes (although importantly not the more fundamental cultural differences in ontology, epistemology, and values) has an important place in education (p.110). Another paradigm, the ‘third space’, draws on Kramsch (e.g. 2009) and Bhabha’s (2004/1994) work on the notion of a neutral domain ‘between’ cultures (assuming that cultures have firm lines around them) in which ‘people from different cultures can come together and be themselves’ (Holliday, 2013, p.110). This approach, however, problematically glosses over potentially zero-sum incompatibility of values. For example, can we label as ‘genocide’ the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, or not? Article 301 of the Turkish penal code prohibits describing it as such, and novelist Ohran Pamuk was tried in 2005 under this law. And yet in Switzerland, Slovakia, Greece, and Cyprus it is illegal to deny that what happened was genocide. Where is the third space here? In addition, Spitzberg and Changnon (2009, p.35) query the practicalities of adapting oneself to cultural others if they, themselves, are also trying to adapt. They note, ‘If both are adapting, it seems possible that both interactants become chameleons without a clear target pattern to which to adapt’.

Theorizing intercultural competence 29 Each of these five discourses of culture are thus problematic in that they take as their basic premise one or more of the following assumptions: that common ground necessarily exists between values; that cultures are homogenous and/or static; that cultures/discourses are attributable to people by structural category (whether nation or otherwise) and that these categories can predict ‘cultural’ behaviours; that cultures are inherently superior or inferior to one another and that therefore some deserve outsider meddling; that cultural lines are inherently uncrossable; that culture can or should be reduced to surface-level exotica or easily adaptable traits, with more profound differences ignored in the name of adaptation; and that cultural and intercultural understanding is universal and not ethnocentric, despite its predominant origin within and in response to centre/ West discourses. The aforementioned framings, variously, are also the bases for instruments that purport to measure individuals’ levels of intercultural competence, such as Hammer et al.’s (2003) intercultural development inventory (IDI) or Bennett’s (1986) developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (DMIS). While such models may help shed light on likely components of intercultural competence, they also attempt to cleave intercultural communications from their messy human contexts, replete with performances and identity scripts, likely divergent perceptions of relative power, intersectional identities, and pre-existing discourses of both self and ‘other’ cultures’. Such models, therefore, elide much of the complexity, nuance, and interestingness of culture in which individuals creatively and purposefully align themselves with myriad aspects of their intersectional identities in their chosen identity performances. These models, taken separately or together, have been the basis of many studies in this field that purport to measure intercultural competence, and Deardorff (2011) provides a book-length study on measurement. Jackson (2010) applies the DMIS and IDI, among other models, to measure the before, during, and after intercultural competence of Hong Kong students studying abroad in England. However, she says little about the macro-level power relations that frame the context, focusing instead on nuanced and beautifully rich data in which the student participants’ gradually make sense of the process of the new culture (e.g. Jade’s engagement with British ways of responding to catching a cold are compared to Hong Kong ways, p.160). But so much is elided in this kind of comparative, values-neutral approach. Similarly, Medina López-Portillo (2004), in a study of US-American study-abroad learners in Mexico found that the time spent and location in Mexico (i.e. whether seven weeks in Taxco or sixteen weeks in Mexico City) determined the extent to which they became interculturally competent as a result of the sojourn. But what else was going on for the twenty-eight students she surveyed? Just as the United Kingdom is unlikely to cause ‘neutral’ feelings in Jackson’s Hong Kong students, Mexico is far from ‘neutral’ in US-American social imaginaries. Without a sense of wider issues of relative power, attitudes, intersectional identities, and messy human beings, such studies are interesting but may miss as much as they find if they hope to cleave intercultural competence from context in order to measure it. For this reason, my focus in this study is

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not on the time period that each participant spent in Latin America but on their discourses about cultural others and their processes of engaging. This is why a more complex, critical model of intercultural competence is needed.

Critical intercultural competence This project moves beyond these five models, disputing that culture and intercultural competence are neutral objects that can be attributed, measured, controlled, neatly diagrammed, or separated from their human hosts. Instead, I take a process-oriented, post-modern, critical approach that frames individuals not as dupes who sleepwalk through structurally attributed national ‘cultural’ scripts, but as active agents who appropriate, resist, recast, and adapt intersectional cultural resources depending on context, desired effect, and interlocutor (Kubota, 2012). What I mean by critical intercultural competence, then, is Holliday’s (2013) sixth paradigm, which he calls ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ (p.109). Others have used different labels or emphasis, such as ‘critical cultural awareness’ (Byram, 2009), ‘critical language and intercultural communication pedagogy’ (Guilherme, 2012), ‘critical intercultural communication’ (Nakayama & Halualani, 2013), and ‘critical approaches’ (Kubota, 2012). I conceptualize critical intercultural competence as incorporating elements of all of these. Criticality is a problematic term. First, there is its polysemy. ‘Critical’ can mean ‘tending to criticize’ or ‘life-threatening’, and I mean neither of these. ‘Critical’ can also mean ‘important’, and while this work is important, this is not my meaning either. Instead, ‘critical’ means conscious of ‘power, context, socio-economic relations and historical/structural forces as constituting and shaping culture and intercultural communication encounters, relationships, and contexts’ (Halualani & Nakayama, 2013, p.1). However, this use is also contested, sometimes seeming to mean ‘opposition to Western power’. This is a similarly problematic oversimplification. However, while criticality is about power, it is important to guard against attributing power categorically based on structural determinism. In the same way as not all ‘Westerners’ are necessarily richer or more privileged than all ‘non-Westerners’ and not all men are more powerful than all women, and so on, we must be cautious when using social categories to ascribe and understand power relations. This is because identities are intersectional. While categories like nationality do very likely influence individuals’ cultural identities and their discourses, it is also necessary to ‘scrutinize intersections of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and classes’ (Collier, 2001, p.xii). To this list I would add, at least dis/ability, sexual identity, family/partner status, generation/age, (claimed and/or personal) ‘cultural’ heritage, life trajectory, religion, politics, first/subsequent language/s proficiency and accent, immigration status, income, occupation, interests, education, location, membership of high- or low-status groupings, and embodied ‘capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986) in the form of conventional physical attractiveness and bodily health and fitness. This wider understanding of the many axes of power and privilege allow for a more nuanced understanding of what is happening in

Theorizing intercultural competence 31 ‘intercultural’ encounters where people do not share the same discourses because of difference along any, perhaps along many, of these axes. Intersectionality of a specific set of identity markers explains the ‘comfortable groove’ that William Kelly (2008, p.268) experienced as a young, white, straight, male, US-American teacher of English in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, where he enjoyed ‘status, money, and popularity’ because of the cachet attributed to his intersectional identity. In the same way, intersectionality can compound marginalization, such as in Boylorn’s (2013) account of growing up as a poor, rural ‘blackgirl’ in the US South. Boylorn combines race and gender labels in a neologism as they are, for her, inseparable identity categories. This is why I share Ono’s (2013), Spivak’s (1985), and Zaharna’s (2009) concerns about the ways in which ‘cultures’ tend to be delineated in the literature and in everyday parlance as synonymous with nation. Instead of culture being nation based, I see it as a heuristic that helps explain why some communications seem to be easier than others. It is important to note that this is not necessarily about national identities. This is why Scollon et al. (2012, p.3) describe culture as ‘a way of dividing people up into groups according to some feature of these people which help us to understand something about them and how they are different from or similar to other people’. Yes, culture is about groups, but not necessarily national groups. Because of this, Holliday (2010; 2013) conceptualizes as the basis of intercultural communication ‘small cultures’, which Fairclough (1995, p.37) defines as an ‘intermediate level of social structuring in which there are identifiable discourses’. These might include, for example, the discourses and accepted norms of members of a ladies golf club, backpackers travelling in Central America, or a virtual community of those who read and comment on articles in the Guardian. So while same-nationality people might share media discourses, some similarities in lived history and experiences of schooling, and to some extent a shared national social imaginary (Appadurai, 1996), we have more in common with those who share our ‘small cultures’ whether or not they also share our nationality. Appadurai (1996, p.31) describes this as a ‘complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes’, noting that this draws upon the French notion of the imaginaire, ‘a constructed landscape of collective aspirations’. So if the following mean little to you – ‘par three’, ‘doing Open Water in Utila’, or ‘mods on the thread’, this is because you are not part of the ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz, 1973, p.5), or shared discourses, of the ‘small cultures’ mentioned earlier. This is why Scollon et al. (2012) describe theirs as a ‘discourse approach’ to intercultural communication, defining ‘discourse’ as ‘the broad range of everything which can be said . . . within a particular, recognizable domain’ (p.8). They go on to say (p.10), We are not “controlled” by our discourse systems. Although the tools that discourse systems provide tend to severely limit and focus the kinds of actions that we can take, we are also able to adapt these tools as we appropriate them into different kinds of situations. We may not always be completely

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Theorizing intercultural competence conscious of how we appropriate and use cultural tools, but there is still an element of choice involved.

So ‘culture’ cannot be attributed by our macro groupings (e.g. nation) or even micro grouping (e.g. Guardian readership) because the same person can simultaneously be grouped into many intersectional categories, with tensions between the various discourses of which s/he is a part and with differing statuses in and orientations towards the various discourse communities. The individual people at the centre of Geertz’s ‘webs of meaning’ mean that it is not always clear where lines can be drawn between the personal and the ‘cultural’. For this reason, Holliday (2013, p.1) describes negotiating culture as a ‘grammatical’ system, explaining that as our knowledge of linguistic grammar enables us to read sentences, so our underlying cultural knowledge ‘provides a structure which enables us to read cultural events’. Holliday goes on to say that this cultural grammar involves a ‘conversation between the different domains’, which is ‘sometimes harmonious and sometimes ridden with conflict’ (ibid.). Thus whereas traditional models of intercultural competence aim to attribute and predict ‘intercultural’ communication based on national labels and, arguably, stereotypes, a critical understanding of the ‘intercultural’ recognizes that individuals are part of intersecting and at times contested discourses and that this is therefore a dynamic process in which sense-making (Weick et al., 2005) is informed by the discourses in which the individual takes part. While individuals have agency in how they choose to engage with people outside of their own discourse communities, they also draw upon their own small-culture discourses and social scripts to make sense of cultural ‘Others’.

Intercultural competence as it relates to this study Having outlined my understanding of culture and critical intercultural competence, I want briefly to address the question of whether this study might then, paradoxically, fall back onto more structural definitions. Isn’t it the case that going to another place is no guarantee of encountering cultural difference? Conversely, is it not the case that cultural difference is as likely to be found in the next neighbourhood in Chicago or Xela as it is to be found by boarding a plane in Chicago and flying all the way to Xela, or vice versa? Holliday (2013, p.109) critiques the notion of culture ‘as a place which can be visited’ and on the surface, it may seem as if this study assumes ‘intercultural’ contact necessarily entails crossing international borders. Certainly, the student and teachers in this study are separated by nationality and language. The students are mostly English-speaking US Americans and the teachers are Spanish-speaking Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Peruvians, even though some of the Guatemalan teachers spoke Kiché Maya at home and some of the US Americans came from Greek American, Japanese American, African American, and other minorities. But on the surface, it may look as if I juxtapose two ‘cultures’ by geographical labels: (mostly English-dominant) ‘Western’ students and (mostly Spanish-dominant) ‘Latin American’ teachers.

Theorizing intercultural competence 33 The language question is particularly knotty. While much has been written about the place of intercultural competence in language learning, much less has been written about the place of language proficiency in intercultural competence. This is perhaps because most models of intercultural competence originate in the Anglophone, US-centric ‘West’, which is ‘(in)famous for its monolingualism and ethnocentricity’ (Medina López-Portillo & Sinnigen, 2009, p.254). As a result, ‘most intercultural communication programs in the [USA] do not require advanced study of a language other than English’ (ibid.). As the participants in this study are studying Spanish, this is a valuable crucible for understanding the development of intercultural competence as it goes beyond a learning-about model of intercultural training programs. In addition, whether ‘cultures’ are conceptualized as national or as discourse communities/small cultures, language is likely to be an important borderline in intercultural communication. Certainly, intercultural research often focuses on misunderstandings borne of unshared meanings of words, sociolinguistic and discourse expectations, and other linguistic phenomena (e.g. Sharifian & Jamarani, 2013). There is also the linguistic relativity argument that the language in which we think influences, perhaps even determines, the way we think (Risager, 2012 outlines this much contested area). So while I do reject what may look like an a priori attribution of cultural difference based on nationality, language does seem to be important here. So although the juxtaposing of mainly US-American students and Latin American teachers may appear to employ reductive categories, the importance of language in framing discourse does appear to be a salient ‘edge’ to some aspects of cultural identity. In part, this is because of the ubiquity of ‘Hispanics’ in the US social imaginary (e.g. Dávila & Rivero, 2014; Milian, 2013). ‘Hispanics’, as a census category, comprise over 17 per cent of the US population (U.S. Census, 2013), and depictions of Latinos, Hispanics, Chicanos, and/or ‘Mexicans’ (Stephen et al., 2003) are all too often stereotypes. Imaginaries of latinidad, Latin-ness, saturate Hollywood (e.g. Brayton, 2008; Peña Acuña 2010) and also cultural products with an overt educational aim such as Dora the Explorer (Guidotti-Hernández, 2007) and Sesame Street (Fisch, 2014, p.110). As a result, non-Hispanic US Americans may feel they have an authentic grasp of Latin American cultures, perhaps conceptualized as homogenous (Lindenfeld, 2007). As the majority of the students in this study are US Americans who have not spent significant time in Latin America, their discourses of latinidad stem primarily from within-US intercultural engagement. Thus although the contexts for this study are about international experiences in Central and South American countries, these are not primarily inter-nation intercultural meetings as the discourses informing the USAmerican students’ experiences primarily draw upon latinidad as constructed in their home country. In this study, then, I conceptualize culture as a way of making sense of why some communications feel easier than others. If someone shares at least some of my ‘small-group’ affiliations and characteristics, it is likely that we will accord similar meanings to signs, whether words, actions, or other encodings

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of meaning. So, for example, people who share my generation, education, work status, gender, and more atomistic orientation towards family life may be able to understand why my not being married or having children in my early forties is a welcome choice and not a tragedy. But other people, perhaps those for whom family is more central, or whose idea of gender roles is different from mine, may struggle to understand what this circumstance means to me and may instead frame it in terms of what it would mean to them. This is cultural difference. This does not mean, however, that we can never communicate across cultures. Instead, when someone shares the same culture (again, not conceptualized as nationality, but as ‘small culture’), I can dispense with some of the conversational ‘footnotes’ explaining and justifying my meaning, choices, reasons, and identity. So my educated, financially independent women friends from Chile and China, for instance, ‘get’ me in a way that some of my compatriots may not. This is ‘culture’ operating along many axes of intersectional identity among which language and nationality may not be the most important. This is not to say, however, that ‘culture’ is simply geometric. It is not the case that if nodes of identity are mapped then a person’s ‘culture’ can be determined. This is because culture is not deterministic from structural positioning, whether from nationality (as the comparative models suggest) or from an expanded model of ‘small cultures’. Human beings are much too complex to be only a ‘product’ of their identity markers. We have agency. This means that our experiences and choices equip us to transcend the tyranny of ‘cultural’ labels. So while my cultural identity is all the things listed earlier, I am also someone who has chosen to engage with Spanish and with Latin America throughout the majority of my adult life. And so although the family-centricism that pervades in some (but not all) Latin American social contexts is not something I share, it is something that I understand and appreciate. In this area then, my ‘culture’ as might be mapped by my identity markers and the reality of my attitudes and understandings in this sphere do not match. Culture is therefore not a prison cell. We can shift our ‘culture’, and we can come to relate across cultures. This may involve a superficial learning of ‘tolerance’, which does not affect our own paradigms. Or it may mean developing intercultural competence, which entails reworking our worldview to some extent (Van de Berg, 2015). Relative power perceptions also matter, at least as much as putative ‘cultural’ characteristics. This means power at macro to micro levels: who am I to you, who has the higher status at this moment, and how has my country treated yours, for instance. Relative power perceptions affects the ‘intercultural’ much more than whether a person’s nationality supposedly respects authority or timekeeping, or is comfortable in general with social touch, or any of the other rules-type ‘cultural’ instructions that appear in the literature on intercultural communications (e.g. Meyer, 2015). This is why intercultural approaches that purport to teach the ‘rules’ of intercultural competence, as a product, is a canny business model for trainers and a never-ending impossibility for learners, because the permutations

Theorizing intercultural competence 35 of ‘cultural difference’ are infinite. Because of this, I see intercultural competence as more of a process: valuing and making sense of other perspectives, safely encircling of one’s own core values while allowing for flexibility over beliefs and ways that matter less; choosing one’s battles; allowing for face-saving, such as by leaving exit strategies; and being aware of relative power. But these are complex and largely ‘invisible’ phenomena, and so the next chapter considers how they might be researched.

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Research processes and intrigues

The purpose of a ‘methods’ chapter, in any research-based book, is to explain and justify how the study was done and how and why it was written the way it was. In this sense, this chapter is standard: I describe who was interviewed, and where, and for how long, and why I chose these particular participants, and what the settings were like. I show that the research design supports the findings and explain how my process ‘fits’ into scholarly research more widely. I explain how I wrote about the study and discuss some of the tensions therein. This is a qualitative, interpretive, ethnographic study that applies a critical lens to social relations, and although I assume the reader is familiar with such things, I explain in this chapter how this study is part of those traditions. In this chapter, I also introduce the use of autoethnographic insights, personal narratives, and reflexivity to manage and benefit from researcher experience and positionality, So far, so ordinary. But I want to do something more with ‘research methods’, which is both why this chapter is about ‘processes’ and ‘intrigues’ and also why Chapter 9 is a more reflective, after-the-fact ‘research methods’ chapter. This is because the research process is often seen as the least interesting part of research. And I think this misses something very important. At the heart of all big questions are issues of knowing: how do we know what we ‘know’? Are all ways of knowing valid? What is ‘truth’? Is ‘truth’ singular or plural? And if we acknowledge diverse ways of knowing, do we risk falling down a solipsistic rabbit hole into epistemological relativism in which everything, and anything, is true? And how can we enable readers to know? That is, how can we and how should we represent people and events and places in text? These are the more interesting methods questions than simply ‘which schools’ and ‘how many participants’, although this chapter also includes these kinds of details. But these interesting questions cannot all be answered here, as I want to draw on the study itself to answer them. And so, in this chapter, I explain how this study was done and written, and in Chapter 9, I come back to the research methods issues that this study raises.

On subverting ‘the academy’ I want to feel, when I write, the same prickling heat in my back as when I read Eduardo Galeano or Michele Moreno. Then I am exhilarated, driven to

Research processes and intrigues 37 keep reading, enchanted by the secular spell of word-magic. An entire day spent in a hammock with these modern greats is not a wasted day. Not at all. Like them, I want my readers to recognize something about themselves that rings true. As in García Márquez’s (1967) Macondo, I want to create living, breathing characters in living, heaving places that readers can never visit but can, through words, know intimately. I want to evoke in others the certainty that, as humans, we’re all deeply similar. I want readers to empathize with the people on the page. However, novel writing is not my baby. I write academically, and my writing has to fit the genre. As in Latin American street parades, where dancers in formation follow the locksteps of the samba or the meringue, academics often have little choice but to dance the standard steps. To join with the others in the parade, I must follow the form. However, having submitted to the standard, is it possible to nudge at the boundaries? Can I subvert the genre even a little? This isn’t easy, as the ghost of academic writing is never far away (as in the following quotation-dense paragraph in which I cite others to explain and support my point). Derrida (1976) calls this problem ‘hauntology’, a play on haunting and ontology: [A]ny attempt to isolate the origin of language will find its inaugural moment already dependent upon a system of linguistic differences that have been installed prior to the ‘originary’ moment. (Buse & Stott, 1999, pp.11–12) Similarly, Octavio Paz (1994, p.138) comments on Rubén Darío’s influence on Latin American poetry, writing that we can never start from scratch. Instead, all writers must decide how to engage with what has gone before: Todo lenguaje . . . termina por convertirse en una cárcel[.]. . . El lugar de Darío es central[.]. . . No es una influencia viva sino un término de referencia: un punto de partida o de llegada, un límite que hay que alcanzar o traspasar. Ser o no ser como él: de ambas maneras Darío está presente en el espíritu de los poetas contemporáneos. Es el fundador. [All language . . . eventually becomes a prison[.] . . . The place of Darío is central[.]. . . More than a living influence, he is a term of reference: a point of departure or arrival, a limit to be reached or crossed. To be like him or unlike him: either way, Darío is present in the spirit of contemporary poets. He is the founder.] And so, in this writing adventure, I want to write as myself. But I am conscious of the need to force my feet either to dance the standard steps or to consciously dance new steps that are defined by what they are not. Either way, what has gone before is always there, haunting my way of being. It is my hauntology.

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Why, then, is it worth nudging the genre? My purpose is more than the selfsatisfaction of creativity and wordplay. This is about accessibility, honesty, and getting the academy out from behind its smokescreen of big words (see also Clayton, 2015). As I have written elsewhere, Academic discourse is, notoriously, inaccessible, both to read and to write. Conventions and convolutions abound, and often the aim appears to be obfuscation rather than clarification. (As in this paragraph. Translation: academic texts are difficult. Academics do weird, complex things in their writing, and they all seem to do it in similar ways. It sometimes seems that the point is to confuse you rather than to tell you anything.) The complexity and conventions of academic writing work, in part, as gatekeeper: if you don’t write like us, you can’t come in. But while complex ideas and exact terminology certainly belong in academic writing, and complexity may be (a more legitimate) gatekeeper, I resist the perpetuation of normative, traditional, conventional writing for its own sake (and for keeping the riff raff out). There are plenty of other ways of being, and of writing. . . . [I]t is possible to write in ways that are evocative, holistic, embodied, and person-centred, and . . . [for] this [to be,] nevertheless[,] a useful, legitimate contribution to academic understanding. (Stanley, 2015, p.146) Just as importantly, I want to dispel the myth that non-fiction writing is neutral, objective, factual. It is not. Writers, all writers, are warm bodies with storied minds: people with prejudices, preferences, positioning, and predilections. It is dishonest to pretend otherwise. To hide behind passive voices in which research seemingly conducts itself, using tropes like ‘the study found’ – these are weasel words of prevarication. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are. When I first started writing non-fiction, I thought I was capturing fact, pinning it down on the page, and holding it still, butterfly-like. Now, I realize my texts say as much about me, the storyteller, as they do about the story. And so rather than hiding (behind) the elusive, illusive pursuit of truth, I’m embracing the fact of my fiction. All writing is a creative process. Like creative non-fiction – in whose handle is flaunted the putative oxymoron of the creative along with the factual – academic writing is a textual creation. It is a storied re-telling, a construction, a fiction in Borges’s (1944) sense. Citing Borges’s (1944) short story ‘Funes el memorioso’, Bell (2007) reiterates Borges’s point that all perception, all reporting, must necessarily simplify and reduce ‘the world’ and that to do so is to select some elements and discard others, to draw conclusions, to generalize. Unlike Borges’s character, Funes, who suffers a fall from his horse and a blow to the head and who, as a result, is cursed with the ‘perfect’ memory in which nothing is filtered, most ‘factual’ accounts are actually ‘gross and arbitrary reduction[s] of the world’ (Bell, 2007, p.124). By presenting ‘factual’ writing as more obviously ‘creative’, I want to acknowledge this problematic relationship that all non-fiction writers have with the ‘truth’.

Research processes and intrigues 39

Contexts There are many thousands of possible locations in Latin America in which one might study Spanish, formally or informally. I selected these three locations, Xela, Granada/Masaya, and Lima, for their variety and for the richness of data they promised. These three contexts, taken together, offer a composite picture of the wider Spanish immersion phenomenon across Latin America. Similar popular language-travel ‘scenes’ exist in Quito (Ecuador), Cuzco (Peru), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Antigua (Guatemala), Oaxaca (Mexico), and Cartagena (Colombia), among many other places. These and other Spanishtowns are long overdue for academic scrutiny. Of the three Spanishtowns discussed here, Xela is perhaps the most typical (Boyd, 2012; Kleinbaum, 2008; Tegelberg, 2013). It has a long-term, low-budget backpacker social scene in its bars, cafes, hostels, and volunteering projects, and services for longer-term foreign visitors are often advertised around town (see Illustration 2). Granada, Nicaragua, in contrast, has a well-heeled, well-established tourist social scene at all price points, from backpacker hostels to high-end hotels. Again, there are plenty of cafes, bars, and other ‘international’ spaces, in many of which English dominates. Adjacent to Granada is Masaya, famous for its tourist market. I see Granada and Masaya are conceptually contiguous because local people often commute between them and because tourism in Granada almost

Illustration 2 Notice board in Pasaje Enríquez, Xela.

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inevitably includes a visit to Masaya, and vice versa. Finally, Lima, Peru, is a major city of ten million people (INEI, 2015) with something of a ‘hipster’ and ‘foodie’ identity (El Comercio, 2014b; Farber, 2013). Notorious for grey skies and pollution, and more expensive than either Granada/Masaya or Xela, Lima attracts few Spanish-language students. However, tourists often volunteer in NGO projects in Lima’s pueblos jóvenes (shanty towns), and they are the focus of the Lima part of this study. Lima is thus atypical but interesting as a Spanish immersion setting. In each location, I worked with two institutions to access a range of participants and perspectives. The six institutions (which like all the participants are given pseudonyms throughout this text) operate as follows. El Patio (Guatemala) and La Escuelita (Peru) are privately owned, for-profit Spanish-language schools that offer homestay options and social and cultural activities including excursions. La Cooperativa (Guatemala) and La Torre (Nicaragua) are not-for-profit Spanish schools with social justice objectives. La Cooperativa is a teacher-run cooperative that works for social justice in part by teaching foreigners about Guatemala’s bloody history and politics. Its income supports education and health projects across and around Xela. La Torre’s model is similar: its Spanish classes crosssubsidize an education project for vulnerable local children. But from the students’ perspectives, La Torre and La Cooperativa operate like any other Spanish school, offering homestay options, social activities, excursions, and opportunities for volunteer work. These four institutions are thus standard examples of private Spanish-language schools as found across Latin America. In contrast, El Proyecto (Peru) and Los Voluntarios (Nicaragua) are NGOs that offer Spanish-language immersion through internships. But whereas most Los Voluntarios participants undertake hour-long, daily, one-to-one Spanish lessons, El Proyecto is unique among the six organizations as no formal Spanish-language lessons are offered. Instead, the intention seems to be that its interns will ‘pick up’ Spanish through living and working in Lima. Both these NGOs organize volunteer-work placements. At Los Voluntarios, participants work at local clinics, hospitals, schools, and agricultural projects. El Proyecto interns work in the El Proyecto office and in ‘the field’, were they organize short-term ‘volunteer’ field trips and market El Proyecto to the short-term ‘volunteers’, who spend only a week in Lima, stay in a hotel in Miraflores, and participate for four days in two projects (usually two days each): a mobile clinic and a staircase-building project. Thus for this study, only El Proyecto’s interns and not its volunteers were interviewed, as only the interns spend an extended period in Peru. At both El Proyecto and Los Voluntarios, interns stay in shared accommodations with their peers rather than in homestay accommodations, and their focus is very much volunteer work rather than Spanish-language development, although almost all expressed a motivation to learn or improve their Spanish during their sojourn. All study participants across all contexts spent at least a month in Latin America, and most spent considerably longer, whether or not at the same Spanish school and/or city throughout their sojourn. For example, some students studied in Xela for a few weeks and then moved on to Lake Atitlán and enrolled in another school for another few weeks before moving on to Nicaragua or Ecuador

Research processes and intrigues 41 to continue Spanish classes there. Most also combined Spanish-language study with tourism activities, such as trekking or scuba diving, and some used a few weeks of Spanish-language study as the foundation for further, sometimes quite lengthy, backpacker travels in the region. A few participants were studying, particularly in Xela, as part of credit-bearing, study-abroad courses in the USA, but these students were the minority. Most student participants in this study were self-funded and self-directed.

Doing the research I first went to Central America in 2000 as a backpacker. And then, in 2013, I went back to Guatemala and also Honduras to scope out the possibility of doing this study. The academic literature did not say much about the small, private Spanish schools, and I suspected there was a lot that could be said about what was ‘going on’ in the Spanishtowns. In Xela and elsewhere, I involved myself in the gringo scene of parties, excursions, and backpacker hostels. I talked to teachers, homestay hosts, school directors, and students, and I enrolled in Spanish lessons at El Patio, where I made friends with a circle of fellow students. But although I did no formal interviews on that trip, I took copious field notes and told staff at various schools about the research I wanted to do. Most were broadly supportive. So in 2014, with a research plan approved by my university’s ethics panel, I returned to Central America. In Granada and Masaya, I interviewed school directors, checked myself into busy backpacker hostels through which to meet backpackers, and left participant recruitment flyers in language schools, cafes, and hostels. I also talked about the study, a lot, to anyone who would listen, and in that way I also found participants by word of mouth. Sometimes, the school directors would invite me to come and tell their students about the study, and I grasped those opportunities too. So when I say that this study is ‘about’ six institutions, I mean that students and others from these places participated. But this is not a portrait of the institutions as such. Instead, institutional information provides background information on participants’ experiences. Drawing upon the Nicaragua data, I then presented at the conference of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (in Panama, in 2014). This is how Lima became part of the study. As with so much in research, the involvement of El Proyecto was a lucky break. Their director approached me afterwards to discuss interviewing his interns. My data had resonated strongly, and he thought that they would likely enjoy and learn from the experience of participating in the study. Many of the Nicaragua participants had mentioned volunteer work experiences as pivotal in their intercultural learning, so I was on the lookout for more data in that area. I therefore went to Lima in 2015 both to interview interns at El Proyecto and to undertake more participant research by enrolling myself in Spanish classes at La Escuelita. Also in 2015, I went back to Granada/Masaya and Xela. In each place, I returned to schools that knew me and was invited, again, to tell students about the project and to ask for volunteer participants. El Patio also offered me the

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chance to lead a two-hour ‘conferencia’ (see Chapter 5), in which thirty-two people participated including students, teachers, and administrators. In Xela in 2015, I also undertook more participant research by enrolling in Spanish classes at La Cooperativa. In summary, then, this study is based on the following data: I undertook nineteen weeks of participant research in total, during which I spent 130 hours as a student of Spanish for (50 hours each at El Patio and La Cooperativa, both in Xela, and 30 hours at La Escuelita in Lima) and 27 hours observing group/ one-to-one Spanish lessons at various proficiency levels at El Patio and La Torre. Throughout, I made detailed field notes. There were 120 people who participated directly in the study, and I spoke informally to many others. I interviewed eighty-eight people comprising forty-five students at Spanish schools, twentytwo people learning Spanish informally (mostly through internships or volunteer work), and twenty-one school/NGO directors, teachers, and homestay hosts. The nationality breakdown of the interviewees was as follows: forty-seven US Americans, fourteen Europeans (from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland), eleven Guatemalans, eight Nicaraguans, five Canadians, and three Australians. Another thirty-two people (sixteen Guatemalan teachers and administration staff and sixteen mostly US-American students) participated in the ‘conferencia’. In total, then, the study is based on 104 hours of interview recordings, 250 pages of field notes, and 157 hours’ worth of notes on Spanish lessons. US-American students dominate this study. While I would have liked to interview more students from other countries, the reasons for US dominance of the Spanish-language teaching market in these contexts are themselves part of the ‘story’. The first reason is simply the USA’s population size and proximity, and the second is the importance of Spanish in the USA itself, which is a product mainly of Latin American immigration. At 17 per cent of the population, ‘Hispanics’ are the biggest minority group in the USA (U.S. Census, 2013), and Spanish is by far the most commonly taught foreign language in US schooling (Furman et al., 2010). A third reason is seasonality. Whereas in 2013, I was in Guatemala in March and April, the time I was able to make free for extended fieldwork overseas in 2014 and 2015 coincided with North American summer, in May to August. As a result, although in 2013 I met Dutch, Australian, German, and Swiss students, as well as US Americans, in 2014 and 2015, most participants were North Americans, many of whom were college students on summer break. Other reasons for the predominance of US Americans in the Spanish-language programs are more nuanced and less based on demographics, but are nonetheless compelling. There are plenty of Europeans, Antipodeans, and some East Asians in Latin America, and when I travelled around, I met backpackers from the United Kingdom and Ireland, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. But, for the most part, they were engaged in backpacker tourism and not usually studying Spanish, or not studying for very long. For some, this was because they already spoke some Spanish and could get by, but overall few seemed motivated to pursue Spanish-language learning

Research processes and intrigues 43 beyond survival level. This perhaps speaks to the relative importance of Spanish in the USA compared to elsewhere. This is therefore mostly a study about North Americans’ experiences. Interviews lasted between twenty-five and ninety-five minutes. Sixty-five were conducted in English and twenty-three in Spanish (most Latin Americans and some students whose Spanish was stronger than their English; participants chose the language of the interviews). Almost all interviews were individual, with ten students in pairs for practical reasons. Most participants were interviewed only once, although twelve did follow-up interviews over several weeks, and five were interviewed across two years. Almost all interviews were audio recorded (three did not consent to recording, and I took notes instead). English-language audio files went to a commercial transcription service, and I selectively transcribed the Spanish-language recordings myself. Most interviews took place in cafes.

Negotiating access Meeting today with Roxana [the academic director] and Marco [the director] at El Patio. I make the point that I don’t intend to shoot fish in a barrel. (‘No quiero pescar los peces de un barril’. How does this sound in Spanish? Strange, I bet.) I’m not criticizing Xela, or the teachers, or the school, or the methods. I want, instead, to make sense of what is going on here in the cottage schools. (‘Las escuelas caseras’, I call them, with what I hope are the wholesome connotations of ‘home-made’ and not the ruinous sting of ‘amateurish’.) This is all absolutely true. But I also consciously do the intercultural in this meeting. I perform. I am conscious that Roxana and Marco probably assume that I want to critique their school. This is why I focus on the best schools in Xela, I tell them. As directors of one of the best schools, I reiterate, I know they’ll take my presence as constructive rather than as business ruining. Flattery cannot hurt, but this is also absolutely true: El Patio is one of the best schools, as is La Cooperativa, and I focus on these schools because the aim of this project is to hear the participants’ discourses, not to critique the schools or the teachers. Still, they need lots of smoothing and sweet-talking because who am I to them? An outsider. A researcher. A potential critic. And so, before even getting to this meeting, there have been two years’ worth of emails and staying in touch and suggesting useful ideas and helping to solve problems. For instance, I showed El Patio’s Coordinadora how to use model release forms for photos of students on their website. In short, I was friendly. Helpful. A person, not just a researcher. And then, in this meeting, I consciously put myself down and give El Patio face. I explain again what I want to do: tell their students about my project so that perhaps some of them would like to talk with me. I’d like to observe some lessons, with teachers’ and students’ consent, of course. I want to understand, I say. And it’s absolutely true. I do. I explain the project in detail again. Then Marco gives me face, too, saying that he studied English and he thought he knew it all, and then when he came to work with foreigners he realized, ‘wow’, there was still so much to learn about culture and

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Research processes and intrigues intercultural competence. My project is valid, he is telling me; learning is good. He says he is very interested. I mention my previous China project, published already by Routledge – they have heard of Routledge and seem impressed. In Xela, this counts as very worldly and impressive, and I know I’m bigging myself up to get credibility. But this kind of thing is a fine balance of being big and being small. Just as Marco has confessed to having thought he knew more than he did, I am now doing the same. This is a dance. Roxana offers me a coffee, and I say no, thanks, I just had one. Actually, I say, I was a bit nervous about coming to talk to you guys, so I had a coffee to give me courage. I should have put some rum in it, I joke. They both smile and tell me not to be afraid. Roxana smiles with her eyes, friend-like, almost maternal. And they seem warm to the idea of me speaking to the students. Marco suggests I might want to present a conferencia for their students on Thursday. They know from two years worth of emails that I’m a doctora something, senior-something, at the university of something-something, in faraway, exotic Australia. But, crucially, in this meeting, I have been a human being. They feel they can help me and that I can help them. Certainly, they can put me at ease, and they do so. In the sense of the intercultural being about doing things, all three of our performances ‘work’. We all come away from the encounter smiling, with something to show for it. They invite me to talk to the students at the morning break. And on the Thursday I am to present the conferencia. And so at El Patio I recruit a bunch of participants, both students and teachers. (Phiona, ‘field notes’, Xela 2015)

As this segment shows, negotiating research access is, in this case, intercultural and performative. I am aware as I talk to Roxana and Marco of the impression I want to convey and the perspectives that they may bring to the encounter. I need to be both expert-capable (particularly with gatekeepers) and also open, questioning, and willing to listen and learn (particularly with participants). This requires the conscious emphasis of different aspects of myself and my ‘truth’. But this is not the slippery trickery of fakery. This is the doing of ‘the intercultural’.

Autoethnography and ethnography as method Ethnography is the in-depth study of a culture. By this, in this book, I mean the ‘small culture’ of the transnational communities of non-local people who learn Spanish and also travel and/or volunteer in Xela, Granada/Masaya, and Lima. To produce an ethnography of these settings it is necessary to describe things ‘thickly’. This means digging deeper than what the participants say, do, and experience in order to explore, also, their ‘webs of meaning’: what they think they are doing and what their actions mean to them (Geertz, 1973). These understandings necessarily come from the ‘inside’ – that is, an ‘emic’ perspective in which I seek to make sense of the world of the transnational sojourners, who, like me, come from elsewhere and spend time, temporarily, in these Latin American cities.

Research processes and intrigues 45 There are, of course, tensions. In order to access the participants’ stories and experiences, I spent time with them, became friends, and did what they did: I took ‘chicken buses’, took Spanish classes, and took time to get to know them. But I am nevertheless a researcher – an identity I never hid from anyone in the settings. I am also different from the participants in that while we hung out and studied Spanish together, I had done those things before. As with all ethnographers, then, I had a bundled identity: participant but also observer, knowing but also seeing anew, and both involved and detached in the participants’ lives and experiences. This is why I combine the more traditional ethnographic methods of this book (e.g. spending time in the communities over three years, 2013–2015, and interviewing many different people) with the autoethnographic methods (i.e. reflecting on my own early experiences in comparable contexts). As my focus is the phenomenon of developing intercultural competence, it is valuable to look both at the participants’ stories and at my own. This is where this study innovates methodologically: it combines ethnography with autoethnography. Whereas most research, including ethnography, looks out at external objects, people, and phenomena, autoethnography looks inside, to the researcher’s own experience. ‘Hidden’ information, that cannot otherwise easily be observed, becomes reachable. Autoethnography is a qualitative method in the ethnographic tradition. But it is not (just) memoir. What distinguishes autoethnography is its focus on the individual within a social context: the ‘auto’ within the ‘ethno’ (Ellis, 2004). The writing of the ‘self’ is a means to an end: researchers tell their own stories in order to access data about the cultural and the contextual (Chang, 2008; Ellis, 2004, Muncey, 2010). Anderson (2006) differentiates between evocative and analytic autoethnography, which can be seen as two ends of a continuum. At the evocative end, writers aim for aesthetic texts that engage readers as co-participants in meaning making. Readers engage with what Willis (2004, p.111) calls compassionate listening: Compassionate listening . . . is when people become attentively silent to allow the others’ thoughts, fears and desires to become visible and alive in their awareness. . . . Concern for this form of listening, or ‘heart’ attention . . . is designed to complement but not supplant rational or ‘head’ forms of attention . . . which have to make analytical judgments . . . [O]ne of the crucial features of compassionate listening and reporting is that it uses nonrational (as apart from irrational) so-called ‘imaginal’ knowing processes . . . [P]eople seeking a more inclusive way of imagining ‘the other’ . . . may benefit from exploring these alternative ways of knowing and learning. Against a post-modern, qualitative research background in which universal ‘truth claims’ are widely discredited, autoethnography can be seen as ‘creat[ing] verisimilitude rather than making hard truth claims’ (Grant, 2010, p.578). This means that it seeks to create resonance. It seeks to provoke in readers an understanding

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of lived experience. And it ‘seeks to elicit caring and empathy, [as] it dwell[s] in the flux of lived experience’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2006, p.431). But is it research? Evocative autoethnography is easily critiqued as lazy, selfindulgent ‘me-search’ that is solipsistic and circular in its findings. Memory is flawed, stories are subjective, texts are fictions, and narratives are performances. Plus, telling experience can be all too telling. So when Carolyn Ellis describes raising a glass of champagne in celebration of her decision, with her fellow academic, intimate- and writing-partner, Arthur Bochner, to buy a new Mercedes (Ellis, 2004, p.349), readers experience an uncomfortably telling insight into what can be critiqued as heteronormative, acquisitive entitlement. Learmonth and Humphreys (2011, p.104) comment on Ellis’s lack of criticality: [I]n this account, as in all evocative ethnography, identity work gets done, versions of desirable societies get constructed, and so on. But the processes are occluded if the tales appear to be just about ‘what really happened . . . . [H]ad there been a concern to link this text with theory, the author may have become more aware of its possible ideological dimensions. They add, [I]ntimate stories of the academic self must be subjected to critique and analysis. Without it, such stories . . . will inevitably reflect our cosy, middleclass professional lives and aspirations[.] (pp.111–112) So while evocative autoethnography is engaging to read, and while it offers unique insights borne of witnessing or testimonio (Chavez, 2012), there also needs to be critical, analytical engagement with positionality and assumptions. What if we subject autoethnographic texts to the critical-analytical scrutiny that we apply to other research-data texts? This is how Anderson (2006) distinguishes analytic from evocative autoethnography, providing a set of criteria against which to evaluate the analytic. This includes the criterion that other people in the ethnographic milieu be consulted as part of the ethnographic process, resulting in an ‘auto’ ethnography that focuses, still, on the self, but that is as much ‘ethno’ as ‘auto’. This may address the perceived struggles of evocative autoethnography to attain academic legitimacy as it connects it to (legitimate) ethnography and takes the researcher’s own story beyond the self. In this book, then, autoethnography is combined with ‘standard’ ethnography. Other people are consulted, resulting in this text that blends autoethnography with ethnography to produce a composite picture of lived experiences.

Data analysis In common with grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), data analysis was iterative, interpretive, and thematic. This means that while I started with general interview

Research processes and intrigues 47 questions about participants’ experiences of crossing cultures and learning interculturality, I gradually refined this so that early interviews and conversations influenced the direction of later interviews in which I focused on specific themes emerging from the data itself. Sampling was purposeful, so, for example, while I had not specifically set out to look at volunteer-tourism experiences, these seemed to be a very important space of intercultural experience and discoursemaking. So I interviewed some people who were not formally learning Spanish but who were volunteering to immerse themselves in the places. They provided different, valuable insights to the project. There are, of course, some issues in analyzing data, particularly interview data. Interviewing, like autoethnography, is problematically reliant on knowledge, recall, issues of strategic impression management, and issues of data seen as ‘a simple window on experience’ (Silverman, 2013, p.50). However, if data extracts are seen primarily as discourse samples, interviews ‘often reveal unarticulated norms and normative assumptions’ (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005, p.903). The study, therefore, uses discourse (Scollon et al., 2012) and content analysis, the latter following the principles of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), to make sense of narrative data from interviews and personal experience. But interpretive research, which is what this is, is necessarily filtered through the lens of the particular researcher who does the interpreting. And as discussed, stories say as much about the storytellers as they do about the ‘facts’. The same is true of texts that purport to examine rather than to narrate. And so it is necessary to have a sense of who the researcher is. Where are the inevitable scratches on my interpretive lens that cause me to see something that is not there or to miss something that is? In answer, I offer the following narrative in which my passion for Latin America, I hope, comes across. This text also explains my inclination to use language holistically (backed up by inductive grammatical sense-making) rather than focusing mainly on grammar at the expense of meaning. Evident here also is my integrative motivation and my intrinsic interest in local people and local references.

Falling in love with Spanish (1994–1996) Lima, Peru, 1994–1995 We’re sitting on the curb in the dusty street under a tree. It is evening. I’ve brought us sugary Inca Kola, and the two glass bottles sit next to us collecting condensation in the humidity. We communicate through my fragments of Spanish but mostly through goodwill, sketches, and shared cognates, which we sometimes write down. It isn’t early March, but we’re talking about international women’s day: el día internacional de la mujer. I know the word ‘mujer’ and the rest is cognate-easy. In Peru, Arón says, women’s day means that men buy flowers for women, just like mother’s day. I say that where I’m from, it is a bit different, a bit more feminist. He considers the word feminist, rolls it around his mouth, and then dismisses it. Feminista. It sounds like an insult the way he says it. Arón is one of thirteen children, trece

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hijos. (¿Tres? No, ¡Trece! Uno. Dos. Tres. Cuatro. Cinco. Seis. Siete. Ocho. Nueve. Diez. Once. Doce. ¡Trece! He counts on all his fingers and three of mine.) He sends his mother flowers on women’s day. Women, he says, where he is from – which is Pucallpa in the Amazon basin – the women there work just as hard as men. Harder. Women’s day celebrates this, he says. With trece hijos, I imagine his mother’s life is really hard. I say this (grammatically all over the place but still making meaning): vida es duro. I tap on the surface of the stone curb to show this idea, duro, hard. Sí, la vida es dura. La vida de mi mamá es bastante dura, Arón confirms, correcting my accuracy without even realizing he’s reformulating it for me. I listen attentively to how he puts it. Then, laughing, I ask if every other day of the year is el día de los hombres, and Arón laughs too and then stops laughing and says, simply, sí. Arón is the gúachiman (a Peruvian term pronounced ‘watchy-man’; plural guachimánes) at the house across the road from where I first lived in Lima. A security guard, Arón wears a brown uniform and carries a gun that is never loaded. ‘No nos dan balas’, they don’t give us bullets, he says. Uneducated beyond primary school, Arón can read and write, slowly and sounding out the words, which are written as they sound to him. For instance, payaso, a clown, is rendered pallazo in Aronese. For me, then, this is very much a course in speaking and listening, and after a while, we no longer write things down. Instead, simply, we sit. We talk. We drink soft drinks. He is bored and doing twelve-hour shifts in which nothing ever happens. We flirt a little, but nothing ever happens there either. Even though it is just across the road, it is a long way from Arón’s world to mine, and vice versa. At the time, on Peruvian television, there is an advertisement for a languageschool chain. In the advertisements, a hot, blonde gringa speaks English to a gúachiman. She tells him that she, a ‘sexy woman’, would very much like to go out with him. Missing her meaning entirely, he gives her directions to Calle Sacsayhuaman, a street whose name sounds like ‘sexy woman’. The tagline appears on screen: ‘aprende inglés para que no pierdas más oportunidades’ [learn English so you don’t miss any more opportunities]. It is silly, sexist, and stereotypical. But it is also bilingual and funny, and Arón and I puzzle it out together. Arón knows that I speak English, but says he has no interest in learning the language of ‘los Yanquis’ [the Yankees]. But his ‘not interested’ does not come across as ‘disrespectful’. He knows that my English is as good as his Spanish, and he knows that my inability to get my meaning across sometimes is only because my Spanish is brand new. I never feel my identity or intellect threatened with him. As well as the conversations on the curb, I sit for hours in cafes with a dictionary and El Comercio. It’s good because it had a lot of pictures that give context. I read reviews of films I’ve already seen so I can follow the stories and focus on the words. I go out with colleagues, both profesores nativos like me and local Peruvians, and I listen, noticing the way they construct things. I get them to write down for me words that they use that I don’t know yet. I listen in to conversations around me and watch terrible Venezuelan telenovelas. The same words and phrases keep coming up and I look them up: pues, entonces, todavía, por lo menos, por si acaso, no es justo, me dijo. I proudly bring all these new acquisitions back to Arón, under the tree. My

Research processes and intrigues 49 Spanish is full of holes and the effort is exhausting, but I feel the progress I am making. It is exhilarating, motivating, exciting. Then, after six months in Lima and escaping my terrible first English-teaching job, I take off around South America. Travelling, I strike up conversations with all kinds of people. I try my first oyster – ostra – tasting of the sea, with some laughing fishermen. Later I find out that aburrido como una ostra is to be bored as an oyster, bored stiff. I squirrel away new phrases like precious stones (squirrel, an animal but not a verb in Spanish: ardilla. Not to be confused with orilla, águila or anguilla: similar sounds, different ideas. Stones: piedras, similar to but not quite the same as rocas, ladrillos, guijarros, or escombros). Like the oysters. I taste the new sounds, chew them and push them around with my tongue ( lengua, which is also language). I roll the r’s, imitate the Latino lilt, play with the voseo in Argentina (¿de dónde sos vos?) I have fun with the language, and I smile a lot, and smiling is infectious. I meet people and they tolerate my lousy Spanish. People speak to me, and later I replay their words in my head, making sense. Much later, I read Michelle Morano (2007, p.148) who describes doing this, too: Over and over [my Spanish housemate] explained the difference between ‘la bañera’ and ‘el bañador’, and over and over I confused the two. ‘Have you seen my bathtub?’ I’d ask, and Lola would shake her head, roll her eyes. ‘I hung your bathtub in the swimsuit,’ she’d reply, and only later, while walking to the university pool and replaying the conversation in my head, would I understand and laugh out loud. Throughout that first year in Lima, and then throughout the next twenty years in which I’m in and out of Spanish-speaking contexts, I do the same thing. A street seller goes off to find small change and tells me to stay put until he gets back: ‘no se me vaya’. I ponder this construction. I have never noticed it. It works like No Se Lo Digas A Nadie, the title of a Jaime Bayly book. But what do these have in common? To learn language like this, one must become a language detective, a sleuth. Both phrases are commands: don’t go! Don’t tell anyone. I try using this structure in all commands, and sometimes it works and sometimes it causes puzzled looks. So then I try just using it in phrases where I know it works. Wait, it’s not all commands. Is it only the negative ones? I try that and it works better. But I hear these odd verb forms cropping up in all kinds of other places, too: que tengas buen fin de semana, espero que vengas a mi fiesta [have a good weekend; I hope you come to my party]. It isn’t until I finally come to study Spanish in class, years later, that I learn what it is. By then, though, I know what ‘sounds right’. And by the time I learn its name, I can use it, more or less. (What is it? The subjunctive.) Like a native speaker, I first learn to use grammar, and then I learn about it. And I keep noticing. Many of the words I pick up along the way I have no subsequent use for. They seem important and I look them up. Or I get them from context and happen to remember. Like most of the people I meet, I never see them again. To this day I know lots of obscure vocabulary that I’ve never needed: eje (both axis and axle), destornillador (a five-syllable screwdriver), azahar (orange blossom, not to be

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confused with al azar, which is by chance), and enlutado (in mourning, from Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s ¡Ay señora mi vecina!) I do not need these words, but ‘need’ is a slippery concept (un concepto resbaloso; I remember deducing resbaloso from the warnings of a stranger on river rocks near Baños in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It was slippery there, too). I ‘need’ all these words in the sense that I need an identity here. My new Latina self needs them. I love being someone who speaks Spanish. If you speak English and Spanish you can talk to half the world. That year I spent Christmas with a family of Bolivian silver miners and crossed Lake Titicaca with a Peruvian priest. In this way, learning Spanish is about culture and confidence as much as it is about language.

Warsaw, Poland, 1996 I am trudging through Łazienki Park in the snow. It’s Friday afternoon, getting dark, and our breath condenses on our scarves. Lots of other people are around but the breath frozen on our scarves is different because ours forms palabras españolas and not polskich słów: Spanish not Polish words. I’m walking with my Polish friends Kinga and Piotr, and we’re going to our Spanish class at the Instituto Cervantes attached to the white marble Spanish embassy. Its teachers are Spanish graduates of filología and lingüística aplicada. They are versed in the mysteries of the pluscamperfecto and the imperfecto. They are amused at my Peruvian ‘street Spanish’. One tells me I sound like I just stepped out of the Amazon. They laugh, gently, that I don’t know such simple words as abrigo, bufanda, and guantes, but I’ve never needed coats, scarves, and gloves in Spanish before. My teachers despair, a little, at the grammatical carnage I make of their royal language. They bewilder me with their metalanguage and insistence on accuracy. But they cannot deny me this: when we listen in class to the crackly original recording of Juan Rulfo’s ‘Diles Que No Me Maten’, I, alone in our group, understand its breathy, Mexican syllables. (Adapted from Stanley, 2014)

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Learning Spanish in Latin America

La Cooperativa and El Patio are more expensive than many other Xela Spanish schools. While not necessarily reliable as an indicator of quality, price does indicate something: teachers told me that the more expensive schools pay teachers more and that the more experienced teachers, therefore, tend to gravitate towards these schools. Choosing ‘better’ schools was an ethical choice. It would be easy, and highly problematic, to study the cheapest, most amateur schools, find flaws, and report on them. This would be unfair and unhelpful. Both La Cooperativa and El Patio are well run and long established. Twenty-five hours of one-to-one classes plus full-board homestay and the social/excursions program costs about USD$240 per week at La Cooperativa and El Patio. Classes run from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., with a twenty-minute morning break. In the afternoons, many students take part in the activities program, which consists of films, talks by invited speakers, and local visits (e.g. to a coffee farm). On the weekends, there are excursions, such as to nearby volcanoes. Illustration 3 shows a class in progress at one of the schools. The Spanish school side of La Torre, in Granada, offers predominantly smallgroup language teaching that is slightly less intensive than Xela. Classes run for four hours per day, resulting in a twenty-hour-per-week student timetable. Many students also undertake afternoon volunteer work with the centre’s children, and this may involve, for example, helping with homework, organizing craft activities, or supervising soccer games. Twenty hours of small-group classes and full-board homestay costs US$270 per week.

Spanish-language schools: The curriculum Most Spanish teaching in the three settings calls itself ‘immersion’, and this word permeates language schools’ advertising (e.g. Xela Pages, 2013). However, while perhaps appealing as a marketing term, immersion is something of a misnomer. In their introduction, Johnson and Swain (1997, p.1) describe immersion as ‘a category within bilingual education’ tracing its recent history through French-English bilingual programmes in Canada. It is in this sense that applied linguists use the term. For instance, Smala et al. (2013, p.374) describe school language immersion programs as ‘a context in which science, mathematics and

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Illustration 3 Class in progress in Xela, Guatemala.

social studies might be learnt through the medium of French, Chinese, Spanish, German or a number of other languages’. Immersion, then, is not quite what is happening in these Spanishtowns. Instead, the idea of ‘immersing’ oneself in a second language environment and making meaning with whatever resources are at hand can more accurately be described as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). While CLT is a broad church, its goal of communicative competence is what distinguishes CLT from teaching that focuses, for example, on grammatical ‘knowing about’ (Pham, 2007). While procedural grammatical competence (i.e. ‘knowing how’, rather than declarative ‘knowing about’) is one component of what it means to be communicatively competent in a language, proficiency also comprises three other components: discourse competence, strategic competence, and sociolinguistic competence (Canale & Swain, 1980). This means that being ‘communicatively competent’ in Spanish includes the ability to extract meaning from, and construct, texts in a variety of contextually appropriate genres (discourse competence). Learners are also aiming to develop the ability to match language use to social context (sociolinguistic competence). Finally, strategic competence is the ability to diagnose and repair instances where communication breaks down, perhaps by using gestures, circumlocution, or other resources.

Learning Spanish in Latin America 53 In practice, this means that CLT is characterized by activities [that] involve oral communication, carrying out meaningful tasks, and using language which is meaningful to the learner and materials [that] promote communicative language use; they are task-based and authentic. (Nunan, 1989, cited by Pham, 2007, p.195) This description is a close match with the breezy marketing of one Xela Spanish school’s methodology. (Note this is not from El Patio or La Cooperativa, as citing their websites would identify the institutions. However, the various Spanish schools in Xela are all very similar in this respect.): Full immersion is the fastest way to learn a foreign language. . . . Our oneon-one teaching approach is personalized according to each student’s level, interests and requirements, allowing for maximum conversation and learning. . . . In addition to class time and experiencing a family home stay, we feel that it is important for students to get involved in the culture, in an active and real way. At [Language School] we provide a variety of after school activities and volunteer opportunities to practice your Spanish outside of class. (Xela Pages, 2013) However, while conversation does feature strongly in language lessons in all the contexts of this study, and students are encouraged to use their fledgling Spanish as much as possible, grammatical content is nevertheless much mentioned in curriculum documents and in classes. For instance, one school sets out its ‘basic’ syllabus as follows: 1 Conjugation of the simple tenses in the Indicative mood A. Present, future, preterit and imperfect (irregular verbs) B. The verbs Ser and Estar (uses and meanings) C. The verbs Saber and Conocer (uses & meanings) D. The verbs Haber and Tener (uses & meanings) E. Common irregular verbs (uses & meanings) 2 Conjugation of the progressive tenses in the Indicative mood 3 Conjugation of the Perfect tenses in the Indicative mood 4 The “Popular Future” or periphrastic tense 5 Grammatical gender and number 6 Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns 7 Possessive adjectives and pronouns 8 Sentence structure (affirmative, negative, interrogative) 9 The noun (classification and uses of nouns) A. Augmentative B. Diminutive C. Pejorative D. Root and derivative E. Nationality F. Collective, fractional and multiple 10 The Adverb (classes, uses and meanings)

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Learning Spanish in Latin America 11 Common adverbial modes (uses and meanings) *Basic program supplemented by reading, writing, composition, oral comprehension exercises, dictation, conversation and translation.

(Xela Pages, 2013) This list centres on the idea that language is its component pieces and that discrete-item grammatical accuracy is either a valid learning outcome in itself or perhaps a proxy for, or stepping stone towards, the ability to use language meaningfully. The asterisked ‘supplementary’ program is the only place in this curriculum where language seems to be used meaningfully. There appears to be a disjuncture, then, between statements about the role of ‘language immersion’ and stated curricula in which the focus is more on grammatical competence than sociolinguistic, strategic, or discourse competence. Indeed, for some students, the classroom experience consisted primarily of learning about grammar through explanations and sentence-based practice exercise, with little opportunity to use the structures meaningfully. Illustration 4, for example, shows a teacher’s lesson on ‘the subjunctive following certain conjunctions’ in which the grammar point was explained through example sentences but in which students did not actually use the subjunctive in meaningful utterances. However, in many classes, and with four or five hours of one-to-one time to fill per day, much of the teaching is (sometimes laboured) conversations between teachers and students, in which students attempt to make and understand meaning and teachers respond to the content while also correcting accuracy. Thus,

Illustration 4 Whiteboard in an intermediate-level class.

Learning Spanish in Latin America 55 although the structure of lessons and arguably also their face validity comes from a grammar-based syllabus, meaningful use of the language is also a large part of what students and teachers actually do. In addition to using Spanish in class, many students stay in homestay accommodations, where their hosts are local families who are encouraged to provide conversation practice and, in some cases, language correction. Students were therefore often ‘immersed’ in Spanish in the CLT sense, with a focus (mostly) on meaningful language use rather than grammatical form. When the teachers I interviewed discussed their work, most identified the declarative knowledge of language as their core knowledge base, and many drew upon this knowledge as a mark of their teacher legitimacy. This seems necessary because many teachers lamented the perception attributed to people outside the industry: that teaching one’s native language to foreigners must be ‘easy’. (A similar erroneous perception, of course, exists concerning the teaching of English by native speakers.) The centrality of declarative grammar knowledge is supported by the availability and widespread use in class of supplementary grammarexercise, Spanish-language books and grammar reference materials. That said, Spanish teaching seems to be fairly well regarded in that it is a well-paid, parttime job requiring few qualifications. The advertisement shown in Illustration 5, for a ‘grammar course’ that is ostensibly sufficient as teacher preparation, often appeared in Xela’s streets and provides an insight into local imaginaries.

Illustration 5 Advertisement for Spanish-language-teacher training course.

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Grammatical competence As suggested by the curriculum documents cited earlier, many teachers seem to ‘default’ to grammar-centric teaching. Meaning and macro-skills development may be sidelined by an emphasis on grammar at the expense of vocabulary, pronunciation, and discourse competence or, in the case of absolute beginners, basic, functional, ‘survival’ phrases. As most teaching is one-to-one, there is scope for students to request variations, and most teachers seemed amenable to such suggestions. However, as the following quote shows, teachers’ perceptions of the ‘core’ of language seems overwhelmingly to be grammar: It was difficult to start with because . . . [the teacher] started on verbal conjunctions [conjugations?] and I didn’t know, like, the days of the week [laughs]. . . . [So in the next lesson] I went on Google Translate and typed in, ‘today can we please learn commands and things which would be useful when looking after toddlers?’ [Jill was in Nicaragua to volunteer with a daycare centre; see Chapter 7] . . . And she read it, and she was like, ‘ah okay’. So we learnt silencio [be quiet] and siéntense [sit down]. Simple things that was much easier for me to learn and for me to practice. The fact that I’ve been practicing means that I’ve been learning. As opposed to repeating verbal conjunctions. . . . [I think she started with verbs] because her English isn’t very good and verbs [are] easy to teach. I’d probably start off with numbers, colours, and days of the week [laughs]. (Jill, early twenties, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) One issue that students identify with teachers’ overemphasis on grammatical accuracy is affective, which Tony describes as follows: There’s just a lack of awareness of the emotional effect that was having on us. So I’d be talking, and I would put a feminine ending instead of a masculine ending. And then the teacher would stop me and say, ‘Ooh, sorry, what? She had a beard? Hahaha’ It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m sorry’. But it was, I couldn’t finish my thoughts and then I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was going to say now. I’m sorry; it’s too late’. And then that would make her angrier because then she would say, ‘Well, come on guys you need to know this stuff’. Then that makes us feel worse and so it was a really . . . we imploded, basically. We went nowhere. . . . My poor wife had to listen to me complain about the first teacher, who in hindsight was much better, because I said, ‘Oh, she’s really good about listening, and she lets us go on and on and she shows great interest in what we’re saying, but then I hear other people making mistakes and she just lets it go, and I wonder if I’m doing the same thing. I can’t help but wonder that’. . . . But with a little bit of perspective now, I much prefer that because at least I felt emotionally good about showing up for the class and learning. And I felt like what we said mattered. So although we may have sounded sort of like Tarzan, at least there was the satisfaction of knowing what was coming out of our mouths was understood and

Learning Spanish in Latin America 57 appreciated and that got me much further than just being cut off every other word. Now, somewhere in the middle is what I would like, and I think the important thing now, moving forward, is I need to be explicit to the extent possible with my future teachers about how I learn best. (Tony, mid-forties, Massachusetts, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) The focus on structural accuracy can also result in confusion as to the pragmatic purpose of teacher questions in class, as exemplified by the following in-class exchange between Jenny and her teacher, Carla, in which they begin by discussing a planned excursion to Zunil, near Xela. Carla: Jenny: Carla: Jenny: Carla: Jenny: Carla: Jenny: Carla: Jenny: Carla: Jenny: Carla: Jenny: Carla:

¿Qué piensas sobre la excursión a Zunil? Yo quierar. ¿Cúales son las conjugaciones? Yo . . . ¿quiero? Sí. ¿Y tú? Yo quiero. Quiero a Zunil. No, las frases. Pero el verbo es querer, no es querar. ¿Esquerar? No. Querer. ¿Yo? ¿Quiero? ¿Tú? Quieras. El verbo es querer. Entonces ¿tú quier . . .? ¿Quieres? Correcto. Muy bien. (Jenny, late twenties, Colorado, and Carla, mid-thirties, Guatemala, ‘lesson’, Xela 2015)

In this excerpt, Carla asks, ‘What do you think about the excursion to Zunil?’ and Jenny replies, ‘Yo quierar’ with the wrong verb ending; it should be ‘yo quiero’. This is like saying ‘I wants’: the pronoun and verb choice are correct but the conjugation is wrong. As this was covered in the previous day’s lesson, Carla takes the opportunity to revise the form by asking, ‘What are the conjugations?’ Jenny is unsure and gives ‘I want?’ with a questioning intonation. Carla says, ‘Yes, and [what ending do you need for] you?’ Jenny misunderstands Carla’s purpose, responding to her display question with the confirmation that yes, she wants to go to Zunil: ‘Yo quiero’. I want. This confusion is then compounded by Jenny’s misunderstanding of Carla’s explanation that the verb is ‘querer’ not ‘querar’. Her question ‘¿Esquerar?’ is simply a repeat of what she thinks she heard Carla say: ‘No es querar’. Carla then salvages the exchange by asking, as she did the previous day, for Jenny to recite the correct endings from the base verb prompts. This she manages, but the conversation about going to Zunil is abandoned. This is similar to the teacher’s focus in lessons, in Xela, with a beginner Dutch student, whose notebook appears in Illustration 6. This notebook contains many

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Illustration 6 Beginner student’s Spanish notebook.

obscure irregular nouns and verbs that she was taught in the absence of any real communicative need, at this stage, for either strict accuracy or these words in particular. For instance, the noun plurals on the left page of the notebook include water/waters (as obscure a plural in Spanish as it is in English), birds, firearms, and axes. In addition, the student has noted that the grammatical gender of these words changes from singular to plural. It appears that these nouns have been chosen for their irregularity, and because they illustrate this obscure point, and not their usefulness. This student’s stated need was for ‘survival Spanish’, as she was about to embark on a Latin American journey. While she was still struggling to buy bus tickets and order food successfully, she was taught irregular plurals and multiple verb inflections. However, some students responded well to form-focused teaching. For those who had mainly learned communicatively, the ‘gap’ was accuracy rather than macro-skills, fluency, and confidence: [My Spanish] it’s very good conversationally . . . I mostly learned it informally through friends. . . . I’ve travelled a lot in Latin America and . . . I guess I took some Spanish in high school, and then I did a week [of Spanish lessons] in Arequipa [Peru], and then I did a lot of independent study with textbooks on my own, so I kind of, I can get by in any situation. But I can’t,

Learning Spanish in Latin America 59 kind of, present academic papers, and I don’t think I always sound as intelligent as I could. So I’m here to fill in the gaps. (Kyle, late twenties, Canada, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) So although there does appear to be an over-reliance on grammar and formfocused instruction in some of the language teaching in these contexts, some students do appreciate the opportunity to focus on accuracy.

Communicative competence Additionally, when the entire ‘bundled’ experience of homestay, social program, and Spanish lessons is considered, most students do make substantial progress in their communicative competence. The following case, although a somewhat extreme example, is ‘proof ’ that the cottage-industry Spanish schools can be very effective and that an in-class focus on grammatical form is not necessarily a barrier to language proficiency (conceptualized as communicative competence). I interviewed Patrick in his thirteenth week in Xela, and although we recorded our interview in English (for the ease of commercial transcription), our conversation was mainly in Spanish. Patrick described his progress as ‘zero to hero’, in that twelve weeks previously, when he arrived in Xela, he had been post-beginner level at best. By week thirteen, during our conversation, I would evaluate Patrick’s level as easily upper intermediate or advanced (CEFR B2/C1). He had no trouble telling me his story in Spanish or understanding my questions. He explains, I’ve been here for twelve weeks . . . For the past seven years before I came, I’d studied [Spanish] just on my own and very, very intermittently. I wasn’t making much progress at all, and it was just clear to me that there was no way I was going to achieve any kind of mastery if I stayed doing what I was doing. So I knew that I would have to do an immersion experience. . . . I started mid-March here, and I’ve progressed for sure. (Patrick, mid-fifties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) However, Patrick’s approach to learning was perhaps atypical of students in Xela, as he made a great effort to eschew what he calls the ‘gringo bubble’: I’m finding it to be about what I expected, which is kind of gruelling. . . . [It’s] tiring and difficult [but] I guess I’m used to working my brain pretty hard [Patrick is a lawyer]. . . . But I don’t, at the end of the day when I’m done with my classes, I don’t really have a desire to . . . just switch off the Spanish and go to English and have a nice, easy afternoon. That’s not really what I want to do. . . . I’m staying in a host family. . . . In some ways, I feel like I’m part of their family. (Patrick, mid-fifties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

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Patrick explained that he thinks of learning Spanish as ‘method acting’ and aims to immerse himself as much as possible. To this end, he prefers to socialize with Guatemalans including his host family and their friends. He says his age has helped, as his host family are ‘abuelitos’ [grandparents]. Highly motivated students then, like Patrick, can and do transcend in-class teaching to a great extent, thus resulting in great developments in their language proficiency. Would Patrick’s Spanish have progressed as quickly if he had simply spent time in a Spanish-speaking environment? While arguably this would have been possible, the experiences of the Lima participants at El Proyecto, who were not formally studying Spanish, suggest that this is less likely: We tried Spanish hour for the first week or so. . . . but it just got too hard. . . . It’s like, we just didn’t have enough Spanish to make it work. . . . Like a couple of [other interns] were pushing at the beginning, to use Spanish. . . . But it just, kind of, fell away. (Lisa, early twenties, Missouri, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) I would say that my Spanish has gotten a bit better since being here but I’ve been struggling because we all live together so, we all speak English to one another. . . . I thought my Spanish would just skyrocket up and be amazing by the time I left because I was here for two months. But I was like, ‘Oh but I don’t have any Peruvian friends’. I was like, ‘How do I make them?’ Because I need to make them and practice my Spanish. (Nadia, early twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) I think I would like to learn Spanish. I did try the . . . Duolingo [app] for about two and a half weeks. I kept up with it, and then it kind of died. I would like to learn more Spanish, be at least proficient and not terrible, with the Internet. . . . I think that might be a goal far out from now. . . . I would like to [learn it], a little bit. (Saleem, early twenties, Georgia, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) These excerpts suggest that Patrick’s experience in Xela differed in three main ways from the experiences of the three Lima participants: input (i.e. ‘enough Spanish to make it work’, as Lisa puts it), interlocutors with whom to practice (which Nadia identifies as missing), and motivation (which Saleem seems to lack). So even if Patrick’s in-school lessons in Xela were more grammar focused than might be ideal, the Xela experience as a whole has allowed him to build communicative competence. In addition, of course, not all teachers focus on grammar, whether as planned lesson content or as incidental correction. Alisha and Anna describe their experiences of learning by doing: I’ve had a really good experience here so far. I really enjoy the style of learning that goes on here. It’s a lot of conversation, not just sitting down and [listening to] a lecture. That really helps me develop my speaking, which is

Learning Spanish in Latin America 61 really what I need right now. . . . We do a lot of different things. Excursions, talking, different in-class activities. It’s really nice. (Alisha, late teens, Ohio, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) I remember in Guatemala [where I also studied Spanish in Xela] one of my teacher’s mantras was like, ‘Let’s go walk, now we’re going into the mercado [market]; we’re having language class in the stalls we’re walking through’. I learn how to navigate through the crowd. I learn how to not necessarily buy the first thing I see, but ask – there’s five people selling tomatoes, ask each person, figure out . . . which ones have come into town today. . . . What is a fair price? . . . Then negotiating, because this is a system where prices are not always marked; you have to barter. . . . So instead of learning it through a book, you absorb it by being in the situation. (Anna, early forties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) These experiences resonate with the following beginner lesson excerpt in which the student, Anita, and her teacher, Antonio, discuss an excursion to Masaya: Antonio: Anita: Antonio: Anita: Antonio: Anita: Antonio: Anita: Antonio: Anita: Antonio:

¿Qué necesitamos para ir a Masaya? ¡Nada! ¿Vas a caminar? [gestures walking, with two fingers] No. Entonces. Necesitamos un bús. Sí, un bús. ¿Qué más necesitamos? ¿Es gratis? ¿Entiendes ‘gratis’? ¿Gratis? Bueno. Si vas a una hacienda que produce café. Como ayer. Café, sí. Tienen varios tipos de café. Hay café con vainilla. Café orgánico. Varios tipos. [holds arms about 12 inches/30 cm apart and moves them up and down across the table as if to indicate various products on display]. Y hay vasitos peqeños para probarlos [gestures filling up and drinking from a small cup]. ¿Tienes que pagar? [rubs his fingers together, gestures handing over money, raises his eyebrows]? Anita: No. Antonio: No. Correcto. Es gratis. Anita: Ah, a sample? Antonio: No. Si vas al cine [gestures a big screen and watching], ¿tienes que pagar? Anita: Sí. Antonio: Pero si no pagas. Si pagas zero [gestures ‘zero’ with his fingers], es gratis. Como [draws free Wi-Fi logo] ‘hay Wi-Fi, es gratis’. Anita: Ah, free! (Anita, early twenties, California and Antonio, late thirties, Nicaragua, ‘lesson’, Granada 2014)

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In this exchange, Antonio asks, ‘What do we need in order to go to Masaya?’ to which Anita replies, ‘Nothing’. Antonio asks, ‘Really? Are you going to walk to Masaya?’ As Anita is a beginner, Antonio makes extensive use of gestures, and Anita seems to understand his meaning throughout. As they cannot walk there, they will need a bus. And, as the bus is not free, they will need bus fare. But the stumbling block is the word ‘gratis ’, which Antonio explains as follows: OK, if you go to a farm that produces coffee, like yesterday. They have various types of coffee. There’s vanilla coffee, organic coffee, various types. And there are little cups so you can try them. Do you have to pay? No, right? It’s ‘gratis ’. Antonio is appealing to shared knowledge. They had been to a coffee farm the day before, and both knew the format of its free samples. However, Anita takes the explanation literally, thinking ‘gratis’ means ‘sample’ rather than ‘free’. So Antonio continues, If you go to the cinema. Do you have to pay? Yes. But if you don’t pay, if you pay nothing? It’s ‘gratis’. It’s like [draws free Wi-Fi logo] there’s Wi-Fi; it’s free. As a communicative language teacher, this looks to me like a good example of beginner-level, macro-skills development (speaking and listening) framed as vocabulary teaching perhaps to enhance face validity. That said, the cinema example seems a rather convoluted way of reaching the target word, ‘gratis’. However, as in natural conversation, there is querying and clarification, and Antonio checks that Anita understands as he speaks. Despite Antonio’s proficiency in English, he does not simply translate the word and move on. This is likely a function of the all-morning lesson in which there is time for meandering conversations like this one. But it is also an example of meaningful dialogue in a beginner class. Instead of basing listening- and speaking-skills development on contrived discussions and/or grammar-practice activities, Antonio effectively integrates the development of linguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. Antonio also acknowledges that while gestures can convey meaning, teachers must be aware of possible differences of interpretation perhaps borne of cultural background. Writing in response to the draft of this book, Antonio clarifies, Para mí lo mejor es que ‘Antonio’ no se salió del español y los ejemplos fueron útiles para identificar el significado de las palabras, los gestos son importante para expresar el significado, pero hay que cuidar que los ejemplos sean claros porque hay situaciones en las que las interpretaciones personales son distintas y los estudiantes las asocian con sus experiencias previas. [For me, the best thing is that ‘Antonio’ doesn’t go out of Spanish [into English] and that the examples were useful [for the student] to identify the meanings of the words. Gestures are important for conveying meaning, but

Learning Spanish in Latin America 63 one has to be careful that the examples are clear, because there are situations in which personal interpretations are different, and the students associate them with their previous experiences.] (Antonio, Nicaraguan teacher at La Torre, ‘Facebook message’, 2016) Additionally, although the word ‘sample’ comes up, Antonio resists the temptation to add in an unnecessary new word. Instead, he appears to have a very good sense of what vocabulary is useful at this beginner level: common words, words with a wide semantic coverage, and words that relate to Anita’s particular needs. These are the words he feeds in through conversations like this. But Antonio seems to be a particularly able teacher. This is not to say he is the most experienced of the teachers I observed. Instead, he has a keen sense of what students at different levels need and will understand, as well as the ability to balance accuracy-focused, fluency-focused, and complexity-focused input. This is not true of all teachers, however, and some of the teachers, in the absence of pedagogical expertise, looked to their native-speaker status for legitimacy.

Native speakers and teacher power The language education literature is very clear: native speakers of a language who are not qualified as teachers of that language are ill equipped to teach that language to learners (e.g. Kamhi-Stein, 2004; Llurda, 2005). As I have written elsewhere, in the context of hiring minimally trained native speakers as teachers of English, this is like fish trying to teach humans how to scuba dive: ‘Fish are perfectly at ease in the water but have no idea how they are doing it, let alone how to teach it’ (Stanley, 2013, p.25). And, as a corollary, non-native-speaker language teachers, who have themselves been learners of that language, may be better equipped as teachers of that language because they understand the process of learning it and likely have better explicit knowledge of how that language works. Whereas non-linguist native speakers may ‘just know’ what is right or wrong, non-native teachers who have had to learn the language themselves may be able to explain why it is so. Theoretically, then, everything else being equal, non-native language users should be better equipped as teachers of that language (e.g. Kamhi-Stein, 2004; Llurda, 2005). However, there are controversial identity politics in this space, and non-native teachers may, nevertheless, face discrimination in hiring decisions, not least as students and institutions may perceive native speakers to be the rightful guardians, even owners, of their native language. Less controversially, native speakers may simply be seen as more authentic interlocutors and/or more reliable informants. This is the phenomenon of ‘native-speakerism’, which is much discussed and critiqued in the TESOL literature (e.g. Holliday, 2006). Native-speakerism’s insidiousness is, I think, primarily about power: who in the native/non-native conversation has power, and how is that power wielded? In the context of TESOL, native-speakerism is critiqued for its power to silence marginal voices, including those of non-native users (including non-native teachers

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and students) of English. Native speakers may take, or be accorded, the power to shut down debate because they can appeal to their language identity as a final arbiter of correctness and putatively legitimate knowing. This is not to say that native informants are necessarily wrong in their assertions of what is linguistically right or wrong (although, importantly, they may be). The issue is how one person’s appeal to a given identity (of native speakerhood) can affect everyone else’s right to be heard. So, for instance, although I am not a native user of Spanish, I am reasonably proficient. But I am on the back foot if I try to innovate or be creative with the language, because it is easy and seemingly legitimate for any native speaker to tell me, simply, that I am wrong. In this way, native-speakerism can be used to curtail my identity and the way I express myself. In the contexts and classrooms of this study, similar power issues come up. Sometimes, native-speakerism manifests itself as seemingly unproblematic language expertise: students ask for a word, and the teacher explains it but with an appeal to in-group membership as a source of authority (e.g. ‘we say it like this’). Sometimes there are more obvious power struggles that result from such exchanges, such when a student, who was herself a French-English interpreter, disputed her teacher’s use of traducir (translate) versus interpretar (interpret) for oral interpreting. The teacher closed the discussion down with an appeal to language ownership and place: ‘No, in Guatemala we say traducir ’, although, in fact, the student’s usage is correct (‘field notes’ on Rocio’s lesson, Xela 2015). Arguably, teachers’ appeals to nativeness in search of power are understandable. Students in these contexts are highly privileged along a number of identity axes, and their teachers, in some ways less privileged, may find themselves grasping at whatever form of legitimacy they can muster to establish and maintain status and credibility. However, teachers’ invocations of native-speaker legitimacy sometimes served to diminish and reduce students too. This is particularly the case where power is claimed in cultural terms, with the message seemingly that, as irreducible foreigners, students must always defer to native speakers for correct ways of being in the Spanish-speaking world: Para nosotros, los chapines, depende mucho de la personalidad del taxista y de su aperencia. Si está limpio, bien vestido, hablamos con él. Las aparencias, en Guatemala, importan muchísimo. [For us, the Guatemalans, it depends a lot on the personality of the taxi driver and on his appearance. If he’s clean and well dressed, we talk to him. Appearances, in Guatemala, matter an awful lot.] (Cynthia, early thirties, Guatemala, ‘intermediate-level lesson’, Xela 2015) Teachers also routinely remind students that they are not local by asking them to speak for their home countries. For example, Luis: Ben:

Ben, ¿en inglaterra, creen en los espiritús? Sí, pero es diferente.

Learning Spanish in Latin America 65 Luis: Lillian: Luis: Lillian:

Lillian, ¿en Estados Unidos, creen en los espiritús? Depende a quien preguntas [laughs]. A ¿sí? ¿Cómo piensan en Carolina del Norte? Pues, algunos. (Luis, late thirties, Nicaragua, Ben, late teens, United Kingdom, Lilian, late thirties, North Carolina, ‘intermediate-level lesson’, Granada 2015)

In this classroom exchange on ‘do people in your country believe in ghosts?’, Luis addresses each student by name and nationality. Both hedge their answers. Ben answers vaguely, ‘Yes, but it’s different’, and Lillian refuses to answer for all the people in the United States, saying ‘It depends who you ask’. So Luis zeroes in on North Carolina and asks her to characterize beliefs there. Again, she hedges, saying, ‘Well, some people’. But Luis does not engage with the answers anyway. Instead, he moves swiftly on to characterizing Nicaraguans’ belief in ghosts, saying that ‘todos acá creemos en los espiritús ’. The verb form he uses is ‘we’, albeit with the omitted pronoun: he includes all Nicaraguans and excludes the students (everyone here, we believe in ghosts). Luis then talks about specific local ghost stories: la cegua, la carreta nagua, la mocuana, and el cadejo. This is, to me, an example of ‘cultural’ content taught divisively. Local ghost stories can be a vehicle for raising students’ awareness of cultural richness, but taught as a them/us binary, it is reductive, and these students see through it. In addition, Luis’s questioning about students ‘home’ cultures is superficial, and he neither asks for more details nor acknowledges any other identity besides nationality, even though Lillian has lived in France and Ben has just returned from Australia, which he often talks about. As discussed in Chapter 3, national and regional origins are just one type of identity, and not everyone feels strongly aligned to or able/willing to characterise by nation. So while some students seemed to enjoy discussing putative national characteristics, these students resisted Luis’s attempts to ‘involve’ them or, arguably, to ‘race’ them (Lee, 2015). This may be because Luis’s questioning served mainly as a platform from which to explain his own beliefs, which he projected onto all Nicaraguans. Inevitably, there is some student pushback against what may be assertions of teacher power. Some of this stems from students’ appeals to Spanish from Spain, sometimes framed as ‘proper’ Spanish compared to Latin American varieties: (Destacar – to stand out – comes up in the text). Lillian: ¿Qué quiere decir ‘destaca’? [What does destaca mean?] Luis: Sobresalir. Por ejemplo LeBron James, ¿conocen LeBron James? El destaca en el baloncesto. [To stand out. For example, LeBron James. You know him? He stands out in basketball.] Lillian: [laughs] A mí no me gusta LeBron James. [I don’t like him] Luis: No importa, él es el más famoso. Hace las cosas más, mejor, que los otros. El destaca. [It doesn’t matter. He’s the most famous. He plays better than everyone else. He stands out.]

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Ben: Luis: Ben:

Luis:

¿Puede decir ‘destacar’ de un avión [gestures a plane taking off]? [Can destacar be used for a plane taking off?] No, despegar. [Writes despegar and destacar on the board]. [No, that’s despegar, to take off]. Sí, pero el professor, de España, él nos dijo que era muy raro pero sí existe. [Yes, but the teacher, from Spain, he told us that it was very unusual but it does exist]. No [shrugs]. Aquí en Nicaragua, no. [Not here in Nicaragua]. (Lilian, late thirties, North Carolina, Luis, late thirties, Nicaragua, Ben, late teens, United Kingdom, ‘intermediate-level lesson’, Granada 2015)

In this exchange, power is negotiated in different ways. Luis explains the word to which Lillian laughs, injecting some agency into the class, and says she doesn’t like LeBron James. Luis retakes control. Not to be outdone, Ben then asks what seems to be a display question about whether destacar can be used to mean ‘take off’ for a plane (it cannot, as far as I know, in Spain or anywhere else). Luis offers Ben the word despegar. But Ben comes back with the appeal to peninsular Spanish as a source of higher authority. Luis shrugs and refers, again, to his native-speaker status, his nationality, and their location: aquí, here. Ben’s appeal to Spanish from Spain as somehow better than Nicaraguan Spanish recurred frequently: Yesterday, when Brooke and Sarah [two longer-term interns at La Torre] were writing useful expressions for the volunteers [with the kids program at La Torre], Ben kept wanting to use ‘vosotros’, even though it isn’t used here. He said it’s ‘real’ Spanish, proper ‘Spanish’, that the [Nicaraguan] kids ‘should’ learn it. Does he feel powerless in Nicaragua and this gives him something ‘over’ the local language, the culture, the people? (Phiona, ‘field notes’, Granada, 2015) This begs an obvious question: if Ben really sees Nicaragua in such deficit terms, why is he there? In fact, he does not see himself as mainly learning in Nicaragua but as helping Nicaragua, a discourse discussed further in Chapter 7. Nativeness also manifests itself in teachers’ talk in class about local and/or generalized ‘Latin American’ life or culture. To some extent, this is the teachers’ job, and part of the stated aims of many students is to learn about the places they are in. As a result, many students commented favourably on these ‘tour-guide’ moments in class (even though, for low Spanish-proficiency students, these moments usually meant that the teachers slipped into English, which offered little in the way of Spanish-language development). Many students appreciated the teachers’ insider status and the sense that s/he was letting them ‘in’ to the local culture: Susan: [Our teacher, Miguel], he’ll start the day with something basic, ask us if we have questions, then we’ll talk. I really enjoy talking to him, even if it’s in English, because I get to learn their culture.

Learning Spanish in Latin America 67 Cathy: That’s true, yeah. Susan: Like, for the last half of the day [i.e. for the last two hours of today’s four-hour lesson], we were talking about how they raise their kids. It’s interesting, because it’s a totally different culture. Cathy: Completely different to English. Susan: Completely different to American. Cathy: Their discipline and stuff like that. Just how kids treat adults and stuff like that. Susan: Yeah. Cathy: It was very interesting, the dynamics of Nicaraguans in general. (Cathy, United Kingdom, and Susan, California, early twenties, ‘interview’, Granada, 2015) There are problems here, though, both in terms of culture and of power. As discussed in Chapter 2, depictions of cultures are, themselves, cultural artefacts. Miguel’s description of how ‘Nicaraguans’ raise their kids is necessarily partial and perhaps also stereotypical. While he can present a testimonio of his own stories or those of his friends, any description that purports to compare aspects of Nicaraguan and e.g. US American cultures (as Miguel did in this lesson) is problematic. Miguel’s own knowledge is impressionistic, and it positions him as the (only) expert in the room. This is another way in which power operates in these contexts. The power wielded and contested in these Spanish lessons is indicative of wider power tensions underpinning these contexts. Macro power relations, particularly within the USA, in turn contextualize these micro-negotiations of power: [Learning Spanish in high school in the USA] is hard. . . . Part of that has to do with patriotism and people that think, ‘America speaks English, period’ and to an extent almost not wanting to delve too far into opening up to another language because it goes away from English. . . . [It’s also demographic.] If it was all upper-class citizens speaking Spanish it would be a different mentality. . . . It’s a language of a working – if not lower than working class – and so no one wants to. Why would you want to learn that? . . . If every Spanish speaker who moved to the United States was earning $150,000 . . . I’m sure the perception would be different. (Drew, NGO Program Director, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) Last year I was working [in the USA] . . . with a couple nurses who took Spanish through college. [They] knew all the verb tenses, knew all the vocab . . . but they’d be like, ‘I’m too scared to talk’. . . . These [Spanish-speaking patients] are here, mostly women, mothers . . . it was a nutritional program . . . And I was like, ‘You don’t want to communicate with them?’ . . . So these nurses . . . felt like these other women mostly from Puerto Rico . . . there was a wall between them that was not just a language barrier . . . [it was] maybe more a cultural barrier. . . . [The nurses] have university status . . . whereas a lot of [the Puerto Rican patients] were illiterate. . . . I guess

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Learning Spanish in Latin America that’s got to be quite a threat. There’s a risk that those people might laugh at your Spanish if you say something wrong. Then it’s more than just a fear; it’s also a loss of face. (Nina, mid-twenties, Connecticut, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

As Drew points out, Spanish may have low-status associations in the USA because of demographic rather than linguistic factors. This can result, as Nina explains, in relatively high-status individuals refusing to ‘lower themselves’ to speaking Spanish in front of Spanish native speakers, as they do not want to give up the power that operating in English affords them. In the Spanish-learning contexts of this study, where students have travelled specifically to use Spanish, this is not happening. Instead, the power struggle seems to have been relocated to negotiations over culture and language inside and outside class.

Power and purpose in Spanishtown It is clear that discourse competence and other aspects of communicative competence are not borne of discrete-item grammar manipulations and conversations alone. Integrated skills need to be taught as opposed to caught. This is a critique echoed in several of the interviews: I do think Central America’s a good place to get the basics [of Spanish] . . . [But] if you’re going to try to work in Spain or Argentina, though, it’s honestly not. . . . a lot of the teachers aren’t really language teachers. . . . They’ve finished high school and they’ve taken a training course. . . . Nicaragua as a whole only has a handful of college-educated Spanish teachers. . . . If you’re just a beginner . . . it’s a great place because everyone is very friendly. Compared to other places, it’s more open. You can practice with people on the streets and the stores. It’s inexpensive, easy to get around, and safe. (Brooke, mid-thirties, New Mexico, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) What got to me was the teaching . . . the methods are sort of the absence of any methods. It’s like, the teachers are well-meaning and smart but [have] no real background in pedagogy. . . . Usually [the lesson] is completely random. We might have a few minutes to read a very dense article, and then we’re supposed to give a summary and then give the details, and we’re supposed to be able to read between the lines, to interpret more than translate. . . . But there’s no real – I guess I would put it this way: we’re given time to do it but no guidance. (Tony, mid-forties, Massachusetts, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) While some teachers are overly dependent on grammatical accuracy as their main focus and goal, others appear better able to help students develop other aspects of communicative competence, including sociolinguistic and strategic competence. In addition, even during the most complex grammar explanations, as

Learning Spanish in Latin America 69 in Illustration 4, teachers rarely worked from notes. This suggests that Tony’s ‘absence of any methods’ may be compounded by the absence of lesson planning. Why, then, is grammar so important to some teachers? The most straightforward explanation of teachers’ recourse to grammar relates to teachers’ limited education as language teachers. Teachers themselves may have learned English through ‘traditional’, grammar-focused methods at school, and many related that this was how they had been taught foreign languages. This ‘apprenticeship of observation’ followed by minimalist grammar-course training would result in teachers teaching the way they learned language: structurally. A similarly straightforward explanation is that the teachers teach grammar because the students want grammar. As these are overtly demand-driven, clientfocused businesses, students’ preferences matter enormously, and many teacher participants commented on needing to be flexible and to respond to what students want. ‘El cliente manda’, several told me: the customer is always right. Why would students want grammar, though? This may about face validity: students may also have learned languages structurally and may like or expect the same in Latin America. Additionally, some, like Kyle, may perceive that their ‘conversational’ Spanish now needs accuracy. Whereas ‘street Spanish’ contexts may be all too error tolerant, teachers are likely much better able to identify and help resolve fossilized errors. Identifying and correcting persistent errors is certainly a very good use of grammar-focused instruction. Another explanation for the ubiquity of grammar exercises and discrete-item focus is that four or five hours of class, particularly one-to-one, can be ‘gruelling’, as Patrick puts it. In the absence, in some schools, of teaching materials besides grammar exercises, it is understandable that teachers and students struggling to come up with five hours’ worth of conversation per day would retreat to whatever materials were available. The aforementioned are plausible explanations. And while they may certainly influence the teaching in these contexts, I contend that the centrality of grammar is primarily about a different factor: power. The cottage-industry Spanish schools do not have the face validity of universities. Further, most of the teachers are minimally trained native speakers. None of the teachers I interviewed had disciplinespecific qualifications in applied linguistics or Spanish-as-a-foreign-language education. Instead, most were university or college students, or graduates, in other disciplines: psychology, engineering, or social sciences, for instance. Many were young (late teens to mid-thirties), and a majority across all the contexts were women. Some, particularly in Xela, were Indigenous. And while most would be considered socially middle class, none were wealthy elites. These factors – identity, positionality, status, education, and perceived institutional prestige – together form a ‘perfect storm’ for the schools and their teachers. Some are very good communicative language teachers (as I understand it, having worked since 2004 as a teacher educator on Cambridge CELTA and TESOL masters programs). But it may be that teachers and institutions feel the need to establish their legitimacy in the eyes of both the students and local people who may feel that teaching one’s native language is ‘easy’. And so they resort to grammar.

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Certainly, being a native speaker is not enough to teach a language well, and several students recounted difficulties with local ‘helpers’ who had little idea of how to teach their own native language. For example, [I told my home stay mother that] I had walked past a shop selling . . . mangoes, and I . . . was trying to say, ‘Oh I wanted to buy some mangoes for . . . dessert’. But I didn’t know what the word was [in Spanish, for ‘dessert’]. So I said to my host mother, I said [in Spanish], ‘You know it’s the thing, it’s when you finish eating, when you’ve finished dinner, but you’re still hungry, you want something sweet’. She was like, ‘Ah yes. You have desayuno [breakfast] and then almuerzo [lunch]’. I was, ‘No, no, no. That’s not what I mean’. So I tried to describe it a different way, and I said, ‘You know, it’s when you want something sweet after dinner’. She said, ‘Ah yeah, yeah, yeah. You say gracias [thank you, said in a very slow and exaggerated way], and then I say buen provecho [bon appétit]. . . . I think I actually cut her off mid-sentence and said, ‘I’m going to get my dictionary’. I went and got my dictionary, and looked it up and said, ‘Ah, postre [dessert]’ I’m not going to forget that word in a hurry [laughs]. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) To establish legitimacy and difference from well-intentioned but unhelpful native speakers, like Alice’s homestay mother, teachers may appeal to an easily identifiable expertise: declarative grammatical knowledge. They also appeal, as shown earlier, to their incontrovertible status as native speakers for legitimacy. Like the grammar-based syllabi that offer institutions credibility, nativeness is used as a shield against those who might disparage the little, local schools. The next chapter extends this discussion, considering the issues of ‘culture’ and power relations as they manifest themselves in discourses about the contexts.

5

Discourses of others Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’

Latin America has a reputation for being dangerous. And in El Salvador, the Chorros waterfalls near Juayúa come with this caution on my hostel notice board: ‘Muggings and robberies are common here. Ask at the police station for an armed escort’. I’m sceptical but cautious and organize, instead, a local guide who carries a machete and knows the shortcuts. We set off early, just after first light, laughing and talking along the way. We swim, talk, walk, and it feels so good to be off the high alert of fieldwork, where even when I am ‘off’, I am always ‘on’. Coming back up the path later, we meet a tourist group speaking loud American English and accompanied by four army-uniformed guards, each carrying a machine gun slung diagonally. From a distance, as we approach, they look like a ragtag army, soldiers leading a column. My guide describes the delincuencia, the delinquency, which causes the muggings that gives El Salvador a bad name. This, he says, doesn’t affect tourism. From what I can see, I disagree. Yes, tourists can use guides or armed guards. And my guide makes some money from tourists, like me, who choose a quiet, early trip to the waterfalls over an escorted group tour. In this sense, the delincuencia is good for tourism, or good for my guide, at least. In most places, though, a destination just out of town would make for a spontaneous afternoon’s walk or a day’s excursion with a novel, a picnic, and some friends. But here it means organizing security in advance. It means not being able to hike alone, as I regularly do in Australia. It means walking alongside armed soldiers, something to which most ‘Westerners’ would likely be unaccustomed. I know I am. This threat of danger and its heavily armed solution certainly make for ‘adventure’ narratives, the lifeblood of many backpackers’ travel accounts and a consequent source of ‘road status’ (Sorensen, 2003). But it also creates a problematic out-group social imaginary in which Latin America is lawless, unpredictable, and utterly unlike ‘home’, thus potentially entrenching any ‘otherness’ that is already imagined. The next day on the bus to San Salvador I meet an Irish woman who has been to Los Chorros with a stocky gringo friend, no guide. Both were robbed at machetepoint. So I’m glad I took a guide. But I’m not sure how to feel about needing one. Later, when I post pictures of my hike on Facebook, I wish I’d photographed the armed soldiers. I realize that I’m reeling, shocked. They evoke the 1980s

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footage of Central America that I remember from childhood: heavily armed men in a forest, in camouflage. Instead, I write, These falls are notorious for robberies and muggings and, indeed, along the way we met a group of Yanquis [US Americans] walking with FOUR uniformed soldiers armed with machine guns (I said ¿van a invadir Guatemala? [Are you off to invade Guatemala?]) But I went early, with a 4’11” [150 cm tall] guide with a machete in his knapsack and three dogs including one that we met along the way. And all was fine. (Phiona, ‘Facebook post’, 2015) I realize that, in this short text, I perpetuate constructed cultural ‘otherness’: stray dogs, short men, machetes, soldiers, muggings, danger. I do not believe, generally, that Latin America is culturally as ‘different’ as ‘Western’ social imaginaries might construct it, and yet I posted a short text that plays up to all the stereotypes, suggesting it is lawless and wild. And then, even as I process these feelings, I realize I’m doing what the Spanish language tends to encourage: conflating myriad and disparate places into ‘Latin America’ that is no more homogenous than ‘Europe’ or ‘Asia’, but that feels more coherent in part because of the language that unites much of the continent. El Salvador, and specifically Los Chorros waterfalls, is not Latin America writ large. And yet if I conflate the continental heterogeneity, after twenty-plus years of coming and going and speaking Spanish, I wonder what my Facebook friends are thinking as they read. It is as if I am saying: El Salvador is dangerous. It is part of Latin America therefore Latin America is dangerous. And those images of Latin America you have in your head, of the civil wars, military governments, death squads, and violencia? It’s all true. This chapter considers participants’ social imaginaries of cultural ‘others’ and the ways these frame their experiences in Latin America. Also salient are local constructions of incoming tourists. The ways in which each ‘side’ imagines the ‘other’ underpin negotiations of culture, identity, and putative difference.

Students’ imaginaries of Latin America The stereotypes mentioned earlier came up repeatedly when I asked participants to discuss how they had imagined Latin America before they arrived. Some examples of participants’ discourse include, I thought Central America was a burning hellscape of war and destruction and death [laughs] . . . I found out that no, the streets are not flowing with lava and decapitated heads. . . . I grew up at the tail end of . . . the armed conflict here . . . so I was vaguely aware of what was going on. I remember seeing it in the news . . . [I knew] there was conflict and that people were dying and it was dangerous. . . . My family thought I was going to get

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 73 kidnapped and decapitated and that the drug cartels were going to send my body back in separate boxes. (April, early thirties, South Carolina, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) I kept thinking, ‘Well, if I’m going to Lima, I’m going to be in this third world country’. . . . [So when I arrived] I was simply shocked and surprised. It’s actually very developed. It’s super great. It’s almost the same thing that I’ve seen anywhere else, for the most part. Unless you go outside to the [shanty town] districts that we work in; that’s different. But it definitely was an eye-opening experience . . . there’s so much diversity. (Saleem, early twenties, Georgia, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) I expected [Nicaraguans] to be a little more warm and a little less, I don’t know if I want to say judgemental. But they have a little bit of a negative perception on white people who walk around. . . . I get taunted sometimes, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily a negative, but it’s not, like, warm. . . . They’re a little more closed off than I thought they would be. Because when you picture Latin American countries it’s like plump and happy and super warm and kind. (Jeff, early twenties, Texas, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) [There are] some people who bought a specific wardrobe [for coming to Nicaragua]. . . . Lots of people spent thousands of dollars to outfit themselves, [for] some sort of adventure getaway. . . . That mentality [is] that they’re coming to the jungle, and they’re going to civilize the savages. (Brooke, mid-thirties, New Mexico, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) The previous quotes, which represent many other comparable excerpts, construct Latin America in participants’ pre-sojourn minds as violent, underdeveloped, and disease-ridden, and the people as jungle ‘savages’ and/or ‘plump and happy’. Many participants then wrestled to reconcile their pre-conceived notions and their in-country impressions as they reflected on their experiences after arrival: There are a lot of homicides in Guatemala. People talk about that. People say it’s really violent, really dangerous, especially Guatemala City. So I got to Guatemala City [and there was] a taxi [driver, organized] through El Patio with a sign with my name on it. And he picked me up at the airport, drove me to the bus station, and put me on the bus. I was really nervous, gripping my backpack . . . and just very nervous. I get on the bus and there’s assigned seats, and there’s this man sitting next to me. I first thought, ‘Oh no, men might be dangerous’. And then he started talking to me. I was like, ‘Oh no, men talking to me [laughs]. I don’t want this’. . . . My immediate reaction was, ‘This is going to be bad; I want to switch [seats]’. But he ended up being one of the sweetest people I’ve probably ever talked to. My Spanish

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Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ was really basic, but he ended up telling me all about his life. He was an accountant, has three daughters, loves his wife, showed me all these pictures of his family, and also asked me a bunch of questions in a really friendly way. All of my fears as a woman travelling alone were gone within a minute or two of talking to him. I felt really comfortable. . . . The bus stopped at a restaurant, we got out, and I didn’t really understand what was going on, but he helped me and made sure I ate and just went out of his way to make sure I was safe and okay. It was just amazing. People in the US don’t do that. When I got to Xela, he made sure I had a taxi and [that] the taxi knew where I was going, so it was just a really smooth, warm, welcoming experience. (Nina, mid-twenties, Connecticut, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

This kind of account, reconciling expectations with in-country experiences, may also be a foundation for re-evaluating broader constructions of place and of the ways in which the ‘third world’ is imagined: I think [our student interns, who spend a few months in Lima] leave with a much more positive light to what Peru is. It’s because they experience so much. I mean, Peru is huge on culture . . . the food, the dancing, the music, how warm the people are. What the people of Villa María [one of the poorest suburbs] are like but also what Miraflores [one of the wealthiest suburbs] is like, and what’s it like to go biking on the Malecón [in Miraflores] but also what’s it like to climb up the Cerros [hillsides] in those pueblos jóvenes [shanty towns]. . . . Some people in the United States, when I said I was I was living in Peru, they’re like, ‘Are there llamas walking about in Lima? Do they have Internet?’ Stuff like that. . . . I think that people have this third world mentality . . . and then they come here and they can see this whole place and . . . it doesn’t mean that they all fit in the same ‘we’re all poor, we’re all starving’ genre. They’re really diverse. There’s many different layers to it. . . . . It opens people’s minds and makes them ask different questions. (Drew, NGO Program Director, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) At the same time, however, participants may have imagined Latin America in more positive, although nevertheless reductive, ways and may be disappointed to find that the cultures as they experience them are less ‘pure’– for example, less ‘spiritual’ – than they may have imagined or than they ‘should’ be: [Nicaragua]’s not as cultural [as Guatemala]. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone . . . dressed in Indigenous clothing in Nicaragua. No. . . . But I feel like Mayan people [in Guatemala] are a bit more cultured. . . . The people I see wearing Maya clothes on the street, they seem very calm, and they seem very grounded and very sure of who they are and very comfortable in that identity. In comparison, Nicaragua, I feel like yes, they do have culture, but when I was there, I felt like there was a lot more outside influence. (April, early thirties, South Carolina, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 75 I completed a holistic midwifery certification program [in the USA] . . . I was under this idea that [in Guatemala, where I volunteered as a midwife] I was going to be able to experience a more undisturbed, holistic, spiritual birth in another culture, but what I experienced was none of those things, actually. . . . [I thought that my supervisor, a Maya Kiché woman in her seventies] would be very hands-off and very holistic. I also had this idea that the Mayans have retained their spiritual connection. At the moment, I don’t feel that I’ve seen that . . . I didn’t feel like she was approaching birth spiritually . . . [I thought] that the spiritual aspect of birth would be more honoured than in a culture [like the USA] that’s a more westernized, medical model of birth. . . . I figured she would have a non-medical perspective, but actually it seemed to me that she hadn’t caught up on some more liberal practices such as skin-to-skin contact and delayed cord clamping. (Amanda, late twenties, California, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) As well, of course, some participants did tell stories supporting the stereotypes described earlier, for example, about violent crime. A Dutch student, Jens, in his late twenties, described being attacked in the street in Xela (‘interview’, 2015). He was walking late at night, ‘a bit drunk but not very’, when three local men ran after him and threw a rock at his back. Luckily, he ran faster than them on ‘those long Dutch legs’ and got away. He didn’t feel much at the time, ‘just adrenaline’, but the next day he had ‘a lot of back pain’ and realized how lucky he had been. He says, ‘If the rock hits my legs I will fall. If it hits my head, it can kill me’. The result, though, was as much psychological as physiological: Jens became very cautious, taking taxis home at night even though his homestay accommodation was only a few blocks from the central park. Although Jens readily acknowledges that this kind of experience could have taken place in any city in the world, he also says he has told all his (Western) friends in Xela ‘to be careful, very careful’. Such stories, and resultant advice ‘to be careful, very careful’ may then result in the mistaken assumption of danger everywhere: I have travelled plenty but I have yet to travel to a place where it is quite a normal occurrence that fireworks . . . will go off at literally at any time of the day to celebrate something, including the morning. . . . And I haven’t even had an experience dangerous enough to really justify this. But I was asleep, right, and it’s somebody’s birthday. It must have been next door because it was a really loud series of bombas [firecrackers]. It’s like [imitates the sound of firecrackers] really loud. And, this is so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m telling you this, let alone on tape [laughs]. But by the time I was fully awake, I woke up on the floor of my room because I just assumed in this really sleepy kind of conked out state, ‘Don’t panic, it’s just people shooting. It’s fine.’ It’s not even that I think that about Guatemala. It’s just something in my subconscious. . . . It’s like ‘someone has come and they’re just killing people’. . . . So I woke up having hit the ground and was so

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Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ fucking embarrassed I was like, ‘I’m the worst person on earth [for making this assumption]’. (Maria, late twenties, California, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

So although students may have strong, often negative, perceptions of Latin America, these were often, though not always, challenged by in-country lived experiences. And sometimes, as in Maria’s story, these negative perceptions were subconscious and at odds with conscious, much more positive evaluations of Latin America. This discussion continues in Chapters 6 and 7.

Local imaginaries of Spanish-language learners What about local constructions of gringos? My researcher positionality is salient here, and this section is somewhat stymied by my attributed identity: I am a gringa. Although I speak Spanish and know quite a lot about Latin America, and while I occasionally ‘pass’ as Latina (Stanley, 2016), I am not an insider. So I understand that local people’s answers to questions about gringos are necessarily filtered through politeness, as a gringa is asking the questions. Nevertheless, I asked local teachers, homestay hosts, and school directors for their impressions. And to some extent, I got useful answers. But because of the dynamics of research across identity lines (which, of course, are also present when I interviewed the students, too), in this section, I have had to infer as much as cite first-hand data. One common local imaginary about language learners was that all are wealthy and that, as such, their tastes would be similar to those of wealthy local people. For example, I observed a beginner lesson, which was interrupted by another teacher looking for a pen, ‘un lapicero’, as opposed to ‘un bolígrafo’ (often shorted to ‘boli ’), which is the peninsular Spanish word that the students had met before. This caused some confusion and a tangential conversation with the teacher, mostly in English, that the students discussed after the lesson: Susan: The word, when the woman came in and asked to borrow a pen . . . Cathy: It’s bolígrafo . . . or boli. Susan: [Laughs] Yeah, then [Miguel, the teacher] went onto a tangent about ice creams. . . . [in Nicaragua, boli] it’s kind of like gelato. Cathy: Oh, helado? Oh, but it’s an ice lolly. . . Phiona: Miguel said, ‘If you go into a store and ask for a boli – Cathy: ‘They’re going to laugh’. Phiona: ‘They’re going to laugh’, right, ‘because tourists don’t want them,’ [is what Miguel said]. Susan: Right, so I was like, ‘Now I want to go [and buy a boli]’. Cathy: Yeah, I would quite like to do that. Susan: It’s like, have you guys ever had, like, Otter Pops or something like that? . . . It’s like a popsicle. Cathy: Oh yeah, like a stick of flavoured ice.

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 77 Susan: Yeah. So I’m guessing it’s similar to that, where it’s kind of just like, it’s water, sugar, and flavour. . . . It’s cheap, Miguel said. Cathy: Like ‘why is anyone going to want this kind of thing?’ I’m guessing that’s what [he meant] . . . Susan: But if they think that, why do they still sell it? Cathy: Because local kids like it. But . . . they think us tourists . . . would want something more expensive. . . . Susan: Something better. Phiona: That’s interesting. Do you think he assumes tourists want something more expensive? Susan: I personally think so, yeah. Cathy: The connotation, yeah. . . . Tourists are rich. Susan: I think so. Most people here do [think that]. (Cathy, United Kingdom, and Susan, California, early twenties, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) A related stereotype of gringos is that they may be unfamiliar with concepts that are locally considered very basic: These words came up the other day in class. The word pollo [chicken] comes up, and then the word[s] gallo [rooster] . . . and gallina [hen]. Pedro did this lovely little thing of ‘el gallo es el marido de la gallina, y su hijo es el pollo’ [the rooster is the husband of the hen, and their child is the chicken], right? Really cute. But the students were like, ‘Surely the meat is the pollo?’ But, actually, the gallina can be the meat as well. One of the students was saying, ‘I don’t know how to translate that. What’s the difference between a hen and a chicken?’ Pedro rolled his eyes. He actually rolled his eyes. . . . And I was thinking, ‘In our cultures, we don’t really have much contact with hens and chickens and roosters except once they’re packaged in the supermarket as, just, ‘chicken’. We don’t see them around. But here, it’s entirely part of culture. Pedro said his neighbours have chickens. You see chickens everywhere. It struck me as something that was assumed to be known [i.e. Pedro assumed the students would know the difference between hens, roosters, and chickens], and it wasn’t. (Phiona, ‘field notes’ recorded in conversation with a friend, Granada 2015) These quotes, taken together, construct a rather unflattering local view of language learners. Miguel’s assumption that tourists would not want bolis and that local storekeepers would laugh if they asked for them, suggests that, in his perception, tourists are (or perhaps think they are?) ‘above’ cheap, local ice pops and, by extension perhaps, also above the local people who enjoy them. Similarly, Pedro’s in-class eye-roll suggests his sense of frustration and amazement at students’ seeming lack of understanding of what, to Pedro, is everyday knowledge. This is similar to Unferth’s (2011, pp.41–42) account of her attempt, in the 1980s, to help the Sandinista revolution. While volunteering at an orphanage,

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she recounts the nuns’ frustration with her inability to fetch water from the river, sew, or pat tortillas. These tasks, in Nicaragua, are everyday. But, for Chicagoan Unferth, who could ‘put dishes in the dishwasher with the best of them,’ (ibid. p.41) such tasks were a struggle. Whereas differences in everyday knowledge and skills do not necessarily demonstrate a lack of knowledge and skills, both Unferth’s nuns and Pedro in the Granada classroom seem to regard foreigners’ unfamiliarity with the Nicaraguan everyday as surprising, frustrating, and perhaps indicative of wider cluelessness. Framed as symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1986), Pedro seemed to ‘read’ his students not knowing about roosters and hens as an indication of ignorance, because, in his own context, this is what it would mean. Taken together, these quotes suggest that, to local people (in Granada, Nicaragua, here), students may be seen as wealthy, accustomed to ‘better’ standards, and somewhat ignorant. If true, it is not a flattering picture. Another assumption that may affect the way gringos are received in Latin America is the product of a convoluted hall of mirrors in which stereotypes about Latin America that gringos are purported to hold may be projected back onto them in a complex ‘he said, she said’ web that entangles any central ‘truth’: What happened in the art gallery was . . . I was talking to the curator for this, like, very modern art exhibit. . . . It was like a contemporary art exhibit with a lot of video performance art, which was my favourite part. . . . And I’m like, ‘I really liked the exhibit’. . . . And I started this phrase . . . I started out by saying, ‘I don’t know what I was expecting but – ’. And I was planning to say something like, ‘I thought the themes of time and memory and impermanence were really interesting’. But he cut in, in the middle, and very kindly in this really understanding, almost patronizing, tone was like, ‘You didn’t expect it to be so modern?’ . . . I was a little thrown at first just because, I mean, you just forget how you’re perceived . . . It says a lot about [the curator’s] past experiences. . . . Am I being read as White, with a capital W? . . . Is that the assumption he was imposing upon me? . . . On one hand I was a bit offended. But it was more like this little voice going, ‘Ha ha, that figures’ . . . There are a wide host of stereotypes that it is assumed that white Americans hold about Latinos. . . . I’ve had moments where I’ll have to remind myself . . . that the person I am talking to really might not be feeling the same way about me at all [Maria’s family is part Latino, as she goes on to explain]. (Maria, late twenties, California, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Maria’s account is complex, as it relates her discomfort at being taken for the type of gringa that she characterizes and suggests is commonly imagined locally. This she says is a ‘culturally’ White (‘with a capital W’), culture-bound and monocultural US-American whose stereotype is that Latin America and modernity must be mutually exclusive. She is somewhat troubled to be ‘read’ this way and appeals to identity markers of latinidad to distance herself from the unflattering reading that she perceives of ‘ignorant’ gringos.

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 79 These social imaginaries appear to be just as negative and as essentialist as those described in the previous section. On the one hand, international students may conceptualize Latin America as underdeveloped, violent, and its people, variously, as savages or as ‘super warm and kind’. On the other hand, Latin Americans may conceptualize gringos as rich, clueless, and holding negative stereotypes about them. Against this background, incoming students of Spanish hoping to become interculturally competent necessarily have to engage with such constructions. What happens when they do is considered next.

Portrait of a ‘conferencia’ It’s Thursday morning, and I’m here at El Patio to ‘presentar una conferencia’, which is how we’re now describing this event. In the three days since I suggested talking to some of the students, ‘but only those that are interested in taking part’, my ‘focus group’ has morphed into an activity on the school’s events calendar, written up on a whiteboard. It is still voluntary, but it has become something that I’m going to ‘present’. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I’m happy to talk about my project because, just maybe, someone who attends will want to say more in an interview later. Stepping into the presenting spirit, I’ve put some Nicaragua data from 2014 onto PowerPoint slides. These, I hope, will make this less of a presentación and more of a conversación. I want to spark debate, maybe to get the students to share their stories, ideas, experiences, and responses. I hope it will be interesting for them. El Patio’s coordinadora says she thinks there might be eight or ten people there, teachers and students. ‘The teachers too?’ ‘Yeah. Actually, a lot of them said it sounded really interesting’. ‘Ah, OK. I wasn’t planning for that. But no worries.’ So I put the slides into Spanish as well. I want the teachers to be able to take part and for the ‘conferencia’ to be useful Spanish practice for the students. Doing research is all about working things out as they come up. I’m happy to adapt. But right now, the problem is the rain. When it rains in Xela, it really rains. The streets become rivers and El Patio becomes a little laguna. And as it does, the outdoor classes around the patio move their tables into the room in which we’d planned the ‘conferencia’. So the coordinadora and I scramble to find another room and begin to unstack plastic chairs while one of the teachers sets up a projector. People file in. And they keep coming. Most bring chairs and one or two, drenched and cold in the sudden rains, bring blankets. There’s a lot of conversation, in Spanish and English. The group is evenly split and, in the end, there are thirty-eight people, local teachers and international students. The students are mostly from the USA. I start with an overview. This is a book project, I say, and today we will focus on two aspects of it: ‘el volunturismo’, voluntourism, and ‘lo de imaginar a ‘otros’, how

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we imagine others. People are polite, silent, listening. I don’t use words like ‘otherness’ or ‘culture’ at this stage. I consciously start off in ways that everyone can access. Some of these students are still in college, most are in their early twenties, and I don’t know how much they know. I don’t want to silence them. I say I’m going to show data from Nicaragua in 2014, not Xela, ‘para que nadie se moleste’, so I don’t upset anyone, and the Guatemalan teachers laugh. Everyone seems to relax a little. What I hope they’re thinking is, ‘This conferencia, and this academic from Australia who already did a little kangaroo impression when she said where she was from, it might actually be fun. I’m going to understand it. I can relax a bit’. I show some slides. Charles, twenty-two, from Texas, whom I interviewed in Granada says, [As part of a mission tour] we were travelling around to rural areas, the really poor areas, to give out food and water and medicine. . . . Some places they would have tables laid out, chairs set up, everything ready to go. . . . They’re just such a welcoming people. . . . We would have lunch together and that’s when the bubbles and the balloon animals and everything would come out. [All these participants’ texts are given in Spanish first, on one slide, and then in English on the next slide.] Then George, twenty-one, from New York and interviewed in Masaya says, The first week [in the clinic, where I volunteered] was even more intimidating because Spanish was so difficult because they talk so fast, and it’s all so chaotic. . . . They assumed that we were doctors. So I guess they thought we were stupid. . . . To work there you had to put in a donation [of $300/ month]. So I’m not really burdening anyone because I’m, I already helped. So it’s not a big deal if I’m an idiot. . . . Some of the nurses are a lot more welcoming, and they let me do some injections. . . . [As] a volunteer, I guess, you do whatever you can to help. And I think I’ve helped. There are audible gasps, but I don’t ask for comments yet. The room is charged with an electricity that seems to be made of interest, concentration, thinking, and seemingly the desire to comment. This is going well. As a teacher, I can feel it. Then Rachel, twenty-one, from Vermont and interviewed in Masaya says, I definitely like working with kids [in my volunteer project, in Nicaragua]. I think it’s fun working with kids from different cultures just because they tend to be more open minded about, or more curious, and that’s always fun too. . . . They always, when we visited schools, they were, oh, they’re so excited to have people from the US come today, yeah. . . . [they’re] definitely always excited to see me, like, a gringa. . . . There might be, I don’t know, just some connection to Hollywood maybe, so I guess they do grow up watching a lot of American movies, so maybe they’re like, oh look, people that look like – I don’t know, [they] get excited at the thought of meeting celebrities.

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 81 A couple of people whisper to each other. There’s a grin, or a grimace, of recognition here and there. Have the students perhaps said something like this to each other? Have the teachers, perhaps, heard this kind of thing from their students? I’m aware that this attention-electricity is now arcing around the room. It’s nearly time for me to stop talking and let everyone speak. As a teacher of adults for twenty-plus years, I can feel the energy shift, and I know it’s time to hand it over. And so I flick to the questions slide. They are ‘open’ questions, pitched at the teachers as much as the students. I want to empower everyone to speak. In Spanish, the slide asks, What do you think of the discourses of the interviewees? How do your students/you talk about their/your experiences here? What type of photos do they/you put up on Facebook? How does one construct an experience through Facebook pictures? Do you think the people of Xela are ‘such a welcoming people’, as Charles from Texas says of the people of Nicaragua? What does this evaluation depend on? And, like the rain outside, the comments pour. I’ve made the decision not to audio record this session because this would quickly silence the teachers. There’s too long, and too recent, a bloody history here of watching what you are on record as saying, and I want to let everyone speak. Because of this, I can’t quote anyone directly, although I frantically scribble notes throughout. I also say that those who want to be interviewed should contact me, and in the days afterwards, many do, both students and teachers. People are polite, raising their hands, helping the students who struggle to convey their meaning in Spanish, taking turns, and offering each other the chance to go first. But the hands stay up, and there are more, and longer, contributions, particularly from the teachers. I wonder if no one ever asks the teachers what they think. El cliente manda, after all. The customer is the boss. It seems that the students are a bit shocked by the data, realizing that, perhaps, their own discourses are similar. The teachers say they have heard so much of this kind of thing before and have held their tongues. Now, invited to comment, they seem to relish telling their stories. There is a culture in Guatemala of the testimonio, storied accounts, and many of the contributions involve long narratives. The atmosphere in the room is charged but not hostile. Deep thinking is going on. Someone, a student, says the people of Xela are very welcoming. Not just in the school, although here they are friendly because they have to be. Follow the money. But we went to a party the other day, our host family invited us, and everyone was really nice, both that day but also the next day when we saw some of the same people again in the street. They are friendly. And then a teacher says yes, some of the students come back again and again, for years. They stay with the same host families, and now it’s not about paying. The families invite them. A student says some of us don’t make much of an effort to leave the bubble of the school. And we have a uniform: we all wear North Face jackets! And a teacher

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says there are very different types of students. Some want to create connections. Some just want to learn Spanish; they’re not interested in the culture, the people here. It depends on them. There are types. Other teachers nod in agreement. Then someone, a teacher, says, ‘Their cultures are so cold! I’m very proud of being Guatemalan, I love my country, and when I went to New York with my family I told my kids, “Don’t learn from this experience, people here, they are so cold” ’. Then a teacher says they come here with the idea that they’re going to be robbed, going to be taken advantage of. They don’t trust. Some of them, they don’t have that capacity to be open. So they don’t make the connections. Implicitly, a student now passes the blame for seeming aloofness, for coldness, for not connecting. ‘I feel embarrassed to show my host family my computer,’ she says. ‘They’ll ask me how much it cost. I don’t want to tell them. What should I tell them? It cost more than they make in six months’. Another student asks, ‘How should I introduce myself here, as a [US] American, knowing the history of what my country did in Guatemala?’ There seems to be some awareness of power, positionality, and history. The students are trying to navigate this. A teacher says many of the NGOs are really not responsive to people’s needs. It’s just people, gringos, coming in and trying to change Guatemala. Some students squirm. And then I lift the mood a little: it’s time for another laugh. I realize I do this often here. I expose some vulnerability, and it opens people up. Is this my way of doing the intercultural, putting myself down a little, and giving face? I tell the story of a woman that I met the other day at a pedicure salon. What a ‘princesa’ thing to do, I say, and people laugh. She asked me how many countries I had been to, while telling me that she had only been to her home town and to Xela. She had never even been to Guatemala City. I felt embarrassed to tell her anything like a true answer, and I certainly didn’t know what to say when she asked me how much it costs to get here from Australia. What should I have said? It’s a genuine question. And a teacher says, slightly reprimanding, ‘Not everyone wants to travel, you know? You should tell her about your travels. Maybe you will open her mind. Don’t be embarrassed. That’s the way of the world. You have money. She doesn’t. You shouldn’t pretend otherwise’. And someone else, another teacher, says, ‘Actually, no. I’m fed up with hearing my students go on about their travels. They show off. Do they think they are better? They don’t have their eyes open when they travel anyway’. And we are back to the idea of a bubble, la burbuja. It is perfectly possible to pass through Xela and never leave the language schools and the tourist cafes. Is this the travelling blindly that the teacher is referring to? Am I just another gringa here, having a pedicure and saying, implicitly or explicitly, how rich and wasteful I am, how different, and how separate from the culture? But the pedicure woman and I spoke for two hours, in her language. We shared some laughs, and we found common ground on which we were more similar to each other than we are different: we both have crap boyfriends, dye our hair, and want to see Jurassic World. When I left, she gave me a hug. I think we bonded. Isn’t this an example of intercultural competence: selecting the shared things and reducing the things that set us apart?

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 83 We move on. I show a slide of a Nicaraguan family living in a tin shack and I say that, for a lot of the students, this is what Nicaragua looks like. And there’s an aside, when one of the students asks how come I’m showing this picture. I say that I only use pictures that are published – this one is from a website – or that I’ve gotten permission to use. But still I cover everyone’s faces if they can be seen. Actually, I say, we’re about to see a few pictures like that, which Charles from Texas gave me. I show his quote on the screen. He says, The neighbourhoods around here [out of town], there’s a lot of that. Houses made out of plastic bags from the dump. But that’s not what Granada’s like in town really. It’s a lot more put together than I thought. . . . [My host family is] a young couple and [with] their two little boys. . . . We sit down after dinner and just talk. We watch movies together and play card games. . . . I have my own room. We spend a lot of time in the living room. . . . Living conditions are way better than I was expecting. . . . I was hoping there would be a bathroom; I didn’t know about that either. . . . I didn’t know if I would be sleeping on a mat on the floor. . . . I guess it’s a lot less third world than I was imagining it to be. Then I show the pictures that Charles gave me, with all the faces obscured. The first is his host family house. In it, he sits in a rocking chair in front of a laptop, on which he and the two children are watching a Pokémon cartoon. The younger boy, who is two or three, sits on Charles’s lap and the older one, who is about six, leans on the chair. Both kids are engrossed in the cartoon. In the second picture, Charles and the two kids are outside the house, in the street, playing soccer. A neighbour woman sits on a bench nearby with a newborn baby. The host family house is a duplex, red brick, and has ornate metal grilles on the windows and a balcony on the upper floor. There is warm evening light and a blue sky. The street is clean and well kept. In the final picture, Charles and his host family are in a grassy park, again kicking a soccer ball. I say that these pictures look, to me, like they could have been taken anywhere. This is not a house ‘made out of plastic bags from the dump’. The students and teachers murmur in agreement. People are shifting a little now, and it’s been almost ninety minutes. I wonder how long this conferencia will go before people are bored. So I put up the slide with the next set of questions to involve everyone again. How were your students/your expectations before coming to Xela? How have they changed during their/your time here? Do you think that there is anything in any culture that is ‘more progressive’ than its equivalent in another culture? If so, how should we respond? Do you have any other comment on these issues? And, again, the room comes alive. One teacher says that the students’ experiences are framed not just by their own expectations but by the fears of people at home. The teacher laughs when telling the story of a student whose mother called him

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every morning during class, checking he was OK in ‘wild, crazy’ Xela. Another teacher says this situation is better than the opposite, where people have not read anything about Guatemala before they come, and they get here expecting it to be just like home. One student, this teacher says, ‘Se fue molesto’ [He left in annoyance] because nothing was to his liking. It was different from home. Then, on this question of expectations and making comparisons, a student says that her mother had told her not to compare, to try to just live, not to expect everything to be like it is at home where there is Wi-Fi everywhere and the food is familiar. And I ask her ¿es posible? It’s a good idea, yes, but I genuinely don’t know whether it can be done. Can we lay aside expectations, assumptions, and paradigms of how things are, or how they should be? Perhaps we cannot lay these aside but we can consciously try to transcend them. One teacher says that ‘Los Estadounidenses ’ [US Americans] are sure that theirs is the best country in the world, and they come here to Guatemala to prove it to themselves. And then a US-American student says that all countries think their country is the best in the world and that the USA is no exception in this. And there are many heads shaking, voices disagreeing. One teacher says, ‘No, not Guatemala. The problem is that plenty of Guatemalans also think the USA is somehow better than them. This is the problem’. Is this Franz Fanon’s (1967) ‘colonisation of the consciousness’, I wonder into my notepad. Is there an issue that the notion of US superiority is so deeply ingrained, on both sides, that when the students flaunt their putative superiority no one seriously challenges them? They are the source of the teachers’ incomes, after all, the host families’ incomes, and the incomes of all the tourist bars in central Xela. Is the Guatemalan teacher’s lot to shut up and put up? Then those students who do not question any assumptions of superiority can go home with their views intact. The conversation is lively, polite, interesting, and deep. But with so much more still to say, our two hours are up. The rain has stopped and everyone is rushing home for lunch. I say, ‘Thank you’, many times ‘thank you’, and they say ‘No, no, thank you’, and they applaud, and I applaud them back. And the coordinadora turns to me and says, in English for the first time in two hours, ‘That was fantastic’. I feel incredibly grateful that the teachers spoke up. I can’t quote them directly because I did not record. And yet their voices are so important. Walking down to the parque afterwards, I think about all that was said. How can we act in these situations? How do we manage the ‘selves’ that we bring with us? Am I right to try to manage the impression I give to people who I know don’t have the opportunities I have had – the opportunities I have, still. I don’t know. I think, though, about my own first experiences of Latin America many years ago.

Learning in Lima (1994) Pre-Internet, I obtained a book that promised a worldwide English-language teaching career on the basis that the ‘teacher’ had a British passport and a pulse. In its back pages were listed some of the more shadowy language schools in the shadier back

Talking about ‘them’ and ‘us’ 85 alleys of the world. These were schools that struggled to find teachers locally because they were woeful, and people on the ground knew it. Oblivious, via a series of faxed letters, I secured an immediately post-graduation job at the grandly titled Instituto de Inglés ‘William Shakespeare’ in the plush Lima suburb of San Isidro. Nowadays, of course, anyone would immediately Google the school, the city, what to bring, who to be, what to feel, and what to do. Instead, I made some mix tapes, had a PaddingtonBear-themed leaving bash, rolled up the Franz Kafka poster from the wall of my share house, and boarded a flight via the Dutch Antilles. The institute was alarmingly British. A Queen Elizabeth II portrait adorned the hall. This is ‘typically’ British only insofar as anything Peruvian-themed in the ‘West’ might feature alpacas or embroidered blankets. It is an imagined cultural ‘authenticity’ feigned to an audience that doesn’t know any better. The furnishings were darkvarnished and ornately carved, and on the reception area tables were two-week-old copies of the Times. We mostly taught in open-plan, ground-floor class spaces, which served the dual purpose of advertising the school and its all-important gringo teachers to passers-by and allowing for surveillance by the fearsome but ludicrous Directora. La Directora, the school’s owner, was a British expatriate of a colonial-officer type long since extinct in ‘Blighty’, a throwback that lives on in the world’s furthest-flung reaches. She was in her late fifties and dressed in beige: sensible skirts, shiny shoes, and a cloud of hairspray. She performed the no-nonsense, bluestocking headmistress, but it was a façade. She was never without a gin and tonic by ten in the morning and by mid-afternoon was all but incoherent. She was casually racist in an easily deniable way. She cared for, looked after, even loved her staff, and did so much for them because, you see, Peruvians, like children, cannot do anything for themselves. Between explaining that Peruvians are thieves, liars, and incompetents, she also boasted that she had saved those around her. All were indebted to her. Luciano and his wife had come to Lima penniless. They had walked from the high Andes, fleeing the Senderista revolutionaries in their village. Now they were El Shakespeare’s live-in cleaners, and my, weren’t they proud of their jobs? We nodded vague assent. Lots of La Directora’s stories were like this. She held forth and we nodded. Luciano doubtless was very grateful to have found El Shakespeare. Plenty of other people displaced by the civil war lived in distant shanty towns and eked out a precarious living selling chewing gum in the unpredictable traffic. There was a clear pecking order at El Shakespeare, and as transient foreigners, we never really fit in. We were decorative, like the poster of the Queen. In this curious empire, La Directora ruled. She explained, pontificated, announced: ‘Peru may be the home of the potato, but here they are inferior because they don’t even sort them into types! The only reasonable places to visit outside of Lima are the country club in Cieneguilla and the gardens of Arequipa. Everywhere else is barbaric! Peruvian tomatoes are less nutritious than ‘proper’ tomatoes because the tropical climate causes them to grow too fast. They don’t have time to absorb as many nutrients!’ Like the foreign teachers, the reception staff nodded at these statements, giving each other the side eye when La Directora’s back was turned. We were all paid, in part, to assent to her patronage. Frustrated, the sleek and groomed reception staff turned their

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disdain towards the foreign teachers. We dressed down. Teva sandals with faded khaki cargo pants and utility shirts, then as now, were the uniform of the adventurous ‘explorers’ we imagined ourselves to be. To middle-class Peruvians, we looked like scruffy, out-of-place zookeepers. The tall, pale, Limeña office staff also looked down on the shorter, browner staff: drivers, deliverymen, security guards. As La Directora ordered the receptionists around, so they commanded tasks of these cholos. And swanning though all of this, the subject of everyone’s fawning, were our wealthy, upper-class students. The women were impossibly well dressed with figure-hugging outfits and large sunglasses perched atop glossy hair. The men wore suits and carried the cassette players from their cars. Like the sunglasses, this was both a security measure and a badge of status. The foreign teachers were a curious mixture, and we shared rooms at the back of the Directora’s mansion. Most of us were new graduates, and we were British, Kiwi, Canadian, US-American. A few were older, odder, more lost. A British man in his fifties spent his evenings clattering on a typewriter, working on a novel he wouldn’t let anyone read. For years I looked for it in bookshops and never found it. A steelyeyed, dyed-blonde Californian in her forties, or older – she was vague about details – had many anecdotes, none of which tied together into a coherent story. There was a husband and a house. And then there was as second husband, several houses. Then, no, just one house, just one husband, but also a business. The business was very successful, and they got rich! But then the next night, no, she had never been married and always been poor. We were curious, critical, and too polite, on the surface, to point out her many inconsistencies. But in Lima, as a blonde gringa, she thrived. We all did, in our own ways. Although we earned very little at El Shakespeare, our costs were also very low. Also, we were always paid late, and each time it got later: two weeks, three weeks. After three months, we were a full month behind schedule. The accountant was always ‘on his way’ from the bank and never appeared. This was a strategy, the others said, to keep us on our toes, for who could leave if they had not been paid? La Directora blamed Peruvian accountants, Peruvian banks, and Peruvian inefficiencies. But I was learning to doubt these stereotypes, and the involuntary thrift of always being paid late meant that after six months in Lima, I had saved some money. I yearned for a South America that I imagined as more ‘real’ than swanky San Isidro and most of our snobby pituco students. By then I could defenderme with shaky, practical Spanish, and I had grown enough confidence to improvise beyond the Lonely Planet script. In short, I left Lima. I bought the ticket, took the ride.

6

Learning from and negotiating with cultural ‘others’

This chapter examines the ways in which language-learner travellers engage with host communities. It focuses on in-class and homestay experiences of engaging and negotiating identities with cultural ‘others’. In-class ‘culture’ teaching and learning are examined first. This includes instances of misunderstandings attributable to differences in ‘cultural’ knowledge and also teachers’ overt attempts to ‘teach culture’, conceptualized variously as part of teaching Spanish. From there, I consider the way the Spanish language and learners’ cultural otherness positions them socially, as well as the impacts on learners’ perceptions of their own identities and efficacy in the contexts. Building from this discussion, I consider a key component of intercultural competence that I revisit in Chapter 8: (how) can we be ourselves in settings that we perceive as culturally ‘other’? To this end, I examine learners’ experiences of intercultural encounters in informal settings, including homestay experiences and transactional public encounters such as getting around on public buses. Not discussed here, but the topic of Chapter 7, are the various ‘voluntourism’ experiences in which some Spanish learners engage. These clearly inform, and are informed by, the ways in which participants interact in settings within and beyond the classroom.

Benign ‘cultural’ content in Spanish classes Culture, with a small ‘c’, is everywhere in the Spanish schools. On the wall at La Cooperativa, for instance, is the mural, shown in Illustration 7, with the Pablo Neruda quote, ‘Podrán cortar las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera’ [They can cut the flowers but they cannot delay the spring]. This is a reference to Guatemalan spring, between the 1944 overthrow of dictator Ubico and the 1954 CIA-led coup. This mural is steeped in culture, then, but also in politics. Similarly, much of the ‘culture’ teaching I experienced in my own Spanish classes was political. At El Patio in 2013, we discussed the Ríos Montt trial, and at La Cooperativa in 2015, we discussed the Roxana Baldetti/Pérez Molina corruption scandal. Then at La Escuelita in July 2015, we discussed Lima’s all-but caste system. The Pan American Games were on and Gladys Tejeda won gold for Peru. But Lima newspaper billboards screamed ‘cholita de oro’, emphasizing Tejeda’s indigeneity, and suddenly the discussion on the news and in Lima cafes

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Illustration 7 Mural at ‘La Cooperativa’.

was more about Tejeda’s race than her racing. So at La Escuelita we discussed racism, classism, and prejudices, all alive and well in Peruvian life. Not all ‘culture’ in the Spanish schools is so overt though, or so political. Culture appears in teaching material, whether ‘high’ culture such as Julio Cortázar or Octavio Paz texts or ‘everyday’ place references, such as El Baúl, a volcano near Xela, used as an example in a grammar exercise. Culture is in local expressions and uses of language, such as the voseo form or local slang. ‘Culture’ is also discoverable by reading against Spain-published teaching materials. For example, the textbook Dominio (Gálvez et al., 2008, p.108) attributes students ‘un espíritu emprendedor’ (an entrepreneurial spirit) with which to petition ‘la junta de la comunidad’ (the municipal council) for financial assistance to ‘construir una casa rural’ (build a country house). At La Escuelita, my Peruvian teacher and I critiqued its embedded assumptions and discussed how this might work in Peru. Culture is also the everyday. It is in the sweet, floury pan dulce for morning break and at the student parties when a guitar is passed around. It is present where the teachers sing ‘Las Mañanitas’ for someone’s birthday and none of the students know the words. Culture also pops up when I tell my La Cooperativa teacher that I hope it rains – ojalá que llueva – and she says ‘café’ and smiles and pauses. Smiling too I add, ‘En el campo’, and we both laugh, sharing a reference to a Juan Luis Guerra song entitled ‘Ojalá que llueve café en el campo’. Antonio brings culture into class when he shows a video called Doble Check, from Spain, and introduces it by writing ‘El Amor en los Tiempos de What’s App’

Learning from cultural others 89 [Love in the time of What’s App] on the board. This is a reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s book, Love in the time of Cholera. This reference is not mentioned in the film, though, and Antonio doesn’t explain it. He assumes the reference is shared, but when I interview the students later, I find it has gone over their heads. Also in Doble Check, in which a couple argues about a What’s App conversation, the fight mentions ‘poner cuernos’ or ‘putting on horns’. This gesture, common across the Spanish-speaking world, refers to infidelity. Although one of the students that I interview later recognizes the gesture, he doesn’t know the term and says he missed the reference in the film. The other student in the class recognizes neither the gesture nor the term (Steve, mid-thirties, California; Alisha, late teens, Ohio; Antonio, late thirties, Nicaragua, ‘advanced-level lesson’, Granada 2015; ‘interview’, Granada 2015). These examples, of ‘culture’ as it comes up in Spanish-language education, are benign. Teachers mention and sometimes explain artefacts with which students may be unfamiliar, and, at best, a little bit of ‘cultural’ learning takes place. Sometimes meaning is lost. Sometimes a little moment is shared.

Contested ‘cultural’ content in Spanish classes But ‘culture’ as it appears in Spanish class is sometimes much more contested. For example, several student participants raised issues concerning how to respond to teachers and also homestay hosts who expressed strong views that differed from, or challenged, their own beliefs and/or identities. For example, perceptions of same-sex attraction were a common cultural flashpoint: I’ve had experiences with some of my teachers. . . . When they’ve asked about my romantic life, and I am [a woman] married to a woman. . . . On Monday I actually had to ask to change teachers because [my teacher’s] reaction was so awful. . . . He said, ‘I’m fine with that’, and then went on to equate homosexuality with prostitution, to say that transvestites were members of . . . gangs and that people were right to be scared of them because they were like these big tattooed men in women’s clothes. Then he went on to say something along the lines of ‘we’re all architects of our own lives. If I wanted to, I could be an assassin, or I could be an alcoholic, or I could have same-sex feelings’. So . . . equating it to a lifestyle choice [and saying] being gay was like being an assassin . . . or having a chemical dependency. Then he also did voices when talking about his gay friends. . . . He was like, I have a gay friend and he’s like [speaks in high, soft voice], ‘Oh, oh, la, la’. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) The big thing is I can’t tell anyone about my [male] partner. We actually just got married. . . . I actually just don’t want to open that can, like, of potentially worms, potentially delicious beans, you never know. . . . I don’t know what my [host] family’s religious background is, but I do know the teachings of most of the churches in Guatemala where they’re the crazy evangelical

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Learning from cultural others religions or the Catholic Church on social issues is like, you know it doesn’t really favour my orientation. Not only that, but, like, it can actually be, like, interpreted in really weird ways around children and stuff. (Kyle, late twenties, Canada, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) There are instances [in class] . . . where I’m like, ‘I do not believe that’. For instance, talking with a teacher who . . . was talking about [her] view on gay people. That’s something that I found really hard to deal with. . . . It’s just something where her core belief . . . was that people who are homosexual were incorrect, like there was something wrong with them, that there’s a disorder, when I know that’s not true. . . . They say in their [evangelical Christian] religion that . . . homosexuals will go to hell, I think is what I’ve gotten from [what she was saying] and that there’s something wrong with them mentally. She was explaining that she thinks there’s a spirit, like a demon-ish spirit controlling them. That just contradicts what I know. . . . Also, she didn’t know that I was straight. (Amy, early twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

These students’ accounts speak to a range of strategies and experiences. While Alice chooses to be open about her relationship and suffer the consequences, Kyle remains closeted to his teachers and homestay hosts in part because of the association, which he mentions, that may be made between homosexuality and paedophilia (I have also encountered this view in conversations with Guatemalan homestay hosts and have also struggled to know how to respond; this conversation is taken up again in Chapter 8). Amy herself is straight and does not have to decide between coming out and performing straightness. Nevertheless, she struggles with how to respond to a teacher whose beliefs are so at odds with what she says she ‘knows’. (And although I agree with Amy, I expect the teacher might also claim that her own beliefs are what she ‘knows’.) Participants raised many different areas in which they felt their values clashed with those of their teachers and/or homestay hosts. Issues cited included perceptions that local people were racist and/or classist, directness of commenting on issues perceived as ‘personal’, and religious beliefs. Additionally, some students felt that although their values did not clash, as such, it was simply difficult at times to find common ground culturally. For example, There’s only so much you can talk about [with Nicaraguans]. Everyone’s talking about the World Cup now, and I’m not quite following it except for knowing how dominant Germany’s been. . . . There’s only so much you can talk about soccer. . . . I was like, ‘Oh my God’. You could root for your team, but the game itself, because I’m not a big sports person, so I wouldn’t know, ‘Oh that’s a good play,’ or whatever. (George, early twenties, New York, ‘interview’, Masaya 2014) [My host mother] is really racist. . . . She was describing [a student] who had previously stayed with her. . . . For the purpose of the recording, I will

Learning from cultural others 91 describe to you what I am doing. She did the thing where you . . . stretch your eyelids to demonstrate somebody who is from East Asia. She was like, ‘Yeah, she was’, and did that to say she was of Chinese origin. . . . Which was very ironic since she also complained about racism in the United States against Hispanic people. Then she said quite a few things about Indigenous Mayan people. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) The disparity is awful here. The Miraflores culture [an upper-class Lima district] is just awful. They have no empathy towards their own people. They’re incredibly racist towards all types of Peruvians, the Afro-Peruvians. They’re in their own little bubble of their own world. . . . It’s like they don’t want to give anything back into Peru; they just stay in the Miraflores bubble and they get their own money, and then they move to the US or other places. It seems like they want to escape Peru. (Luke, early twenties, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) The Nicaraguans point things out very directly. . . . [One of the teachers] said, ‘Hey, Sally, you’ve gained a little weight’. And I go, ‘I know, ummm, thanks’ [laughs]. . . . But it’s not bad or anything, like it would be perceived in the US. It’s just like, ‘Hey, by the way’ . . . and you’re like, ‘Oh I know’. (Sally, mid-twenties, New Mexico, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) I’m an atheist. And I can be very out about that fact. But here I’m more reserved about it. . . . One of the first conversations I had with my [host] family was, did I believe in Jesus. I really tried to sidestep the question by saying, ‘Oh you know, I’m just non-religious’. They came back like a good lawyer, almost [laughs] like, ‘That’s not what I asked. I asked do you believe in Jesus?’ I said, ‘No, no I don’t’. I felt a little funny about it . . . because I’ve devoted my professional life and maybe otherwise to serving poor people. So my understanding of Christianity is that the importance of serving the poor ranks high among the priorities. . . . But I wondered whether . . . I could say to people, ‘Well you know, like Jesus . . . I’m interested in serving the poor, and it’s important to me’. I wondered if that would be insulting to the people who really believe in Jesus as God, et cetera, et cetera. I found out that no, they’re quite happy to hear my story in that regard. (Patrick, mid-fifties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) These excerpts speak of students experiencing discomfort because of differences they perceive between their own and the host cultures’ norms and expectations. Some of these are a simple mismatch in interests and knowledge. George does not follow soccer and is bewildered by the ubiquity of the World Cup in summer 2014 in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, though, he turns this difference into a deficit discourse about Nicaraguans, deriding them for not offering him other topics of conversation. Similarly, but more understandably, Alice and Luke critique local discourses, expressing surprise and discomfort at what they

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perceive and describe as stark, shocking racism and classism. Is this different from George’s perception of too much soccer talk though? Is it the case that racism and classism are objectively problematic, whereas ‘too much’ soccer talk is simply a cultural preference? Sally implicitly theorizes this, explaining normative differences through a symbolic interactionist framework imbued with cultural relativism. She says that the same statement that in the USA might be considered rude (‘Hey, Sally, you’ve gained a little weight’), but in Nicaragua it is ‘not bad or anything’. She would argue, no doubt, that George might usefully frame soccer talk as neither bad nor good, just different. But is it perhaps also the case that the racism and classism Luke and Alice describe are similarly ‘not bad or anything’? Just how far can cultural relativism go? I return to this question in Chapter 10.

Handling intercultural encounters How should we respond to situations like those presented earlier, in which we perceive cultural differences that do not sit well with our own values and beliefs? How do we hold onto ‘ourselves’ while immersing ourselves in a cultural milieu that is not our own? What happens if we deny our core values in this kind of context? And how does power operate here, where the students may be simultaneously powerful and powerless? This section discusses a range of experiences and approaches and considers how participants’ discourses construct intercultural competence. Homophobia was frequently raised in all three contexts, but particularly in Xela. This is not to say that everyone there is homophobic. In fact, I watched a gay pride parade there in 2015 (albeit among local people who told me that ‘son muy extraños ’ [They are very strange]). But there seems to be a strong perception that it is wise to remain closeted while in Latin America. However, hiding a core part of one’s identity is not the easiest of things to do: All of my Latino friends in the United States, told me, ‘Latin America is an extremely conservative place. . . . You’re really going to want to be careful about how you demonstrate your identity as a gay person’. So I just said, ‘I’m not, quote, flaming, unquote [laughs]. I can pretty much . . . do the straight thing’. But I didn’t realize everybody that you interact with on a significant level, including my homestay [family], is just like, ‘My friend saw you and she thinks you’re super cute or she wants to meet you’. Or, ‘We need to get you a novia [girlfriend]’. . . . A novia, not a novio [boyfriend]. . . . At first you’re just like, ‘Yeah, I can do this. This is fine. Acting’s easy’. But then . . . it starts to really wear you down. . . . It’s like you’re a pillar of sandstone or something. It’s just a tide coming in and out, and in and out, the tide . . . it’s wearing you down. It’s making you weaker and weaker. It’s a really slow process but you can feel it. . . . Do I have to be a straight person for the next two months? (Sam, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

Learning from cultural others 93 Sam is clearly struggling. As discussed in Chapter 2, much of the literature on crossing cultures is about surface-level artefacts: foods, festivals, and getting used to new ways of doing things. But what happens when culture intersects with values and ethics, where some people get to celebrate who they are while others have to hide their identities? For some, hiding is the easiest way: I would just rather avoid all that because I don’t actually get much from telling it anyway. I’m not the kind of person who needs to go to other cultures and say, ‘Look who I am. I’m this category of person that you might never have heard of, accept me’. I think LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] people do that a lot in their activism internationally, and it sometimes causes a lot of problems. So I’m not – it’s not something I need to do. . . . But it is, it would be nice if I could talk to people about my life back home, because all of a sudden you have to sometimes lie about things, which is annoying. . . . I’ve told a lot of little lies. . . . It’s annoying, but it’s not really that bad. It’s just performing, right? (Kyle, late twenties, Canada, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Whereas Sam perceives his identity is being worn away through his closeted Xela experience, Kyle (who is older, married, and a more experienced traveller) shrugs off ‘performing’ as annoying but not fundamentally challenging to his identity. This is not at all to say that Kyle holds his identity or his values less dear than Sam, but that people respond differently to the need to perform, enhancing some aspects of their identity over others, as part of intercultural crossing. Interestingly, also, Kyle mentions international LGBT activism. Implicitly, here, he echoes Sally’s culturally relativistic position that different cultures are simply different and that no culture should try to change another. On the one hand, this is an anti-imperialist standpoint: who is Culture A to attempt to change Culture B, particularly where colonial power relations are so often still in place? Who is Sam, or Kyle, or Alice to try to change Guatemala? On the other hand, are there really no universals when it comes to human rights, LGBT rights, and anti-racism?

Powerful/not powerful The issue of power crops up both at the macro-level (for example, all the participants cited earlier are from the North American/British Anglophone ‘centre’) but also at a micro-level of different levels of education: I have pretty strong political views about certain things. In some ways, I’ve been able to express them [here], in other ways not. . . . I talk about politics quite a bit with a guy in my host family. . . . One thing that we’ve discussed a lot is capital punishment, and he’s very adamant about the need for capital punishment. . . . I think it’s barbaric. . . . But part of my work [as a lawyer] is to deal with people whose views are diametrically opposed to mine. It’s really important to be able to function in that world, to not go crazy and

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Learning from cultural others not to erupt in anger or whatever, and to really hear people out. So when I have an argument with him, I try to be respectful and polite. . . . I do hold back at times, too, because I feel like, I don’t know, this is maybe going to sound condescending, but I almost feel like I would destroy his arguments with my arguments, because of the strength of their logic. But also in terms of wanting to keep the peace and wanting to keep the friendliness. . . . I guess it comes from having, as part of my job, routinely having arguments with people . . . while still saving the relationship. (Patrick, mid-fifties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

Patrick is highly aware of the power relations in the situation in which he is a university-educated lawyer arguing with a relatively less educated Guatemalan. Whereas his training in argumentation and logic would at times allow him to defeat his homestay friend’s case, he sometimes holds back because he is aware of their educational disparity and of a parallel aim: to preserve the friendship. Sam also acknowledges his own power in Guatemala: I don’t feel like you can go into a place that’s not yours, where you’re a foreigner and where your passport gives you incredible privilege . . . and your country has a terrible legacy – I really don’t feel like you can go into a place and lecture people. Even though I feel uncomfortable, after a while [of] my [host] family [saying], ‘You need a novia’ [girlfriend] . . . at the same time, I still don’t feel like I’m in a position where I can be like, ‘Okay, you need to shape up’. . . . As much as I would love to see a flowering of LGBT acceptance in Guatemala and Central America . . . I think it’s kind of the white man’s burden, and is it the gay white man’s burden if I come in and lecture . . . the people I interact with on a daily basis to say, ‘Okay, this is my identity and my identity’s getting accepted in my country and you need to accept it’? (Sam, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Sam echoes Kyle’s view that he is in no position to come in and colonize Guatemala with his own, or his culture’s, ideas about ‘correct’ sexual politics. Sam’s view is more nuanced, though, because he acknowledges intersectionality. On the one hand, Sam’s position is highly privileged, as he is a young, white, able-bodied, good-looking, US-American man coming in with US dollars and taking advantage of affordable Spanish lessons. Sam is to a great extent privileged. However, his sexual identity makes him a minority in Guatemala, where being gay is, at best, laughable and, at worst, violently persecuted. ‘Possibly even killable’, he says, when I make this point. Sam is also highly aware, as a student of Guatemalan history, of the legacy of US foreign policy and its effects on domestic politics. With this awareness comes some historical guilt. So Sam is, simultaneously, in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ power positions. While he tries to reconcile those things intellectually, no amount of rationalizing seems to help him to deal with the emotional fallout of constantly being told he needs a novia. So while Sam struggles, he feels rather guilty saying so.

Learning from cultural others 95 Many other participants were similarly aware of their own privilege, and many mentioned the guilt they felt when trying to cope with everyday challenges, particularly when they noted that these were local people’s everyday realities. While practical difficulties may be part of the process of negotiating cultural ‘otherness’, the layer of guilt and perceived privilege added a layer of complexity to the participants’ experiences: I am just so aware of my own privilege. . . . For example, just my flight getting here would be . . . the amount of money that [my host family] would earn in years and years. Just being aware of your privilege is uncomfortable, especially in the situation where somebody is inviting you into their home [as a homestay student]. There is a, kind of, an awkwardness. I don’t know if that’s just a British thing [laughs]. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) One of the things that comes up frequently [in conversation with my teacher] is that we [international students] have so much freedom. Opportunity. We get to travel everywhere. We get to see more of their country than they do. It’s weird right? I do feel kind of terrible about it. . . . like, somebody doesn’t even have enough money to visit their parents, you don’t want to tell them that ‘I’m going to Matagalpa next weekend, and then I’m coming back’. . . . I think I have a lot of guilt about it. (Beth, late thirties, Canada, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) I’m in the process of learning so much right now. A big part of it is political because after seeing the impact that the United States has had on Guatemala, and learning more about the impact of the US in the world. . . . I’ve always been like, ‘I’m not political’, but that’s not really an option for me at this point because it’s just not acceptable. We [US Americans] have so much influence, more so bad than good maybe, in the world. So being more intentional about being more politically aware has been a big part of what I’ve learned here. (Amy, early twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) As shown in this section, students perceive they are highly privileged, and this may result in some feeling guilt, awkwardness, and/or a sense that they need to make changes to the identities they perform to local people. This might include hiding their sexuality or their weekend trips. Another way that students have of countering their guilt and awkwardness, however, is to volunteer their help in alleviating poverty. Such discourses and practices are discussed next.

Discourses of ‘helping’ the ‘poor’ The vignettes that I showed to the participants at the conferencia at El Patio, described in Chapter 5, are typical of some participants’ discourses about poverty.

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In those quotes, participants described part of their purpose as ‘helping’ and Latin America, variously, as poor, welcoming, intimidating, chaotic, and curious about/admiring of foreigners. Examples of similar ways of constructing volunteer work include the posters, flyers, and language-school publicity materials shown in Illustrations 8 and 9 and also the following: [Being here] helps me achieve my goal of helping people that haven’t been as blessed as I’ve been. . . . So that’s why, even though I know that there’s way more other countries and more people that need help, I can only do so much. . . . My wish would be that more organizations like this will spread . . . so we could help more people, not just, like, Peruvians. (Isabel, Florida, early twenties, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) [The program I’m participating in] it’s mainly a volunteer program . . . It’s whatever that area needs, really. So in Nicaragua, they do a water and sustainability project, this year they’ve been building houses for single mothers. . . . They have a turtle conservation [project] as well. . . . I get, like, one class worth of credit for coming here . . . it’s just mainly volunteering, getting to know a new culture, and kind of helping people, yeah. . . . The Spanish immersion [week-long program, beforehand, in Granada] is just to . . . learn a bit of Spanish . . . which might help with the volunteering part of the trip. (Susan, California, early twenties, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) They haven’t told us our project yet [for the first week, near Chinandega]. They’ll probably tell us when we get there. We do the turtle conservation [in week two, on Little Corn Island]. . . . I think there are two projects [near Chinandega], one involving children and teaching and one involving building, and I think we might get a choice. But it depends what they need doing at the time, I guess. Because it’ll pick up from where previous volunteers left off. So if they’ve not finished building, then we’re going to have to finish what they’ve started. . . . The organization visited my university just trying to get more volunteers, for an extra set of hands. . . . I’ve never done anything like this, ever. I’ve never travelled by myself anywhere. . . . I just thought, yeah, that would be cool. Obviously, the building work, conservation . . . it’s just something I’ve never done before. It’s an experience. (Cathy, United Kingdom, early twenties, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) We were at a community meeting last Friday and [one of the local staff] was talking to them about how we’re going to build this community staircase and they’re going to work with us. Then he was telling the community about us, the students who were there, and he was like, ‘You don’t see people from Miraflores here to help you, do you?’ And the whole community was like ‘no’. I could tell that that struck a chord with them. (Renee, Ohio, early twenties, ‘interview’, Lima 2015)

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Illustration 8 Advertisement for a Spanish-language school.

These are discourses of mostly very young, travel-inexperienced participants. Whereas Isabel modestly admits she ‘can only do so much’, she frames the presence of ‘helping’ foreign volunteers as entirely unproblematic and beneficial. Similarly, while Susan and Cathy do not seem to know much about any of the

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Illustration 9 Advertisement for a volunteer project at a coffee farm.

week-long projects to which they will be supplying ‘an extra set of hands’, both appear to accept that their unskilled work (and mere presence?) is of benefit to Nicaragua. Indeed, this putative benefit, to Susan herself if not necessarily to the host country, is recognized by the college credit she earns for undertaking this trip. Interestingly, Susan’s trip, including the two-week volunteering

Learning from cultural others 99 component, the Spanish immersion week, the turtle conservation add-on, and college credit costs over US$5,600, not including flights to and from Nicaragua. Although she did cite this figure briefly at interview, and I checked it with the organization’s website, Susan did not mention the substantial price of the trip again. So while Cathy and Susan frame their activity in terms of helping, much of their money is also going to Nicaragua (although whether the bulk of this money stays in Nicaragua or goes towards the projects themselves are different questions). In these discourses, volunteer tourism is constructed as worthy, good, and selfless, and the volunteers themselves, who are simply more ‘blessed’ than Latin Americans, are good hearted and useful, even though they may have only undertaken a week’s worth of beginner Spanish-language lessons (as in Cathy and Susan’s cases) and may volunteer in projects and roles, such as construction, in which they have few relevant skills to contribute. They are well-intentioned, though, and the previous quotes do not seem cynical. Clearly, however, these are interview quotes, told to an (older, more teacher-like?) interviewer in front of whom a certain amount of performing may be inevitable. There may also be more instrumental, though still fairly innocent purposes at work here, in which the ‘experience’ may be recycled for the purposes of résumé building or Facebook bragging: I originally came on a Proyecto trip to Lima a year ago . . . and it was originally for really selfish reasons. Like, I was a pre-med student, and it’s more and more becoming something that’s expected, to come on one of these service trips. So originally it was just a very shallow résumé-builder type of thing. (Renee, Ohio, early twenties, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) A lot of [the student volunteers] describe their trips [in their Facebook posts] as ‘medical service trips’ or ‘medical mission trips’ and [say] they’ve learned so much. They’re so thankful . . . grateful for the opportunity to help out and do that. But again, they do always . . . they’ll post a sandboarding picture, tour pictures, stuff like that. . . . At the clinics, they’ll take a picture with the kids. That’s very common. The toothbrushing station with you brushing their teeth and stuff like that. Or just three or four children, like, your squad . . . It’s their experience, just showing their experience and what they’re doing in these countries. (Saleem, early twenties, Georgia, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) This is identity work that references the kudos that comes from transcending tourism and seemingly performing more of an aid-worker than a ‘mere’ tourist role. Cathy also performs local knowledge, recycling Miguel’s explanation of ‘bolis ’ (discussed in Chapter 5) into a Facebook picture she posts from Little Corn Island, in which she and a group of other volunteer tourists are eating ice pops. Her caption reads, ‘Us with our bolis ’. This kind of locally savvy, aid-worker-nottourist trope is found on the humorous website, Humanitarians of Tinder, which lambasts online dating profiles in which Westerners post pictures of themselves

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‘helping’ and ‘being at one with’ the developing world (Humanitarians of Tinder, 2015). This is the discourse that implicitly underpins the excerpts cited here. But some of the students’ discourses go deeper into their own rationale and perceived reception by local people, as well as their attempts to influence local people’s ways of thinking or being in the name of ‘helping’. This is sometimes framed as part of their own cultural immersion and/or development of Spanish language. Examples include, We’re training local people to sell high-impact goods like water filters and solar lights and reading glasses to their own community constituents. . . . We actually just give products to people, and they sell them . . . so we don’t create debt for people who don’t need the stress of debt. . . . We travel around with a small cohort of us [foreign volunteers] to reach, essentially, what we call ‘the last mile of real poverty’. . . . It’s pretty exciting. It’s cool. . . . [In our team] there’s a woman . . . [who] has spent a little bit of time bouncing around Ecuador looking for a similar gig . . . found us and then had to move up here. (Alan, early twenties, Texas and Canada, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) I think [volunteering] definitely breaks down a lot of stereotypes. One particular [experience] . . . was when a Peruvian family had donated beds . . . and so we transported the beds and rode in this flatbed truck to get to the outskirts [of Lima.] . . . I feel like a lot of people think that, as Americans, we need to have the best of everything or we are very hoity-toity. Like we need to, I don’t know, have the best; we can’t have Peruvian standards. . . . Well, we were all on our knees putting this bed together [laughs]. And I think seeing that, and slowly breaking down the stereotype, that we’re really there and we want to help and there’s that earnest desire to do that I think really translates to the people. (Nadia, early twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) We have some students from Denmark . . . taking Spanish classes in the morning and volunteering in the afternoons. . . . They work with the [high school] kids. . . . They did a sexual education class a couple of weeks ago. . . . [They] came into the kitchen one day where . . . everyone hangs out, and they just blurt[ed] out really loud, ‘How do you pronounce “condom” in Spanish?’ And just everyone died [laughing]. We looked at them like, ‘Why? What’s going on?’ They were like, ‘We also need to buy bananas’. . . . For the [high school] kids to be in our program, the Nica parents have to be accepting of what we are teaching them. . . . When we’re teaching tolerance for homosexuality . . . it’s really small baby steps with these kinds of things because there is a deeply, deeply embedded homophobic culture . . . and is there a word like ‘different-aphobic’? If there’s something that’s odd or different, it’s a phobia as well. . . . I think [ours] is just a very progressive approach to education. In a lot of our home universities, our schools, it wouldn’t be seen that way, but compared to the culture here, it is [‘progressive’]. (Sally, mid-twenties, New Mexico, ‘interview’, Granada 2014)

Learning from cultural others 101 These excerpts are more nuanced, as they display a balance of, on the one hand, more agency and awareness than the participants cited earlier but also at times a problematic blindness to their own privilege and positioning. So although Alan describes a project aimed at sustainable development (akin to microfinance), he does not seem to ‘read’ the power relations and likely cultural imperialism of a situation in which young, semi-skilled US Americans ‘bounce around’ the continent ‘training’ local people. He also admits that his own Spanish is not entirely adequate for the job but blames local people who ‘mumble’ and may not understand his ‘clear’ explanations: So I can explain to you how a water filter works in Spanish pretty quickly, pretty easily, but then if someone has a question about it and if they’re older and they might mumble, I do struggle a little bit to get to the root of what that is that they’re looking for. . . . There’ll be a few times where I think I’ve explained something very clearly, and in fact, they haven’t understood. (Alan, early twenties, Texas and Canada, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) Similar issues occur in Nadia’s excerpt, which, in more direct ways than Alan’s, constructs the negotiation of power relations. Nadia cites a common stereotype: Peruvians may regard US Americans as ‘hoity-toity’. She says that for local people to witness foreign volunteers getting their hands and knees dirty may serve to improve the latter’s image. This is likely the case. Indeed, the Peace Corps (2015) lists among its stated aims for its presence in Peru improvement in how local people see US Americans. However, Nadia elides the origins of this stereotype, which goes some way to explaining why both the Peace Corps and Nadia may wish to challenge it. As described in Chapter 1, the USA has an exceedingly heavyhanded history in Latin America. This has produced significant resentment, while at the same time holding up the USA as a beacon of desire for Peruvians (NiñoMurcia, 2003). This results in a love-hate relationship underpinned by a sense that US Americans may feel, or be treated, as if they are ‘above’ Peruvians – a stereotype that Nadia confronts in her quote. The unexamined right of foreign volunteers to initiate projects of their own devising, that may run contrary to prevailing local cultural norms, is another issue in determining how power works in this space. For me, there are two possible readings of the situation of the Danish volunteers’ sexual education class for local high school students. The first is that knowledge of contraception is important and homophobia is unethical. As Nicaragua does not teach these things in schools, the Danish volunteers are making the world a better place by going to Nicaragua and teaching this class. A different view, however, would be that Nicaragua has its own culture with its own integrity. Homophobia and Catholic teachings about contraception, for better or worse, are part of that culture. And while outsiders may be invited to volunteer because Nicaragua is poor and needs the income that foreigners bring with them, it is culturally imperialistic for volunteers themselves to set the agenda for what they feel Nicaraguan culture ‘lacks’. This discussion is continued in Chapters 8 and 10.

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In the meantime, it is important to note that the power implicitly negotiated in these excerpts is present, also, in the use of Spanish itself. Indeed, it may be that a sense of relative powerlessness in part causes the participants to reduce and belittle the local cultures in these ways, as a defence mechanism. The next section considers this possibility.

In Spanish, on the back foot Learning a foreign language can be, perhaps even should be, a humbling process. The learners in this study were all, at least, high school graduates and almost all had undertaken or were undertaking higher education. In addition, most used their first language, English, in the tourist ‘bubbles’ in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru. Additionally, in all the schools and projects, English was the administrative operating language. As a result, when transitioning from relative educational and linguistic expertise to that of struggling beginners in Spanish, many participants perceived relative power loss: When I was [video conferencing] my mum I said, ‘I feel like a child’. . . . I’ve done well academically, and I would consider myself a well-read, articulate English speaker. Then to come into a country when I can barely [speak Spanish]. . . . I feel like a child when they’re talking to me, and I can’t understand what they’re saying, or they have to use really simple terms and talk very slowly. I don’t know the impression that I’m conveying to them. I’m sure it’s not becoming [laughs]. It’s very humbling. . . . I think that because I’m unable to understand what they’re saying [at the clinic, where I’m volunteering] . . . that trust isn’t able to be built and therefore I kind of become a clump on the wall [i.e. unimportant]. The less I’m able to understand, the less effort they put in to trying to explain things to me. (Tina, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) [My old teacher] said, ‘when you first came here you were a lot more like a little kid and, like, jumping around and that kind of thing, and now you’re just very serious’. . . . She means the last time I was here [three years previously]. . . . At first I took it as an insult . . . But then it kind of hit me, and I went, ‘Oh I know exactly why. It’s because I don’t feel like I have to dumb myself down to a childish level or be goofy. I don’t have to bank on [those strategies] to have the communication to build those relationships anymore’. . . . Tons of people do [it]. I mean, the Danish students [for example] . . . they’re just goofing around all the time having cake fights and water fights and . . . building these really strong, hilarious relationships [with the Nicaraguan staff and the kids at La Torre], but it’s not based on what it would normally be . . . conversation and getting to know someone’s history. It’s not that. But I don’t see the relationship being very different. (Steph, mid-twenties, New Mexico, ‘interview’, Granada 2014)

Learning from cultural others 103 Being on the back foot, it also happens when you’re with that [host] family, when . . . you don’t know how to say ‘bath’ and you don’t know how to communicate that you need two buckets of water to wash your hair [laughs]. . . . It takes you way out of the comfort zone [which] puts you at a social disadvantage, which is exactly what you’re at when you step foot in a foreign country. (Anna, early forties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) Some students responded to these humbling, out-of-comfort-zone experiences by claiming and performing other types of expertise. This included students who performed ‘expert’ traveller roles both among fellow students but also to their teachers. It also included those, as in the previous section, who sought to help ‘them’, the poor people, ‘los pobrecitos ’. I also struggled with all of this my first year in Lima. Linguistically, professionally, practically, and socially, I was on the back foot, struggling with loneliness, with unfamiliar living conditions, and with not understanding local references or ways. My situation was perhaps atypical, as I was not part of a supportive gringo bubble, and this both helped and hindered me. While I was more or less alone in facing the difficulties of coping in Lima, it pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to make mostly local friends quickly. As one of relatively few gringas in Lima at that time, this was fairly easy: many Limeños (including plenty of local Romeos) wanted to brag about their ‘amiga extranjera’, their foreign friend, and/or practise their English. But to engage with Lima, I also found myself engaging with cultural, practical, and contextual differences.

Learning to be Limeña (1995) After a few months of vagabonding in South America, I realized that backpacking alone, just going from place to place and seeing churches and museums full of pots, is pointless and isolating. I’m sure this is not the sense in which Lonely Planet is named, but I felt it. Lonely, I mean. Connections made along the way are fleeting, and while some of the places I saw were truly spectacular, I found very little of the deeper understanding that comes from living and working among local people. And so, missing my friends in smoggy Lima, I went ‘home’. This time I found two part-time jobs. And, as I was no longer living at the El Shakespeare house, I found a cheap, terrible apartment tacked onto the rooftop of a sprawling extended-family house that echoed La Casa de los Espiritús, The House of the Spirits (an Isabel Allende book set in a similarly sprawling, crumbling mansion in Chile). My apartment was cheap because only the bedroom was actually built. The other walls, made of flimsy wooden panels and painted pink, came up to just above head height. Above the plywood was a gap all around with posts extending upwards at intervals, and over these was stretched rattan matting to form a roof. It had cold water only, and the shower, shared with la familia below, consisted of a

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water pipe sticking out of the wall high up in the concrete bathroom. Because it was so terrible and so very pink, I mockingly called my apartment La Casa Rosada after the Argentinian presidential palace. In this cheap, terrible apartment, there were cockroaches skittering across the stone floors and on every surface were marching trails of ants. And there was the rat. In fact, I suspect, there were many rats. But the one, singular, iconic rat that I can still see in my mind’s eye was a muscular, black creature, pink nosed, and cautious, who came and went from the bathroom. I’d bought a mattress – the Casa Rosada came unfurnished – and the huge plastic bag it had come in was rolled up under the sink. At night, I used to hear rustling and sometimes by morning the plastic would be pulled out into the middle of the floor, torn at the edges a bit more each time. I’d shove it back in under the sink and get on with my day. But I also began to notice rodent footprints, distressingly large, around the edge of the toilet bowl and trotting across the floor. Might a rat have been drinking from the toilet bowl? Might a rat have come from the toilet?! I left the bedroom door open and watched, and sure enough, my rat was confident when she thought I was sleeping. She pulled at the plastic for a long time, tearing off strips and spiriting them away. Like me, she was building her nest in the Casa Rosada. The next day I investigated the local market, where there was an entire stall dedicated to weapons of mouse destruction: traps and gluey paper and poisons. Dead rodents were laid on top of each product by way of testimonio. But no, I didn’t want my rat – I’d stopped short of giving her a name – to be trapped or stuck or poisoned. Instead, at night, I left the toilet seat lid down, weighted with a stack of books. And the rustling stopped, and I never saw my rat again. Strangely, I wished her well. I thanked her for teaching me that I could share my living space with a rat and be OK. She and I both survived, and she taught me about coping. There’s something perfectly allegorical, though, about weighing down a rat-hole toilet with a stack of books, because reading as a way of dealing with the daily grind of smoggy Lima ended up being pretty much what I did that year. Books were then, and still are now, expensive in Latin America, and a vibrant bootleg trade of greyish photocopies exists on the streets. One Sunday, I was walking alone down Jirón de la Unión in central Lima in vague search of something to do. I was bored. Unchallenged. Teaching English was boring. Lima was grey. Making a social life, from scratch, in a new language, was exhausting. I had no plans for the day. Many times before I’d browsed bookstalls, wishing that they had something, anything, in English. But as they catered to the masses, they stocked schoolbooks, popular paperbacks, and the literature that schoolkids were supposed to read and that was well beyond my still-patchy Spanish. Why, then, did I stop that day to browse? Why did I get talking to that particular bookseller? And why did I confess to him in self-conscious Spanish that I would like to read something only I didn’t think I was good enough yet? I don’t know. What I do know is that the gruff stallholder was, clearly, my guardian angel. He retrieved a bootleg copy of a Peruvian novel, Jaime Bayly’s No Se Lo Digas A Nadie and told me, ‘Intenta, no más [Just try]’.

Learning from cultural others 105 I did. No pictures. No learner simplification. Authentic Lima contexts, storylines, and phrasings, but by then I was steeped in jerga peruana, Peruvian slang, and so this was much easier, in a way, than an ‘official’ Spanish from Spain would have been. Reader, I understood it! Not all of it, but enough to make it pleasurable and not a chore. I read for meaning, not searching out every unknown word, but reading for gist. Looking back, the book is very simply written, but it was a huge motivational milestone then. Nothing motivates like success. Jaime Bayly was a controversial celebrity in Peru, and little by little, I was able to discuss the controversy around him with Peruvians. And little by little, I began to learn from, negotiate with, and find my place in Lima.

7

Voluntourism Practicing on the community?

Volunteer tourism has been the subject of much critical debate in tourism and development studies (e.g. Lyons et al., 2012; McGehee & Andereck, 2009; Mostafanezhad & Hannam, 2014; Palacios, 2010; Raymond & Hall, 2008). And its dominant discourses, discussed in Chapter 6, may permit tourists to reduce and disdain local cultures. However, this is not to say that all volunteer work is necessarily problematic. In some cases, it seems, volunteer work does help raise participants’ awareness and shift perspectives in ways that can be said to contribute to their overall intercultural competence. However, where discourses of deficiency remain unchallenged, as in the excerpts cited in the previous chapter, intercultural competence likely suffers. I therefore ask: how do volunteer experiences contribute to making Spanish-language learners more, or less, interculturally competent? It may seem perverse, but I am less concerned here about the effects of volunteer tourism and misguided ‘helping’ on local people. Yes, I think that far too many Latin Americans are catastrophically poor and that there is systematic inequity. But this is not a situation that can be remedied by a few crumbs from the gringos’ table. Local people are also, for the most part, sufficiently savvy to be able to engage with visitors in ways that work for them, as the following stories attest: Gringos came to the countryside and said, ‘Oh my God, they will ruin their backs weeding with those short-handled hoes! Don’t they realize?’ So they went back to the USA and raised money for the poor, ignorant Guatemalans. And, proudly, they brought back their long-handled hoes, showed people how to use them, and handed them over. The local people were very happy. Lots of nice, smiley photos were taken. These were really good hoes with heads made from one single piece of reinforced steel. They were much better than the cheap, Chinese-made ones from the local ferretería, which tended to break where the two pieces had been welded together. When the gringos left, the people cut the handles down to the length they were used to, because that’s what they were used to and what they knew how to use. No one thought anything much of it. The gringos just didn’t know any better.

Practising on the community? 107 Another group tried something similar with stoves. An American organization thought that cooking over an open wood fire was backward and that, clearly, the people who did so were too poor to have any other option. And so in one village they bought everyone ‘proper’ gas estufas. But when they came back the next year, people were using them ‘para poner cosas ’, just to put things on. They weren’t using them. Dismayed, the benefactors asked why not. ‘Pues, no las necesitamos. Ya tenemos estufas. Well, we don’t need them. We already have stoves’. (‘field notes’, Barbara’s account translated from Spanish, Xela 2015)

Contesting voluntourism discourses Many participants, particularly those who had travelled more extensively and/or those who were a little older, were critical of the discourses of ‘helping’ the ‘poor’ of Latin America, as described in the previous chapter. For some, this came down to the personal experience of having volunteered naively in the past: When I was in college, about [age] twenty, a bunch of friends started, without knowing very much about Haiti, started . . . a bamboo reforestation project. This was two years after the earthquake. . . . One of the partners was a community centre that ran a kids’ camp. I was like, ‘I want to go help with the bamboo reforestation program, help with the kids’ camp, and see what Haiti is like’. So I went for five weeks, and I learned very quickly that [laughs] this very romanticized idea of volunteering to help the poor orphans is usually, I think, often the people who are volunteering may take away more than they are able to give. Not because they don’t want to give but because . . . what is really needed is local infrastructure and capacity building. . . . For example . . . they don’t need engineers, they need someone to come teach engineering so that when [the volunteers] leave, which they all will pretty much [laughs], there’ll be something sustainable left behind. I think people don’t realize how little they can give. . . . I think local kids enjoy it, but then it’s sad because the foreigners leave, and they create these bonds, which they then break. (Nina, mid-twenties, Connecticut, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Similarly, some of the Lima interns acknowledged that the student ‘volunteers’ that El Proyecto brings to Peru for a week at a time had a very reduced role in the eyes of the local staff and people, who may not see them as ‘real people’: We go to the community meetings; we all have to say our names and say ‘hi’ to the community and have a small greeting. So there’s just a sense of person-ability, I don’t know if that’s even a word [laughs]. . . . Yeah, [the interns, as opposed to the volunteers] we’re real people to them. . . . Whereas the volunteer side of things, [they]’re there for such a short amount of time [a week]. You don’t really get introduced to the community. You’re

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Practising on the community? just there. . . . It’s a white person in a Proyecto shirt. . . . The volunteer trips are very, very coordinated. . . . Everything is arranged for you [if you’re a volunteer]. You don’t have to think about anything. You just pay your money and you go. (Nadia, early twenties, Minnesota, ‘interview’, Lima 2015)

Nadia’s is a different organization than that through which Cathy and Susan went to Nicaragua, although the trip duration and the social media and other discourses of the volunteers appear to be very similar. In both cases, their usefulness is exaggerated, whereas to the organization they may be little more than a source of funding, perhaps for the ‘real’ work of an NGO behind the scenes: Yeah I mean it’s kind of like, it’s kind of bad to say, but in the long run, it’s basically a numbers game. Because that’s how we sustain our NGO. We can help more [local] people by getting more [volunteer] people to go on the trips. . . . So [the volunteers] are helping to fund – so we can help all the future patients. [They enable us] to run our clinics. That’s a very important thing. People [would-be volunteers?] always ask us, ‘Why is this so expensive?’ . . . I’m just, like, ‘Think about it this way, half of your money is going to be able to do this clinic; you’re doing all these things. How many people you help out as opposed to what you could have done with that money?’ (Saleem, early twenties, Georgia, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) To Nadia and Saleem, therefore, the role of one-week student ‘volunteers’ is very important but less for any actual work they might do than for the funding they bring, which allows the NGO to operate. Similar funding models are in place at La Torre in Granada, where the Spanish school pays for the children’s project, and at Trama Textiles, a weaving school in Xela. An Indigenous women’s cooperative, Trama Textiles (its real name) provides an income for rural women whose weaving is also sold via the school and its online Etsy store. Gringos who can read and write English and who can use computers sometimes volunteer to help with the website. But for most, Trama Textiles is about learning: Tuesday was my first time weaving, but I really love it because I feel like, yeah, the balance goes where it should be. I’m the student, and I feel I have so much to learn from these women. I feel like being this dynamic allows me to understand way more of their reality, their lives, and doing something as we do, so I love it, yeah. (Olivia, late teens, Quebec, Canada ‘interview’, Xela 2015) The nature of Spanish-language students’ involvement with local organizations – whether ‘helping’ or ‘learning from’ local people – seems to affect, and be affected by, the way they see their local role.

Practising on the community? 109 For example, during the week of Olivia’s interview, where she and I were both taking back-strap loom classes, local workers were rebuilding part of the Trama Textiles roof. This sparked plenty of flirting between the young foreign students – all women – and the Guatemalan labourers. And it resulted in a conversation with one of the weaving teachers about the phenomenon of foreigners volunteering in construction projects in Xela. Referring to that conversation, Olivia critiques unskilled volunteer work: I would feel bad to come in a country to volunteer, for example, to build a house. I have absolutely no competencies in building a house. Why should I . . . a student from Canada, why should I have the legitimacy to come to another country to show or teach or whatever something that I don’t know about it? . . . I think when the rains come the house will be terrible [laughs]. . . . The people who do this have very, very good intentions, and they’re friendly and lovely. But I feel like this is really not the best way. If you want to help, yes, but do things that you actually can do. I feel like if you go to a developing country . . . you will be perceived that, ‘Yeah, he knows what he’s talking about’, and you don’t. (Olivia, late teens, Quebec, Canada ‘interview’, Xela 2015) This does not mean, however, that Olivia decided not to volunteer. Throughout her Xela sojourn, she studied Spanish at La Cooperativa, undertook weaving lessons, and also volunteered at the local cultural centre. In the following excerpt, she reveals a good deal of critical reflection: I’m volunteering at a cultural centre [teaching a children’s choir]. . . . I was a music teacher in Quebec. Also I was like, well, if a music school [in Quebec] accepted to pay me some money to do this, probably that is because I have the competence, and I can bring something. So then it was like, ‘Okay, it’s not only because I’m a westerner’. . . . I have a choice between, ‘Okay, well the centre [in Xela] can have a chorus [choir] or not have a chorus’. . . . I teach every week, for two months. . . . We should commit a longer time so that we don’t just do something for two weeks and then leave. (Olivia, late teens, Quebec, Canada ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Olivia’s text is considered and nuanced, and she is aware of how macro power relations affect the intercultural at person-to-person levels. Crucially, she also positions herself mainly as a learner (of Spanish and weaving) and volunteers in a role in which she is skilled and qualified. Other participants were similarly reflective, with some referencing reading they had done around these issues: Before coming here, I struggled with the whole, like, white-saviour complex, and that was a big thing I was anxious about when volunteering. Because I’d read articles about why Westerners go to volunteer in developing countries

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Practising on the community? and one specific article about a group of students building a house. They found out at the end of it, by accident, that every night the locals were undoing what they’d done and redoing it properly. So I guess it’s a bit different with me because you can’t undo what I’m doing [laughs]. I’m not building a house. I’m chilling with kids. So, yeah, that worried me a little bit, the fact that I’d come here and feel as though I’m doing more harm than good. But now that I’m here and the kids seem to be enjoying having me there and the staff, I think, enjoy having me there. They’ve given me some mangoes and bananas [laughs]. So I feel like that’s a good sign. (Jill, United Kingdom, early twenties, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015)

Later, in response to reading the draft of this book, Jill adds, It is interesting to read back on [what I said] . . . I remember not only talking with you about being anxious about making a negative rather than a positive difference due to the white-saviour complex but also feeling that throughout my stay. That was until my last day at the day-care centre when my co-workers asked for my email address to keep in contact, and many of the toddlers, upon realizing I would not be back, gave me lots of cuddles and offered to give me their toys. I didn’t make a difference to Masaya or a huge difference to these children’s lives, but I had enjoyed their company, and they had enjoyed mine. I was there on hand as someone extra to play with, tie a shoelace, or help them to eat when usually there would only be one or two adults to twelve toddlers and two or three babies. Looking back, I would not volunteer in a country where I didn’t speak the language again because I feel I could’ve made much more of my time and made more meaningful connections with the locals if I had done. However, it is difficult for travellers to realize this before booking a ‘volunteer trip’, as many companies state on their website that you don’t need to speak the language to volunteer, as did the company which I volunteered through. (Jill, United Kingdom, early twenties, ‘Facebook message’, 2016) For others, the reflecting and thinking about the ethics and practices of volunteering were a collaborative effort within their peer group: Poverty porn makes me really angry. It is so dangerous to simplify an entire country with complex issues and economic and social and political things going on to just ‘poverty’. Because it contributes so much to that saviour complex, this white man’s burden idea that like, ‘Oh, we need to come and fix this entire country’s issue because obviously we just connect everyone to clean water and give them electricity. They’ll be fixed, everything will be fine’. But people oversimplify so often, and I think maybe it’s just out of a good-hearted ignorance. . . . That’s something we all . . . sat down and really started talking about it in depth every day. . . . There’s so many things that contribute to this issue. (Lisa, early twenties, Mississippi, ‘interview’, Lima 2015)

Practising on the community? 111 These quotes, then, show much more nuanced thinking about volunteering. However, Jill is a beginner-level user of Spanish, and the program for which Lisa interns places unskilled volunteers into situations of helping extremely poor communities, with no requirement that they be proficient in Spanish. Perhaps this does not matter much in practical terms: Jill works with toddlers and both projects are staffed and supervised by local staff. But although Jill and Lisa are evidently thinking much more critically than the sojourners cited earlier, a certain amount of blindness to their own positioning and usefulness remains. Jill does not ask, for instance, what the effect on the toddlers might be from repeatedly bonding with volunteers and having those bonds broken. And although Lisa (rightly, I think) rails against ‘poverty porn’, it is this very perception of the abject poverty of the communities in which she volunteers that brings her there in the first place. Some participants took awareness and criticality further. The following quotes, taken together, tessellate to evidence some participants’ nuanced awareness of power, sustainability, ethics, and cultural misreadings: The clothing is really, in that particular setting, they’re working at a domestic violence shelter with Indigenous women [in Xela, where Anna studied in 2013] . . . They’re young women with tattoos and miniskirts and seethrough shirts and lipstick on and facial piercings and all kinds of things that, in Latin culture, is not acceptable for women. Yes, they have their American rights and they have their American freedoms and they don’t understand. That young girl [in the shelter] is looking at them as a role model. . . . They don’t realize how dangerous it is for them not to understand that language is more than what is spoken. Language is also communicated by body language, it’s communicated by what we do and how we dress. This idea that, well as a woman in an enlightened society I have the right to wear what I want. Well no. . . . That’s United States culture but here in this culture, if you dress like that and you go outside at two o’clock in the morning with your girlfriends and you’re hanging out with the local guys drinking, it may turn out bad. (Anna, early forties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) I think in principle . . . service learning is great, as long as it doesn’t suggest that the person is there to transfer some sort of notion of the need for change. I think the best type of changes that come about are organically driven by local populations, not imposed on them by people coming [from outside]. So if service learning involves, you know, the typical thing here seems to be working on a farm somewhere. . . . I’ve seen advertisements in English, like, ‘you can discover the real Nicaragua by volunteering on a farm’. . . . In a cultural context there is no such thing as authentic culture. It’s, I think, a very simplistic didactic way to analyze the world. . . . It supposes that Nicas have to be a certain way or they’re not real, which is not very helpful. But on the other hand, I see the point behind it. You have to market

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Practising on the community? an idea somehow and an easy way to do it is with language that appeals to a lot of people and say, ‘Come discover the real Nicaragua and feel good by working the fields’. (Tony, mid-forties, Massachusetts, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) I talk to [students who are volunteering] and I see that they have good intentions and that even that a lot of the institutions they’re working for as well have, like, really laudable goals, and people work hard to improve other people’s lives. That’s, like, an intention that I should respect. But just because they have good intentions doesn’t mean that they . . . come without a lot of, like, weird assumptions . . . about their ability to help. . . . I think that this is generally a problem at all levels of international development, where expertise is always seen as belonging to the West. . . . And at the same time I think sometimes they maybe inadvertently do good things. . . . But there’s a kind of international development student internship abroad complex [by which I mean] most of these students who work here are relatively privileged, even in their own countries. To be able to come abroad . . . and a lot of these kids are coming from fairly elite colleges too. . . . One of the effects of that privilege is . . . the world is often just created for you and you just kind of step into it and it always works for you. . . . This internship is just another one of those things that you can step right into and do a good deed and come out with a new line to put on your CV so you get into law school. And the thread tying all of it together is money. (Kyle, late twenties, Canada, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) [My experience with shadowing the midwife (mentioned in Chapter 5)] made me question a lot of what really is the relationship going on between foreigners and locals here, especially when money is involved. I think it plays a huge part into the dynamic. . . . I was paying [the local midwife] US$150 a week to live with her and that included my room, my board, all of my bus rides with her, and to follow her around and witness all the prenatal, postpartum, birth. . . . I felt that because my beliefs differed from hers, such as she practiced early baby-mother separation, things that I don’t feel comfortable with . . . I honestly think any midwife would have told me to go. That’s not good for her practice. It’s not good for me to be questioning her. . . . I can’t imagine she wasn’t uncomfortable with that, but she didn’t show it. And I felt that, because of how much money I was paying her, there was a lot of dishonesty going on. I understand that a midwife generally, in Guatemala, charges GTQ300 a birth, which is about US$50 . . . so midwives in Guatemala are generally fairly impoverished. . . . She does several prenatal appointments, the whole birth, and eight postpartum appointments, for about US$50. So to have an opportunity to make US$150 a week is a lot for her, and it did feel to me that that was really clouding a pure relationship between us. (Amanda, late twenties, California, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

Practising on the community? 113 I was a bioethics minor at [my university] . . . so this is actually a really big struggle that I have. I don’t have an answer but I can explain my struggle. . . . So this trip, for example. I paid $1400 to be here for two months. . . . What if I had just donated $1400 to the hospital, what kind of resources could they have obtained? . . . Lots of suture kits, absolutely, and medication. [Talks about the cost of previous volunteer trips, one of which cost $1600] . . . if I had just donated that . . . think what $1600 of medication could have looked like, and it’s a lot. It’s pretty damning, to be honest, because it really makes me question why I want to go. So if I go in to try to provide medical care to these people, wouldn’t it be better if I didn’t go? I don’t have any ability that would make me special, but these medications could save lives. . . . At this point, I guess how I rationalize it in my head is that these experiences will allow me to be a better physician. When I’m more culturally competent . . . not only will I be able to treat my patients with a better foundation of maybe where they’re coming from and not just white American Western culture. (Tina, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) I read an article once that stuck with me because it said, ‘young, blonde, white girls’, and I just went, ‘shit, that’s me’ [laughs]. That was the first line. . . . It just talked about how, say, I come here and I make a relationship with some young kids and they look up to me and I give them things they need like school supplies and that kind of thing, they’re still looking up to me. Where their idol shouldn’t be me. It shouldn’t be. It’s that simple. So it easily makes them think, ‘Well I want to be like her and to be like her I can’t look the way I do or I can’t be the person I am’. That is something that is just not okay. But there is also . . . a lot of [US Americans] come down to do medical things . . . that have no idea what they’re doing . . . it just seems completely unethical. . . . I think when it comes to academic things [like helping with homework] where it’s like, ‘I actually am better at math than you are; I am going to help you’. It’s not, ‘Oh well, I’m white and I come from a rich country and they gave me a needle so I’m going to inject you’. That’s a big difference. But also, I think . . . they can look up to their peers. [At La Torre] the older kids help the younger kids, too. (Sally, mid-twenties, New Mexico, ‘interview’, Granada 2014) These participants have travelled extensively and/or have lived and worked in countries other than their own previously. Crucially, all are making serious inroads into learning Spanish. And all seek to understand local cultures and to work out how they can engage locally in ways that are equitable, responsible, and useful. In these discourses, their ‘helping’ is framed within ‘learning’, both Spanish and about local cultures, which they speak of in terms of complexity and respect rather than in reductive terms of poverty and helplessness. Together, these participants discuss many of the tensions in volunteer tourism. These include symbolic interactionism, which Anna describes in the context of a

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domestic violence shelter in Xela. There is the problem of performed authenticity (MacCannell, 2008; Stephenson Shaffer, 2004) in which out-group imagined latinidad is invoked to market tourist volunteer experiences. Tony also queries some sojourners’ desire, or assumption of the right, to try to change host cultures, an issue that Kyle raises, too. Importantly, Kyle links this to students’ identities, noting that many are highly privileged. Amanda, Tina, and Sally extend this theme, considering the impacts of differences in wealth and skill levels in negotiating intercultural relationships and Tina’s decision to volunteer rather than simply donate the cost of the trip. In particular, Sally refers to the ethics of volunteers doing ‘medical things’, and it is to this issue that I now turn.

Medical ethics and discourses of volunteering While this book does not focus specifically on medical ethics, all the study participants, including those volunteering in medical contexts, were learning Spanish, and all sought to learn about and engage with Latin American cultures. So the following stories, although perhaps seemingly tangential to the question of intercultural competence development through Spanish-language learning, illustrate how discourses of ‘helping’ and dependence may interfere with an intercultural competence that is based on equality and mutual respect. Participants at Los Voluntarios and El Proyecto were the most obviously ‘medical’ volunteer workers. However, they are at opposite ends of a spectrum in which medical volunteers may be more or less ‘hands on’, respectively, in the work they undertake. Whereas in Masaya the Los Voluntarios medical interns routinely conducted medical procedures for which they were not qualified in their home countries, such as suturing and injections, in Lima the Proyecto interns and volunteers focused on observing and non-medical tasks, such as helping children brush their teeth. In both contexts, most volunteers were ‘pre-med’ students or graduates in the USA – that is, students/graduates of the undergraduate degree that precedes medical school. No participants had finished medical school. As a result, many spoke of internships in terms of medical school applications, although, again, this is a very contested area: Nadia: Many students that have come back from trips [with another organization], they’ve delivered a baby, helped in an amputation . . . Saleem: Did surgeries, dentist stuff. . . . There are two or three NGOs that do that. They’re sort of our competition in [universities]. Nadia: As a student coming to university for the first time, you are pre-health, pre-med, something, and you want something that’s going to look good on your résumé. You’re going to see five different booths at activities fair that allows you to volunteer abroad. So as a student, you’re thinking, ‘Okay, I get to do all of these cool medical procedures, and I can write it on my résumé; it’s going to look awesome’. Little do they know . . . that med school frowns upon it, that you shouldn’t be doing anything that you can’t do in the US. . . . It just gets me riled up when

Practising on the community? 115 people come back and they’re like, ‘I performed a pap smear’. I’m like, ‘Are you authorized to do that?’ . . . It makes me so mad. Because I just feel like they’re just losing respect for the human and human worth and [they’re] just demeaning individuals. Just because you were born in a privileged place, in a privileged country, doesn’t mean you can throw up privilege on them and demean human life. But that’s what it’s like . . . I was talking to someone who was in the process of applying to medical school, and he was like, ‘You’re going on an international volunteer trip for medicine?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m really excited’. He was like, ‘Yeah, I helped deliver a baby my first day there. I literally landed and I went to the clinic and I did that. Then I performed a pap smear, too’. A man, an American male, doing that to . . . a Guatemalan woman. There’s just so many different . . . lines that are crossed and a lack of understanding between those two parties. (Nadia, early twenties, Minnesota and Saleem, early twenties, Georgia, ‘interview’, Lima 2015) Nadia and Saleem are very clear that they feel they should not be undertaking medical tasks for which they are unqualified and, as Nadia says, doing so ‘crosses so many lines’ of ethics, culture, and perhaps also gender. It is interesting that she claims medical schools ‘frown upon’ such activities, considering that she goes on to say that pre-med students may compete, on medical school application forms and among each other, to undertake ever-more serious medical procedures in developing-world crucibles of their own learning. And indeed, Tina who had undertaken several hands-on medical internships in various countries, described later in this section, was accepted into medical school in late 2015. My concern is not about medical schools, which are far from my field of expertise. More relevant to this study is how these experiences, and participants’ narratives about them, affect their understandings of local people and how these understandings go on to affect intercultural competence. The following quotes suggest the following two points. First, that giving young non-medics free rein to conduct medical procedures necessarily constructs their patients as lesser. Indeed, when I asked Danny, the Los Voluntarios director if he would be happy to check himself or his mother into a clinic attended by his interns, he replied, simply, ‘of course not’. Second, the very fact that the participants are allowed to undertake suturing and the like in Nicaragua necessarily lowers Nicaragua in their eyes. Akin to the apocryphal Groucho Marx comment, that he wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member, for the participants there appears to be a sense in which, if they are allowed to practice unqualified, then Nicaragua can justifiably be constructed as ‘sketchy’, as Candace memorably puts it: All the medics around the table [at Los Voluntarios ‘family dinner’] describe the clinic/hospital as shocking, insufficient, etc. Blood all over the floor, gloves/instruments reused between patients. Danny told me [earlier that day] about scissors so blunt that to cut suture thread you have to pull at the

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Practising on the community? stitches a bit, and the wound sometimes then reopens. In this case, they got the scissors from the clinic [and] sharpened them. [They also] bought the clinic a suture kit with proper surgical scissors. [The clinic] had been using the folding scissors you get in a sewing kit. Later [over dinner], Candace says she wants to do skydiving in the USA when she gets home. Holly tells her, ‘You can do it in San Juan del Sur [Nicaragua]’. ‘No, no way. Nica is way too sketchy’, Candace says. Nicaragua as ‘sketchy’ is based on her experiences at the clinic. . . . Having come thinking she was helping a terribly poor country, so very poor that it needed her as a medic, has she now had this confirmed? Nicaragua is so very poor, so ‘sketchy’ that it cannot do anything ‘properly’, whether skydiving or suturing. (Phiona, field notes, Masaya 2015)

This theme recurs throughout the Masaya data: The clinic was a lot different from what I thought it would be . . . maybe the standards are a bit lower. . . . I guess they have their way of doing things and . . . it doesn’t necessarily overlap with what I would learn to do [in the USA]. Because a lot of people here have diabetes and get really nasty infections. . . . I’d never seen a diabetic infection up close. It’s like, I don’t know, people having amputations and . . . sometimes they just clean out the wound, but it’s in a very gritty way. So someone would have a hole in their foot, and [the nurse would] dig their finger in and just scrape. . . . There was this woman who has a really nasty open necrosis infection on the inside of her leg. . . . We were just taking out the skin, cutting off some skin. And just, it smells like death in there. (George, early twenties, New York, ‘interview’, Masaya 2014) I would say I’ve learned a lot, but I guess more culturally than medically . . . they don’t have very many resources for the patients, for the clinic . . . it’s kind of sad. When we do shots, they don’t have an alcohol swab to disinfect it beforehand. . . . In the beginning it was hard. I think they expected me to, like, know everything. They were telling me to do stuff, and I just didn’t know what to do because I’d never done it. But now it’s, like, not that hard. It’s pretty simple things. I’ve gotten to do stitches and remove stitches and stuff like that, which is pretty cool. . . . They didn’t really show me all that well, but I figured it out. . . . The patients think I’m a doctor most of the time. (Candace, late teens, Kentucky, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) Candace’s sense that they expected her to know everything and that the patients thought she was a doctor reiterates the point made earlier that Latin American social imaginaries may project expertise onto Westerners. This assumption leads George to recount that ‘we’ were ‘cutting off some skin’ while Candace says that ‘we’ do shots and stitches. Both have extracted their own hands-on experiences from this situation, even as they distance themselves from the Nicaraguans

Practising on the community? 117 running the clinic: ‘they have their way of doing things’ and ‘they don’t have very many resources’. This is the dark side of what Kolb and Kolb (2010) call ‘playspaces’ and Ibarra and Petriglieri (2010, p.10) call ‘identity play’, defined as ‘engagement in provisional but active trial of possible future selves’. While Candace, George, and others may try out possible future identities in Nicaraguan playspaces, the experience is likely far from playful for their patients, whose lives and whose dignity is at stake. Such experiences seem to do little to help sojourners build an intercultural competence based on respect. Instead of learning from Nicaraguans, Candace and George are practising on them. But perhaps this kind of volunteer work can be useful, despite these problematic discourses. And some participants had learned relevant skills prior to coming to Nicaragua, whether through volunteer trips or otherwise: When I was in Honduras [last year], and granted I was with other American students and we were with physicians who were from Honduras but spoke English to us but then spoke Spanish to the patients. [There] I did pap smears. I ran the triage centre, and I helped with consulting and pharmacy. I feel like I have the ability. I know how to suture; I know how to do these things. . . . I also have been to Ghana twice to do a similar clinical [experience] for the same program. . . . Well, actually, suturing specifically I learned from my grandfather. He’s a retired physician, and I’ve showed interest in medicine for a long time, and so he was able to get pigs’ feet, which is like the classic learn-to-suture thing. So we had like a workshop [laughs], and it was just me and him and we sutured pigs’ feet for an afternoon. So I actually know how to suture. . . . Every day [at the clinic in Masaya] we have at least two patients come in with severed fingers or a lacerated hand. The machetes are out of control. The safety with machetes is not a thing here. (Tina, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) Tina’s account of learning to suture is touching, and her enthusiasm is infectious. But the fact remains that, in Honduras, Ghana, and now Nicaragua, she has been ‘helping’ beyond her credentials. But while medical ethicists would doubtless throw up their hands in horror at well-meaning and perhaps reasonably skilled (although medically unqualified and sometimes insufficiently Spanish-language proficient) volunteers in Latin American clinics and hospitals, the brutal reality is that local provision may well be insufficient to meet local demand. Clearly, I would rather that skilled, qualified, local doctors were stitching up machete-wounded Nicaraguans. But if this is not available, is it not better that foreign volunteers stitch their wounds than that no one does? This is the stark reality facing the ethicists. As Farmer (2005) says, There have been few attempts to ground medical ethics in political economy, history, anthropology, sociology, and the other contextualizing disciplines. (p.204)

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And also, The quandary ethics of the individual constitute most of the discussion of medical ethics. . . . The countless people whose life course is shortened by unequal access to health care are not topics of discussion. (p.174) This is not, then, a question of what would be ‘best’ for these individual patients. This is a case of their not getting to be patients if, for example, government corruption siphons money out of health care and into the hands of wealthy elites. Indeed, it may well be Tina’s suturing skills are plenty sufficient, compared to the alternatives. And there is no guarantee that a qualified doctor’s sutures are proficient in the context, as this testimony suggests: I went to a hospital with one of my dear friends who needed stitches, and . . . it was atrocious, and it was a horrible job [by local, qualified medical staff]. . . . It was not professional. . . . I sat with her the whole entire time, from the very beginning to the very end of the [procedure]. . . . I held her hand. I literally held her hand the whole entire time, and walked out with her. Judging from that, I don’t know [that doctor] certainly doesn’t represent every doctor [in Nicaragua]. . . . So I think someone can come and honestly have the intention to help. (Tanya, early thirties, Oregon, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) Tina is also somewhat critical of local doctors, focusing here on their interaction with patients and their gentleness, or lack thereof: I try to bring the same standard of patient care that I would in the States. But from what I’ve witnessed, physicians in the emergency room [here] . . . can rough up a patient. Just kind of more rough and tumble, more so than I would have anticipated. . . . So an example is when I was flushing out a patient’s eye today. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an eye injury, but it’s all you can think about, this poor guy. So it’s flushing out, flushing out, and the doctor just kept pushing his eye open really wide and wasn’t being very tender with it. . . . [Whereas, afterwards] I would do it for a while, and then I’d let [the patient] take a break. . . . So it’s little nuances like that that I would assume that a physician in the States would exhibit and maybe not as much here. . . . [Here] there’s less of this babying of the patient, if you will. One doctor here, a guy came in, and he’s one of the guards around the hospital. He came in and he had really hurt his arm. I think he strained it or whatever. And he wanted an injection for the pain. The doctor came in and he said, you know, ‘Oh stop being a little girl’. He called him a niñita [little girl] and slammed, like, just punched him right in his bad shoulder. That would never have happened in the States. . . . You’d be sued. (Tina, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015)

Practising on the community? 119 In these two quotes, Tina and Tanya construct Nicaraguan doctors in ways that are entirely unflattering. Similarly, participants described witnessing doctors sexually harassing patients and nursing staff. Again, though, my concern is less for what this says about Nicaraguan health care, which is a separate study. My focus here is how such experiences, bundled with linguacultural Spanish immersion, affect students’ development of intercultural competence. Unfortunately, if students focus their attention only on contexts of poverty and malpractice, reductive constructions of Latin American inadequacy are reified. While inadequate health care is, sadly, part of many local realities, if seen in isolation, without considering other areas in which Latin America is culturally rich, students may take away an entirely negative and unrepresentative picture. There is also an ethical issue around the effects of these experiences on the students themselves. Tina also tells a harrowing story about a fatal accident in which an elderly woman, who was not wearing a helmet, ‘fell off the back [of a motorbike and] cracked her head open’. Tina describes the woman as ‘not responsive. She was kind of gurgling but not able to respond to anyone’s prompts’. Tina says, In the States you’d go immediately to surgery. But here they didn’t have the resources to do that . . . so they just stitched up her wound that was bleeding on the back of her head and just let her lay there for a while to see what happened. The woman’s condition deteriorated, and Tina recounts what happened next: When they first tried to intubate her, they didn’t sedate her at all. . . . But she was fighting it, and there was just blood and vomit everywhere. They were short staffed. . . . So they needed me in this situation and so I was literally, like, laid across her body trying to pin her down, and her daughters were holding down her arms and legs. She fought this tube going down her throat and then was just like vomiting up all this blood and vomit. It was horrible. So then they finally decided to sedate her to give her the tube and that’s when she didn’t regain the ability to breathe again. . . . What I kept thinking was, ‘I hope that this is helping her because as we were doing this I felt like we were causing so much pain’. (Tina, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015) Tina says that, as a result, I just kept thinking if we were in the States this would be so different. That just kept running through my head that they would know what was going on. They would know what needed to be fixed . . . It was really hard. For me that was just a very clear illustration of the difference in medical practice. . . . It was incredibly traumatic . . . in a, like, terrifying way but [also] in an eye-opening way. The thing is, when I look back on it, I’m not surprised that something like that would happen. . . . People don’t wear helmets [on

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Reading this, and remembering Tina in our interview, I feel for Tina herself, who says she is ‘scarred’. Although Tina is surrounded by fellow volunteers, there are no counselling facilities for sojourners in any of the contexts of this study. Tina is 22, far from home, and mostly operating in a language in which she is not proficient. And she has experienced a traumatic event. While Tina herself appears to be coping admirably, as I argued of young, Western English teachers in China (Stanley, 2013, p.187), there is often insufficient mental health care for young people interning or studying abroad. This is no exception. These stories are very moving, sometimes shocking, and also hugely important in understanding how participants’ volunteer experiences can contribute to their development of intercultural competence, or not, through a Spanish-languagelearning sojourn in Latin America. Crucially, the participants’ discourses of the failings of local health care and other systems, as well as the apparent need for semi-skilled volunteers, feeds into a worldview in which Latin America is irreducibly ‘other’: impoverished, needy, desperate, unfair, unsafe, and in need of charity. This framing, unchallenged and reified by the experiences and aforementioned recounts encourages sojourners to perceive contextual otherness rather than similarity and to see themselves as ‘above’ local people. But sadly they are not alone. Rather uncomfortably, I now turn my analytical gaze on my own work and sense-making as a twenty-one-year-old teacher of English in Lima. While I was not explicitly a volunteer, I earned much less in Peru, on a local salary, than I might have in the United Kingdom. With twenty years’ hindsight, and a loud inward groan at my own naivety, I then apply that hindsight to my own sense-making. This is not enjoyable, but it is necessary.

Foreign teacher (1995) I quickly found two part-time jobs: one in the mornings, one in the afternoons. The first was at an army officer training school on a military base reached by interminable bus rides. There I pointlessly taught beginner English to large classes of smartly uniformed cadets. Many had been up all night doing guard duty and most fell asleep in class. They were very polite and hailed from all over Peru. Many brought me regional sweets from their mothers’ kitchens after visits home. There were lúcumas, a fruit from the Andes, a kind of dark-blue jam called mazamorra morada served with rice pudding to make the colours of the Alianza Lima team, and alfajores, a biscuit not unlike Scottish shortbread. Some students’ eyes would become suspiciously shiny when they talked about their home towns, their local foods, and their mothers. They were my age and, like me, were far from home. For almost all of them, I was the first real-life foreigner they had met, although many told me this only in hushed,

Practising on the community? 121 confidential tones. They knew, and I knew, and I think also the Peruvian army knew, that they would have no future use for English. But there was some funding flowing south from the USA to support the war on drugs in the Andes – I didn’t mention my invented-bogeyman thesis – and these were the last days of the civil war against the Sendero Luminoso. So they learned English. Later, a few of these sweet military boys with their plastic boxes of sweet desserts and photos of their mothers were sent to the border skirmish with Ecuador. Fewer returned. My other part-time job was at a language school where I mostly taught older teenagers headed for university. As I was the only gringa, it was assumed that I would teach the conversation classes, and I still don’t know if this is a compliment (only you can actually use the language) or an insult (you know nothing about grammar). Perhaps it is both. Certainly, both assertions were true. Conversation classes had no textbook and consisted of anything I wanted to teach. The end-of-course assessment was a curious mixture of each student giving a short speech and a cassette-recorded listening comprehension test. When I questioned its rationale, the academic director explained, in patronizing tones, that as conversation is speaking and listening, the test should also be speaking – giving a speech – and listening – to a recorded text. My four-week English-teaching certificate had not covered precisely why this is nonsense, but even then I felt that speechmaking and listening to recorded texts were quite different skills from those of having a conversation. And so, with the students’ approval, we did the assessments on the first day before getting on with actual conversations in English. From learning Spanish, I was discovering that this sparked both language proficiency and confidence. The students seemed happy. Importantly, also, nobody questioned my gringa authority to shake up the way things were done. (I don’t think I actually articulated this framing, even to myself, but my paradigm was clear through my actions. I thought that I knew better than they did, even though I only had very minimal teacher training.) There is something hilarious, to many, at the thought of a Scot as the model for Peruvians – or, indeed, anyone else – learning English. And, indeed, in twenty-odd years of working with people from all over the world, my accent has eased. It has mellowed, as have I. My home town is now Nativespeakersville, Nowehereland. The last time I took a taxi in Edinburgh, the driver asked me where I was from and refused to believe the true answer: ‘here’. But in 1995, I still carried Edinburgh in my voice. I thought that mine was ‘correct’ English and that Peruvian-accented English was necessarily wrong, uninformed, and in need of my correction. A minimal pairs exercise that I wrote for my conversation class exemplifies this. Along with the v/b pronunciation pair that troubles Spanish speakers – very and berry, vest and best – I included examples of the long and short ‘i’ vowels – sit and seat, live and leave. These also cause difficulty, and Peruvians will tell you that they ‘leave’ in Lima. But in searching for examples for this exercise – nowhere I taught had any resources for teachers whatsoever – I came up with an example that only works in a (very) Scottish accent: bird (‘birrrrrd’) and beard (‘beeerrrrrd’). I cringe to write this description of it now. In most English varieties, I know now, these are quite different vowel sounds. Bird is /bɜːd/, and beard is /bɪəd/ (if you’re southern English) or /bɪrd/ (if you’re standard American). My

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version was /bɪrd/ versus /bi:rd/. Although it worked for the exercise, the distinction was misleading as a model to imitate because I was implying this was ‘the’ standard. Mine was a native English and therefore, in that context, it was the standard, not least as I was the only ‘native teacher’ in the school. My bird/beard exercise focused on reproductive accuracy because, implicitly, I wanted my students to sound like me. My minority, native-speaker accent was, to me, and crucially to them, a suitable correction to any Peruvian-accented English. As non-natives, they were necessarily wrong. And I was right. There were many, many examples like that in my classes that year. I thought that as the possessive ‘s’ form had an apostrophe, that ‘it’s’ must also be possessive, and I corrected accordingly. I knew that the present perfect takes ‘have’ and taught students ‘I have an ‘A’ in my name’ as an example of the form. I tried using jokes in my teaching that relied on complex wordplay or obscure, British cultural references, and when students didn’t get the joke, I would laboriously try to explain, confusing all of us. I tried using songs, but with no real sense of what to do with songs in class, I simply handed out the words and had students sing along. I taught content that was far too easy or impossibly difficult, with no sense at all of what different proficiency levels needed or knew. And I had no real sense of why a given form was wrong, except how it ‘sounded’. I was a disaster of a teacher.

Checking my privilege I am aware, oh so aware, now, of the implicit, unexamined white-(wo)man’s burden as I lived and breathed it in Lima. Peruvians and the English-language teaching industry told me that, as a native speaker, I was unquestionably valid as a teacher of English. And I believed them. To a very large extent, I accepted the privileges that my Britishness afforded me without reflecting on the ‘helping’ I was doing. I had laughed at La Directora, but just how different was I really? Danny, the director at Los Voluntarios describes native English speakers as ‘teachers’ and as ‘the ace in the pack’ of volunteering – an unproblematic ‘help’. But I disagree. It is harmless enough for Peruvians to encounter regional accents or typical native-speaker errors. Learning English is about communicating internationally, after all, and learners should be exposed to different native and non-native varieties of English. They should strive to understand and be understood. But there is no reason for English learners to acquire a distinctive native-speaker accent. Peruvians learning English should sound like bilingual Peruvians, and if they want to sound ‘native’, the variety of English they learn is up to them. It is not up to their twenty-one-year-old ‘teacher’ who thinks she knows better. Similarly, although I was a native English speaker with four weeks of TESOL teacher training, I was unsupported in Lima and had no teaching materials at all. For although CELTA is a reasonable introduction to English teaching, it is certainly not qualification enough to develop a curriculum from scratch. I recently re-read, through splayed fingers, letters that I wrote home from that year. In them, I talk about the shocking poverty I saw – at one point, in Bolivia, I describe a rat, a dog, and a man scavenging from the same rubbish tip.

Practising on the community? 123 In writing, I soothe myself by claiming a bullshit martyr’s identity: ‘I’m doing something useful here. . . . I’m getting involved with education’. Even then, I think, I had some inkling that ‘educating’ rich kids and military cadets was not going to change the world. What I was seeing was unfair. I wanted to help. I just didn’t know how. Among other things, what I lacked in Lima was a sense of who I am in relation to cultural ‘others’ and how to manage the privilege I might be accorded. Part of that is not rushing in fixing, changing, ‘helping’, telling, and correcting. Part of that is not believing – even if those around me do – that because I am a gringa, I must know best. I know some stuff. But, as with all of us, there is so very much more that I don’t know. In Lima, though, I genuinely thought I was ‘helping’ the helpless, childlike pobrecitos who were, implicitly, all Peruvians. I hear so many of my participants engaging in this talk now. It bothers me, but I ask myself: is it necessary to come through this to reach intercultural competence? Are we all on a journey here? I hope so. I cling to this to explain my own twenty-one-year-old letters and the memories of classes that I taught, which cause me to groan as I revisit them.

8

Theorizing Doing and developing intercultural competence

In this chapter, the findings and discussions thus far coalesce to produce a theory of what intercultural competence is and how it may be learned in these contexts. It is important to say that my focus remains squarely on ‘Westerners’ learning Spanish in Latin America. While these findings and theorizing may be more widely applicable beyond these contexts, only readers can know whether they resonate for contexts with which they are familiar. Therefore, I reject the notion, widely assumed in the literature, that intercultural competence transcends all/ any culture/s, irrespective of values, contexts, power, privilege, language proficiency, knowledge of local references, and attitudes. As comes through clearly from the stories in this book, becoming interculturally competent is locally situated, ever changing, and dependent on identity, values, and affect. I start with autoethnographic vignettes in which spotlights shine on various ‘intercultural’ moments I have experienced in Latin America. I then pull these and findings from the previous chapters together to consider the nature of intercultural competence. The tensions and possibilities in the explicit teaching of culture in Spanish-language classes are then explored for what they might offer as a way to inculcate intercultural competence in students of Spanish.

Vignettes of crossing cultures (1994–2015) Lima 2015 My old friend and I drive into the hills one day with a buddy of his, and I’m aware that he is showing me off. La gringa del alma peruano, he calls me. I’m a foreigner with a Peruvian soul. We’re chatting in the car, and Wilmer, who always plays with words, sets me up some puns. Discussing yesterday’s lunch, at which we ate a Limeña dish called causa, he asks me what I liked about the meal, and I say I liked it, por causa de la causa. We giggle and bump fists, and Wilmer catches his friend’s eye in the rear-view mirror. The friend smiles. I think Wilmer is proud of me. I’m a gringa who knows Lima, and my Spanish is good enough for this kind of thing. Then, in our next riff, on how foodie Lima is becoming and how good everything is, Wilmer says that his problem is he has an apeto – the large form of what most people have, which is an apetito, a (little) appetite. We laugh, and then, still on food, Wilmer checks with me ¿te gusta el chile? His eyes twinkle. He calls it chile and not ají or picante,

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which are more common words for what he’s asking, which is whether I like spicy food. I sense another pun and reply, ‘Me gusta el chile’ [I like chile]. I pause. ‘Pero prefiero el Perú’ [But I prefer Peru]. Wilmer howls and his friend pats my shoulder. I feel accepted. Yes, I’m performing tricks. But these depend on knowing Wilmer’s language and culture and on a twenty-year-long friendship. There is no cultural difference here. There is only a shared sense of silliness, a mutual love of wordplay, and a couple of old friends having a laugh.

Mexico City, 1999 I went to pick up my laundry, and the woman said, ‘It’s not ready yet’. [And I said], ‘Oh but my sábanas [sheets], and I don’t even have clean underwear for the morning! [This is a] Mexican way to complain, confidences and ‘what will I do?’ I’m learning. She says, ‘OK, come back in an hour’. It’s 8:00 p.m. and I go back. ‘It’s not quite ready, come in’ fifteen minutes, chat, chat, chat. International sisterhood stuff. She’s doing washing, drying, and babysitting all at the same time. [She says], ‘We women can do several things at once, not like men!’ And she says, ‘Oh and when they’re ill [they say:] ‘Bring me soup. Where are you going? Don’t leave me!’ (Stanley, 2016)

León, Nicaragua 2000 After Mexico, I’m tanned, and my hair is dyed black. In a Nicaraguan marketplace, a stallholder addresses me. Not hearing, I ask in slangy Mexican Spanish ‘¿mande?’ And we chat a little. She says that my paisano, my countryman, was here earlier. ‘¿Mi paisano? Oh, really? Where am I from?’ I’m playful, not challenging. ‘De Mexico, ¿no?’ She thinks I’m Mexican. After so many years of Spanish lessons, reading novels, talking to people, and travelling in Latin America, I’ve just ‘passed’. She thinks I’m Mexican! I feel a sense of triumph, a warmth spreading from the blush in my cheeks through my whole body. I don’t correct her. She makes my day (Stanley, 2016).

Mexico City, 2000 I’m waiting on the corner outside Bosco’s house. He’s gone to Aurrerá [supermarket] to buy cat litter. On the phone he says he’ll be back soon. So I wait. A thirty-something woman in tight black clothes – once was pretty – comes up and kisses my cheek: ¿Cómo estás? [How are you?] Bien, gracias. [Good, thanks.] ¿Trabajando? [Working?] She thinks I’m a puta, a prostitute. I’m wearing mostly black and hanging around on a street corner near Revolución station, so I must be, right? I tell her, ‘No, no, un amigo vive acá’ [a friend lives here], which she clearly doesn’t believe. She walks on, turning to blow me a kiss, and when Bosco gets home, I’m embarrassed. I don’t tell him about it straight away, and when I do, he laughs and he says she was clearly high on something. He’s sweet. He’s diplomatic. But I get that I haven’t cracked it at all, this Mexican code. I’m still getting it wrong, still blundering around.

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What is intercultural competence? The previous vignettes, like the other autoethnographic pieces in this book and the stories and experiences of Kyle, Tony, Patrick, and many others, speak to strong integrative motivation. Just as I’m delighted to be included among Peruvians and dismayed to be getting it wrong in Mexico, Tony’s Spanish-language identity is heavily invested in ‘feeling that what [he says] matters’ (even if to do so he has to ‘sound like Tarzan’; Chapter 4). And Kyle, who studies Mexican history, is keen to move his communicative Spanish towards presenting academic papers. Evident throughout these motivations is the centre-stage role of Spanish. Without knowing Limeña causa or the slangy Mexican ¿mande?, those small, wonderful moments noted earlier would have been lost. Also crucial are the local references and local ways. Without knowing that sharing confidences and asking for help are face-saving, problem-solving strategies, might I have become the shouting, sweating gringa, dismissing the Mexican laundry as inefficient? Instead, the noticing and learning of Mexican ways enabled these moments of understanding. The role of personal history is also important. This is the deep caring that comes of shared experiences, and the resultant embodied knowing is rarely mentioned in accounts of intercultural competence. But it is crucial. In December 1996, by then living in Warsaw, I remember being unable to pull myself away from television footage of the Japanese embassy siege in Lima. To me this was not just another kidnapping in a ‘backwater banana republic’, as one of my colleagues put it. San Isidro, where the crisis occurred, was the suburb of El Shakespeare. I knew those streets! And, like most Limeños then, I had an instinctive fear of the MRTA revolutionaries that stormed the Japanese ambassador’s residence. Early 1990s Peruvian social imaginaries created in me a terror of walking along streets on which a single car was parked. Then, and sometimes even now, my un-thought assumption was coche bomba, car bomb. Sometimes in Sydney, I will hurry past lone-parked cars without thinking, and realize, and then laugh at myself. But in Lima then, this was instinctive, learned from Peruvians. It was part of my embodied knowing. This kind of knowledge is also part of intercultural competence. Now, of course, it is different. There are no more coche bombas in Lima. This points to another factor in intercultural competence: as well as being place and ‘culture’ dependent, things change over time. Revisiting Lima in 2015 with my mid-1990s Lima sensibilities unchanged, I was just as foreign, as if I were from a different place. The past, in terms of culture, really is another country. In the previous vignettes, I also beat myself up when I got things wrong. Did my behaviour, my demeanour, my clothes outside Bosco’s house scream, ‘puta’? Do I overstep a line when I hope to be accepted as a gringa with a Peruvian soul? I sometimes ‘pass’ as Latina, but is this kind of identity subterfuge acceptable? These kinds of questions, and many more besides, swirled around the in-depth conversations that founded the friendships with those I met throughout the three years of the study. This kind of processing – as a collective rather than an individual effort – is an important part of intercultural competence too.

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A further kind of processing is the analysis of power relations and the conscious performance of identities that seek to find balance, equality, and fairness. The warmth, the ‘sense of silliness, a mutual love of wordplay, and a couple of old friends having a laugh’ that I describe in the scene in the car with Wilmer and his friend, this is an ‘intercultural’ encounter with beautiful equality. The same process is at work in the Mexican laundry and with the Nicaraguan stallholder. In both cases, with local women, there is shared laughter and the sharing of a moment. Again, this relies on language but also on a conscious performance of identity in which commonalities are emphasized, differences diminished. This is where there is enormous tension between, on the one hand, maintaining one’s own ‘truth’ and, on the other, seeking harmony. As neither situation threatens my identity or integrity, though, it is easy in each to laugh, enjoy the moment, and move on. But what of zero-sum situations in which one’s core values are threatened? This is the situation Alice faced with her racist homestay mother and Amy faced with her homophobic teacher (both described in Chapter 6). In each case, the students wrestled with whether or not to speak up and face the consequences, or say nothing and seethe. This processing is their intercultural competence in action. Similarly, Patrick (also Chapter 6) took into account his legal training in his conversations with his host family and decided to ‘try to be respectful and polite’ and also ‘hold back at times’ because his priority was ‘to keep the peace’. Because for all that Alice abhors racism, Amy abhors homophobia, and Patrick abhors capital punishment, and for all that these are core values, none of the students were directly affected and none of their Guatemalan interlocutors had power to do anything about their (to them, distasteful) views. But this is not the case with Alice, who experienced a direct homophobic attack from her teacher and who, as a result, requested a different teacher. In this situation, it is notable that this was possible. For although the students may feel powerless in the face of these kinds of comments, they are powerful in that they are the paying customers of the schools and the host families, and money talks. This does not mean that we have to agree with everything that we encounter or that, unless directly threatened, we should put up and shut up. But there will be times when our core values and the views and/or values of the people we meet are irreconcilably different. Sometimes, this will be impossible to resolve, with no shared third space and no way forward. And in some cases, the only answer may be to walk away. But again, the processing – knowing what is at stake, the choosing of battles, the giving and saving of face, the leaving of exit strategies, the valuing of perspectives, the appreciating of paradigms, and the awareness of relative power, for instance – these are the things of intercultural competence. And then there is Spanish, which is essential to intercultural communication as Kyle and Maria and others describe. Maria’s processing of the conversation in the art gallery, for instance (Chapter 5), relies on unpacking the curator’s assumptions about gringos but also on her fluency in Spanish, in which the encounter took place. Further, as Anna says (in Chapter 7), communication goes far beyond language itself. While, as discussed in Chapter 2, language is often elided in Anglophone definitions of intercultural competence, in these situations, Spanishlanguage proficiency is a core component of intercultural competence. Indeed, if

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assuming the rest of the world will speak to us in our language is not sufficiently divisive as a gesture, the language/s of intercultural encounters to some extent also defines who holds the power. Given that there may be an attribution of high status to centre-west Anglophone identities, taking the encounter out of English and into Spanish neutralizes some locally perceived power. As participants said in Chapter 6, it puts them on the back foot. To engage with Latin Americans in Spanish is to say, ‘Your language matters to me’. From this, it is a short step to ‘your culture matters’. And then, crucially, there is the key implication, ‘You matter’. This is not about the power of the gringo gaze to validate but about the coming together of people who care about one another. The message of using Spanish, I think, goes some way towards resetting the power imbalance.

Doing intercultural competence Of course, there are still plenty of unresolved issues. How should we do the intercultural where values boundaries are crossed and there is no shared common ground – nowhere in which to simply enjoy the moment. For example, I was staying in a host family [in Guatemala] and [my host mother], over a few drinks on the Friday night, was really homophobic. Like wildly homophobic, equating people who are gay with child molesting and paedophilia and stuff. I was like, ‘Um, some of my best friends –’ but she wouldn’t hear it. So I made an excuse and went to bed early because I thought, ‘I don’t want to sit and drink with this woman, but also I don’t want to rock this boat, and I’ve got to stay here’. But I felt so guilty afterwards for not saying anything. . . . Should I be standing up for people [e.g. my close friends who are gay] who aren’t there? I was just hiding behind my straight privilege. I had talked about my novio. I felt really bad. . . . Then someone said, ‘Oh no, no. Choose your battles. You’re not going to change that woman’s mind. You can’t go in being all colonial. It’s not your place’. (Phiona, ‘field notes’ recorded in conversation with a friend, Masaya 2015) These opposing pressures, of cultural relativism and anti-imperialism on the one hand and speaking up for LGBT rights, identities, and humanity on the other are very difficult to reconcile. Appiah (2006) suggests that a middle way is to talk it out. He says that he would hope his friend would correct him when he is wrong and that this tenet should apply across and between cultures, too. However, there is much more to this than simply a friend making a suggestion, because all of these ‘intercultural’ encounters are also imbued with considerable, perhaps insurmountable, power (Farmer, 2005, pp.200–207). In these cases, much depends on the purpose of the encounter. In the host family situation, I chose not to engage with the values of my host mother because to do so would bring us to an impasse: she ‘knew’ she was right; I ‘knew’ I was right, and our positions were zero-sum, incompatible. Importantly, also, neither of us had an exit strategy; we both had to stay there, to relate again. Arguably, I

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saved face. Arguably, I kept the peace. Arguably, I chose my battles. Arguably, I was anti-colonial in not trying to impose my ‘centre’ values on the ‘periphery’. And yet, arguably, I patronized her: if I would call out a friend for this kind of view, do I reduce and stereotype my host mother for holding the same view, telling myself it is OK as she is ‘just’ ignorant, ‘just’ homophobic, ‘just’ an older Guatemalan woman? Arguably, also, who am I to speak for my gay friends, or anyone else? Arguably, I ducked the difficult conversation because it was Friday night and we were drinking and I didn’t want an argument, but this is how the bad guys win. Arguably, I chose between cultural relativism and universal human rights, and relativism won. Arguably, also, my Guatemalan host abused her power because I, as her guest, was silenced by the situation. There are many ways of framing this, many possible arguments. Actually, I still have no idea what I ‘should’ have done. In a similar situation, Kyle also kept quiet about his husband (cited in Chapter 6). Like me, Kyle is careful to perform an acceptable identity, even though doing so denies part of his identity. But is it the case that sometimes, in intercultural encounters, we need to deny our own truths in order to keep the peace? This was also the strategy of other participants cited in Chapter 6 when handling ‘delicate’ issues such as racism and atheism. This is knotty indeed, and book-length studies have been written on relativism versus universalism in ethics (e.g. Rovane, 2013). On the one hand, who are we to try to impose our own culture’s values, beliefs, and/or practices? On the other, how else are we to show solidarity with people who are oppressed by powerful discourses? This is a problem many participants wrestled with: I think there’s a balance between assuming that the people are intelligent beings and that they have just as much humanity as everybody else but also not assuming that they’re [necessarily] experts on their own culture. . . . So you go to the United States right, let’s say you’re Brazilian and you want to study American slavery because Brazil has this long history of slavery [too], and you want to compare it with your own experience or something. You go to the South and . . . you just start talking to people about race relations. You’re going to run into a lot of [white?] people who are like, ‘You know, blacks just need to shape up’ [and/or] ‘You know, Jefferson Davis wasn’t that bad a guy’. Like, ‘Slavery was our life blood’. They’ve had 150 years to get over this, and they haven’t gotten over it. . . . This is stuff that anybody who has taken, like, African American History 101 could just tear down. . . . But if you’re a Brazilian, and you’re not familiar with that discourse of American history, you’re not going to know that. You’re just going to be like, ‘Man, these people have a lot of opinions about history. Who am I to question that?’ So when I run into a Guatemalan who tells me like, ‘We just need to get past the civil war’ or ‘Inequality isn’t as bad as people say’, I go, ‘You know, you have your opinion and your experience, and your discourse is valuable and you’re entitled to it. But I have facts too. My nationality doesn’t prevent me from contending with those facts. . . . You’re entitled to your opinion, you’re entitled to your perception, but you’re not entitled to your own facts’. (Sam, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Xela 2015)

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Sam is grappling here with identity politics, cultural relativism, and an argument against the postcolonial critique of what might, in another context, be seen as cultural imperialism. Interestingly, in his allegory, he juxtaposes a Brazilian (periphery) gaze on problematic (centre) US-American perceptions, asserting the possibility that a Brazilian, armed with the facts, need not bow to local perspectives purely because they are local. Can this situation be extrapolated, as Sam suggests, so that informed US Americans can tell Guatemalans that their perspective is wrong? Or do centre/periphery identity politics render this cultural imperialism whatever the universalist rights or wrongs of the situation? Does the macro power relationship occlude the issues themselves, making the debate a proxy for who has the power to decide what is right or wrong? In all of this, for example, can international students justifiably hope to counter homophobia in Guatemala or racism in Peru? (And, therefore, what should I have said to my host mother?) Again, what is important is the process of working through this dilemma. There are no easy, ‘correct’ answers. Instead, part of intercultural competence is the desire, the awareness, and the skill to weigh the relative importance of, on the one hand, being true to our own values, and, on the other, keeping the peace and saving face all around. This is what it means to do intercultural competence, to wrestle over how we are to make the intercultural work in each context anew. But this starts with respect for the culture of the ‘other’. Whereas some people, like Candace, reduce Latin America to a ‘sketchy’, dangerous, poor, dirty, but ‘fun’ adventure playground, others are able to perceive and value and engage with the complexities of their host cultures. If intercultural competence is based on true appreciation and respect, the next section discusses how learning to see cultural richness is part of acquiring intercultural competence.

Learning to see cultural richness Ay Nicaragua, Nicaragüita La flor más linda de mi querer Abonada con la bendita, Nicaragüita, Sangre de Diriangen. Ay Nicaragua sos más dulcita Que la mielita de Tamagás Pero ahora que ya sos libre, Nicaragüita, Yo te quiero mucho más Pero ahora que ya sos libre, Nicaragüita, Yo te quiero mucho más. (Nicaraguan folk song celebrating the 1979 Sandinista revolution) [Ay Nicaragua, little Nicaragua//The most beautiful flower of my love// Bought with the blood of blessed Diriangen [Indigenous resistance fighter against the Spanish colonization of the 1520s]//Ay Nicaragua, you are

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sweeter//Than the honey of Tamagás [a town near Managua]//But now that you’re free, little Nicaragua//I love you so much more.] In July 2015, the Garden Café in Granada hosted Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy and Marcelo Boccanera, iconic Nicaraguan and Argentinian musicians, respectively. The venue was packed with a mixed crowd of mainly Nicaraguans and a few gringos. I went with Brooke, an intern at La Torre. The concert was spectacular and was, of course, entirely in Spanish. As their finale, the musicians sang Nicaraguita, and as prelude to the last line, Boccanera raised one hand and said, priest-like, blessing-like: Por la paz en Nicaragua y en el mundo, por la democracia, por la libertad, por la poesía, por el tango, por la amistad, por la ternura. [For peace in Nicaragua and the world, for democracy, for freedom, for poetry, for the tango, for friendship, and for tenderness]. (Marcelo Boccanera, Garden Café concert, 2015) In the short video I made of the song, there are tears streaming down my face. This is why I love Latin America. This. Afterwards, Brooke and I said we wished that the Spanish-language students that I had been interviewing for weeks and from whom she heard all kinds of disparaging remarks about Nicaragua all the time could have witnessed this rawness, the passion, the beauty of the song, its historical importance, the moment, and the concert in a garden under the navyblue night sky of Nicaragua (almost) libre. Instead, sojourners’ Nicaragua may comprise dirty, dusty, ‘sketchy’ experiences of volunteer work that may amount to little more than poverty tourism. Many also practice extreme sports in Nicaragua, such as volcano boarding, which many study participants had done and which Jill described as ‘awesome! You would never get to do something like that in a developed country’ (Jill, United Kingdom, early twenties, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015). Similar to snowboarding, it is practiced on the volcanic ash of Cerro Negro, an active volcano near León. In contrast to the world-class Mejía Godoy concert, which invoked an incredible pride in Nicaragua, poverty tourism and volcano boarding allow visitors to maintain and strengthen discourses in which Nicaragua is an adventurous destination that is dangerous and undeveloped. By catering to the whims of backpacker tourists seeking cheap adventure playgrounds, Nicaragua damns itself as ‘undeveloped’. But as the concert showed, Nicaragua is proud, complex, and culturally rich. It has largely freed itself, through popular revolution, from the dictatorships that have been the scourge of postcolonial Latin America. Similarly, while still fraught with catastrophic inequality (e.g. Velásquez-Nimatuj, 2011), Guatemala is at last becoming more responsive to its people: in 2015, popular corruption-scandal protests successfully toppled the president and vice president, and in January 2016, fourteen former government/military officials were arrested for their part in the massacres during the Ríos Montt presidency. Peru, too, where violence

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looms large in living memory, is now at peace. These are complex countries with a great deal of human agency now setting their own course despite a history of mano dura, heavy-handed dictatorships that were all too often US-supported. Yes, there is abject and relative poverty throughout Latin America, and not everything always works as it is supposed to. Yes, there are problems. (Though where is there a society without problems?) And it is important to remember that much of the blame can be placed at the door of historical exploitation: the Spanish conquest, subsequent European meddling, the US-Monroe doctrine, and twentieth-century US foreign policy. But these three Latin American countries are complex and proud, and their people are active agents in shaping their societies. They are not simply pobrecitos – little poor people – as some tourists’ discourses imagine them to be. Learning to recognize and appreciate at least some aspects of the ‘other’ culture allows for the relative power and positioning to change, with visitors ‘learning from’ and ‘learning to understand and appreciate’ rather than ‘helping’ (or practising on) them. As Olivia says, in Chapter 7, of her weaving lessons in Xela, ‘The balance goes where it should be’. This need not only be about traditional arts, ‘high’ culture, or taking classes aimed at visiting foreign tourists, however. For instance, one of the aspects of Latin American visual culture I have long admired is the ornate, hand-painted ‘chicha’ lettering style found on trucks and moto-taxis. Because of its transport origins, an art studio in Lima dedicated to these street styles calls itself ‘Carga Máxima’ (Maximum Load), after this inscription on trucks. While the lettering is still used for such pragmatic purposes, it can also be used for witty statements or protest slogans. Intrigued by this style, in Lima in 2015, I participated in several day-long chicha lettering workshops (see Illustration 10 for an example of the style). While clearly I wasn’t mainly thinking about intercultural competence in these classes, in which I was the only non-local and which were entirely conducted in Spanish, the content and the time I spent with accomplished Peruvian visual artists gave me a deeper appreciation of the nuances of chicha style but also its rural, working-class origins and its progress to what it means now in Lima: a trendy nod to Peruvian cultural pride (El Comercio, 2014a). It is this kind of insight into and appreciation for some aspect of the ‘other’ culture that seems to be a cornerstone of intercultural competence. Obviously, it need not be art. During the 2014 soccer World Cup, for instance, many people I met in Nicaragua and Panama, locals and outsiders, supported ‘Los Ticos’, tiny, neighbouring Costa Rica, whose team unexpectedly beat Uruguay and Italy, both previous tournament winners. Whether art or soccer, admiring and getting involved with some aspect of local life and culture on a level of learning from and being an equal among locals seems to be a more positive discourse of connection with cultural ‘others’ than approaches that reduce, perhaps by seeking to ‘help’ los pobrecitos.

Illustration 10 Carga Máxima postcard illustrating chicha lettering style.

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Teaching culture in Spanish classes How does this relate to Spanish-language teaching? As discussed in Chapter 5, the inclusion of cultural content as opposed to focusing mainly on grammatical accuracy can ameliorate students’ reductive discourses. Explicitly teaching ‘culture’ takes students’ interactions with local cultures and with local teachers beyond the transactional to an engagement that, potentially at least, allows for appreciation of local cultural richness. So, for instance (in Chapter 6), when Antonio mentions El amor en los tiempos de What’s App, he would do well to make the reference explicit and explain who Gabriel García Márquez was and why his work is an everyday reference across Latin America. Similarly, when my La Cooperativa teacher teasingly tests me on a Juan Luis Guerra song, she is implicitly saying that Latin American cultural references matter to anyone who aspires to be a user of Spanish. I agree. They do. However, as shown in Chapter 6, teaching culture is hard to do well, and what passes for culture teaching is all too often based on essentialized stereotyping and partial but ‘insider’ information, such as teachers describing the way that ‘we’ los Chapines (Guatemalans) or ‘we’ los Nica (Nicaraguans) raise our children, speak to taxi drivers, or any other detail of everyday life. While students such as Susan and Cathy enjoy this kind of ‘tour-guide’ information, such descriptions are necessarily partial, even as they purport to represent a people. They may also serve to remind students that they are ‘other’. There is also a risk that students whose purpose for learning Spanish is transactional may reject the inclusion of culture as superfluous and that the very fact of including culture may be ‘read’ as indicative of ineffective teaching: I think if you went to that [culture-teaching] approach to someone who came in with that mentality [of Spanish as transactional], it could almost work against. They’d be like, ‘You know, I went to Nicaragua. They couldn’t even give me a structured class. . . . Look at this funny little country. I went there and they wanted to talk about a poet.’ . . . It could have the [opposite] contradictory effect. (Max, early thirties, United Kingdom, School Director, ‘interview’, Granada 2015) In addition, of course, a few participants, like Ben, seem to have already decided that Nicaraguan Spanish, and by extension Nicaraguan cultures, are inferior to those of Spain anyway. While far from typical, the presence of voices like Ben’s in students’ milieu present the risk that already reductive discourses may be strengthened by well-intentioned but ineffectively executed attempts to teach culture. So, for example, when Luis talked about Nicaraguan ghost stories, Ben actually walked out of the room. Ben told me later that Nicaraguan culture ‘just doesn’t matter’ (Ben, late teens, United Kingdom, ‘interview’, Granada 2015).

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But even the most reductive and disparaging discourses can change. As Unferth (2011, p.143) says of re-reading her own eighteen-year-old-in-Nicaragua diaries: I don’t recognize the person who wrote those journals. . . . I get exasperated with her, furious. I want to reach through the murk and shake her, but then another voice steps into my mind and defends her. ‘She’s trying to figure it out.’ This other me inside me says. ‘Be patient with her.’ As I described in Chapter 7, I feel the same about my own youthful writing from Lima. Is it the case that learning about and learning to appreciate local cultures and people is a gradual process? Perhaps it is not something that can be done wholly or even mainly in class. Certainly, those participants like Kyle, Patrick, Anna, Sally, and Brooke, who have found ways of empathizing and engaging with local cultures, have spent longer with Latin Americans, speak better Spanish, are older and more experienced travellers, and have engaged to some extent with local friends outside of the Spanish-language teaching milieu. Perhaps, as Unferth (2011, p.143) urges, although we may be exasperated by the discourses of young, naïve people who blithely want to ‘help los pobrecitos’, we need to remind ourselves: ‘She’s [or he’s] trying to figure it out. . . . Be patient with her [or him].’ That said, not all young sojourners are naïve. Olivia, who was nineteen at the time of our conversations, had no Latin American background and limited travel experience, and yet she was entirely able to process critical intercultural complexities. This suggests, as discussed in the next section, that intercultural competence can be learned without the naivety of ‘practising on’, or disparaging, Latin America.

Developing intercultural competence Certainly, then, intercultural competence takes time, experience, and probably some getting it wrong at first. But I think we can speed up the process of becoming interculturally competent. The process starts with awareness raising, and the conferencia in Xela (detailed in Chapter 5) is an example of the kind of participatory process in which students and teachers can usefully engage. Awareness raising is as important for teachers as for students, and I would propose that in addition to the Curso de Gramática, discussed in Chapter 4, Spanish-language teacher training in the contexts could usefully focus on how (and how not) to ‘teach culture’ in class. One key area for focus in culture teaching would be the discourses of volunteer work. In this space, I would suggest that would-be volunteers choose instead to come to Latin America as learners (as Olivia explains in Chapter 7). By ‘learners’ I do not just mean language learners, although undertaking Spanish-language classes is an excellent first step in establishing a power relationship in which visitors learn from local people rather than hoping to practice on them. Sojourners might usefully undertake all kinds of learning in Latin America in the ultimate

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pursuit of intercultural competence: perhaps weaving or art classes, or learning about local history, culture, music, or sport. And in place of offering volunteer placements to visiting gringos, local NGOs would do well to establish themselves as teaching and/or as tourism organizations that sell courses or excursions to cross-fund locally staffed NGO projects that do genuinely useful work in response to locally perceived needs. As discussed, Trama Textiles is a fine model of this. Similarly, Quetzaltrekkers is a Xela NGO that sells trekking tours whose profits fund a school and residential centre, run by paid local staff, for street children. This said, I do understand that offering volunteer-type activities, such as El Proyecto in Lima does, can be an important source of funding for NGO projects. Nevertheless, it is vital that volunteers are guided in critically considering the contribution they can actually make and the assumptions behind their presence and that they question (as Tina does in Chapter 7) their own motives and ethics. But is there any way for gringos to help that is unproblematic? Skilled, in-demand volunteer work targeted to locally perceived needs, I think, can be useful, provided that volunteers understand that local people know better than outsiders as to what is needed. For instance, in 2013 in Xela, I met a drainage engineer who had extensive experience working on US-American golf courses. He spent several months in Xela during the dry season learning sufficient Spanish to be able to provide flood relief during the wet season to highland villages that lacked drainage. Local people themselves raised money and provided labour for the projects, which were organized by a Guatemalan priest. This, to me, is an unproblematic type of volunteering, as it fills a needs gap where expertise is unavailable (or unaffordable) locally, is locally conceived and run, and does not bring a foreign volunteer in ‘above’ local people or ‘above’ their own skills and ability just because of who they are. Trama Textiles’ English-language Etsy store is, I think, another example of useful volunteering, as is Olivia’s children’s choir. However, even this kind of ‘development’ work nevertheless occludes colonial legacies and structural inequalities that cause much of the poverty: [D]evelopment approaches . . . place the problem with the poor themselves: these people are backward and reject the technological fruits of modernity. With assistance from others, they too will, after a while, reach a higher level of development. Thus does victim blaming . . . recur in discussions of underdevelopment. (Farmer, 2005, p.155) So while there are examples of sojourners with specific skills that are hard to come by locally who respond to locally perceived needs and who work for or with (and not ‘above’) local people, it is important, still, to recognize that their work is a Band-Aid applied to a major wound and that the problems of poverty go deeper even than drainage. But unskilled tourist volunteers who pay thousands of dollars for Facebook bragging rights and the conclusion that Nicaragua is ‘sketchy’ are the most

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pressing problem. To me, this has only very limited utility in helping visitors acquire intercultural competence. It might offer some international exposure within a safely curated tourism experience. (Alternatively, as in Tina’s case, it might offer the harrowing experience of being powerless to help a motorcycle accident victim.) But in place of creating respect and understanding about Latin America, including its poverty but also its cultural richness, this kind of tourism compounds reductive stereotypes of dependence and inflates Westerners’ perceptions of their own importance and usefulness. As such, it reifies implied notions that the centre-west is actually ‘better’. Goudge (2003, p.17) writes: [T]he constant flow of development visitors from the materially better off countries . . . [may] unwittingly transmit a message that [practices] in the West are superior to those in [the South] . . . The message of superiority and corresponding inferiority, repeated endlessly in relation to all aspects of life, contributes to people believing the idea that everything in the West is superior[.] She goes on to say, [Volunteer work provides] a chance to improve one’s career prospects by cutting one’s teeth on ‘unusual’ challenges. . . . This is a continuation in a different guise of the old colonial relationship whereby colonies were regarded as essential providers of what the ‘mother country’ needed and desired. Only in those days it was slaves, sugar and cotton rather than exclusive beach holidays and character-building safari adventures. (p.35) Most volunteer work is thus problematic, bringing in unskilled Westerners ‘over’ the local culture and reinforcing notions of superiority, as Anna explains, Westerners [do] this immense fundraising to actually come to countries and participate in missions [i.e. volunteer work]. However, the resources that they spent just getting there are resources . . . [that are] essentially wasted resources. . . . Because Westerners tend to have difficulty partnering with people of colour in foreign countries and really trusting them . . . because of the idea of money and power . . . they feel like it’s a better use of their resources to actually come and do the work themselves. . . . They want to physically go and deliver something good . . . unless there’s another westerner there who is collecting the funds and disbursing them. . . . These trips, where the students go and they volunteer, is really not about ministering to those people, it’s really about ministering to these students. It’s about their self-worth, it’s about their understanding, their perspectives. But they gain so little because they come in over the culture. . . . They’re not really volunteering, they are showing – I don’t know if it’s pity or compassion – but it’s not necessarily the kind of love that I thought that I would see, as a

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Much of the volunteering in these contexts is thus highly problematic for the volunteers themselves and their own intercultural competence aside from any good or damage they might do on the ground. Similarly problematic are tourists’ discourses of ‘helping’ that surround actual practices. As Galeano (cited by Tejedor 2012, p.168) writes, La caridad es humillante porque se ejerce verticalmente y desde arriba; la solidaridad es horizontal e implica respeto mutuo. [Charity is humiliating because it is exercised vertically and from above; solidarity is horizontal and implies mutual respect]. However, it is important not to conclude from this that it is better for visitors to restrict themselves to appreciating the literature and music of the continent, staying well away from the poverty. To do so would be a very partial understanding of Latin America indeed. Similarly, it is important to note that sojourners can learn and choose to behave in ways that may actually help. Most important is a historical perspective that recognizes the role of foreign meddling in Latin America and the role of centre-west capitalism – and in particular US foreign policy – in perpetuating poverty, structural inequalities, and, until very recently, widespread state violence in the name of opposing communism. Also needed is a sense of the role of their own economic behaviours in the world order and the effects of these on people elsewhere. As Peruvian liberation theologist Gustavo Gutierrez (2004, p.44) writes, [T]he poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labour and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order. Central here are the ideas of learning from, learning about, and listening to people who are silenced by the system. Key, also, is an awareness of our own complicity in that system, which Freire (1986, p.101) calls conscientização, ‘becoming conscious’ or conscientization. Farmer (2005, p.143) calls this ‘the process of coming to understand how social structures cause injustice’.

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Against this background, well-intentioned (though perhaps résumé padding?) poverty tourism that involves unskilled, unqualified, perhaps monoglot volunteers working with children, medical patients, or survivors of domestic violence looks increasingly unthinking, exploitative, and even absurd. Comparably, Unferth (2011, p.87) recounts some of the international volunteers during the Sandinista revolution who came to juggle: Imagine. We walked across their war, juggling. We were bringing guitars, plays adapted from Gogol, elephants wearing tasseled hats. . . . The Nicaraguans wanted land, literacy, a decent doctor. We wanted a nice sing-a-long and a ballet. We weren’t a revolution. We were an armed circus. Instead of hoping to turn up and help, visitors who listen and learn seem to be those who develop intercultural competence in the contexts. Further, those who engage with places they might otherwise never have known or cared much about report that when they see news items from those places subsequently, they feel much deeper compassion. Some of the language schools, particularly in Xela, make this very easy by offering students a chance to meet and hear from of a wide range of local people. The next section is my description of one such testimonio.

The Testimonio of Don Carlos At La Cooperativa today they wheeled out a survivor of the genocide, Don Carlos. He was straight out of central casting: five teeth in total and amazing sticking out ears ragged from having had bits cut off them while he was being tortured in the 1980s, he said. He was aged at least sixty but could be up to one hundred, and he revelled in a wild and elaborate moustache without the slightest trace of hipster irony. He started to describe how the military government tortured him. My God. He described, in awful detail, exactly what the military police did, because they suspected he was a guerillero. His crime was this: he was a farmer and was part of an agricultural cooperative that owned shared tools. Therefore, he was clearly a communist. They convicted him based on the testimony of his twelve-year-old neighbour, who was tortured to give up a name, any name, just to get away. Don Carlos left school in grade two of primary and is functionally illiterate even now. Yet they said he had masterminded la resistencia in the San Marcos region and made him sign confession papers. He couldn’t read them but they kicked him until he signed with an X. Then they threw him in a hole in the ground for eight days until he ‘confessed’ that he was also part of the counterinsurgency effort. At one point, he asked for water, and one of the soldiers, standing high above him, pissed into the hole. Don Carlos blushes as he says this. He looks down. He re-lives the indignity in this bright, yellow-painted room of listening gringos. Eventually, a priest helped him escape to Mexico. By this point, he was begging the soldiers to just kill him, to set him on fire, which is what they had done to others before him in the same hole, because he was in so much pain. This is

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Don Carlos’s pain: when the priest helped him escape, on horseback, he was too sore to sit up. Instead, they asked around for blankets to cushion his injuries and then bundled and tied him onto the horse ‘como tanta carga’, like so much cargo. ‘Harrowing’, a paltry adjective, is insufficient for Don Carlos’s testimonio. Listening then, I cried. Coming home afterwards, I felt numb. Writing this now, I struggle. What on earth is ‘intercultural competence’ when this kind of thing is part of local reality? The intercultural in language education really doesn’t ‘go there’. We look at food and festivals. Safe topics. Let’s not offend anyone. Let’s not confront. Let’s pretend the world is happy, jolly, sane, fair. Let’s hope people get along with one another. That’s what we assume, what we portray, what we imagine. But how does Don Carlos’s testimonio fit into this pretty picture? I don’t know. And yet, it has to. To erase such a testimonio is an act of violence too. (Phiona, Field notes, Xela 2015)

Perceiving power This book is a call for deeper and more power-aware engagement across cultures. To this end, this chapter has defined what intercultural competence is and how it might be acquired. Important are the discourses that surround individuals who engage with people conceptualized as culturally ‘other’. If these ‘others’ are imagined as deficient, particularly if patronizingly assumed to be in need of young, unskilled ‘helpers’, then any intercultural engagement is ephemeral, illusory, a chimera. As discussed in Chapter 2 though, cultural crossing is not necessarily about people from distant lands. If ‘culture’ is an intersection of many aspects of identity, then it is possible to acquire an intercultural competence relevant to Latin America without actually setting foot in Latin America, as Maria explains, I don’t think I needed to travel internationally to do it. Some of my more difficult and nuanced navigations of interculturality have been within my own country and that’s nothing to sneeze at, you know? So I don’t think you need to travel for it but I do think . . . that theory is never sufficient, because . . . when it is truly a different culture whether it is because of ethnicity, race, class, nationality what have you . . . you can read books as much as you want and that won’t stop a borderline panic attack you might have if you end up on the other side of the world and don’t know what you’re doing. You need to exercise applying these things and in my experience you have to get burned. It’s like constant practice. . . . So yes, I don’t think you need to travel, and I definitely don’t think you need to help anyone to get it, absolutely not. (Maria, late twenties, California, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) Interestingly, Maria says, ‘You have to get burned’. I agree. While it is not the case that everyone who gets it wrong will eventually get it right, those who are unwilling to try to find ways of engaging with cultural ‘others’ will certainly fail.

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An example is Ben, whose constant references to the Spanish of Spain as ‘proper’ Spanish clearly implies that he considers Nicaraguan Spanish deficient. Ben’s disdain for Nicaragua was evident also when Brooke and Ben went to find veterinary antibiotics in the market for the La Torre cat. Brooke described Ben as ‘impossible’, alienating stallholders by telling them what they ‘should’ stock and how much more, and better, is available in England. Ben seemed to relish highlighting putative European superiority throughout many of our conversations in Nicaragua, begging the question of just why he was there at all. Ben’s account of his purpose there was framed entirely in terms of his résumé and improving his Spanish-language proficiency. So it may be that Ben resisted engaging culturally with Nicaragua as that would have put him on the back foot and at the mercy of not knowing and ‘getting it wrong’ in a culture he had constructed as ‘beneath him’. But getting it ‘wrong’, as I did in Lima, as Deb Unferth (2011) did in Nicaragua, and as Maria described earlier, seems to be a vital first step to learning, reflecting, and becoming interculturally proficient. It is not a destination so much as a journey, and as on all journeys, some discomfort is to be expected. There is the not knowing. There are the strong emotions. There is the discomfort, dissonance, and exhaustion that comes of consciously managing one’s identity performance. And there is power, which, once perceived can never again not be seen. But at the end of the journey, there is the great reward that is the possibility of genuine engagement with people from other worlds.

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This chapter is an unusual inclusion in a book of this sort. Whereas normally the focus would be squarely on the research itself – project, findings, implications – this book aims to do something more. This is a methodological contribution about issues in researching a phenomenon, such as intercultural competence, which is hard to describe and observe but that can be partially narrated and noted by/in oneself and others. In this phenomenon, lived experience is ‘bundled’ together with strong emotions and complex notions of identity, values, status, self, and power. Throughout the book, I have treated memories, embodied experiences, and narratives as data, and I have allowed the participants’ voices to tell their own stories. While these are engaging and are sometimes all too telling, I discuss the extent to which we can rely on such sources and on storytellers. I am not suggesting any of the participants lied. Perhaps some did; I cannot know. But all of us tell stories in ways that construct ‘fictions’ out of the facts (Borges, 1944; see Chapter 3). We curate and manage our accounts to emphasize or diminish certain aspects, to present ourselves in this light or that. So this chapter also asks, how do the stories, and my way of presenting them along with my own autoethnographic sections, contribute to this study?

Going back to Lima (2015) From a stamp in the long-expired passport of my early twenties, I calculate: it is precisely twenty-one years since I went to Lima. That is half my life. In July 1994, I turned twenty-one. In July 2015, I turned forty-two. And, almost to the day, twentyone years since I first arrived there, I went back to Lima. This feels tidy. It is almost magical. I’ve been thinking a lot about the city that taught me so much. Thanks to Lima, the world feels both smaller and bigger. When the circle of light expands, the perimeter of darkness around it increases too. Since Lima, I’ve grown up. Now, I have an apartment, a mortgage, a PhD, a ‘proper’ job, a circle of old friends, and an adopted city, Sydney, which feels like home. Since Peru, there have been adventures, mistakes, an engagement but not

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a marriage, many jobs, some purposeless vagabonding, some writings, improbable places, and an expensive, determined migration to blue skies at the bottom of the world. Now I mostly travel on my Australian passport. Like Charles Nicholl (1986) in The Fruit Palace, I now have my own tall tales of travel capers. I can say that I’m happy. And so returning to Lima, I am different. Lima is too. My Airbnb apartment costs twice as much per night as the roofless Casa Rosada was per week. The sprawling house where the Casa Rosada used to perch on the rooftop has been renovated, its rooftop cleared. And Lima itself is more fun than I remembered. There is more going on, new restaurants, and quirky things to do like the lettering workshops at Carga Máxima. There’s even a cat park. Like cat cafes in Japan, this is a park in which friendly cats live – an animal charity feeds them – where people can spend time with animals without the commitment of pet ownership. A spectrum of Limeña society enjoys this park: businesspeople on lunch breaks, nurses wheeling the elderly, kids running and chasing, construction workers resting under trees. The cats sit with the construction workers, with the office workers, and with me. Lima seems a tiny bit more egalitarian than I remembered. But in some ways, it is still exactly the same. In winter, the sun rarely shines through the garúa of coastal fog. It is still traffic snarled and home to millions of souls, many in the precarious pueblos jóvenes. There I once met a family living in a wooden crate that had been used to ship a Volkswagen. Their five children, aged up to seven, were all still breastfeeding. Reliable nutrition is a precious commodity there. I had wondered if such families, and such circumstances, still existed. After talking to interns at El Proyecto I find yes, yes they do. Limeños are also still judging and labelling each other mercilessly. My friends laugh when I ask, ‘are the cats in the park the only Limeños who do not care how ‘cholo’ or ‘pituco’ you are? [These are Limeño terms that mean, ‘provincial/Indigenous’ and ‘snob/racist’, respectively; Vasquez de Aguila, 2014, pp.20–22]. As I use these kinds of words again with my old friends and read El Comercio, I feel I have come home. But we can never step in the same river twice. A river constantly changes. Lima is not the same city. And as Unferth (2011, p.172) puts it, There’s the foot too, of course. If you’re looking at the river, knowing it’s different, and looking at the world around the river and knowing that’s different, you may well happen to notice the foot that’s stepping in the river as well. Maybe you didn’t even know it was the foot you came to see, not the river, until you see the foot there, wet in the water. Then you say, ‘Damn, what happened to that foot?’ Lima has been important to me for half my life, and yet it has been absent from my life for almost as long. This is why I have come back after all these years. I didn’t fully realize why I needed to come back until now. Yes, Lima has changed. But much more so, I have changed. I realize I had to come back to make sense of that. In contrast to the terrified, terrorized child I was in the Netherlands thirty years ago, I am much more confident in the unfamiliar. Indeed, much of what was then unfamiliar is my comfort zone today. Like the cats in the park, I have learned ways of

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sitting with people who are cholos and pitucos and other categories besides. Though I still have so very much to learn – we all do – what has changed is that, in the context of Lima in particular but Latin America more generally, I have acquired some intercultural competence. But there’s also a betrayal. Latin America still draws me in like nowhere else. It has a chispa, a sparkle, like nowhere else. Here ‘no termino en mi mismo’, as Pablo Neruda puts it. I am more than just myself. Here I don’t end at the boundaries of my own body. My Latina self is more confident, more willing to charlar with strangers and initiate la conversación. I like who I am here. But while this book is a love song for the continent with which I am still ridiculously in love, I wonder if I am also saying goodbye. Am I saying, ‘Thanks, but now I’m ready to be in one place and that one place is not here?’ In Latin American cities I always used to pick up the local paper and skim the job vacancies and real estate ads, idly imagining a life for myself in Guadalajara or Cuenca or Tegucigalpa. Now, I have a life in Sydney that is full and busy and fulfilling. I am no longer half-shopping for a new existence. One day, Wilmer asks me, ‘Si hubieras quedado en Lima, ¿quien serías?’ [If you had stayed in Lima, who would you be?] I laugh and suggest, a housewife? An activist? A novelist? A lost English teacher forever at the mercy of a Directora who never pays her staff on time? Your rum-drinking buddy? I make light of the question though it goes deep, frightening me slightly. In the next weeks, I come back to it often. I like who I am now. I like who Wilmer is too. But I don’t think Lima would have been as good to me as it has been for him. I’m glad I went to Lima, but I’m also glad I left. I still love Latin America more than can adequately be conveyed in text, but I realize, finally, that it is not my place. Not really. Or at least, not now.

On not being American: My positionality I’m not Latina. But I’m not US-American, either. These two facts position me in specific ways as the researcher of this study, a majority of whose student participants are US-American and all of whose teachers are Latin American. In some ways, my outsider positionality is an advantage. Not being entirely on either ‘side’ makes it easier for me to ‘make the familiar strange’ when describing the contexts. This is in part because some of the ‘familiar’ is not, in fact, all that familiar to me at all, and I find myself asking about and describing, for example, Lima’s class system or US medical school applications in more detail than I might if these were entirely known to me. My assumed lack of familiarity, particularly with US-American cultures, also allows for a neutral outsider positioning, in which participants from all over the USA confided in me in ways that they might not with a researcher who was positioned differently from them within the USA. For example, [Another US-American student] tried to bond with me over foods that we missed. . . . The stuff she brought up, she’s like, ‘I’m sorry; I just so miss . . . that glass, that big glass of milk in the morning . . . and that American cheese. I just miss, oh my God, American cheese and what it taste like’. I’m sitting there, and like, who am I? Right? I’m from Berkeley [California]. Ethnically

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I’m Greek and a little bit Latina. My whole family . . . we’re all mildly lactose intolerant. So it’s all, like, a little bit of feta here, a little bit of yoghurt here. But a huge glass of milk, to me, sounds disgusting. . . . It’s not just that it’s not our food. We can’t do it. So ethnically, that’s not happening. Culturally, it’s Berkeley, a hippy town, so that’s not happening with the American cheese thing. People make jokes about American cheese, class-wise, to be entirely honest. She’s also middle-class, but there are class assumptions based on location. . . . I mean, it’s horrible to say, but along the coasts, there’s a huge tension in the States between the coasts and the middle. It’s considered more of an in-the-middle thing to really be into American cheese, because it’s not considered very good. The people on the coast have enough interaction with different people from different backgrounds to know that. And so it’s considered low class. So there’s a class thing, there’s a location thing, there’s an ethnic thing, and she’s bonding with me as if this is a universal culture that I will understand. I’m like, ‘We have no, there’s no American culture. We don’t have this [shared] culture. It’s not real’. (Maria, late twenties, California, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) In this extract, Maria positions herself as ‘ethnic’, ‘coastal’ (as opposed to from ‘the middle’ of the USA, and specifically from ‘hippy-town’ Berkeley), middle class, and, crucially, ‘above’ the student she describes in terms of tastes and class. I doubt Maria would have framed this in quite the same way if she thought that I was from ‘the middle’ or had had insufficient ‘interaction with different people from different backgrounds’. In describing the ‘other’ here, Maria implicitly includes me and excludes the student she describes. My positioning, as ‘neutral’ in US-American terms, allows for this. Similarly, students from ‘the middle’, and from Texas, and from North Carolina, and from elsewhere also told me their stories and perceptions. With them, too, I was sufficiently neutral. They trusted me. But my outsider positionality was sometimes a distraction or a disadvantage. For although I have never lived in the USA, I have US-American friends and I pay attention to US politics and public life. I have a reasonable general knowledge, have been to some scattered US places, and, at times, I noticed myself ‘performing’ my own legitimacy to participants, as in the following example: Tina: Phiona: Tina: Phiona: Tina: Phiona: Tina: Phiona: Tina:

In September, I go home. I’m going to start [a job] in Madison. That’s Madison, Wisconsin? Mm-hm, yep. You’re from Virginia? I am. That’s quite a ways. It is. It’s quite a ways. How are you feeling about moving there? I’m really excited. It’s going to be fun. . . . I’ve lived in Virginia my whole life . . . and I’m excited to kind of have not only this adventure here in Nicaragua but then also an adventure in a different state. (Tina, early twenties, Virginia, ‘interview’, Masaya 2015)

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In this example, my knowledge of where Virginia and Wisconsin are in relation to each other, and the fact that they are culturally rather different, allows Tina to describe Madison as a far-flung ‘adventure’, similar to her Nicaraguan ‘adventure’. If the USA were taken to be culturally homogenous, which it is obviously not, Tina’s framing may have been different and, indeed, she starts the excerpt by saying she is going ‘home’. In this case, my engagement with US-American cultural heterogeneity seems to have allowed Tina to pluralize her USA experience and frame Madison as more ‘adventure’ than it is ‘home’. In this excerpt, to some extent, I feigned insiderness. But unfortunately I doubtless missed many other such ‘insider’ insights because some of the US-American students’ references were lost on me. I am, after all, a cultural outsider. But as described in Chapter 3, nationality is not the only, or necessarily the main, axis of cultural identity. ‘Old Latin America hand’ is another identity that I sometimes ‘performed’ with participants who had spent a lot of time in Latin America, too, and who sometimes, slightly, tested me. When I look back over those transcripts, I note that the participants and I are both establishing ‘Latino capital’, a legitimacy from which to speak. One example is the following interview excerpt: Kyle:

I love trying street food, so I tried . . . I think they’re called chinches [I’m not sure what Kyle means here. Chinches are bedbugs. Are they a street food too?] I don’t know. They’re kind of like almost like flattened pupusas that are grilled and then inside there is, like, cheese. Phiona: Are they good? They sound like gringas [similar to tacos]. Kyle: They’re pretty good. They’re kind of like gringas. That’s what I thought when I first saw them actually, but there is more dough. They’re bigger, and then they put like a salad and some spicy sauce on top. Phiona: Sounds good. Kyle: It’s pretty good, yeah. Phiona: Are they at the market? Kyle: Yeah, and in one of the buildings overlooking the plaza there is like, the room is open . . . there are a bunch of tables set up with people selling good, like, nice little complete meals in Styrofoam. (Kyle, late twenties, Canada, ‘interview’, Xela 2015) This may look like a banal exchange about food. But it is also a performance in which Kyle and I each establish our relevant cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Kyle introduces the local food term pupusas, and I counter it with one of my own, gringas. From this it is clear that we both have some local knowledge and we both speak Spanish. We also establish that we both eat market-stall food, which not all foreigners do. Through this exchange, we establish a shared ‘expert’ identity. If culture is not national but ‘small’, in the sense of intersecting axes of identity (see Chapter 2), then with some participants, and with a bit of conscious effort to find common ground, I am a cultural insider.

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Ficciones, paradigms, and accessible writing To do this research, as described in Chapter 3, I interviewed students, teachers, homestay hosts, school directors, and people from NGOs. But I also talked about this project with other people I met. I asked taxi drivers about it, talked to laundry and café employees, and heard a range of perspectives. And sometimes local people’s paradigms were very different from my own: Although I’m bringing a critical, power-aware, anti-colonialist paradigm to this project, I find that, whenever I discuss my research with locals – homestay hosts and teachers in the thick of working with gringos and cab drivers and my neighbours here in Guatemala who are not – all recount, to me at least, a similar take on the matter: ‘Nos ayudan’. They help us. Is this about my identity? Do they tell me the gringos are helping because I’m a gringa? Or is it that semi-skilled voluntourism actually does help the world? Really? Central America does have a history of international ‘brigadas’ who helped the Sandinista revolution, and Che Guevara – foreigner, medic, revolutionary – helped in Guatemala. So am I, perhaps, seeing power issues where none exist? Is there a supreme irony here that, in trying to decolonize Westerners’ behaviours overseas, I am imposing paradigmic imperialism, framing things in ways that just do not resonate locally? (Phiona, ‘field notes’, Xela 2015) This is tricky. If some local people perceive volunteer tourists as helpful and their presence unproblematic, who am I to question it? Is my bringing of a critical framing an example of what Cisneros Puebla (2015) calls ‘epistemic violence’, the trammelling of local ways of knowing and the imposition of centre-west ‘colonializing ways of seeing’? (ibid. p.392). Is my framing, indeed my very presence as a researcher, perhaps, an ‘instrument of domination’ that silences the ‘narratives of the oppressed’? (ibid., p.391). And yet if the roles were reversed, I doubt well-meaning but unqualified young Central Americans would be welcome to ‘help’ as doctors or teachers in the USA (even assuming they had passports, visas, and enough money to get there and work for free). There is definitely a power relation here. I see it. Guatemalan teachers at the conferencia (Chapter 5) saw it. And Latin American scholars see it (e.g. Freire, 1986; Gutierrez, 2004). So even if taxi drivers cannot (or perhaps will not, for politeness’s sake, when asked by a gringa) perceive the issues of semi-skilled volunteer tourism, my raising these issues, I hope, does not silence local people. But there is also the problem that all stories, as first-person accounts, may be ‘untrue’. Just as the cab drivers may tell me that gringos do help, any and all of the participants’ perspectives and my own are necessarily positioned by identity, paradigm, perspective, history, and power. Stories also rely on memory, which may be flawed. Stories contain perspective as well as ‘what actually happened’. Narrators create desired versions of themselves through stories in which checkable facts are melded into the telling. In contrast to Borges’s Funes el Memorioso (discussed in Chapter 3), all stories are ficciones.

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A worked example of this is provided in the polyphonic play I Am My Own Wife (Wright, 2003) in which the life of East Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is presented through first-person interviews and other sources including Stasi files and artefacts. Charlotte’s stories are decades old by the time Wright records them. Perhaps unsurprisingly there are inconsistencies: Stasi files incriminate. Charlotte remonstrates. Artefacts silently demonstrate: At this very table haben Bertolt Brecht, Merlene Dietrich, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfield, und the actress Henny Porten alle gesessen, ja? This table, he is over one hundred years old. If I could, I would take an old gramophone needle and run it along the surface of the wood. To hear the music of the voices. All that was said. (‘Charlotte’, Wright, 2003, e-book loc.360) Would ‘the truth’ come out if only the table could speak? Unfortunately, even among the voices of those who sat at the table are yet more layers of storytelling, identity management, and performance. So Wright introduces the character of a psychiatrist ‘to “settle” the matter with science’ (Wright, 2003, e-book loc.793). The psychiatrist explains Charlotte’s stories: ‘[they] aren’t lies per se; they’re self-medication’ (ibid.). And then there is the perspective of the writer himself, Wright, the playwright, who writes, That [Charlotte] navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the western world has ever known – the Nazis and the Communists – in a pair of heels. I need to believe that things like that are true. (Doug, Wright, 2003, e-book loc.800) By writing himself into the play, Wright acknowledges that authors have their own investment in story: he wants Charlotte to be a survivor, not a collaborator. This is why I also need to acknowledge my own stake in the conclusions I draw in this project. I do not want to say that tourist volunteering, Spanishlanguage learning, and tourism in Latin America are entirely bad. Although it would be possible to conclude from this book’s data that the best thing for Nicaragua, for example, would be to close the borders and get on with life on its own terms; this would be impractical: tourism contributes 9.1 per cent of Nicaraguan gross national product and provides 7.9 per cent of all Nicaraguan jobs, or almost two hundred thousand people’s livelihoods (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2014). More importantly, tourism, Spanish-language learning, and even volunteering can be good for the host countries in much deeper and more sustainable ways than providing jobs or foreign exchange earnings, if it entails enabling tourists to ‘become conscious’ (Freire, 1986) of harsh realities. This is why, in Chapter 10, I discuss ways in which stakeholders, including schools, teachers, students, and also academics working in the centre-west, can work towards more equitable intercultural relations in these spaces.

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But Doug Wright’s (2003) telling of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s story also raises the tensions of treating memories, embodied experiences, and stories, including the author’s own stories, as data. Throughout this book, I have told my story of developing some intercultural competence in/related to Latin America. Of course, this is only one version of one story, and the telling of it comes with plenty of hindsight. But in recounting my own purposes, problematic practices, positionality, and paradigm-boundedness, I have aimed to present something that would be very difficult to access otherwise: a look at how intercultural competence develops as it is happening (even when it is not happening very effectively at all). By extension, and particularly by looking at examples of where my own intercultural competence has been lacking, autoethnographic data offers an understanding of what intercultural competence is. So even though this story is partial (both in the sense of incomplete but also as the opposite of impartial), it is uniquely valuable in that it allows access to this much, and this personal, data. Telling, and critiquing, my own story is also an ethical position, similar to that of other scholars who have examined their own youthful transnational experiences (e.g. Holliday, 2005; Kelly, 2008). In fact, I am very wary of interculturalidentity scholarship that does not do this. Plenty of scholars record, isolate, and critique participants’ interim discourses. Indeed, there is no other type of discourse as we are all learning, all the time. Every day is a school day. These kinds of texts point out their problematic discourses, their misunderstandings, or even their racism, without training similarly analytic spotlights on the researcher’s own interim ways of seeing, however embarrassing. We are, all of us, figuring it out. This is part of the process of coming to intercultural competence. Yes, some of the participants can be naïve at times. Some are implicitly racist. And there will always be blind spots in my own intercultural competence too. So opening my own story up to readers’ critique is part of redressing this power imbalance between the researcher and ‘the researched’. There is also a power imbalance between writers and readers, particularly when academics write inaccessibly. As discussed in Chapter 3, this book is written to be readable so that it may be read. Unlike most academics, teachers in the Spanish schools are in a position to make changes. Teachers of Spanish in the USA and elsewhere also have a role to play in disrupting the problematic discourses described. And as students themselves are actually living these experiences, I hope that those interested in this process will get a lot out of reading this book too. For this reason, students themselves are at least part of my target readership. As Farmer (2005, pp.227–228), writing about Haiti, says, Although we conducted work and published it, research did not figure on the wish list of the people we were trying to serve. Services were what they asked for. Farmer goes on to say that ‘education is central to our task’ (p.242). Raising the critical awareness of Spanish-language students, particularly those who go to Latin America aiming to ‘help’, is why this book exists. So although I am

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not aiming to ‘serve’ the people of Haiti or anywhere else, I do want this book to make a difference. And it cannot do that if it sits in libraries bending shelves rather than bending selves. There is one way in which the book is less accessible than we might hope, however. Readers of earlier drafts who do not read Spanish have commented that ‘so much Spanish’ makes the book ‘a bit difficult to read’. To address this, I have translated most of the Spanish used along the way. However, where Spanish words are closely linked to English through cognates (e.g. ‘conferencia’ versus ‘conference’) and when the same words recur repeatedly, I have omitted some translations. This mimics the experience of being a learner in an unfamiliar linguacultural environment and is the strategy of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), who writes poetry in different varieties of Spanish and English. Readers viscerally experience, as Anzaldúa herself did growing up between languages, the difficulties and identity struggles that language barriers cause. As part of intercultural competence is becoming proficient in languages other than our own, the Spanish in this book serves as a reminder. Perhaps, though, I am wishing for too much impact from this little book. Morano (2007, p.38), writing about the Spanish-language subjunctive, says, [Grammar is] a set of guidelines not just for saying what you mean but for understanding the way you live. There is something extraordinary about thinking in a language that insists on marking the limited power of desire. The subjunctive is all about acknowledging the limits of one’s own influence. ‘Espero que tengas un buen viaje’, for example, says that ‘I hope you have a good journey’. The ‘have’ is subjunctive because I cannot control whether you do or not. Another subjunctive-like experience is sojourning in Latin America, learning Spanish, and perhaps ‘helping’ as a volunteer. Like the grammatical subjunctive, it has no power to change anything in and of itself. But it is my hope that getting students, teachers, and others to reflect on the ways in which intercultural competence is, or is not, learned in this context might change something. In Chapter 10, I provide specific suggestions as to how this might happen.

Reflections on participating in the study In the meantime, it is worth considering the effect that participating in the study had on the participants themselves, because it appears that reflection on the intercultural is part of becoming competent. To do this, I sent a draft of this book to sixteen participants who had expressed an interest in reading my work. This section considers their responses. While not all responded, the nine who did mostly began by confirming that they felt they were accurately represented, sometimes saying that the study had caused them to reflect on their experiences at a deeper level. For example, I can almost hear my Frenchie accent while reading the way you wrote my quotes, which is a good sign . . . I clearly remember saying [those things]

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exactly that way, and I think it is super to be quoted! . . . I found very interesting participating in you study. . . . You study was a moment I could take to clarify and deepen my thoughts about my relations with the people of Xela, and about how culture influenced it. . . . Reading what you wrote about it, several months later, while I am now back to university, gave an occasion to reflect another time. (Olivia, now twenty, Quebec, Canada, ‘email’, 2016) I am happy with how my comments came across – I think it very accurately reflects our conversations. I was slightly concerned that I came across as a bit ungracious in the section [in Chapter 4] where my host mother tries to help me with the word for ‘dessert’, but I’m perhaps reading too much into it. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom, ‘email’, 2016) Some went into more detail about the ways in which participating in the project had challenged their thinking or practice: Hablé con algunas de mis compañeras, les pregunté si recordaban la mesa redando? Ellas dijeron . . . que claro, pues . . . por primera vez se había expuesto lo que los estudiantes esperaban al visitar un país como este. . . . Brindaste una plataforma de manera que todos nos sintiéramos tan cómodos para compartir nuestra opinión sin ofender. Creo que esa plática dejó marca en muchos de los presentes. No sabes el total efecto, pero estoy segura que hay. Personalmente usé esa información para investigar lo que opinaban mis estudiantes y la sigo usando cuando algunos de ellos vendrán con la idea de ayudar. Siempre les pregunto ¿Qué esperan? Y a los que se van les pregunto ¿Quién recibió más beneficios sobre esto? La respuesta hasta ahora es que son los voluntarios quienes [reciben más]. [I spoke to some of my colleagues and asked them if they remembered the round table (La conferencia; Chapter 5). They said yes, of course, as it was the first time they had been exposed to what the students thought/ hoped for when visiting a country like this. You gave us a platform to share our opinions in a way that we were all comfortable without offending anyone. I think that talk left a mark on many of those present. You do not know the full effect, but I’m sure it exists. Personally I used that information to investigate what my students thought, and I still use it when some of them come with the idea of helping. I always ask, ‘What do you expect?’ And those who are leaving I ask, ‘Who received more benefits from [your volunteer experience]?’ The answer so far is [that] they, the volunteers [receive more].] (Lola, Guatemalan teacher, El Patio, ‘Facebook message’, 2016) Lola’s response suggests that Spanish-language schools would do well to organize more intercultural dialogues along the lines of the conferencia described in Chapter 5. It is also heartening to know that Lola has incorporated similar awareness-raising ‘cultural’ content into her own teaching.

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Sam’s response is also indicative of a deepening of his intercultural thinking: I remember our interviews very clearly and you quote things that I said exactly, and capture the context of my comments well. In other words, I was not surprised by any conclusions you drew from my story. . . . I think your interviews pushed me to think more about how traveling was a personal process for me, independent of history and national relationships. That I didn’t necessarily need to put my own feelings in the context of some historical relationship. The interviews made me think about how I could have an emotional experience and my identity or my privilege didn’t immediately matter because those were my feelings. . . . I mean, I wouldn’t take showers for days at a time because the water went out in Xela so often. Or the water wouldn’t get hot. And that’s just one example of the kinds of conditions people were living with in Xela. And Xela is a relatively better off part of Guatemala! How can you really complain when you know you get to go home in two months were showers have always worked. . . . [Nevertheless] The uncertainty and stress of things on a daily basis . . . drove me crazy. . . . I kept it inside but at the end of the day I lost the ability to keep my cool after two months. Selfcare is important. Something to work on for the next trip. (Sam, early twenties, Virginia, ‘Facebook message’, 2016) Sam’s response is an insightful observation. Being aware of privilege and macro power relations (such as the relative ease of daily life in the USA compared to Xela) may compound on-the-ground challenges for participants if they also feel guilty for complaining about what, for them, are very real challenges. Sam continues, I think as a student of history and Guatemalan history, I tend to deal with emotional and personal situations by putting them in some historical, social or empirical context. So when I was in Guatemala my knowledge of the history there was always a central aspect of how I reacted to my experiences. Reading the excerpts you quoted from Kyle and Alice demonstrated to me that there is a personal aspect to traveling, to living, that you can’t necessarily rationalize with empirical knowledge. (Sam, early twenties, Virginia, ‘Facebook message’, 2016) Interestingly, both Alice and Kyle also happen to be research students in history. So while Sam attributes his contextualization to his discipline, others transcend a macro framing of power relations in order to acknowledge their own feelings of powerlessness and related struggles in Guatemala. But whereas Kyle’s decision may have seemed unproblematic in his interview data, he later adds another layer of nuance to how he felt at the time: It is striking how much of what I said was aspirational, rather than directly reflecting how I felt. For example, I honestly described why I didn’t want to come out of the closet, but it was something I sometimes struggled with.

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I knew that staying in the closet compromised my ability to share and learn because I was always hiding a huge part of my life. I also struggled with feeling like I was condescending or just being cowardly in not telling people the truth. Some of the opinions I expressed were contingent on the time and place of that summer in Xela, and in the future I might give different answers. This isn’t a recommendation to change anything, but maybe just a note to remind the reader that I was always grasping for the right way to do things, but it was not always clear what the right way was. I did my best using the tools at my disposal (historical knowledge, principally). (Kyle, late twenties, Canada, ‘email’, 2016) Alice also engages with this kind of problematizing of how to engage interculturally when our own values and identities differ from those of local people. In a response email, she grapples with the ways in which power may manifest as more or less ‘threatening’. Alice also subtly critiques my ‘choosing of battles’ stance and my decision not to engage with the homophobia of my Guatemalan host mother, as discussed in Chapter 8: I am sure it is easier for me as a woman to disclose that I have a same-sex partner than for ‘Kyle’ or other same-sex attracted men to be open about their sexuality. Also, I present as (fairly) feminine so I don’t think the fact of my sexuality is as threatening to people who hew to very traditional gender norms as it could be. It might be different if I was very butch or if I was an unmarried lesbian. I am quite a ‘safe’ gay person: white, middle-class, married, monogamous. All of this is to say, I don’t think the fact that I was open about the gender of my partner was particularly brave, and I’m not even sure that I approached the question of deciding whether or not to disclose the gender of my partner as a political one, per se. It was just more effort not to, as my wife is such a big part of my life. (I love that gal!) I don’t go around thinking of myself as a lesbian as a particularly strong identity, I just think of Liz as my partner. It is more tedious to skirt around it and make up a fake boyfriend than to just say, ‘mi novia’ or whatever. Laziness rather than bravery! And I think most people can handle it. I like when you ask ‘is it patronising if I don’t call them out?’ Maybe it is. We all live in a globalized world, we are all having our views challenged all the time. To think that we can or should somehow preserve the people we are visiting from our own views and predilections is in its own way somewhat orientalizing. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom, ‘email’, 2016) Other comments similarly suggest that the process of reading as well as participating in the study caused participants to reflect on their own practices, whether these are ‘intercultural’ in a large or small sense: Yesterday, a fellow student told me about how much excited she was about going to Sénégal this summer to do some ‘medical volunteering’ in a clinic;

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Olivia’s conclusion is also implicitly critical of my own non-engagement with my Guatemalan host mother, and both Alice and Olivia’s emails have caused me to rethink what I should have done in the situation. Then, I described one of the components of ‘intercultural competence’ as the choosing of battles and justified walking away as keeping the peace. Now, I am not so sure that I was right not to call her out on her homophobia. This is one of the most ‘universal’ human rights issues; there is nothing relativist about homophobia. It is probably the case that Olivia’s Canadian classmate is an easier target for a frank exchange of views than an older, less educated, Guatemalan woman with whom I had to go on living. But I think and hope that if I were again in that situation I might now be rather more honest when engaging across intercultural difference, worrying less that my normativities would function as colonizing discourses. This change of thinking suggests also that my own intercultural competence is a work in progress, and reiterates for all of us that the intercultural is never a fixity but rather a process.

10 Suggestions and teaching activities

Where do we go from here? As discussed previously, this book is an act of activism. I hope it will influence practice in language education, international education, and the pre-departure ‘intercultural’ training programs that seem to focus mainly on reductive, stereotypical ‘knowing about’ other countries rather than awareness raising about power and strategies for intercultural engagement. I would also wish for universities who give students credit for ‘service learning’ to ask themselves some hard questions about just what learning, in intercultural terms, is going on for their students. In this chapter, I therefore propose a model of teaching intercultural competence that engages with the issues raised in this study. I propose that educators use texts of the type generated by this project to problematize and explore ‘culture’ in ways that addresses students and teachers’ own complexities, intersectional identities, values, and practices. Importantly, though, while these activities may be useful for those working with learners in or going to Latin America, they will need to be adapted for students who hope to engage with other cultural contexts. This is because, as discussed in Chapter 2, intercultural competence is rather less homogenous than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model. These activities are suggested, then, in the hope that they will provide some ideas about how critical intercultural competence might be taught, with the intention of improving the way people relate to one another across Latin America, but also in other contexts including across the backyard fence. Intercultural competence is present not just in the sojourner-local encounters but also in the encounters between and among the participants. So when Maria, in Chapter 5, is ‘embarrassed’ to have assumed the fireworks were shooting and feels ‘a bit offended’ that the gallery owner read her as ‘White, with a capital W’, she shows a much more nuanced intercultural competence than she does in Chapter 9 when she derides the ‘middle’ US-American student’s tastes and homogenizing of shared ‘American culture’. Although relating to Guatemalans may be more obviously intercultural, and perhaps also more glamorous, intercultural competence is also about finding common ground with people who may share our nationality but not our other identity markers.

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They know more than we do (about many things) Do you know how to pat tortillas? Do you know how to wash clothes in a pila? Do you know how to prevent floodwater from leaking into a house? Do you know how to survive on $2 a day? Do you know how to grow avocadoes? Do you know what lionfish look like, why they are an issue in the Caribbean, and how to safely spear one? Do you know how to teach children to read? Do you know how ‘pasar el huevo’ functions for Peruvians who are sick? Do you understand microfinance? Do you know the difference between a machete, a hoz, and a guadaña and what each is used for in different regions? And even if you are a native speaker of English, do you know how to teach the language to speakers of Spanish? All of these are basic knowledge types for people doing the kinds of jobs that tourist volunteers routinely try to do across Latin America. Very often though, local people know more than incomers, as this anecdote from Mexico suggests: André Breton, founder of the surrealist school in France and writer of Les Manifestes du surrealisme, was invited to Mexico in the 1930s to teach Mexicans about surrealism. He wanted a table so he hired a carpenter and asked him to build it. Breton drew an architectural drawing of a table, diamondshaped, foreshortened front legs, long back legs; and the carpenter took the drawing and made a table just like the one in the drawing – diamond-shaped, with short front legs and long back legs. When Breton saw the table, he said, “I have nothing to teach these people about surrealism.” And he returned to France. (Morris, 1988, pp.63–64) Intercultural competence starts with respect. Real respect. Respect for the fact that there is a lot we do not know, cannot know, and could not cope with if we, ourselves, faced the realities that local people face in much of the world. This is not a respect borne of empty platitudes. It is not about ‘tolerating’ difference. It acknowledges that most human beings struggle, perhaps in ways that we cannot imagine. This respect for cultural others acknowledges that, if there were simple solutions and if all that was needed was an ‘extra set of hands’, as Cathy put it, then local people would have solved their problems for themselves long ago.

The world is unfair In particular, we need to acknowledge the fundamental inequalities on which the macro-relations of the world’s economic and political system are based. Farmer (2005, p.8), after Galtung, calls this ‘structural violence’, defined as a broad rubric that includes a host of offences against human dignity: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontestedly

Suggestions and teaching activities 157 human rights abuses, some of them punishment for efforts to escape structural violence[.] This is to say that the system in which we are all implicated is absolutely unfair. It is unfair that Indigenous Mayan girls, for example, are more likely to die before their fifth birthday than they are to go university (Hallman et al., 2007). It is unfair that so many rural Guatemalans do not complete schooling because they are engaged in agricultural and other work (ibid.). But this is not accidental. It is part of the global system in which Guatemala provides artificially cheap raw materials destined above all for the US market. These include agricultural products such as coffee and sugar, but also cheap labour in the maquila clothing factories. So when US teenagers, for example, go to the mall to buy cheap clothes and enjoy sugary coffee, they are complicit in the exploitation of Guatemalans who are not paid for their work at anything like the rate that the US teenagers can demand for their work. As Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Segundo (cited by Brown, 1993, p.44) says, [U]nless we agree that the world should not be the way it is . . . there is no point of contact, because the world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them. It is necessary, then, as a first step, for people in the centre-west to acknowledge that, first, there is plenty that local people know or can do that outsiders know nothing about. And, second, the (human-made) world economy is structured in ways that advantage ‘us’ and disadvantage ‘them’. Without these points of beginning, there can be no real intercultural dialogue with most Latin Americans. There are hard truths to hear. And yes there are (very few) stupendously rich Guatemalans and (rather more) very poor people in the centre-west. There are also plenty of people in the economic middle all over the Americas, and while middle-income people in the USA are wealthier than middle-income people in Guatemala, for instance, each may have plenty of economic agency and choice. Farmer (2005, p.176) acknowledges this, classifying Latin American elites as part of the ‘transnational culture’ of wealth and exploitation. As discussed in Chapter 2, this is why ‘culture’ cannot easily be determined by nationality. He also notes that this culture makes it so much easier not to see the ‘pathologies of power’ that undergird the system: ‘We don’t like to be reminded of misery and squalor and failure. Our popular culture provides us with no shortage of anaesthesia’. So while there are plenty of very poor people in Central America, not everyone is poor, and assumptions that everyone is impoverished may be met with offence or derision. As an example of the latter response, one of the Guatemalan teachers told me about US-American students whose thank-you gift was a live chicken. She joked, ‘¿qué voy a hacer, dejarlo caer de mi balcón?’ [What am I going to do, drop it off my balcony?] Although she is Guatemalan, she does not necessarily want (or know how) to look after or butcher a chicken.

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Farmer acknowledges, also, that trying to rectify an ingrained system of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is ‘always a utopian enterprise’ (p.227). But he says, Many factors might limit feasibility, but that didn’t stop the authors of the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] from setting high goals. That we have failed to meet them does not imply that the next step is to lower our sights, although this has been the default logic in many instances. So even while we may be unable to change the system, we must become aware of the power relations that haunt every ‘intercultural’ interaction in Latin America. This is Freire’s (1986, p.101) conscientização, ‘becoming conscious’, which is ‘the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence’. Brown (1993, p.45) explains, This involves discovering that evil not only is present in the hearts of powerful individuals who muck things up for the rest of us but is embedded in the very structures of society, so that those structures, and not just individuals who work within them, must be changed if the world is to change. The key word here, for me, is ‘discovering’. While Brown calls for change, critical intercultural competence calls for awareness of power relations. But there is a fine line between raising awareness about structural disadvantage and reiterating reductive discourses of Latin America as, for example, ‘a burning hellscape of war and destruction and death’, as April memorably put it in Chapter 5. This is as much an awareness raising about our own discourses.

Discourses may be destructive Part of intercultural competence that can be explicitly taught, then, is a challenging of reductive discourses. Popular culture products offer scope for in-class critique and awareness raising, and Matthews (2010) provides an exemplar of how popular portrayals of Latin American ‘others’ may be critiqued. For example, in the Hollywood young-adult comedy Pitch Perfect 2 (Banks & Brooks, 2015), a Guatemalan character’s personal history includes being kidnapped, having ‘diarrhoea for seven years’, being sold for a chicken, faking her own death, and contracting malaria. Deadpan in style, this is supposed to be very funny, but it relies on facile stereotyping of Latin America. Excerpts from this film would be a useful classroom resource for exposing and challenging stereotyping. Similarly, but more subtly, the British television series Stephen Fry in Central America (2015) offers as its central ‘character’ a British television host whose gaze is the subject of the series. Although this is a much more balanced introduction to many aspects of Central American life, local perspectives are eclipsed by the seeing, knowing, doing British subject of the series. Mary Louise Pratt (1992), critiques this phenomenon in travelogues written by Europeans and North Americans in Latin America. The writers, she says, claim authority to interpret and critique: ‘What they see is what there is. No sense of limitation on their interpretive powers

Suggestions and teaching activities 159 is suggested’ (p.213). She is particularly scathing of the Paul Theroux’s travelogue The Old Patagonian Express for its lack of engagement with Latin America on its own terms and in its own language. Instead, Theroux expects but does not find familiar features of Western commodity culture including a great variety of products and options (‘differentiations, specializations, subdivisions, games of taste’; p.214). With nothing familiar for his taste to work on, he dismisses Latin America as lacking rather than as a different, just-as-complex world as his own. His impulse is to condemn, to trivialize. Instead of seeing otherness, such approaches see wrongness. This, Pratt says, ‘is the official metropolitan code of the Third World, its rhetoric of triviality, dehumanization, and rejection’ (p.215). While most students travelling to Latin America are not producing travel memoirs from their trips, many recycle this trope through their Facebook posts (Chapter 7). In these, elements include entitlement, familiarity, and the moral obligation of ‘helping’ the other/othered. In this way, students’ discourses may similarly produce Latin America, on their own terms. This is comparable to Spivak’s description of ‘worlding’ (Chapter 3). Pratt (1992, p.3) writes, [Travel writing] ‘gave European [i.e. centre] reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized [i.e. periphery]. . . . They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism.’ Sojourners’ social media and other discourses may fulfil a similar function. I hope that my own writing, thinking, being, and doing in Latin America does not reduce and dehumanize the places and its people in the ways Pratt accuses Theroux of doing. Equally, I hope that my writing does not tip the other way, of reducing Latin America into a series of easy platitudes, colourful stereotypes, attractive fantasies, and decontextualized factoids. I understand that not all Latin Americans can dance, sing, or play soccer. I do not devalue those that prefer to play chess, or who don’t ‘get’ poetry, or who yearn to be elsewhere. This, and so much more besides, is part of the richness and complexity of the Latino ‘world’. Similarly, I cite some participants who are equally enamoured of Latin America and who may risk, as I do, putting it on a pedestal. To simply adore Latin America is potentially just as reductive as to condemn it, though. This is why, even as I perform the troubadour, singing my admiration of Latin America, I am aware that there is a need to see both darkness and light. Cultural complexity is about complexity, after all. So while there is a need to strive for conscientização, ‘becoming conscious’ (Freire, 1986), we also need to acknowledge that we cannot characterize Latin America and teach students about it. Instead, we must strive for an intercultural competence that stresses awareness raising, not least about our own cultural peculiarities, positioning, and power to construct or imagine a place that is not our own. So unless sojourners make an effort to disrupt the social imaginaries of how Latin American cultures are constructed, these discourses are as likely to be reinforced as challenged by a visit to Spanishtown. This is where educators have

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an important role to play before students leave home, while they are in Latin America, and after they return. In the next section, I explore practical steps that educators might take.

How to facilitate intercultural competence development The earlier sections have discussed the importance of raising learners’ awareness both of structural violence and of local people’s agency, capacity, enterprise, and expertise. There is then a need for a fine balancing act: raising learners’ awareness of disadvantage without falling into discourses that reduce Latin America. And there is a need, when challenging the reductive discourses, to avoid going too far the other way – that is, falling into the trap of imagining Latin America as more authentic or spiritual or colourful or any other stereotype. The interview texts in this book offer a starting point for students to examine their own and others’ discourses in this space. The first step is guided noticing of how intercultural processing might be undertaken. Then learners might engage in guided discussion. Third, learners need guided practice of intercultural engagement. These steps appear in the following suggested classroom activities.

Activity 1: Guided noticing Read April’s description of a conversation she had with a Guatemalan teacher: He asked me, did I like the food in Guatemala? I said, ‘No’ and I felt terrible because I answered him honestly. I said, ‘No, I don’t’. And he just, oh, he just put his hand over his heart and looked like someone had just let the air out of his balloon. . . . Then he said, ‘Why don’t you?’ I said, ‘I can only take so many tortillas’. . . . Then I tried to recover a little bit, I said, ‘But I love the avocadoes’ . . . When I first got here I had to be very careful with my words and very respectful of every single thing and keep my negative opinions to myself. I did feel like . . . that I had to be very positive about everything. But after almost three months [here], I feel like I wanted to drop that illusion. I wanted to be more honest, so now . . . if someone asks me if I like something, I’m honest. I say no if no and I say yes if yes. . . . I felt like I was ready for the gloves to come off. I feel like I’ve been here long enough . . . to give an honest critique from my point of view, which may or may not be fair but OK. (April, Spanish-language learner, early thirties, South Carolina) Discuss the following questions: Part 1 1

Why do you think April tells her teacher that she ‘loves the avocadoes’?

Suggestions and teaching activities 161 2

3

When April explains that she ‘can only take so many tortillas’, do you think she makes the situation better or worse? What else might she have said? Do you think her teacher over-reacts? Why/why not?

Part 2 4

5

6

7

8

April says she had to ‘be very positive about everything’, although we understand that she means ‘despite what she really thought’. This is a kind of performance. Think of a time when you have ‘performed’ in this way to save someone’s feelings. Do you think this kind of performance is necessary when we engage with people from other cultures? Why/why not? April says that when she first arrived she was ‘very respectful of every single thing and keep my negative opinions to myself’. Why do you think she did that? Did she make the right decision, do you think? Why/why not? April says she ‘was ready for the gloves to come off’. This metaphor is from boxing, suggesting that she sees engaging with Guatemala as a fight. Do you agree with this metaphor? What other metaphors might you use? April says she has been in Guatemala ‘long enough’, which is ‘almost three months’. Do you think this is long enough for her to ‘drop the illusion’ and ‘to be more honest’? Why/why not? What would you have said in April’s situation? What about if the question had been about something other than food, such as a question about something you believe in strongly?

Activity 2: Guided discussion Step 1: Work in two groups. Each group should read the card for their role. Group A There has been a devastating flood in Centralia in Latin America. You have seen the footage on television, and you want to help. Think about the (real-life) skills you can offer and what you can do to help. Discuss with your group how you might help the people of Centralia. Group B There has been a devastating flood in Centralia in Latin America. You are Centralian, and you live and work in a flooded city. You know that wellmeaning people from other countries would like to help you. Discuss with your group what you need and make a list of what you would like your helpers to do for you. Step 2: Now work in A/B pairs. Negotiate what help should be given and make a plan together for what you are going to do.

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Step 3: Work in your original two groups. Compare the plan each pair devised. Were all the pairs’ plans the same? If not, how did you negotiate differences of opinion? Reflect on how power worked in the situation: did the people of Centralia decide what they needed, or did the helpers decide what was needed? Step 4: How was your negotiation process similar to, or different from, what happens when people from your country go to volunteer in Latin America? If you know anyone who has gone to Latin America to do volunteer work, think about how and whether their project was negotiated with local people and whose interests and motivations were most served by the project.

Activity 3: Guided practice Read the quotes and discuss the questions. All of my Latino friends in the United States, told me, ‘Latin America is an extremely conservative place. . . . You’re really going to want to be careful about how you demonstrate your identity [there] as a gay person’. (Sam, early twenties, USA) 1 2 3

4

Do you agree with Sam’s friends’ advice about Latin America? In your experience, is Latin America ‘extremely conservative’? Specifically, Sam was going to Guatemala. Is Guatemala particularly conservative within Latin America? Why/why not? Is there a problem with characterizing an entire continent or country as ‘conservative’, or any other label? How else might Sam’s friends offer advice? What do you understand by Sam’s friends’ advice, ‘Be careful about how you demonstrate your identity’ ? How do we demonstrate our identities? To what extent can we choose what identity we portray?

I just said, ‘I’m not, quote, flaming, unquote [laughs]. I can pretty much . . . do the straight thing’. (Sam, early twenties, USA) The big thing is I can’t tell anyone about my [male] partner. We actually just got married. . . . I actually just don’t want to open that can, like, of potentially worms, potentially delicious beans, you never know. (Kyle, late twenties, Canada) My teachers. . . . [have] asked about my romantic life, and I am [a woman] married to a woman. . . . On Monday I actually had to ask to change teachers because [my teacher’s] reaction was so awful. (Alice, mid-twenties, United Kingdom)

Suggestions and teaching activities 163 There are instances [in class] . . . where I’m like, ‘I do not believe that’. For instance, talking with a teacher who . . . was talking about [her] view on gay people. That’s something that I found really hard to deal with. . . . It’s just something where her core belief . . . was that people who are homosexual were incorrect, like there was something wrong with them, that there’s a disorder, when I know that’s not true. . . . Also, she didn’t know that I was straight. (Amy, early twenties, USA) 5

How does each person demonstrate his or her identity, both at the moment he or she is describing and then later as he or she tells the story? How are our chosen ways of presenting ourselves part of how we engage with people from other cultures?

I don’t know what my [host] family’s religious background is, but I do know the teachings of most of the churches in Guatemala where they’re the crazy evangelical religions or the Catholic Church on social issues is like, you know it doesn’t really favour my orientation. Not only that, but like it can actually be like interpreted in really weird ways around children and stuff. (Kyle, late twenties, Canada) They say in their [evangelical Christian] religion that . . . homosexuals will go to hell, I think is what I’ve gotten from [what she was saying] and that there’s something wrong with them mentally. She was explaining that she thinks there’s a spirit, like a demon-ish spirit controlling them. That just contradicts what I know. (Amy, early twenties, USA) 6

7

How does knowing or not knowing operate in each of these quotes? If you could step into these situations and tell any of the people anything, what would you tell them and why? Kyle says ‘crazy evangelical religions’. Is he doing exactly what he and others are criticizing about homophobia: stereotyping and reducing evangelical Christians? Or is this different from being homophobic? Why/why not?

I would just rather avoid all that because I don’t actually get much from telling it anyway. I’m not the kind of person who needs to go to other cultures and say, ‘Look who I am. I’m this category of person that you might never have heard of, accept me’. I think LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] people do that a lot in their activism internationally, and it sometimes causes a lot of problems. So I’m not – it’s not something I need to do. . . . But it is, it would be nice if I could talk to people about my life back home, because all of a sudden you have to sometimes lie about things, which is annoying. . . . I’ve told a lot of little lies. . . . It’s annoying, but it’s not really that bad. It’s just performing, right? (Kyle, late twenties, Canada)

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I didn’t realize everybody that you interact with on a significant level including my homestay [family], is just like, ‘My friend saw you and she thinks you’re super cute or she wants to meet you’. Or, ‘We need to get you a novia [girlfriend]’. . . . A novia, not a novio [boyfriend]. . . . At first you’re just like, ‘Yeah, I can do this. This is fine. Acting’s easy’. But then . . . it starts to really wear you down. . . . It’s like you’re a pillar of sandstone or something. It’s just a tide coming in and out, and in and out, the tide . . . it’s wearing you down. It’s making you weaker and weaker. It’s a really slow process but you can feel it. (Sam, early twenties, USA) 8

These quotes speak of how easy or difficult it is to keep quiet about something that matters to us. Think about a time when you had to ‘bite your tongue’ (either once, or over a longer period of time). How did you feel? What do you think the people in these situations, whether gay or straight, should have said/done? Why?

How (and why) to teach culture in Spanish class Another important strand of raising learners’ awareness is reuniting Spanish language with its cultural and pop-cultural richness. This means reducing teachers’ reliance on grammatical accuracy and in addition looking to stories, poems, history, politics, and other ‘cultural’ references as the content of teaching. This is not to say that beginner-level learners of Spanish should necessarily struggle to engage with the ‘high’ culture of literature (although as Activity 3 suggests, they might). But pop culture such as advertising or songs offer very useful inroads into teaching a much more nuanced ‘cultural’ awareness. Again, I suggest possible activities while noting that these apply only to the intercultural teaching of Latin American Spanish. Teachers working with other languages or in other cultural contexts will want to adapt these suggestions.

Activity 1: ‘Nicaragüita’ First, match these words and phrases to their meanings. Note that ‘vos sos’ functions like ‘tú eres’ and means ‘you are’. yo te quiero mucho más pero ahora ya sos libre abonada con la bendita sangre de . . . la flor más linda sos más dulc(e/ita) que la miel(ita) de . . .

much more the flower you are sweeter than the honey from . . . fertilized with the sacred blood of . . . but now I love you you are free (already) more beautiful

Suggestions and teaching activities 165 Now, watch the video and check that you understand the song. It is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp7-nWslZe0 (or search ‘Nicaragüita Carlos Mejía Godoy’). Next, think about the context. The video is from Managua in 1983 and is of a huge crowd singing ‘Nicaragüita’. The singer and crowd are singing to and about Nicaragua, their country, saying that they love it and that it is now free. Research the history of the Sandinistas and Nicaragua from 1979 to the mid-1980s and explain why they sing that Nicaragua is ‘free’. Finally, now that you know something about Nicaraguan history, how do you feel when you hear this song?

Activity 2: Gladys Tejeda and Peruvian social diversity Do three Google image searches as follows: •

• •

Find the Hola magazine cover that shows white Peruvian athletes (issue dated 22–28 January 2014). You might try searching ‘Peru Hola revista atletas blancos ’ (Peru, Hola magazine, white athletes). Find pictures of Gladys Tejeda, a Peruvian marathon runner. Find pictures of people in Peru (try googling ‘Peru gente’ or ‘Lima gente’). Compare the pictures and discuss the questions. 1

2

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The cover of Hola magazine features white athletes. Why do you think these athletes were chosen for the cover? Who do you think buys Hola magazine? Now do a search for demographic information for Peru. Compare this to the ‘people’ pictures you found. What percentage of Peruvians are considered white? Mestizo (mixed ancestry)? Indigenous? Do you think athletes are drawn equally from Peruvian society? In light of this, what do you think of the Hola cover? When Tejeda won the marathon in the 2015 Pan American Games, the Lima newspaper Trome ran the headline ‘Cholita de Oro’ (19 July 2015) [Cholita of gold]. Cholita is diminutive of chola. Do a search for the Peruvian meaning of ‘chola’ (or the masculine form, cholo). Note that there are different meanings in different parts of Latin America. What do you think the Trome headline was trying to say? What did it emphasize? What do you think of the choice it made? Now watch two short Spanish-language videos. The first is about Gladys Tejeda located at https://youtu.be/q9iu0ycAJBg (or search for Criando a un atleta olimpico: Gladys Tejeda, Peru). It shows her journey from her background in the Andean province of Junín to winning the marathon in the 2015 Pan American Games. The second video documents the Hola magazine cover photo

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Suggestions and teaching activities shoot with seven athletes in the 2013 Bolivarian Games; it is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIKkgD8ZlSA (or video search for Revista Hola: valen oro.) Given that both these videos are representations of Peru, what can you say about Peruvian social diversity?

Activity 3: The dinosaur Guatemalan short-story writer Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) wrote the following microrelato [micro-story]. The complete story is as follows: Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. [When she/he/it awoke, the dinosaur was still there]. Discuss these questions: Part 1: Expand the story 1

2

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The story does not say who woke up, because in Spanish it is possible to drop the pronoun of he, she, or it. In the story, we are supposed to know, or guess, who woke up. But who do you think it was? Invent a character. We know that someone (or something?) was sleeping and then woke up. But not everyone wakes up in the same way, and each awakening might be different. Think about this morning: did you wake up gradually or suddenly? Were you aware of what woke you, or did you awaken naturally? In this story, Monterroso doesn’t say how the protagonist woke up. Add this to your invented character’s story. The word ‘still’ is important: the dinosaur was still there. Did the sleeper know about the dinosaur before s/he/it went to sleep? If so, how did s/he/it go to sleep knowing a dinosaur was there? Or is it that we, the readers, know about the dinosaur and Monterroso is telling us that it was still there? If so, what was it doing before the sleeper awoke? Add these details to your story. How do you feel about dinosaurs, and how would you feel to wake up next to one? How have films such as Jurassic Park affected the way we imagine dinosaurs? Is Monterroso using a dinosaur to mean ‘a scary, unknown thing’, or do you think he specifically means a dinosaur? How does the character in the story feel to wake up and know that there is a dinosaur there? Add reactions and feelings to your story. Monterroso does not tell us what happens next. The sleeper awakes, the dinosaur is there, and then what happens? Finish your story.

Suggestions and teaching activities 167 Part 2: Monterroso’s microrelato 1

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Now share your story with your classmates. Notice how different (or how similar) your additions are to Monterroso’s seven-word story. What does this tell us about the relationship between writers and readers? Do writers usually tell us the whole story, or do we have to fill in details for ourselves? Do you think Monterroso should give us more information? Or is the microrelato supposed to be vague? What metaphorical readings of this story are there? Are human beings perhaps sleeping through things that will shock us (climate change, maybe?) Will we one day awaken to find that these things are ‘still’ there, even though we have been ignoring them? What do you think the story means? Do you read it as literal, or metaphorical? Why? Can you write a similar very short story that contains as many possibilities as this one? Try writing a one-line sentence and exchanging it with a classmate to see how many possibilities they can find in how to interpret it.

As these activities suggest, pop culture and news texts offer rich pickings for even low-proficiency Spanish-language students to gain insights both into the particular cultures with which they hope to engage but also to the ways in which the ‘cultural’ operates more generally. Crucially, such activities offer insights into cultural references that are very much part of Latin American public-domain knowledge rather than the more obscure ‘high’ culture of literature, for example. To engage with Nicaraguan revolutionary history, Guatemalan short stories, or Peruvian athletes (and social controversies) is to begin to be part of Latin American everyday consciousness. Of course, though, this requires that teachers step out from behind their shield of grammatical certainty. It is also necessary for schools to counter students’ possible resistance to overt ‘culture’ teaching. This is, I think, a question of teacher education and marketing to students that explains why this approach allows them to develop Spanish in ways that are locally respectful and relevant. Including popular and more accessible ‘high’ culture also allows teachers and students to segue into discussing deeper issues of poverty, politics, and power in Latin America’s relationship with the outside world, particularly North America. For example, Mexican rock group Maná sing ‘Pobre Juan’, a song that recounts a migrant’s journey to the USA ‘en busca de una vida digna’ [in search of a dignified life] because ‘no tenía ni un centavo’ [he didn’t even have a cent’] and his fiancée was pregnant. The song’s narrative recounts Juan’s use of a ‘coyote’ (people smuggler) who betrayed him, resulting in an anonymous end in which ‘el desierto lo enterró’ [the desert buried him]. This kind of text, like the worked ‘Nicaragüita’ example presented earlier, is suggested for its cultural richness on both levels.

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Conclusion This book has explored what it means to be interculturally competent in contexts of Spanish-language learning and its associated activities. It has employed a critical lens to focus closely on power relations at work between and among relatively long-term language travellers in various ‘Spanishtowns’ across Latin America. My finding is that to teach intercultural competence, we must raise awareness of historical power relations and cultural richness, without falling into the trap of reducing and stereotyping cultural ‘others’. In particular, this is about sojourners learning, being aware, and listening with compassion to those whose stories and experiences are very different from their own. This might mean holding the harrowing story of Don Carlos without judgement. It might mean engaging with local pop culture. It might mean acknowledging that there is an enormous amount that outsiders do not know, and need to learn, if we are to engage effectively. This includes Spanish language, but so much else besides. Where do we go from here? Clearly, I do not think Spanish-language learners should simply avoid Latin America. Indeed, they will go anyway, and Latin America relies heavily on tourism revenue. So the question is how to make the Spanishtowns better. Similarly, while some volunteer work is probably harmless or even useful (such as volunteers who respond to locally perceived needs with specific, well-developed skills that are not readily or affordably available locally), there are grave ethical problems when outsiders come in above local people and/ or are unqualified to do the jobs in which they are volunteering. As this kind of problematic volunteering is so often bundled with Spanish-language learning, I suggest that teachers engage students in discussing its ethics. But the learning starts at home, which is why I have suggested ways in which educators might start to prepare pre-departure learners so that they are able to develop intercultural competence through their experiences overseas. This means scaffolding the learners’ interrogating of their own assumptions and providing a critical conceptual toolkit with which to engage with cultural others sensitively, with passion, and as an act of activism that seeks to redress and not to reinscribe historically abusive power relations. This is idealistic, but it is only with idealism that we move forwards: ¿Para qué sirve la utopía? . . . La utopía está en el horizonte. . . . Yo sé muy bien que nunca la alcanzaré. Que si yo camino diez pasos a ella, se alejará diez pasos. Cuanto más la busque, menos la encontraré, porque ella se va alejando a la medida que yo me acerco. . . . ¿[Entonces] para qué sirve [la utopía]? Pues, la utopía sirve para eso, para caminar. [What is utopia for? Utopia is on the horizon. I know very well that I will never reach it, and that when I draw ten steps nearer, it retreats ten steps back. No matter how much I try to get there, I can never reach it, because it retreats by however much closer I get. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It serves to move us forwards.] (Galeano, 2013)

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Index

academic writing 37–8, 147; accessibility of 38, 147–9; researcher positionality within 46, 76, 144–5 aid work see volunteer work America versus USA 12, 33 Anzaldúa, Gloria 150 Armenian genocide (1915) 28 art city in China see Zhejiang autoethnography 7–8, 44–6; definition 44–6; evocative versus analytic 7, 38, 45 backpackers see sojourners Bayly, Jaime 49, 104–5 beginners (Spanish language learners) 4, 56–63, 68, 76, 99, 102, 111, 164 Boccanera, Marcelo 131 Borges, Jorge Luis 38, 142, 147 bubble see gringo bubble Cambridge CELTA (teacher education program) 19, 69, 122 car bombs 126 Carga Máxima 132–3, 143 cat park, Lima, Peru 143 centre/periphery 5, 16–17, 28, 128–30, 159 charity 20, 101, 112, 120, 136–9 chicha lettering 132–3 children’s choir 109, 136 cholo/a 86, 143–4, 165 classism 15, 67, 85–6, 88, 90–2, 132, 144–5, 157 communicative competence 20–1, 52, 59, 68 communicative language teaching 52–3, 58–63, 68–9 conferencia sobre la interculturalidad 42, 44, 79–84, 95, 135, 147, 151

conscientização 138, 158–9 core values 28–9, 35, 90, 92–5, 124, 127–30, 153, 155 criticality 30–2, 46, 147, 149, 168 cultural imperialism 27, 93, 101, 128, 130, 147 cultural relativism 92–3, 128–30, 154 culture 1–3, 21–5, 28–35, 44, 65–8, 87–92; and agency 33–5; change over time 126; as place/nation 18, 44; superficial approaches to teaching 23, 25, 93, 140 curriculum vitae (CV) see resumé Darío, Rubén 37 deficit discourses 66, 91 Derrida, Jacques 37 directness in communication 91 discourses of ‘helping’ see volunteer work Doble Check (short film) 88–9 El Dinosaurio (short story) 166–7 embodied knowing 1–3, 8, 10–11, 126, 139–40 epistemic violence see paradigmic imperialism ethnography 7, 44–6 Etsy (online marketplace) 108, 136 expectations compared to realities 71–6, 83–4 Facebook see social media Farmer, Paul 117–18, 136, 149–50, 156–8 Freire, Paolo 138, 147–8, 158–9 Galeano, Eduardo 13, 16, 36, 138, 168 García Márquez, Gabriel 37, 89, 134

180

Index

gay pride parade, Xela 2015 92 grammar (as focus of Spanish lessons) 47–9, 54–9, 62, 68–9 gringo as term 12 gringo bubble 59, 81–2, 102–3 Grounded Theory 46–7 gúachiman 48 Guatemalan history and politics 12–17 Guerra, Juan Luis 88, 134 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 147 guilt 94–5, 152 Gutierrez, Gustavo 138, 147 hauntology 37 helping, discourses of see volunteer work high and low context cultures (Hall) 27 ‘Hispanics’ in US census 33, 42 hoes, short versus long-handled 106 Hofstede, Geert 27 Hola magazine 165–6 Holliday, Adrian 23, 27–32, 63, 149 home stay 53, 55, 59–60, 81–4, 90–5, 128–30; as Spanish language development 70, 103 homogenisation of putative ‘cultural’ traits 25–7, 32, 158–60 homophobia 92–3, 100–1, 127–30, 153–4, 162–4 host families see home stay Humanitarians of Tinder 99–100 human rights 93, 129, 154, 156–8 I am my own wife (Doug Wright’s play) 148–9 identity play see practising on local people ‘immersion’ language learning 4–6, 22, 39, 51–5, 59, 100, 119 Indigenous people 1–5, 12–15, 27, 69, 108, 111, 143, 157, 165–6; genocide of Maya Ixil (Guatemala) 14, 139–40; out-group discourses of Indigenous cultures 74–5; racism towards 14, 91, 143, 165–6 Instituto de Inglés ‘William Shakespeare’ 85–6, 126 interculturality 26–7 interpretive research 46–7 intersectionality 31, 94 Japanese embassy siege (Lima, Peru) 126 Juayúa, El Salvador 71–2 juggling 139

languaculture see linguaculture language choice (and loss of face) 64, 67–8, 102–3 language teacher qualifications 55, 68–70 Latinidad 19, 33, 78, 114; putative heterogeneity (translatinidad) 19; ‘salsa level’ (Díaz) 23; see also Hispanics Latino capital 146 learner identity: and affect 56–9; negotiation of 63–8 liberation theology 138 linguaculture 21–2 linguistic relativity 21–2 Maná (Mexican rock group) 167 Marx, Groucho 115 medical ethics see volunteer work medical school applications 6, 99, 113–20, 144, 153–4 Mejía Godoy, Luis Enrique 131, 164–5 mental health of sojourners 120 Monterroso, Augusto 166–7 Morano, Michelle 11, 36, 49, 150 native speaker teachers 55, 63–70, 121–2, 156 neoliberalism 24 Nicaraguan history and politics 12–17 Nicaragüita (folk song) 130–1, 164–5 Nicholl, Charles 19–20, 143 orientalism 28 Pamuk, Ohran 28 paradigmic imperialism 147 passing 8, 76, 124–6 passion project 8 Paz, Octavio 37, 88 peninsular Spanish see Spanish from Spain performance of identity 29, 44, 126–7, 141, 146–9, 161 performed authenticity 114 Peruvian history and politics 12–17 Pitch Perfect 2 (film) 158 playspaces see practising on local people practising on local people 117, 132 privilege 3, 30, 64, 94–5, 101, 112–15, 122–3, 152–4 pueblos jóvenes (Lima, Peru) 15, 40, 74, 143

Index Quetzaltrekkers (Xela, Guatemala) 136 realities compared to expectations see expectations compared to realities religion 89–91, 163–4 researcher identity 9, 144–6 resumé 20, 99, 114, 137, 141 Sandinista Revolution (Nicaragua) 15–16, 130, 139, 147, 164–5 Segundo, Juan 157 Sendero Luminoso see Shining Path service learning see volunteer work Sex education 100–1 sharmandegi, ‘being ashamed’ (Persian/ Farsi term) 21 Shining Path 14–15, 121, 126 ‘sketchy’ 115–16, 130 small cultures 31–4, 44 social imaginaries 23, 29, 31–3, 71–9, 159–60 social media representations of sojourners’ experiences on 99–100 social status of Spanish (in the USA) 6–7, 33, 67, 102–3 sojourners 4, 6, 7, 17, 44, 111, 114, 117, 120, 131, 135, 136, 138, 159, 168 solipsism 36, 46 Spanish from Spain 66, 76 Spanish language schools 4–6, 39–41, 43–4, 51–63, 68–70; business models 40; face validity of 54–5 Stephen Fry in Central America 158 stereotypes/stereotyping 25–7, 32, 158–60; about Latin Americans 23, 33, 48, 67, 71–6, 114, 129, 137; about US Americans 2, 48, 76–9, 100–1, 116 storytelling 36–8, 147–9 straight privilege 128 structural violence 156–8 study-abroad programs 6, 17, 29, 41 subjunctive mood (Spanish) 49, 150 surrealism in Mexico 156 Symbolic Interactionism 78, 92, 113–14

181

Tejeda, Gladys 87–8 Testimonio 46, 67, 81, 139–40 thick description 44 third space 28 tourism revenue, Nicaragua 148 tourists see sojourners Trama Textiles (Xela, Guatemala) 108–9, 136 travelogues 19, 27, 38, 159 travel writing see travelogues Tzotzil (Mayan language) 21 Unferth, Deb 77–8, 135, 139, 141, 143 US foreign policy in Latin America, legacy of 12–17, 131–9; my thesis on 19; sojourners’ awareness of 94, 95, 110, 129–30, 132 volcano boarding 131 volunteer work 79–84, 99, 106–23; agricultural 40, 98, 112; conservation projects 96–9; construction projects 96, 109–10; costs to participants 80, 99, 113–14; discourses of ‘helping’ 6, 20, 77–8, 80, 95–102; domestic violence shelter (Xela) 111; earning college credit for 5–6, 96, 155; educational/childcare contexts 40, 51, 66, 102, 109–10; efficacy of 109–20, 135–9; medical 40, 80, 114–19; micro-lending 101; midwifery 75, 112; perceptions of ‘gringos’ as experts 2, 80, 116; and Spanishlanguage proficiency 56, 96–7, 100–3, 111; sustainability 107, 136–9 voluntourism see volunteer work weaving (Xela) 108–9, 132, 136 white man’s burden 6, 94, 109–13, 122–3 worlding (Spivak) 28, 159 Xela (Quetzaltenango), Guatemala 1–4, 39–40, 51–2 zero-sum 28, 127–8 Zhejiang, China (art city) 24–5