Aurora, Colorado — When Alisson Ramirez began seventh grade at her first American school and was faced with classes taught entirely in English, she felt rejection and months of loss.
“I was anxious because I didn’t know how to answer when people asked me questions,” said a teenage boy from Venezuela. “And I’m embarrassed to answer in Spanish.”
But it wasn’t what she expected. On her first day at Colorado’s Aurora Public Schools last August, many of her teachers translated the lesson’s relevant vocabulary into Spanish and handed out instructions written in Spanish. Some teachers even asked questions like “Terminado?” Or “Preguntas?” — Is it over? Do you have any questions? One person promised to study Spanish more to better support Alisson.
“It made me feel good,” says 13-year-old Alisson.
Outside the classroom, the story is different. While the school system is trying to accommodate more than 3,000 new students, mostly from Venezuela and Colombia, the city government has taken the opposite approach. The city council has tried to dissuade Venezuelan immigrants from moving to Aurora by pledging not to spend money helping newcomers. Authorities plan to investigate a nonprofit organization that helped immigrants settle in suburban Denver.
When Aurora’s mayor spread baseless claims that Venezuelan gangs had taken over an apartment complex there, former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump expanded on the claims, calling Aurora a “war zone” on the campaign trail. Immigrants are “poisoning” schools in Aurora and elsewhere with disease, he said. “They don’t even speak English.”
Trump has promised that if he is elected, Aurora, with a population of 400,000, will be one of the first places to begin an immigrant deportation program.
This is life as a new immigrant in America in 2024, home of the ‘American Dream’ and conflicting ideas about who can achieve it. Immigrants arriving in this polarized country are dismayed by divisions.
Many people have come here in search of a better life for their families. Now they question whether this is really a good place to raise children.
Of course, it wasn’t always clear that Alisson’s family lived in a separate city called Aurora. Its own government and policies differ from nearby Denver and other suburbs. As her mother, Maria Angel Torres, 43, traveled between Aurora and Denver looking for work or running errands, one thing seemed clear. Some organizations and churches are willing to help, while others are deeply afraid of her and her family.
The fear first became apparent last spring during a regular trip to the grocery store. Torres was waiting in line carrying bottles of milk and other items when she got too close to the young woman in front of her. The teen, who spoke Spanish with an American accent, told Torres to keep his distance.
“It was humiliating.” Torres said. “I don’t look like a threat. But people here act like they are scared.”
And when Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman and Trump started talking about Venezuelan gangs taking over apartments and the entire city of Aurora, Torres didn’t get it. She didn’t believe gangs had “taken over,” but she worried that bad press about Venezuelans would affect her and her family.
Keeping dangerous people out is important to Torres. The reason her family left Venezuela was to escape lawlessness and violence. They didn’t want it to follow them here.
In addition to Alisson, Torres has an eldest daughter, Gabriela Ramirez, 27. Ramirez’s partner, Ronexi Bocaranda, 37, owned a food truck that sold hot dogs and hamburgers. Bocaranda said Venezuelan government officials extorted bribes known as ‘bacuna’, or vaccines, from him. Because paying a bribe protects you from harassment. He paid them $500, about half a week’s income, to keep operating.
The next week, when Bocaranda refused to pay, government workers stabbed him in the bicep. There is a scar about an inch long on my left arm. The men threatened to kill Ramirez and her young son, who were in the food truck that day. Bocaranda sold the business, and the entire family, including Torres and Alisson, fled to Colombia.
A little over two years later, the family headed north on foot through the Darién Gap. In Mexico, he crossed the Juárez border and turned himself in to the U.S. Border Patrol. They will all have deportation hearings in 2025, where they will have the opportunity to argue their asylum claims based on threats against Bocaranda, Ramirez and her son. Then, after hearing about the Denver area from a family member who helped me move to the U.S., I decided to settle in Aurora.
Torres and her daughter tried to send their children to school soon after arriving in Aurora in February, but were confused by vaccination requirements. Can children go to school with the same immunizations they received in Venezuela and Colombia, or will they have to get all new immunizations? Do I have to pay for each child? Potentially costing hundreds of dollars per child?
Alisson and Dylan stayed in the house for several months. Dylan played math games and first-person shooter games. Alisson watched a video of the production on TikTok. When they finally started school in the fall, Gabriela Ramirez and Torres both wanted classes to be in English, believing that their children would learn English faster that way.
If they had arrived in Aurora three years ago, that is exactly what they would have encountered.
Aurora is used to educating the children of immigrants. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, more than one-third of residents speak a language other than English at home. Immigrants and refugees are attracted to Aurora’s proximity to Denver and its relatively low cost of living.
But the sudden arrival of many students from Venezuela and Colombia who did not speak English caught some Aurora schools off guard. Previously, teachers in a school system with 38,000 students might have had one or two new students in their classes. Some schools now have as many as 10 teachers, or a third of their classroom rosters.
When Marcella Garcia visited an English-only classroom, she noticed that new students were not speaking. “Kids felt left out and unable to participate,” said Garcia, principal of Aurora Hills Middle School.
Schools asked their local central offices for advice and training, and the central offices recommended a strategy called “language translation.” This means that Spanish is sometimes used to help students make sense of the English lessons and conversations happening around them.
It is not clear how much this helps students learn. It’s still too early to tell. Or, it’s unclear whether schools are striking the right balance between translating for newcomers and forcing teachers to engage in what they call a “friendly struggle” to understand and learn English.
But this approach has helped Alisson feel more comfortable. On her first day of school, her social studies teacher, a bald man with tattoos on his forearms and a blunt teaching personality, translated nothing and did not speak Spanish in his presentation. “I sat there and thought about not saying anything,” Alisson recalls. “But then I thought, ‘I’m here to learn.’”
She and a friend approached their teacher during class. Now Jake Emerson is one of her favorite teachers.
On a Wednesday in September, Alisson and her friends sat at a round table in the back of Emerson’s class. They spoke Spanish to each other as Emerson talked to the rest of the class about the pictures he was projecting on a large screen in front of the class.
It was a scene from an ancient Egyptian market. “What do you think this fellow here is doing with the basket?” Emerson asked the class. The students at Alisson’s table continued talking while Emerson spoke. One girl, who had been attending Aurora School longer than the other students, translated for Alisson and the other teenagers.
Before schools adopted this new approach, teachers may have stopped communicating Spanish among students. “When I saw two students speaking Spanish, I thought it was off topic,” said Assistant Principal John Buch. Now he says students are encouraged to help each other in any language.
So far, there appears to be little public pushback from the district against this approach. This usually requires more work for teachers who need to translate materials or their own speech in real time.
English-speaking students react differently as teachers try out new Spanish vocabulary. Some people seem to be bored or annoyed by their teacher’s sudden interest in speaking Spanish in class. Bilingual students feel proud when their teachers can help them use more Spanish in class.
Nonetheless, some English-speaking and bilingual students harassed Alisson. A few weeks after school started, a group of boys tried to stop her from sitting down in class. They called her ugly and told her to go back to their country. When Alisson reported this to her teacher, nothing changed. “They say they don’t tolerate bullying,” she says. “But this is bullying.” After a few weeks, the boys finally stopped.
After spending most of the day in mainstream classes, Alisson and her new colleagues took a class called Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education. This is the only class designed explicitly to help new immigrants speak English.
Teacher Melissa Wesdyk does not speak Spanish fluently. She recently began using Google Translate occasionally as a simultaneous interpreter. As she speaks the instructions into her laptop, a slightly mechanical voice speaks the instructions in Spanish.
The same content is not available in Amharic or Persian, the languages spoken by two of the more than two dozen students in the same class. For those two, she translates written instructions and projects the words onto a screen at the front of the room.
Wesdyk rarely smiles and remains serious throughout the class. Perhaps that’s because the students are much more unruly than Alisson’s other students. Wesdyk acknowledges the relative confusion, but says it’s because Spanish-speaking students are more comfortable in classes made up almost entirely of Latin American immigrants.
One boy keeps standing on his chair during class, and Wesdyk interrupts the class at least four times to redirect the boy. “Por qué hablas?” she asks him. Why are you talking? Another time she said, “Please stop.”
The course also requires more students, whom Wesdyk pressures to pronounce words and answer questions in unison. It’s hard work, and her methods don’t always achieve the goal.
At the end of class, Wesdyk told the students they would “share the whip.” Google repeats the word in English because it doesn’t know how to translate it. Each student is asked to share one of the words they used previously in class to identify the English word for each letter of the alphabet.
When Alisson suggests the word “pink” for the letter P, Wesdyk appears surprised and slightly embarrassed. “That’s not one of the words I wrote, and it’s a good one.”
For the letter F, another boy says “flor,” which means flower in Spanish. It appears to observers that he tried to say ‘flower’ but mispronounced it. Wesdyk doesn’t seem to understand. “floor?” She speaks to him again. The boy repeats “flor” and Wesdyk says “Floor?” Emphasizes the R sound in English. The boy looks embarrassed.
In mid-September, Alisson’s mother received a message from Aurora Public Schools saying there were rumors of bomb threats at that school and other schools across the state. It’s unclear whether the threat is related to Trump’s rhetoric that Venezuelan gangs have taken over Aurora. Eventually, a similar problem arose in Springfield, Ohio, after false statements were made about Haitians eating their pets.
A message from the school system says there is no truth to the bomb threat rumors, but that doesn’t make Torres and Alisson feel any better. Despite her fears, Torres still sends Allison to school. She has learned that Alisson can get in trouble if he misses class without a good reason, and Alisson is generally happy at school.
But none of them understand how American schools and children could be targeted, even if it’s just a rumor.
“This doesn’t happen in our country,” says Torres.
Torres said Venezuela’s economy and democracy may be in shambles, but no one there would think of threatening children at school.
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