GITANO CHILDREN IN MID-CITY: LOCAL CHANGES AND SOCIAL OPPORTUNITIES

Mid-City is a small city situated in central Spain, in a largely rural region. Like many old cities in Spain, it is clearly divided into two sectors: the “historical center” with its narrow streets, old houses, and apartment buildings, and a newer part that has grown over the last century around this center. Gitanos have been present in the province since the beginning of the 18th century, and in the urban locality since the 1930s. Upon their arrival, Gitano extended families settled in one of the “upper” peripheral neighborhoods of the historical center, where, despite cultural differences from their neighbors, they shared similar economic activities (tied to agriculture, temporal employment and small-scale trading) and multigenerational familial patterns. From this first entry, Gypsy families began to spread out in the city, going to “lower” parts of the center and then, at the end of the 1960s, to a newly built neighborhood in the periphery of the new section.

This latter neighborhood, known as “the 300 Houses,” was one of the first public housing initiatives of the city and was primarily targeted at lodging Gitano and working-class residents. Again, in this neighborhood, Gitanos settled in extended multigenerational families and shared several social and economic features with their Payo neighbors. By this time, agricultural activities (except seasonal work) had lost ground in favor of small-scale trading, with a minority of families finding employment in local construction or service industries (occupations that are most important to this day in Mid-City's Gypsy economy).

Finally, since the 1980s, Gitanos have primarily been settling in a new sector of the city, known as San Pedro, in public housing developed in this section during the past two decades. However, there are several features that make this settlement substantially different from the previous movements. Often, only the younger families move to this sector; dividing the Gitanos of Mid-City in generational terms. The vast majority of families in San Pedro consist of young parents and their children and, at most, the grandparents (who, given the early age at which Gitanos traditionally wed and have children, are often below 50 years of age). In turn, the 300 Houses is currently thought of as a “neighborhood of grand-(great)-parents and elder people,” where only a minority of Gitano children live – and these children expect to move with their parents to San Pedro sometime in the future. San Pedro, unlike previous sites, is not a peripheral and socio-economically homogeneous district. Rather, it is one of the growing parts of the city where an increasing number of infrastructures, services, and commercial areas are found. Also, the neighborhoods of this district combine modern single-family houses with apartment buildings and public housing, allowing a wide range of socio-economic conditions to coexist here.

These transformations run parallel to changes in social policies affecting Gitano communities and children. Over the past two decades, the regional government has been developing social programs and funding nonprofit private initiatives aimed at the social integration and socio-educational advancement of marginalized communities such as Gitanos. At the moment, in San Pedro, for a total Gitano population below 1,200 members there are several social programs run by numerous organizations which provide after-school support for children and work-related training for youth. Gitano members have also been actively involved in these processes. Since 1985 there has been a Gitano cultural association (the one we have been working with), run by Gypsy members, developing its own programs and using its resources for similar purposes – and competing on equal standing with other nongovernmental organizations for public funding of its programs. For over a decade, this organization has had its own facilities in the 300 Houses, and for a few years it also had an office and site in San Pedro where it developed several programs for children until economic pressure made maintaining two sites unfeasible and the newer office was closed.

Finally, as another visible Gitano institution, the Evangelist Church has had a presence in the community for several decades. Traditionally, worship took place in the homes of church members in small gatherings, but in the 1980s the local Church of Mid-City was able to set up a chapel close to the 300 Houses, and since then has been able to maintain regular services and have an assigned pastor. Having a site for worship has also facilitated the development of several church-related public activities such as the choir, religious instruction classes, or the gatherings with other churches that are becoming increasingly important in the network of Evangelist churches in Spain.

In short, Gitano children in Mid-City today are being raised in a social environment substantially different from what was traditional for Gitanos of the locality. Within Gitano homes, smaller “nuclear-type” families are becoming more common. The children live and participate in a community much more heterogeneous and intertwined with the larger social and economic structure of Mid-City; and the educational and economic expectations for these children are also quite different from what was traditionally contemplated. Finally, there are established and visible Gitano community institutions (not just in symbolic terms, but with assigned spaces, materials, and activities) where children participate and are often the targeted audience of the institution's work.

Obviously, not all families and children participate in these changes with equal intensity. Yet the current living conditions of the Gitano community make available a number of resources that, if taken up by Gypsy children, demand acquiring and displaying new skills and knowledge, and adjusting to the demands of a changing social environment. In this context, we focus on part of the discursive knowledge that circulates across these community sites and that is developed in the children who participate in them. Note, however, that the characteristics of the community that we have outlined above may make the case of Mid-City relatively different from other Gypsy communities in urban contexts, especially in the larger Spanish metropolitan centers. Nevertheless, to our knowledge there is not much comparative research on Gitano children's discourse socialization in the community, and so the generalizabily of our case remains an empirical question to be answered with future studies.

VERBAL GENRES IN THE ESCUELA DOMINICAL

In the community of our study, religious sites are genre-rich settings. Activities during church services (el culto) and religious instruction classes are organized as successive sets of verbal formats and activities that are clearly bounded, labeled, and recognized by participants. Presentaciones ‘presentations’ and despedidas ‘farewells’ open and close religious events in both church and classes. The culto is composed of verbal activities such as alabanzas ‘hymns’, songs performed in chorus and accompanied by instrumental music; dar la palabra ‘give the word’, the reading of the Bible and comment produced by the pastor or other religious leaders of the church (e.g., invited pastors from other congregations or candidatos ‘apprentice pastors’); and testimonios ‘testimonies’, in which church members narrate personal experiences in which the work of the Lord played a significant role in times of hardship and precipitated a key episode in their conversion or faith consolidation (cf. Jacobs-Huey 2003). The religious classes have versions of hymns and giving the word, and also what participants properly call escuela ‘school’, instruction on religious matters organized by the teacher with “book and pencil work” as supporting materials.

All these verbal genres are experienced with an orientation toward performance in its “marked” sense, toward the display and evaluation of verbal competence by participants (Bauman 1977, Bauman & Sherzer 1989, Bauman & Briggs 1990). Speakers who produce elaborate instances of the above genres are said to have a buena palabra ‘good word’, and many verbal productions receive immediate interactive feedback in the form of applause or praise at the end, or inserted religious response cries (‘amen’, ‘praise the Lord’, etc.). In the “negative,” if the instance is perceived by the congregation as unoriginal (e.g., the orator instead of improvising a prayer reproduces the verses of a known song), it may be received in the pews with moderately disparaging comment. Complementarily, speakers may “disclaim” their ability to produce an instance of the genre (Bauman 1977, 1993), both to avoid designation as speakers and to calibrate the possible assessment that will be offered after their performance.

Presentations and farewells share all the above traits and will be the focus of our analysis, since in the context of religious instruction they clearly show a developmental progression across children of different ages, and they are modeled and scaffolded by adults in an explicit process of genre teaching and acquisition (cf. Bakhtin 1986). Religious instruction classes took place Saturday mornings approximately between 12:00 am and 2:00 pm in the congregation's church, which was opened specifically for this purpose. They were attended by a varying number of children and several adults (male and female) responsible for the classes: two or three women, one of whom was the responsible teacher while the others acted as assistants, and two male adults who supervised the activities and were primarily responsible for the children's choir rehearsal, which also took place in these classes. One of these adult males was a highly regarded pastor candidate who also participated in the discussions during school, served as an authority to maintain order, and, as we will see, was often invited to open and close the session.

In the escuela dominical, presentations and farewells opened and closed the event. When the classes began, once all the children were inside the church and the teacher had turned on the lights, organized the materials, and moved the front benches into a square, she asked the children to form a circle (including adults), standing up, holding hands, bowing their heads, and closing their eyes. Then she designated two to four children to successively “present” the class, or allowed one of the available adults to do that. At the end of the class, after school, choir rehearsal and other planned activities were completed, the teacher gathered the children again, reviewed the work done during the morning (regarding both content learning and the children's behavior), and gave instructions and reminders about the events and work planned for the coming week. After this, she organized the group in the same manner as in presentations and again designated a set of children and adults to bid farewell to the class. Then the group broke up and participants gathered their belongings and left the church (which was closed and locked by one of the adults until the evening) to go home on foot or by car, alone or in groups accompanied by the adults.

Presentations and farewells are relatively brief instances of discourse that can be generically characterized by a set of traits relating to their rhetorical design, illocutionary content, and metric structure, as summarized in Table 1.

Generic traits of oral presentaciones and despedidas in religious classes.

A presentation or farewell is composed by improvising a set of lines, which are often begun or closed with a reference to God with one of several alternative tokens (‘Jesus’, ‘Father’, or ‘Lord’), and built by developing and recycling a number of syntactic constructions. These presentations/farewells, in their oral version, center on a limited set of verbal actions directed to God (illocutionary content), which may be realized in one line or over a set of lines in which the same basic act is elaborated. Although we have no evidence that the actions that may be performed in presentations or closings should be restricted to what appears in the corpus we have gathered, these seem to be limited to three kinds of verbal tasks: thanking God, asking God to bless (bendecir) various people, and asking God to cure various people. In terms of content, the recipients of these actions to be performed by God can be those immediately present in the class (the teachers and the children), other known community members who are personally named or identified by role (‘the pastor’, ‘my family’), or segments of society at large who are prayed for (‘the sick’, ‘the poor’, ‘the good’, etc.). The following example, produced by José Luis, the adult pastor candidate, is an elaborate instance of the genre as a farewell:⁴

In this example we have a rather long text organized in four stanzas, in which José Luis builds elaborate “thankings” and “requests for blessings” of three sets of participants: the children attending classes (stanza A and the second part of stanza D); the adults and himself, who are first cited in general in stanza B and then named in particular in stanza D, as those responsible for the religious education of the children; and us, the researchers, as visiting observers, in a mild instance of proselytizing (stanza C). Structurally, this adult speaker is able to produce fluently a combination of rather long and shorter verses in which improvised verbal formulas are recycled in different versions and grammatical forms (e.g., lines 10, 11, 12). Finally, he contextualizes several of his lines and stanzas with a varied set of referential tokens for God, such as Señor ‘Lord’, Padre ‘Father’, and Jesus.

As an adult and authorized figure in this religious setting, José Luis produces instances of the genre that serve as a model for the children of the community. In this way, some of the older and more competent students in the class are capable of performing presentations and closings that make use of the templates that have been provided by adults, as is the case of the girl in example (2), a presentation:

This presentation contains several of the elements pointed out above that we saw in adult performances, but, as expected, in simplified form. The explicit illocutionary content is reduced to thanking, and the same parties as in the first example are mentioned: herself and her fellow students, both present (line 2) and absent (line 8), the researchers (line 6), and the adult women in charge of the class (line 4). In this case, Meli's thanking is made from the perspective of the children, and she simply thanks the Lord for the presence of the teachers. This contrasts with José Luis's perspective as an adult, where he thanks the Lord for providing him and the other adults with the capacity to educate the children (1, lines 7–9). Also, throughout her presentation Meli, of the available alternatives, only uses one token to refer to God (Señor). Finally, as a complementary activity to thanking, in her presentation she asks the Lord to ‘keep in the hollow of his hand’ each of the participants. This is a complete formula that allows for little improvisation and internal variation, and that appears in the prayers and songs of the congregation. In this case, Meli produces three couplets (lines 4–5, 6–7, and 8–9) in which the second part is the canonical formula and the first part successively mentions the different constituencies of the class (the adults, the visiting researchers, and the children who have not come to class). Given this development, while the overall presentation has a compact design in comparison to the adult version, the degree of personal elaboration is reduced.

Meli was one of the more competent children in the class, yet even the youngest students in the class (4 or 5 years of age) were encouraged to participate and produce their presentations or farewells. These instances may be fully scaffolded by adults, as in the following farewell performed by César, who closed the class that morning:

In this instance, the usual components are reduced to a minimum. The farewell is reduced to two instances of thanking; the first of which one of the teachers (Ester) breaks down into three segments to be repeated by the child, and it contains only one token for God. However, there are two aspects of this presentation that are relevant. First, it is a collective construction by a child and an adult, so the perspective it adopts in relation to its interlocutor is common to both, as opposed to the adult- or child-produced instances, which we have seen develop distinct participant frameworks (Goffman 1981) between all the mentioned parties and the performer's interlocutor (i.e. God) (cf. Keane 1997). Second, there is an explicit assessment of the child's achievement, a move that helps to index the marked nature of this speech and explicitly to insert the children in a developmental path.

To restate what has been said so far about presentations and farewells, they represent a recognizable genre in the community that is associated with a number of religious events and practices in which they play a specific social role. Formally, presentations and farewells can be characterized by a set of flexible rhetorical and content features that allow members of the congregation to improvise specific instances of the genre. Further, although all these instances share the traits that allow them to be recognized as part of the same generic framework, there are important variations among instances that reflect broader social processes among the participants implicated in their production and reception. Speakers vary in the competence they display in the genre depending on both age and institutional role in the community (children, adults, students, teachers, pastor candidate, etc.). Within the escuela dominical, different classes of participants emerge – adult teachers, students, and observing researchers – and this distribution is reflected in the different positions that individual performers construe as members of one segment in relation to other groups of participants and the performer's supernatural interlocutor. In short, while some “general” generic elements allow for production in a wide range of social events, the particular social conditions and relations in effect on these occasions also determine the specific traits of each generic instance.

This combination of textual processes may explain the varying characteristics that were displayed in texts of religious content produced by children in a very different social setting, to which we turn in the following section.

RELIGIOUS WRITINGS IN A COMPUTER AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM

As we have said, Mid-City's Gitano cultural association has been working over the past 15 years for the social, political, and educational advancement of local Gypsies. It is a small institution chartered as a nonprofit organization, with very few paid employees, and it develops two main lines of action. On one hand, it serves as a base of advocacy and consultation for most political affairs that affect Mid-City Gitanos, such as housing policies, schooling measures, and social programs. On the other hand, it organizes and runs publicly funded socio-educational programs designed for adults, youth, and children. While all programs share a central concern for the educational and economic advancement of Gitanos, the specific design and implementation of programs vary each year to meet changing political priorities in funding and the human-resource and economic pressures that the association always confronts. During the years we have worked with the association as part of our research project, three programs have been implemented for school-aged children: a summer school program, an after-school computer program, and a home-study support program.

Computer skills programs have been developed for some time by the association to provide Gitanos access to new technology, and, in the case of youth and adults, skills that might facilitate their entrance into the labor market. However, as explicitly expressed by the social worker in charge of these programs, computer classes (especially those designed for adults) also have a goal of general literacy acquisition and development. Both these goals have been con-tinued in the development of the after-school program for school-aged children, as evidenced in the fact that children's main activity during the class sessions was writing.

The educational approach in the program for children was rather open. Classes took place on three weekday evenings per week; the children were allowed to enter and exit the program freely, and were only reprimanded or invited to leave class when their behavior was excessively disruptive. Participating children, around 20 students on a regular basis, organized in pairs, groups, or individually in front of computers and worked freely with different software. The children would ask the social worker to turn on the computer and run different programs depending on what they intended to do (e.g., ‘play’ with a CD-ROM, ‘paint’, ‘write’). By far the most frequent activity was writing, which usually took place in word processing or painting software. Children wrote freely on their computers, and their texts were corrected and edited by the available adults only when the children requested. Some of these texts were saved or printed out (which allowed for further development on later occasions), while others were erased at the end of the session or when the program was closed and the computer turned off.

The content and structure of the texts varies significantly, ranging from ritual insults and personal letters to texts of exclusively religious content, which has allowed us to establish a preliminary classification based on different generic traits (Cano et al. 2002). In terms of content, the most frequent references are to religious themes, which appear in 37% of the texts. An initial analysis of the texts, applying the accumulated knowledge of verbal activity in religious contexts, shows that presentations and farewells in fact provide the main generic grid for religious written texts. However, these writings are not a simple transcribed version of oral presentations/farewells; they show a number of particularities, summarized in Table 2, that complicate the text-context relationship.

Generic traits of the written texts with religious references in the after-school program.

Religious writings share with the oral versions a rhetorical structure based on parallelism, the contextualization of lines with formulas, and a textual organization that can be divided into lines/verses and stanzas.⁵

The following text, produced by Talia, a 7-year-old girl, shows how some of the features of oral presentations/farewells are entextualized in the written texts and intertwined with other generic frameworks:

This text shares several of the features that we discussed in the previous section. It is limited to two discursive actions – requesting a cure and thanking – which in form are produced in a way very similar to the instances discussed above (compare line 6 in this example with lines 8–9 in ex. 3). The participants in these actions are God (lines 1–2), who continues to be the direct interlocutor, an anonymous segment of society, ‘the sick’ (line 3), and more immediate beneficiaries such as herself or her family (lines 4–5). However, the full text is opened and closed with devices that are not easily associated with the generic frame we are familiar with. The opening ‘for god’ (line 1) makes explicit the intended interlocutor, an explicitness that is obviously redundant in a formal religious activity and that never appears in oral versions. The opening could also be seen as a device typical of the personal letter genre. This second possibility becomes relatively clear with the closing of the text, where Talia completes her text with a highly personal and informal formula (line 7) and “signs” her writing (line 8).

In short, this text combines features of two separate genres: religious openings/farewells and personal letters (cf. Guerra & Farr 2002). These genres are heavily grounded in oral and written modes, respectively. Among other things, this determines the degree to which different participants are made explicit in the texts. In an oral routine within a religious event, both the final interlocutor (God) and the author (the speaker) are not problematic, and thus their participant roles do not have to be stated. In contrast, in a written text (a potentially permanent record) produced in a nonreligious context, these roles need to be established explicitly, both in terms of the designated addressee (‘for’) and the author (signature). Further, children not only signal explicitly these differences in their texts, they also have different notions of the social consequences and uses of each type of text. Specifically, in the interviews several children explained that letters are written to ‘print out and send in the mail to someone’, while religious texts are written for ‘oneself to keep and express what one feels’. Thus, when conventions from nonreligious genres are inserted in texts with religious content, it is clear that it is the former that are subordinated to the latter, since the practical uses of each type of text are very different. However, writing occurs in a context which potentially favors interpretive ambiguity (regarding the situation and participants involved in the texts), which, in this case, is resolved through this hybridization

Children's sensitivity to these variations shows that they are developing working distinctions among modes of transmission (oral vs. written) and the constraints of different communicative situations. While the above contrast can be seen as a byproduct of established generic conventions, children can also use oral/written distinctions for much more expressive purposes, as in the following text authored by a 10-year-old boy:

In this text, Luis Ángel continues some of the discursive acts that we have seen so far but does so while simplifying the verse design. The text develops a central statement, which is recycled several times (lines 1, 3, 9, 11), accompanied by a complementary act which is also repeated (lines 4, 12), and by relatively fixed religious formulas (lines 5, 10) in which he also identifies himself. More relevant to our discussion, the texts contains a metalinguistic stanza (C) in which Luis Ángel explicitly discusses capitalization, a problem restricted to the written mode, as a way to organize a hierarchy between God and himself and to establish his subordination to the higher being. In other words, the child draws on an established written convention and infuses it with theological meaning for his own expressive purposes in the text.⁷

Finally, in the corpus of religious written texts, although presentations/farewells are the main generic resource, other verbal formats present in religious contexts are entextualized in this new context. Some children incorporate full lines of songs and hymns or exploit established maxims of the Evangelist Church (such as Dios es amor ‘God is love’, an oft-repeated statement that also appears printed in church banners and bulletins), producing hybrid texts of several religious genres. Also, children may draw primarily on other, single religious verbal formats. In the following example, an 11-year-old boy produces a relatively long text that is grounded in ‘giving the word’ (the sermon) in the church service:

As an instance of writing, the text opens with a title (which in the original is presented in boldface, centered in a single line and in much larger font than the rest of the text), a resource grounded in print conventions. As an instance of giving the word, the text exploits the more cryptic religious discourse regarding conflicts between good and evil and God's presence. It is only in the central part of the writing (stanzas C and D) that Antonio turns to more immediate matters addressing possible co-members of a congregation, who are referred to as ‘brothers’ (line 9), and speaks broadly of the human faults that need to be overcome (which from the child's perspective are making fun of others, drinking, smoking, and using drugs).

The interesting aspect of the rhetorical stance of this text is that it develops in a direction opposite to what is recurrently stressed during religious instruction. The teacher and other adults in the class appreciated children's broad references to God, good and evil, and human faults, but they also insisted that children speak and pray about “little things” and establish connections with their daily lives and specific problems and needs (with families, friends, school, etc.) (cf. Moore 2003). Further, such a concern for the specifics of daily lives and the establishment of connections between religious beliefs, the Bible, and members' immediate concerns is a fundamental trait in the growth of the Evangelist Church among Gitanos at a national level (Méndez, in press) and is reflected in the content and structure of the verbal practices that constitute religious events.

To summarize the discussion of this section, children's texts in the after-school computer program draw on varied resources including a set of established discourse genres developed in an oral mode in religious settings – most prominently, presentations/farewells. However, their recentering in a written mode in the program can not be seen as a simple transcription, since the previous generic frameworks undergo several important transformations in the written instances. First, children build hybrid texts that draw on diverse genres, both religious and nonreligious, and that are socially grounded equally in oral and written modes. Second, children exploit, tacitly and explicitly, features of the written mode for their own rhetorical and expressive purposes. This process, while it does not show that the children generally master standard written conventions, does indicate that they have established important distinctions between the oral and the written codes (cf. Blommaert 1999). Finally, children show sensitivity to the new participation frameworks that permeate writing in the after-school program in which the relationships and identities of authors, designated addressees, and overlooking readership (those present in the after-school setting at the time of writing, and the full set of unspecified readers who may access the text if it is stored) are diluted.

In combination, these analyses of genres in two contexts and the interconnections between them have a series of theoretical consequences that, first of all, require that we revisit several assumptions regarding literacy among Gypsies. The findings also have implications for a final topic that we want to develop in the conclusion: our understanding of Gitanos' performance in formal education, and of how linguistic practices are embedded in larger institutional and social systems.