Segunda Oportunidad (Second Chance)

You The following program was made possible in March 2020. The following program was made possible in part by funding from the home education livelihood program with the cooperation of KEMW TV in Portella, New Mexico. The Sun rises over the village of Mora in northern New Mexico, casting light on a culture and a way of life that has endured for centuries.

The Sun rises over the village of Mora in northern New Mexico, casting light on a culture and a way of life that has endured for centuries. The Sun rises over the village of Mora in northern New Mexico, casting light on a culture and a way of life that has endured for centuries. Adobe dwellings in churches stand as a reminder of a time when things were simpler.

In the early 1900s, this area was the leading agricultural producer in the state. Timber was the main industry and Mora thrived. Claudio Chicone still lives on land. His ancestors cleared generations ago. Here's a goal you can have a strip like this. You could raise two or three goats, maybe four or five cows. You could milk the cow, produce your own cheese. You could raise chickens and you could have a vegetable garden and all of that would help you. And if you made a few dollars, you didn't have to pay for electricity, you didn't have to pay for transportation because everything was closed by. The church was closed by and the school was closed. You could walk almost anywhere or write your horse.

In the 1940s, life in this idyllic valley changed. Families found that they could no longer support themselves by working the land. The people who gather at Theresa Marie's restaurant several days each week to share a meal and talk over the large and small events of their lives remember those tough years. My dad just to come up in Wyoming with us and her sheep back in those days. But no, since the early 50s, he stayed home from it. The ranch started getting a little better because of the few sheep and they started making it here. The back of them, they lived in the early 40s rather it was hard to make it around here. This pattern of leaving Mora to find work but maintaining family ties continues today.

I go in and out at a Mora. In fact, I think I'm just waiting for a contract in grants. I bid thirsty and I'm just waiting for the results. There's not going on here in Mora, not very much. Most of the people go out to work. This man over here, he's a trainer. He goes to Ratton, Nabokirky or Santa Fe to the racetrack. He's a horse trainer. Some people leave Mora because of the economics. Not because they want to leave. It's a beautiful valley. Nowadays, if you want a job, you have to commute maybe 30, 40 miles. Some people commute as far as Santa Fe. In some work as far as Albuquerque, but they probably stay there during the weekend. Come home on the weekend, you know. It's pretty hard to make a living out here. You have to have something else. You have to have something else and have that love for the land that keeps you here, I think. Otherwise, you wouldn't stay here. There's no real profit farming, but if you can see the fences just to keep your fences up.

Unless you're really a big, big time rancher and there's a few that are real big. With the average person that's lived here for many years, subsistence, I guess you call it. The scarcity of jobs gives Mora the highest unemployment rate in the state of New Mexico. Over 32% of the residents here are out of work. Two other problems plague this village. The high school dropout rate and the illiteracy rate are among the highest in the nation. For years, educators and administrators acknowledged the need for a reading instruction program in Mora. A program aimed at adult non-readers and poor readers, but invariably it was deemed too big a challenge and plans were dropped. Finally, in the summer of 1988, a nonprofit agency, the home education livelihood program, decided to undertake the task. Teachers from the community were recruited and trained. The teachers then went into the homes in Mora to talk to the people who could most benefit from the program.

It was originally to help the people in the community. The folks needed help with reading and so forth. This is what we worked on. We went around and visited people and invited them to put up some signs and so forth and publicized the fact that this was available for people who wanted help. They would be people that would like to have some improvement. A lot of people said, well, I can read, but I don't understand what I'm reading or I need help with vocabulary and so forth. This is what we were recruiting people and advertising. We spent about two weeks doing that before the classes started. It was really interesting to go around and visit people and tell them about it. Well, we went and had it announced in both radio stations in Las Vegas and we put up posters throughout the community. Initially, there was strong interest in the class of.

We didn't know how the people would accept it. We knew that there were some people that needed to learn to read, but we didn't know how they would enjoy coming. We advertised a lot and talked to people. They seemed very interested at the time, but as time went on, after coming once or twice, they felt that they maybe didn't want to come that often. So we lost some people there, especially right in the center of Moira. The people we were getting were mostly elderly from the senior center. We had an average, probably, about three to four each class, and then winter came and a lot of people started complaining about transportation. And the weather, but it started out really good.

People were really encouraged to come. It was their transportation and the weather gets really bad here, so people just don't like to go out unless they really necessarily have to. As the numbers of students dwindled, the teachers considered canceling the classes. When they first set up the program, the teachers had advertised that the Moira Rio Grande Long Term Treatment Center, a facility for people with drug and alcohol problems. Now they learned that some of the residents of the center were interested in the reading classes. They met with center director Ben Sanchez, who explained the center's offerings and described its clients. We are a 30 to 90 day long term treatment program. Mostly what they come here for is the treatment of the disease of alcoholism and addiction. Most individuals that we served here are poly drug users. In other words, it's not primarily alcohol. We're not only alcohol, but we find that alcohol to marijuana, cocaine, heroin, prescription medication. Also some abuse of over-the-counter medication has been our experience here.

Although they'd never worked at a treatment center before, the instructors brought a wealth of teaching experience to their classes. I just retired last summer and I had taught 35 or 36 years in mission schools here in Holman and Chacone and in Moira Public Schools and also taught a couple of years in Pennsylvania before I came out here. Mickey Valdez had also recently retired after many years in the classroom. The teacher's knowledge was valuable to the people at the treatment center. They're basic experience. Both are professional teachers and that's a plus. The other part in so far is they are active members in this community and well known throughout the community. So they kind of act as a linkage also between the community and the treatment center here. There was a special on their own way because they do stay there and teach us to work with us to make us understand that everyone makes mistakes whether reading or they're misspelling words. I find very good people in that area.

Do you feel like they're really interested in seeing you progress or become a better reader? What do I do? I do because they don't shy away from you. When you ask a question they go to where you're at and help you with the sentence or write a word or what they do is make... They write a word or make a sentence. They always tell us what the word means if we don't understand what it means. The teachers are warm, open, considerate, very helpful. They understand you a lot. They know where you're coming from. I graduated in 73 and the reason I graduated was that I was getting my credits by working instead of going to school.

I was in a low class which means that I was always hard at learning things. Now we have our GD class here which is mandatory also. They teach us things like fractions and this most... All those things that I've never learned in high school. In high school did you think of yourself as a good reader? No, I never did think of myself as a good reader when I was in high school or a good spelling. How about now? Now I think I've accomplished a lot because I'm usually nervous when I'm reading and I feel myself...

When I'm nervous I'm not reading something right or saying a word right. I think I've learned a lot while I've been in that class. When they were in school they were in big group. Perhaps they had one assignment for the whole group. And the teacher perhaps did not even return their responses for that assignment for maybe week or so. So they never really knew individually how they could be helped. In high school the teacher that had really wasn't that concerned whether I did good or not. And here it seems that they help you a lot in that way. They care. They understand that you're a minority and that it's been hard in the past. Does anyone have something on the floor?

Since there are only about seven or eight people in the class I find that it's not that difficult to focus on the one that needs more. The one that needs more help or the one that needs more advanced help. Writing is an essential element of this reading program. I usually want them to do a lot of writing because I find that that is their weak point. They have run in sentences and poor spelling. I don't focus so much on the grammar part because unless they have certain sentences that are way off then we talk about that. When we do writing we make stories out of different things whether it's about things we've done in life like gone out of walks or our families. We make sense this out of words. We look upwards, we do not understand and get a dictionary and get definitions from that.

There's a lot of interesting words that we find that sometimes we've never even heard of. I asked them one time what would you like to really do and they said well let's work on more spelling words. That's why we look up so many words in the dictionary and others wanted let's write more. I noticed they were very afraid at the beginning to write. They thought their expressions and their ideas would not be very good but I find that they are. I myself have written poetry some poetry and I learned how to express myself in poetry how to floor-matter in a paper and how to punctuate it, things like this. So it helps me a lot in that type of work.

The poetry that some of them have written has been very interesting. They know how to express very inner feelings but they don't know how to put it into a way that it looks like poetry. So it's mostly just a block of words and they can't separate into a sentence or a partial sentence. I forgot about how to write and read a lot of big words but learning how to understand their definitions and how to write block stories, things like that. We get to learn different things that happen in the world through magazines, through articles, different books, get to read stories, get to write about stories. We've been reading the readers' pages, the graphic books and so everything is okay.

We get a little bit of everything and that really helps. How many of you remember the magazine stories you did the other day? I gave you pictures and you wrote the story about what you thought it was and then we looked at the article. We're going to do that with newspapers today. So could we pick up the newspapers and put them in the sand around the way and let you choose some of these pictures that you want to write about? Okay, these are, I took the newspaper last night and I cut out pictures and I kept the caption but you're not going to get to see it until you're finished with your article. I want you to look at the picture, decide what you think, where you think is happening, this certain things happening, what is going, where it's going to be, where it is now. This is in New Mexico, it's not more, it's not in Albuquerque, but it's in New Mexico and you write what you think it is. You're writing a newspaper article from the picture. Okay, here's another one, artwork. It looks like, doesn't it?

This is something else that's going on. This is a human interest story, people. Something's happening here. Can you think what might be, can you, and you decide where does this take place, do you think? What's happening? Why are these people sitting there like that? There's none. Let's see. Okay, Joseph, do you want to share yours? I think it used to be in Roswell, New Mexico, but I haven't seen the water in Roswell, so you have to be out of place. One of the things we do is writing sentences to help us with our vocabulary or just to have them writing because some people don't feel secure with writing. We see improvement in the length of the sentence, in the type of sentence that they write. Then we go into writing stories or paragraphs and you can see improvement and they feel more comfortable doing it as we progress. It's really going back, you know, to do it like a research deal because it's hard, you know, when you're out of school for quite a while, then you have to start a lot of work and then you find out that, you know, your level.

Rootsports teaching strategies are based on one idea. For me, it is to meet people where they are and to improve from there, to help them to see what they need and to let them tell me. There's a lot of chance to use your own initiative, your own ideas in public school and other schools. They usually have goals and objectives you have to meet these before the end of the year. You have to cover a book or certain things. We have goals and objectives here but with us and our students, we make our own goals and objectives and we can use whatever. We can use a lot of new ideas and things that are fun. The other day I had them write a story about what was the longest walk that you ever took on foot.

And it was just amazing to me how far some of them have gone on foot and where they went so that it brought out some of their experiences. And so, in the least likely environment, in groups containing all different ages and orientations, the reading program began to affect the students in a very positive way. One of the things that it did that we found almost immediately was raising the self-esteem. Well, I'm coming back to data and studying, which I haven't done for quite a while. I need to help you quite a bit. Right now, I'm getting help, getting into a Votec. The grammar, the classes help us a lot because like I said, don't remember. For myself, it's helping me because I didn't finish high school. I only went up to 10th grade.

But I received my GED, but the classes here also help freshen because it's hard that you really don't remember some of the grammar. Things that they, you know, are helping us out here. So it helps a lot and that will be used for like a future. It helps me be able to be more comfortable when I'm reading around others and being able to learn new words. And also helps me in my thinking and my skills to bring out my skills a lot better. It helps me think of different ways of paragraphing them and bringing the whole, my whole feelings, my whole way of thinking, and writing them down a better way. Perhaps the most important change the program has made is in the students' outlooks. They now feel they have options and opportunities for the future.

This gives me a chance to screen things out for when I get out of here and see if I can better myself. Instead of just sitting idle maybe now I can get out there and look for something you know that keeps me going. I'm going into nursing. That's my first priority and what I should have done before when I have finished high school. The individuals may see that post-secondary education can be a reality, okay, and that a GED can be a reality even if they have quit school since the eighth grade 10 years ago. Nobody's looking over our shoulder and saying, hey you didn't meet such a such objective in a certain amount of time and you find different ways to meet the needs that the people have than just the regular teaching. And I like that. I felt that that was really worthwhile, a lot of fun, a lot of things we could do.

For anything, we do what we can while they're here to improve them, help them like reading, to help them improve their thinking skills. Then we do all that to the can and say when they have to go we have to say goodbye and we've done what we could in that song. Organizers hope the students' new enthusiasm will spill over into the community, creating a positive effect which will extend far beyond the classroom. For information about a literacy program in your area, contact the New Mexico Coalition for Literacy in Santa Fe at 9-8-2-3-99-1.

Or ask your local library for the number of the local chapter of the literacy volunteers of America. The preceding program was made possible in part by funding from the home education livelihood program with the cooperation of KENW TV in Portela's New Mexico. You You

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