Abstract

For this assignment we needed to find someone who was different from our culture and customs to do an interview. I decided to interview a cousin from the Dominican Republic who has never traveled or seen anything different than the place that she was born. My focused topic with her was about her point of view on education and her experiences with the educational system of the Dominican Republic. In this essay I elaborate on her ideas and compare mine to hers in order to showcase some of the privileges I see we have in New York City compared to her. I also provided my reflection where I recap on my thoughts and feelings about the interview and the interviewee permission slip signed by her which gave me permission to use her legal name in my assignment.

The Layout of Truths

Sometimes being Hispanic does not necessarily mean that we know the real life that our people endure at motherland during their lives, mostly when you go for vacation and not for a living. While I have been raised and educated in New York City, I have many cousins who were raised and educated in the Dominican Republic like Rosa Liberky Perez, and then I see how even though public schools aren’t the best in NYC, in some ways we have privileges compared to public schools in other places, such as some of our homelands.

Liberky, a 24-year-old married women who is born and raised in the province of Moca, the Dominican Republic. She has 2 daughters ranging in the ages from 3 to 5 years old. During the interview her 3-year-old was frequently in the living room where she, I guess she was following the Christmas tree right behind Liberky that looked very colorful and gorgeous. She graduated high school about 2-3 years ago and lives in the “country like” part of the island which I thought made her perfect for my interview because she could offer her most recent and past experiences with the school system. One of the first things she declared was that schools usually have less updated resources and are less likely to be founded properly unless they are private which the parents pay for. Due to high poverty rates students have a tendency to drop out of school and go for what seems to be the real necessity, which is finding a job and help sustain, not only themselves, but also their family. Differently from New York’s public schools, their schools do not have securities within the halls to help prevent or interfere with any fights between students or any outside danger. One of her daughters currently started kindergarten and the fact that there is no protection within the schools, she does not feel comfortable leaving her daughter, but she sates “I have to do it for her well-being and growth”. While she desires to feel that her daughter is safe in school, here we tend to think that having NYPD in public schools is a way or minoritizing students who attend public schools, when in Dominican Republic people seem to see it more as a privilege because it is only seen in private schools.

Apart from her daughter not being offered protection within the school, she is also not taught as well as she should be. Liberky compared her memories when she was in kindergarten to her daughters today. She stated that “In the time I attended school, teachers were more motivated to educate students because they would correct them in the thing’s students were wrong” in order to ensure that they were learning correctly. As far as she has seen, the case is not the same for her daughter. She described that her daughter does not yet know how to space between words and “at home I remind her to place a finger in between each word so she could get an idea on how spacing should look like”. When her daughter does her work in school and does not apply spacing, her work was marked as “Well done” instead of having a note that she should practice spacing in between her words. While picking my niece from school, I see how parents sometimes get annoyed when they hear so many “complaints” about their children. They argue that “they are just starting, what’s the rush?” and that is normal for them to have some behavior defects because “they are children and are in a different environment from the usual”. Their flaws, even during class, are brought to attention. Usually, parents are given some advice on how to help their children do better in school in any way needed, whether it is in an academical way or behaviors. And while some complain, my cousin desires that attention towards her daughter’s academic growth.

For her I am privileged, similar to one of the kids who attends DR’s private schools. To me I am part of the poor-middle class group in society. For many parents they’re “complaints”. For her is something needed for her daughter’s educational growth. For many is minoritizing and labeling as problematic, while she experiences anxiety for 8 hours of until she is able to bring her daughter home. As you can see, sometimes it is important to take a look at things outside the box in order to be able to appreciate the things we have and not always look at it in a negative perspective; we will only know how important these things are in our life until we actually open our eyes to see how others are affected by the absence.

Transcultural Reflection

For my interview I had the pleasure to ask my cousin Rosa Liberky Perez on her experiences, opinions, and perspectives about the public school system of the Dominican Republic and what effects these have had in her personal academic life as well as for her two daughters. I believe that she was the best person to ask because she has lived all her life in the Dominican Republic and has never traveled or lived elsewhere differently from me. Also, she is much older than me, I am 18 and she is 24, she has finished high school a few years before I did and one of her daughters just begun to go to primary school. This places us with different ideologies and experiences, not just because of the time that we attended, but also the location that we received our education in. Due to these circumstances, my interview was approached with a lot of past tense questions about her education and also present tense opinions she might have based on what she has seen in common or difference between how she received her first years of education and how her daughter is getting it now. During the interview I was surprised with many of the things she said to me because even though the topic was public schools, I realized we were in two different worlds but under the same title. Making sure to not make the interview about my ideas, I also was able to speak to her about how in NYC public schools we differences have when it comes to school security, teacher feedbacks, and educational advantages. In the continuance of the interview our interactions changed from the specific topic of schools to long term influences we see in people of our area based on the local education system we have had in the past and now. I believe that this transition in our conversation helped both of us have a vision on how around the world people will never know the advantages they have until they take a look to other places and see how privilege they actually are, which I believe made this assignment meaningful in a reflective aspect.

The image below is the permission signed by Rosa Liberky Perez, giving me permission to interview her and use her legal name in my paper when stating or describing our interview.