Latino Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: Suspended Identity and English

By Albert Janzen

God has placed His love in my heart for the young men from Central America who regularly come north as Temporary Foreign Workers to work on our farms. This is like winning the lottery for them because it allows them to assure their family back home with a better life while they put up with a dormitory lifestyle usually in an older house that may be near the farm or even down the street from where we live. We may never know unless we pay attention to who our neighbors are or if we take an interest in the cultural diversity at the supermarket.

Most of them will know very little English even if they have worked in Canada for many seasons because their lifestyle is not learner friendly. On their job, the farm owner may depend on one worker who knows enough English to translate for the group. If the supervisors are another culture, like Punjabi, the English they hear will sound different than in an ESL classroom. Most of them will understand the bare minimum of English for shopping, banking, and other business, really not much. Speaking English is limited to important words and phrases without benefit of fluency.

For an employer it is not important that their Latino workers learn English because that would make them eligible for other higher paid employment, so it is better to stay with Spanish for all communication, if possible, including all the employment information posted in their houses, which are bonafide Latino bubbles floating unnoticed on the Canadian cultural landscape. You will never hear any English in there and the television will be tuned to a Spanish channel. Of course, the workers also prefer it this way, so their estrangement from Canadian society remains unchallenged.

Conditions in the workers’ homes is not conducive for academic learning. The lighting is often poor, very little table space to use for a writing surface, next to no furniture to store books, maybe in their suitcases. A noisy TV and many other workers near you interferes with a need to concentrate on studying. I could go on, but you get the idea. Besides, your wife and children expect a long daily phone call. Otherwise, cooking and cleaning and the cell phone will consume most other spare time.

An immigrant has much more incentive to learn English, but not when your identity is suspended between your home country and Canada. What are you really? Do you become more Canadian from more seasons spent in Canada? Probably not, any more than a jail should seem like ‘home’ if you live there for half your life because all you really want is to be free. Same for these workers, except for a select few who are taking on the steep learning curve to become Canadians, and then English becomes a necessity.

I believe Canadian Christians have a unique opportunity and obligation to enable these Latino migrant workers with very basic English skills as an act of Christian love to help them do life more easily within a cultural environment that is foreign to them. There is still so much more that I could say about effective ways to reach out to these young men with genuine Christian friendship. You will be rewarded with their friendship and trust, and will receive more than you give, as I have found. Is that not the way the Gospel was meant to work?

I still have not found a foolproof strategy to teach ESL to these men, but I know for sure it must begin with friendship and at least a small core of committed volunteers to devise a plan that will circumvent the obstacles I have referred to, and then, with God’s blessing, it will be done!