First of all, dear readers, I apologize up front for writing about personal issues that move on an everyday basis: my forever-passionate professional bilingual English-Spanish journalism career.
Now, for ice-cream lovers, here’s the scoop.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico is carrying out courses to train Mexican journalists to learn to write in English. The official teaching on-line is carried out by the University of Pennsylvania.
As a native Mexican Spanish-speaking person whose second language is English I can only stand up and applaud this move by my much-admired and still U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson. Other than being perfectly bilingual, truly yours is an ordinary Mexican.
Honestly, even if all my beloved commie friends at Gobernación have labeled me as a CIA agent. There’s nothing further from the truth as even today I have never had any contact with the United States of America Embassy in Mexico other than to request, and get a tourist visa. I’m good with that.
My heart is with the English-speaking people who read The News and over the past 25 years I’ve devoted my credibility to telling it like it is in Mexico. Is that treason? Still, over the past 50 years I have paid my taxes and in return I get a Mexican government pension and thanks to it I can continue to do what I love best: writing in English.
For your info, I have never worked for any government agency and still am a philosophical child of all those journalists who can pay taxes but live without the scourge Mexican greedy politicos have become.
But I’m getting sidetracked. My intention is to praise the move by the U.S. Embassy and its consulates in Guadalajara and Tijuana, now carrying out courses to train Mexican reporters to write and report in English.
(Hey Roberta, while you’re still ambassador, I have a request: as an old fashioned ballet dancer, will you please waltz with me?).
In any case, the move to train English-writing journalists – and I speak from personal experience – is not an overnight effort.
Back to the case at hand, surely the Embassy has a huge job in store and an overseeing judge like truly yours.
Having worked in places like Tijuana, I recall that 25 years ago I was the only bilingual reporter for the Mexican press at Tijuana-San Diego authorities, both monolingual, none of my Mexican colleagues spoke, never mind wrote, English.
The task the University of Pennsylvania along with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico is a commendable one but the problem lies not with the program but with the student. Can they spell “grammar”?
I wish great luck to both students and professors. With one observation only: being bilingual is only one part of the story.
Being an honest journalist – which is surely part of the U.S. Embassy-sponsored course’s objective – is a different teaching, particularly in Mexican journalism.