Helen T. Boursier, College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, Minnesota, USA

When the Migrant Protection Protocols were enforced along the Texas-Mexico border beginning in July 2019, a small group of Brownsville, Texas, residents organized an all-volunteer group to walk across the pedestrian bridge to Matamoros, Mexico, and provide assistance with necessary food, clothing, supplies, and tents for shelter for some 2,500 migrants seeking asylum in the United States. These migrants were forced to “remain in Mexico” for the duration of their asylum process (www.teambrownsville.org). Once Team Brownville formalized its assistance for the basic necessities for these families living out in the open along the Rio Grande River beside the Gateway International Bridge that connects Matamoros to Brownsville, the volunteers, who are primarily educators by vocation, considered how to help educate the children who were stuck in Mexico (Reyna, 2019); see Figure 1. Team Brownsville’s Escuelita de la Banqueta, sometimes referred to informally as the “sidewalk school,” uses a network of volunteer teachers to provide free education every Sunday morning for the children in Matamoros.

Figure 1. Team Brownsville core member, Francis Castillo (left), teaches middle school. (Click for larger image)

The volunteer director for Escuelita de la Banqueta, Melba Salazar-Lucio, an English professor at Texas Southmost College, located one block north of the Gateway International Bridge (www.tsc.edu), explained, “There is a fee for elementary education in Mexico. It is minimal, but when you have nothing, it is a lot to pay” (M. Salazar-Lucio, personal communication, April 24, 2020). They scheduled the school for Sunday mornings because most of the volunteers are teachers who, of course, teach school Monday through Friday (see Figure 2). The first day of class was August 11, 2019. The director remembered, “We did not get permits or ask permission from Federales or any Mexico official, we just brought our teaching supplies and started teaching the children lessons.” At the conclusion of the first hour-long session, an “important looking man asked me if I was in charge, and of course I said, ‘Yes,’” Salazar-Lucio said, adding, “He asked who gave me permission [‘No one,’] and then he rattled off all these government agencies that I needed to see to get permits. I asked him, ‘Who am I hurting? We bring all of the materials, and we are only coming here on Sunday mornings to teach the children.’ He said, ‘Well, we will just see if you can come back.’” They returned every Sunday thereafter until COVID-19 shut the border and forced Escuelita de la Banqueta to creatively engage in distance learning, using online education to remain connected with the children.

Figure 2. Children eagerly greet Dr. Melba Salazar-Lucio once she crosses the pedestrian bridge to Matamoros, Mexico. (Click for larger image)

ESOL/ESL Pedagogical Process for Migrant Children in Matamoros

Initially the school was held outside in a small plaza adjacent to the Gateway International Bridge, but later it moved a few hundred yards away to a park area (also out of view of pedestrian and car traffic at the bridge) when the Mexican government provided tents to use as “classrooms.” On a typical Sunday, the volunteers gather ahead of time to prepare two hundred gift bags to leave with the children. The bags include crayons, composition book, pencils, and pens so the children have something to use during the following week. Volunteers gather at the bus station in Brownsville to load wagons with the supplies, which they pull across the pedestrian bridge to Matamoros (seeFigure 3). Upon arrival, the volunteer teachers divide the children by age. Initially, they organized the groups based upon what grade children were in when they left their home country, but the director said, “It quickly became obvious that many of the children had never attended school before, so we began dividing them based upon their age.” The teens stay together in one group for the entire hour. All the other ages have a new teaching session every fifteen minutes. The children remain in their designated place, and the teacher brings the next lesson to them (J. D. Lucio, 2020).

Figure 3. Volunteers gather at the bus station to load wagons with school supplies to pull across the Gateway International Bridge from Brownsville, Texas, to Matamoros, Mexico. (Click for larger image)

The lessons are bilingual, with the emphasis on teaching the children English. Subjects include math, writing, geography, history, science, physical education, and art (see Figure 4). Teachers design the lessons to be interactive and engaging to help the children learn traditional education content, but also social skills, manners, letter writing, and memory-building (see Figures 5,6,7,8, and 9). They sing upbeat children’s sing-songs in English like “Hokey-Pokey” and “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” They have a giant Jenga game, but in order to pull out a block the child has to know the answer to a math problem, and yoga instructor Gina Barrett brings a team from Colorado every other month.

Figure 4. Volunteers adapt lessons to teach fifteen-minute sessions to the various age groups. (Click for larger image)

Figure 5. Geography lesson. (Click for larger image)

Figure 6. Interactive and fun. (Click for larger image)

Figure 7. Creative learning. (Click for larger image)

Figure 8. Interactive ESL engagement. (Click for larger image)

Figure 9. Fostering ESL learning. (Click for larger image)

As word about the Escuelita de la Banqueta spread through social media and newspaper and online articles, teachers traveled from across the United States to volunteer on Sunday morning with Team Brownsville in Matamoros. Organizations also have supported the all-volunteer school by providing teaching supplies and books. For example, Children in Crisis, an organization of librarians who collect books and send them to children, donated more than one thousand new books to Escuelita de la Banqueta, which made it possible to begin a library at the migrant camp in Matamoros. The children are expected to read seven books each week, and their parents make a list and sign that they either read the books to their child(ren) or witnessed the child(ren) reading them (see Figure 10).

Figure 10. A volunteer inspires love of reading. (Click for larger image)

Salazar-Lucio said, “I have ‘readers’ and I have ‘writers’—some children who want to read and others who want to write or draw.” As the school progressed and the children began using the writing supplies or reading the extra books during the week, their individual interests and skills began to emerge. She said, “We began to see children who want to read or write or draw on their own—during the week when we were not there. We also saw children who were emerging as gifted in art, so we would bring them art supplies to encourage them with their art.” The director rewards reading and writing by bringing a goodie bag filled with stuffed animals, small toys, books, puzzles, headbands, flashlights—all the things that children love. After the formal lessons conclude, children bring their parental proof of their reading and writing progress from the previous week, and each child selects a prize from the coveted bag of surprises. Love of learning spread through the migrant camp, with parents often sitting in on the lessons with the children.

The director fondly remembered when she and her husband, also an educator, crossed the bridge on a Tuesday to make dinner for the families when there were two hundred people, not the 2,500 people there are now. When she set the food supplies down on the table that they normally used for school supplies on Sunday morning, a four-year-old asked, “Que es eso maestra? [What is this teacher?]Quiero libros! [I want books!]” Salazar-Lucio said, “It was like she was asking, “Where are the books? I don’t want the food.’ She wanted food for her brain more than she wanted food for her stomach.”

When COVID-19 closed the U.S.-Mexico border and access between Matamoros and Brownsville, the Escuelita de la Banqueta joined the world in online learning to continue education in the migrant camp alongside the Río Bravo/Rio Grande (J. D. Lucio, 2020; D. Lucio, 2020). Shortly before the border closed on March 20, 2020, to all but non-essential travel, Team Brownsville had installed a large flat-screen television in each of the four small “stores” (tienditos) located throughout the migrant camp. Each store holds the donated supplies, which are monitored by a local store keeper who distributes items at no charge to the families as needs arise. The televisions became the centers for online education as children gather to learn through the video lessons Team Brownsville’s cadre of volunteer teachers provide. The director sends the digital links to Tiendito numero uno (small store number one) to the teenager in charge of the library, and to the medical center at the camp. Salazar-Lucio said, “So, we are doing bilingual online learning in a very primitive way. Most importantly, the children know that we haven’t forgotten them. We cannot see their faces, but they can see our faces each week with these online videos.”

Once COVID-19 lifts, the school is “poised and ready” for the next phase of the ESOL learning journey. Movie producer Estefania Rebellon and founder of Yes We Can World Foundation and Yes We Can Mobile Schools (www.yeswecan.world/programs), is working with Team Brownsville to set up a school in the camp using an old school bus that has been ripped out and then refitted as a portable classroom and teachers who are licensed in Mexico. It will run on weekdays and will include a formal certificate to recognize student learning achievements. The Team Brownsville Escuelita de la Banqueta will still function, but it will become enrichment rather than the mainstay/only education option. The converted classroom school bus is ready, but it has not been able to be transported to the refugee camp because of border closures. Salazar-Lucio said, “That’s the future; that’s the next step. Once the border reopens, we are poised and ready for the new beginning.”

References

Boursier, H. T. (2019). The ethics of hospitality: An interfaith response to U.S. immigration policies. Lexington Books.

Liendo-Lucio, J. D. (2020, April 25). Scavenger hunt for two dimensional figures-bilingual. [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrvUGqKHhS4&feature=share

Lucio, D. (2020, April 24). Coach Lucio’s weightlifting at home. [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iADBzU4MdrQ&fbclid=IwAR2teSr1YV0LmLTujMD9IvsjkBce7q0ALQZqJ8O7yFS1IxHC--KlNmwZGPE

Lucio, J. D. (2020, March 15). Escuelita de la banqueta. [Video file]. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41AuGjFmHTk&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0IsIKKUkWcFh8-A6juIryAtmJYEtQvf5w_6OnUFfOQniB7nPtiySqPUxs

Reyna, N. (2019, August 19). Volunteers teach classes for asylum seekers in Matamoros. The Monitor. https://www.themonitor.com/2019/08/19/volunteers-teach-classes-asylum-seekers-matamoros/

All photos © Helen T. Boursier; migrant faces blurred for privacy; shared by permission.