Francisco Wild Tongue Thesis

This seminar was about the Rehabilitating the "Wild Tongue" Philosophy at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. The speaker, Francisco Guajardo, divided his presentation into four major parts. Francisco starts off by giving a background information of his life. In the first few minutes of the presentation, I learned Francisco belonged to an immigrant family. His family migrated to the United States, in search for a better life. Francisco grew up in the city of Elsa, Texas beside his two brothers. Francisco first language was Spanish, but he later was introduced to the English language. While Francisco attended his first year of elementary school, his classroom became a test trial for bilingual instruction. Francisco states that rushing a Spanish speaking child into an English classroom will affect their language development.
The child will not comprehend the language causing them to drop out in the long run.
Francisco shows an interview , he conducted, that involved elders in the bilingual education. Ramon Billescas, the interviewee, tells a story about his school experience. He mentions a story where he was spanked because he was speaking Spanish. Francisco included this in his presentation, in order, for the audience understand the overall concept. Furthermore, he explained the rationale for making UTRGV a fully integrated bilingual, bi-cultural and bi-literate institution. Francisco spoke about the initiative and the absence of bilingualism at
UTRGV. In his presentation, Francisco discussed the roots of bilingualism at UTRGV'S predecessors. Finally, Francisco mentioned a student of Pan American University had written about her experience in the institution. In the book, Borderlands/La Frontera, the author wrote about the prejudice against Spanish.