ESL students unite in common goal: opportunities

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As a 16-year-old visiting his sister in Chicago for the first time, Jorge Diaz was struck by one thing.

“The city was so big. Everything was big. Cars, airports, streets, people…height and width,” he adds with a laugh. “Big parks, big buildings, big lakes.”

Not that any of this should have surprised him. Growing up in Santiago, Chile, Diaz’s main impression of the U.S. was based on episodes he’d seen of the popular TV show “Dallas,” an “everything’s bigger in Texas” soap opera with big hair and bigger drama. But the sheer size of Chicago still impressed him.

While Chicago’s neighborhoods seemed vast and overwhelming, Diaz managed to find a diverse but connected community in Hyde Park. Ensconced within the University of Chicago campus, Diaz was surrounded by people from all backgrounds and nationalities. He had come for vacation, but was swayed into moving here permanently by the culture and opportunity the U.S. seemed to offer.

Upon arrival, Diaz immediately began taking English classes, for a suggested donation of $25 a month. Diaz learned basic grammar and conversation, alongside 12 to 15 fellow immigrants. His classmates were “Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Romanians, one Mexican, two Africans, one from Nigeria and one from Ethiopia, one Argentinean boy and myself,” he lists. He was the youngest. Some of the others were over 40 years old.

The class met four days a week for two hours. Often, their teacher would lead field trips to different neighborhoods of the city, or into museums and the Shedd Aquarium. (Diaz’s personal favorite outing.) On some Saturdays, particularly dedicated members of the class would meet in whoever’s house was available, to get to know each other a little better and practice the conversational skills they had learned that week.

 “No matter where you were from, we were all after a goal. We were committed,” Diaz says.

Their goals and motives were as diverse as their backgrounds. For one young “go-getter” woman from Romania, it was a dream of studying Anthropology. For others, it was to begin taking classes at a community college and then begin work. For Diaz, it was his sheer frustration at not being able to effectively communicate in the U.S., an obstacle that became even clearer after meeting a young woman from Mississippi. She was as unlearned in Spanish as he was in English.

“A girl asked me out one time, [and] I was surprised,” Diaz says. Diaz managed to understand the time and place of their date in his self-described “broken English”, and met her at the Medici café in Hyde Park. The date continued for 3 ½ hours, Diaz’s dictionary sitting on the table next to their plates. He spent the meal scanning its pages for answers to her questions as fellow customers looked on curiously. “It was like a back-and-forth interview for a job. We talked about who I was and who she was.” As frustrated as they both felt, Diaz said the chemistry was clear enough, and the two ended up dating for over a year.

“I felt the need more than ever to express myself. I felt blocked,” he explains. “I guess that’s why within six months I was communicating in very basic English.”

Regardless of their motivations, be it university course work or conversation with a crush, Diaz and his classmates worked toward becoming fluent, and one day, successful, Diaz says, who now loves his work as a self-employed carpenter.

 “Regardless of the culture or country we were coming from, we related to each other in one common thing: opportunities.”