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center for writing | minnesota writing project | mwp invitational summer institute | institute fellows 2019

Julie Pokaski

©2019

Immigrant Stories

Author’s Note: This is a script that was written to accompany a digital story, so it is a script that is meant to be shared orally. 

 

My mother’s goal was to keep all of her teeth until she was 90. 

It would have been a pretty impressive feat, considering that my mother, without indoor plumbing on her family’s farm in rural Italy, rarely brushed her teeth as a kid. (She’d later attribute her good dental health to the lack of sugary, processed foods in her childhood, claiming that was the reason she had all her teeth while my father, born and raised in Boston, Massachusett, did not.) 

My mother, with her parents and five out of her ten siblings, came to the United States in 1968. She celebrated her 12th birthday during the boat ride over. As one of the few siblings who was too young to immediately work, my mother was enrolled in Boston Public Schools (the school district I would later graduate from myself). When she got to school, she told me, they put her with a group of students who were supposedly at a second or third grade reading level--I remember her telling me that because she spoke Italian and didn’t speak much English, they thought she was stupid. And she told me she worked and worked until they finally put her in a level that truly matched her ability.

My mom was the youngest of her seven siblings who stayed in the U.S. and one of two who completed high school and received a college degree. 

A couple of my friends have commented something along the lines of "wow--you would never know your mom was born in Italy!," which, to be honest, I don’t think my mother would be too fond of. She told me "never date an Italian man--they are too traditional!”, but was always immensely proud of her Italian heritage. From her own experience and that of her siblings, she knew that the system automatically disadvantages immigrants--and she worked against those inequities in her eventual work as an ESL teacher. She also recognized a variety of other ways the system oppresses, and challenged my ideas about race. As a teenager, I found these questions cringy and embarrassing. Ten years later, as a teacher, I see how fundamental and essential these questions are. 

My mom was only 54 when she died, but--she did have all her teeth. When she died, I was 19--and had just taken some of my first education classes.  I’d like to think that she had hope for me that persisted through my brushing off of her critical questioning, and I wish she could see the educator I am today.