Word: tijerina
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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Until he was 14, squat, jolly, Texas-born Felix Tijerina could not speak a word of English. He was like thousands of other Mexican-American children: his mother taught him to read and write in Spanish only. And had he gone to school, he might still not have learned English. At the time (1920), Texas segregated Mexican-American schoolchildren on the basis of language-a discrimination usually as enduring as skin color. According to the odds, Felix seemed doomed to stagnate behind the language-discrimination barrier for the rest of his life...
Felix was made of sterner stuff. When he went to work as a restaurant bus boy in Houston, he started with the word "catchup," painfully taught himself to speak, read and write excellent English. Today, at 54, Felix Tijerina owns a chain of thriving Texas restaurants, is president of the nationwide League of United Latin American Citizens. But civic-minded Restaurateur Tijerina has not stopped there. In his spare time, busy as a platoon of pedagogues, he has launched an assault on the language barrier. By last week Tijerina had worked out a method that may spread among Spanish-speaking...