English Speaking Cruise Ship Workers from Huanchaco: Language as a Gateway to the World

INTRODUCTION

Surfing. Sunsets on the Pacific. The second-oldest church in all of South America. Stunning archaeological ruins and community-wide festivals with fireworks, live music, and dancing. All of these things make Huanchaco, Peru sound like the next hot travel destination. Indeed, much of HuanchacoÕs commercial activity caters to tourists. However, even though tourism is the most promoted industry in this rapidly growing community, a large percentage of its members are doing what they can to learn English and leave Peru to work for U.S. and European owned cruise lines. I had the opportunity over the course of a five-week field school in Huanchaco to meet and talk to people at various stages in the process of obtaining such a job. I set out researching for this paper in hopes of gaining a grasp of who in Huanchaco learns English to work with tourists, who leaves Huanchaco to use their language skills on cruise ships and how this affects the course of their lives.

Because tourism seems to be so widely embraced as a tool for local economic development, I think it significant that another option is so widely chosen by members of the younger generation. This became clear to me during my first conversation about cruise ships, which took place between me and a Huanchacan man named Marco* who is currently taking classes to prepare for an interview with Royal Carribean cruises. After explaining to me that the economic situation in Peru is disastrous, he informed me that up to 30% of Huanchacan men and women between the ages of 22 and 30 are currently working on cruise ships, trying to earn a better living than is possible in their hometowns. Such a statistic makes a compelling case for the importance of cruise ship employment in Huanchacan society.

In a region living under economic duress with limited opportunities for wage-earning, I feel it is important to understand one popular employment option available to young Huanchacans from a cultural perspective. With so many young people leaving, it seems that cruise ship employment must be having a great cultural impact on the people of Huanchaco. It occurred to me upon starting this project that one facet of this impact might be found in the decision to learn English, since this is one of the largest obstacles to overcome in order to work on a cruise ship. For this reason, I have chosen to explore how learning English is achieved, why English is so widely embraced in Huanchaco, how English is used on cruise ships and the impact of learning and leaving on the family.

BACKGROUND

I became interested in studying this topic because it is relevant to connecting my two areas of study, Spanish and Anthropology. I am always interested in the effect of language on the dynamics of culture. In the case of cruise ship workers from Huanchaco, I wanted to know if there were cultural patterns in the act of learning English and leaving Huanchaco to work with tourists. Additionally, the lives of the people I wanted to meet for this project mirrored my own. I made the decision to learn Spanish and to leave my family and friends in Tacoma, Washington to travel and study. In addition to living in different states of the US and going to field school in Huanchaco, I have spent three months studying in Cuernavaca, Mexico with a great deal of language immersion. These experiences have changed me as a person; I know more of the world, which in turn has changed how I see my hometown, friends and family. However, learning Spanish and leaving home is not a phenomenon that occurs in my hometown as frequently as the opposite occurs in Huanchaco. This made me wonder, what could motivate such a large demographic of people to learn a new language and leave their homes, and how does their family and community deal with this decision?

More context for my project came from reading Erve ChamberÕs book, Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. When discussing tourism and language, Chambers points out that "tourist languages are usually dominant in touristic exchanges," to the point that a great deal of time is spent training employees in tourist languages while tourists themselves are not expected to study the language of their host community (105). I was curious upon arriving in Huanchaco to see the extent to which the people I met would expect me to know Spanish and how many people would have learned English for the sole purpose of communicating with tourists like me. ChamberÕs work also helped me delineate the dynamics of learning English for tourists in Huanchaco; I came to see that there are those who learn English in order to work with the tourists here in Huanchaco, but that there must be something that inspires Huanchacans to actually leave Peru and use their English and their experience with tourists to work on cruise ships. Could exposure to English-speaking tourists in Huanchaco act as a gateway to working with them on cruise ships?

Issues of immigrant workers are also of interest to me because I have had contact with many Spanish-speaking workers and their families. Having worked at various factories in the Tacoma area, IÕve gotten to know a handful of people who have uprooted mostly from Mexico to find work and support their families. What is more, practically the entire janitorial and food service staff at Saint MaryÕs College, where I matriculate, consists of contracted immigrant workers, and I have been lucky enough to make acquaintance with a few of them. Since these workers are hired to do everything from preparing our meals to vacuuming our dorms and maintaining our yards, it is nearly impossible for me to miss this demographic. We also had a living wage campaign on our campus, which struggled to earn our workers a wage that met the cost of living in the East Bay area of northern California. As a result of this exposure I try to learn as much as I can about the lives of people who work as foreigners for US companies.

METHODS

I have collected data by having conversations with many different people involved in learning English for work on cruise ships or for selling crafts to English speaking tourists. I have spoken with two men, Marco and Fernando, who wish to work on cruise ships and are in different stages of achieving that goal; I have spoken with a young man named Enrique about his experiences applying for and working his job on a cruise ship; I have spoken with the director of a cruise training center about the kinds of training his students go through; and I have spoken Dolores and Clara, the respective aunt and mother of a young man currently working on a cruise ship. I also met a woman named Susie who has studied English in order to sell more crafts at her artisanÕs booth by the waterfront in Huanchaco and a family whose son learned English partially as a result of his contact with tourists while working at their artisanÕs booth.

My talks with the people involved in my project were either ethnographic interviews with no planned structure or semi-structured interviews in which I had a few questions ready to prompt my contacts. Since I was not trying to make a comparative analysis between peopleÕs experiences, I avoided quantitative research methods. Instead, I set out to create a body of information that included personal stories and insights that would help me describe peopleÕs lives as they were affected by the option of cruise ship employment.

Thankfully I have enough Spanish skills to understand the people I spoke with without needing a translator, but as it is not my first language and the dialect of Spanish spoken in Huanchaco is not the one I am most familiar with, there is no doubt that some things were lost in translation. Additionally I have translated peopleÕs words and summarized them in English for this paper, so another slice of meaning will have been lost in this process as well. Another limitation on the research I did is the brevity of my stay here in Huanchaco. Five weeks can never be adequate for understanding the lives of an entire community, but I do feel that I gained some understanding of the people I talked with directly and that insight can be gained from their stories. One other limitation is the fact of my personality, which leans to the shy side. For someone who speaks the language and is a fairly good conversationalist, I could have been more social and visited my contacts more often. This stems also from being a typical American tourist who is not normally comfortable shooting the breeze with every other person she meets. Luckily I was able to overcome this personal and cultural barricade enough to make a few friends and gain some insight into my topic.

DISCUSSION

The first prerequisite for gaining cruise ship employment is basic English mastery. Everyone I spoke to anticipated or had already been through a first interview spoken completely in English, possible with a gringo representative from the cruise line. However, learning English or wanting to learn it is common enough in the Huanchaco/Trujillo area. From personal experience I know that gringos walking down the street receive hails of "Hello! Hello!" shouted out to them by Peruvians young and old, male and female (mostly males took an interest in speaking English with me, but I doubt I am an unbiased measure in this instance). Many people would like to practice their English with gringos and see wandering tourists as possible helpers in their quest for language mastery. My classÕs Peruvian tour guide at the ancient Chimœ ruins of Chan Chan made it clear to us (in English) that we people who greet us in English might want to practice and that we should be friendly and talk to them. She herself learned English through cassette tapes and by practicing with tourists.

Actually mastering English in Huanchaco is not an easy task. Physiologically speaking, it is easiest to learn a new language before the age of twelve. However, most of my sources said that only a few grade schools and high schools in the area offer English courses and that their scope is very basic. English is not a carrera (like a "major" in the U.S.) offered in the universities, so one must enroll in and pay for separate courses at the university to learn English. The best places to learn English are institutos, of which there are a plethora in Trujillo. These are institutes created solely for teaching English and offer three levels Ð basic, intermediate and advanced Ð which can be completed in three years total. This is assuming that the English-learner in question has the plata (cash) to pay the monthly fees charged at the institutos, which not everyone has. As a result, it would probably take the average Huanchacan much more than three years to complete an instituto education.

Because of this and similar hardships, alternatives can be taken in order to expedite the English learning process. One young man I spoke to named Enrique has already spent some time working on cruise ships and described to me how he dealt with his poorer months while he tried to learn English. He invested in a DVD player so that he could watch movies in English, he listened to music in English and he spoke with any tourists that he could. He practiced with an acquaintance who sold crafts near his fatherÕs stand on the beach, and anything that he saw with English written on it he would try to translate. "Lo m‡s loco que hice (the craziest thing I did)" he told me, was to follow some British tourists around and spend over 6 hours with them in a pub just to practice English. I met a woman named Susie who is learning English to help her sell crafts at her store on the waterfront; she has studied at an instituto but also practices with tourists because it is a financial burden to study at an instituto all year round. Fernando, an older man I spoke to who has already been hired by Carnival cruise lines, cannot go to an instituto because he works 12 hour shifts every day except the weekends; he pays a private instructor on Saturdays and Sundays so that he can keep practicing for when he earns enough money to leave the country to work for Carnival. In fact, the most popular way for me to reciprocate my informantsÕ kindness was to help them practice their English.

In light of all the effort the people I met have put forth to learn English, one begins to wonder why speaking English is seen as such a desirable skill. Beside the more obvious fact that English is a prerequisite for working on cruise ships, there does seem to be an overwhelming desire on the part of many Spanish-speakers in the area to learn English. As I mentioned above, it seems to the gringo walking down the street that every Huanchacan wants to speak English. One compelling explanation for why the people of this region would wish to speak English is that they generally want to be able to talk to everyone who crosses their path. It is customary for a Huanchacan to give a greeting to most anyone s/he meets in the ordinary business of their day, and gringos are no exception. This could explain why many people have troubled to learn, "Hello, how are you?" since this is what they would normally say to acquaintances in Spanish.

When more interaction is required, such as in the selling of crafts, more English is necessary for Spanish-speakers to feel comfortable. I asked Susie if learning English helped her sell crafts, and she said yes because it made her less awkward with English-speaking tourists. She told me that, when you cannot speak the language, "no sabes que hacer, y te pones as’ (you donÕt know what to do and you act like this)." She tightened her shoulders, crossed her arms over her chest and looked from side to side. Awkwardness seems to be something most people I talked to try to avoid. An older lady I spoke with named Clara, whose sister Dolores owns a restaurant that accommodates tourists, helped me toward this conclusion; she said that many tourists are fr’os (cold) and do not talk much with people who try to greet them. Since most US and European tourists are not accustomed to constantly talking with strangers, learning English could be a way to try and make tourists feel comfortable enough to open up and dissolve the awkward barrier between themselves and the owners of the businesses that cater to them.

With so many people already learning English in order to work with tourists, it is not surprising that many young people would undertake to learn English in order to work for cruise lines. However, it seems that the function of learning English changes once a younger Huanchacan applies to work on a cruise ship. English becomes the central part of the interviewing process Ð a determinant of who is qualified. After visiting the International Cruise Training Center in Trujillo, I realized that there are a great deal of job skills that cruise lines like Royal Carribean expect their workers to attain before leaving home. Classes in cleaning rooms, bar and restaurant service and cooking are helpful rŽsumŽ builders for potential cruise ship workers. Among the myriad of other things one must go through to gain employment on cruise ships, English training appears to be one more skill learned to become a good worker. Consequently, little interpersonal exchange with tourists seems likely to result from the English learned to work on a cruise ship; as most workers start cleaning in kitchens and cabins, contact with English speaking tourists would be minimal compared to such contact in Huanchaco. One word I heard often in descriptions of work on cruise ships was, beside trabajo muy fuerte (very hard work), was encerrado (enclosed). I started to get a feeling of being trapped in oneÕs place of work for months on end while working long hours, which contrasts sharply with the open and talkative way Huanchacans tend to work with tourists.

Despite these working conditions, it seems that many people hope that working on cruise ships will help them get to know the world and meet new kinds of people. The kind of reciprocal tourism in which many Huanchacans participate in their hometowns Ð in which they get to know different peoples of the world through visitors to their community Ð seems to be the goal for working on cruise ships. While everyone I spoke with said that young people go away to work because of the economic situation in Peru, everyone also spoke of how they or their loved ones hoped to get to know the world through traveling on cruise ships. Clara, whose son Antonio is currently working on a cruise ship, told me that he left "para conocer el mundo, viajar, independizarse (to see the world, travel, become an independent person)." Even Fernando, who stressed that his economic situation was a huge factor in his decision to work as a mechanic for Carnival cruise lines, hopes to use his shorter mechanicÕs hours to his advantage and visit the places at which his boat will dock. He spoke at length about seeing Europe: "Pues, no es todo el mundo, pero al menos es una parte (Well, it isnÕt the whole world, but at least itÕs one part)." Enrique had already worked several months on a cruise ship and been sent home to recover from a serious burn, and expressed great pride at having realized his dream of seeing Miami. Marco hopes to see more of the world through his work and eventually be able to see the interior of the United States.

While many young Huanchaqueros are getting to visit new places through their employment on cruise ships, it does change their relationship with their families and their hometown. I asked Clara how she reacted when she learned that her son Antonio was going to leave to work on a cruise ship, and she shook her head repeatedly, crossed her arms across her chest and said, "No quise (I didnÕt want it)." Dolores told me that young people who leave to work on cruise ships return to their families, "m‡s duros, m‡s fr’os (harder, colder)." In addition to working hours of up to 16 hours a day doing manual labor and living with strangers in small cabins, workers have limited communication with their families. Clara told me that Antonio calls home and sends e-mails, but that did not seem to change the effect his separation had on her.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

My research has brought me closer to understanding the dynamics of language and culture in Huanchaco. My initial question of whether or not learning English to work with tourists in Huanchaco leads young people to consider working on cruise ships seems to have brought out different aspects of this dynamic. English learning is embraced in the community because it eases cultural barriers between residents and tourists, and because it helps Huanchacans learn about other places in the world. As a result, young people have a short step to take to learning English to work with tourists abroad, where they will get to know even more of the world. However, this decision leads to the painful act of leaving family and hometown behind and also to working long hours at a difficult job.

On the other hand, different takes could be given by other students. My conclusions are shaped by my personal background, the length of my stay and the logistics of meeting enough people and understanding enough about their lives in order to give an in-depth discussion. I think the connections among language, culture and tourism are worthwhile topics for exploration, and that future research should be done to understand how learning English has affected the residents of Huanchaco. For example, I am still not completely sure why many residents seem to be fascinated by tourists, and I believe there are more reasons than Huanchacan friendliness and openness (and the desire to attract business) that could explain why so many people would like to speak with tourists.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all of the people who have aided me with my research. All my informants were very generous with their time and I wish I could do more to reciprocate this helpfulness. If I could give what I would most like, I would I wish luck to Marco, that he succeeds in his training and his interview, to Fernando, that he may soon see the ocean from a boatÕs deck and enjoy shorter hours instead of spending all day inside, to Enrique, that his return to work on his cruise ship takes him to new and amazing places, to Susie, that she may continue to make friends from all over the world by selling crafts and learning new languages, and to Clara and Dolores, that they may keep attracting tourists to the restaurant and that they hear from Antonio very soon. I also would like to thank my professor Bonnie and T.A. Chad for helping me get out and meet people (and sometimes bringing them to my door), and for guidance during the whole trip. Many thanks to my classmates/fellow travelers/friends: you all helped me relax and enjoy a new a sometimes overwhelming place and I could never have succeeded without you all. And of course, thanks to my mom, who convinced me I should go in the first place and then let me go when it was time to leave.