Voy a hablar Ingles en clase. Here’s a pencil and a piece of paper. Now sit and write this phrase in English three hundred times: I will speak English in class.

This is only a taste of what native Spanish speaker Darlene Villicana and fellow classmates had to endure if caught speaking Spanish in school.

Villicana was born in the United States but her parents hail from San Luis Colorado, Sonora, where Villicana would sometimes cross the border to attend school.

Even though she began learning English grammar at nine, Villicana said she didn’t speak English until she was forced to at about fourteen, while living in San Luis, Ariz., a border town.

“Before then, the school system wasn’t too harsh on students that were learning English,” Villicana said. “But after this new law had entered, they didn’t allow us to speak Spanish in the classroom.”

Speak English, speak English.

“Even when we were outside playing, there would be someone outside checking on us to see if we were speaking English,” Villicana said. “It’s all about the enforcement of American identity because other cultures and languages are seen as dangerous.”

Even though everyone around her spoke Spanish, Villicana was encouraged by her parents to continue to learn the English language.

“My father wanted me to eventually study English for a better future in the United States,” Villicana said.

Villicana added she sometimes felt out of place while trying to learn English.

“I was frustrated because I wasn’t able to express myself how I wanted to express myself,” Villicana said. “Most of the time, meaning was lost and emotion was lost. My personality, to this date, isn’t the same because all of those emotions that I wasn’t able to express.”

Not being able to express her feelings reflected the tension Villicana felt in and out of school.

“When people looked at me, sometimes they would assume that I was white,” Villicana said. “So they would say things about Mexicans in front of me that I didn’t think were appropriate.”

To some, learning English is a new way of communicating, a different way of talking and a new way of relating to your surroundings, said Tom Miller, a local freelance writer and editor.

“I have always (been) fascinated at how well they pull it off,” Miller said. “I watched my wife and step-son go through the process.”

This fascination, coupled with a run-in with a colleague, eventually compelled Miller to release “How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life” last August.

“I wanted to get a wide range of people, not necessarily high profile, but a lot of them are well known in their fields,” Miller said. “There’s always some kind of context. Some kind of motivation, which could have been political, economic, or family related.”

With the release of the book, Miller said he hopes to change the perception of migrants.

“When you say migrants or migrations, generally there’s this image of an immigrant dying in the desert or somebody low income living on the edge of society,” Miller said. “You know people who have made it, and they are typical. It wasn’t as if they were exceptions.”

Miller said the media focuses on the quantitative border, which encompasses issues such as the number of people arrested, the budget for homeland security and the number of people dying. All of these things change from day to day.

“I look at the border as a qualitative border, which is the border of families, spirituality, sports, music, sex, architecture and art,” Miller said. “This is the permanent border. Those things don’t change.”