“Mi casa es tu casa.”

So say students living in Casa Hispanica, a Spanish learning community located on the second floor of Willow Hall, who practice their Spanish conversation skills with other members of the house.

“We’re going to focus on conversation,” said Adriana Santos, senior in business management and management information systems from Colombia. “It’s easier to read, write or understand than to speak a different language, so the purpose of the house is to improve their communication skills.”

Santos, the peer mentor for Casa Hispanica, said it is her job to encourage the members of the learning community to use Spanish.

“My role is talking to them in Spanish,” she said. “I have to correct them; I have to go to their rooms, talk to them, make sure they are speaking Spanish when they are supposed to and not English.”

The students on the floor are required to speak Spanish from 4 p.m. until midnight.

“We want them to get out of that shell of not speaking Spanish,” Santos added. “We want them to not feel afraid of going up to someone who speaks Spanish and doesn’t speak English and saying ‘Hey, how are you doing; can I help you?'”

Besides motivating students to stick to the ground rules for the group, Santos also organizes events for Casa Hispanica.

“I have to get them involved with other clubs that can provide them with different opportunities to speak the language, which is the main purpose of the house,” she said.

Santos said she has to build a rapport with the members of the learning community in order to help them with their Spanish.

“I pretty much have to be their friend before I can be their mentor,” she said. “English is my second language, and I know how it feels to make a mistake; I know how it feels not to be able to communicate as you would like to.”

The members of Casa Hispanica are doing better than originally expected, Santos said.

“At the beginning it’s a joke, and now it’s becoming serious and they’re coming out of a shell,” she said.

Tara Gentry, senior in Spanish and education, is the resident assistant of Arnquist House, the home of the Spanish-speaking learning community. Gentry said the perception of the floor as an entirely Spanish-speaking house is misleading.

“It’s actually Arnquist floor with all kinds of residents, and then there is a Spanish-learning community on the floor called Casa Hispanica, which has 18 participants,” she said.

Gentry also is a member of Casa Hispanica, in addition to being the RA of Arnquist House. She said that in the future, Casa Hispanica may expand to an entire floor in the residence halls.

“Eventually, hopefully, it will be a whole floor because it will be much more conducive to the purpose,” she said. “Right now, it’s pretty difficult because there’ll be a bunch of us talking, and some people won’t be in Casa Hispanica so we’ll be speaking in English.”

Santos said there was concern that Casa Hispanica would not integrate well with the other residents of Arnquist House.

“The other members of the house thought that we were going to have all kinds of Spanish things going on or Hispanic people walking around the floor and not have them involved,” Santos said. “But I talked to the whole floor, and they know that they’re invited.”

Gentry said she is pleased at how well the residents of Arnquist have melded together.

“Part of my job as an RA is to make sure there is harmony on the floor, so it will be interesting to see how that will work. So far everyone has been pretty cool about it,” Gentry said.

“The majority of the [residents], we’ve discovered, actually speak Spanish because it’s so popular to take in high school,” she said. “They’ll listen, they’ll pipe in occasionally. They’re pretty comfortable with it. Occasionally, they’ll look at each other with sideways glances and laugh.”

Dan Moeller, freshman in civil engineering, said he has not been affected by the presence of Casa Hispanica on Arnquist floor.

“I haven’t even noticed a difference,” he said.

Santos said that the residents of Arnquist floor have been very understanding of the purposes of Casa Hispanica.

“So far we have not seen any problems; everyone is respectful of each other,” Santos said. “They know that it’s going to be beneficial to the members of the learning community.”