I am nineteen, and my best friend Franny has dragged me uptown and onto the roof of her boyfriend Oscar’s building. Franny and Oscar met when she caught him stealing jewelry at a store she worked at in SoHo. He’s a tall, skinny, twenty-something Dominican kid with a goatee, who still lives with his grandma and wears big belt buckles and the type of man-jewelry you might expect to find on an 18th-century pirate. I have no idea why Franny is with this kid when we could walk into almost any bar in New York and some fool would scramble up to us, offering to pay for Franny’s drinks – mine too – just for the opportunity to talk to her.
Franny had orchestrated a double date for us. We meet Oscar at this bar uptown that doesn’t ID. My date is one of Oscar’s cousins; let’s call him Damien. He is the type of green-eyed, light-skinned Dominican kid who has been told exactly how handsome he is his whole life. I can tell that Damien isn’t pleased about this match. I am the opposite of Franny – five-feet-two, with a thirteen-year-old’s face. I still have braces and just recently had a hard time getting into an R-rated movie. On this blind date, I am the obvious dud.
We start by playing an hour and a half of unsuccessful pool — unsuccessful mostly because I stop playing. I can’t get past how pool is just an excuse for some guy to creep up behind you, slip his hand along your arm to reposition the cue, and then press his body against yours. I’d seen this same scene play out in real life and in movies a dozen times, and the clichéd gesture is enough to make the whole night feel irredeemable and corny. I drink one cheap beer after another just to forget that I am bored.
Two am, we travel back to Oscar’s building. Damien and I sit, drunk, on the edge of the roof, watching the city tilt and whirl while Franny and Oscar smoke and make out on the stairs. The conversation between us lulls, and we keep looking longingly at our friends, hoping they will stop kissing so we can all crawl back home before dawn breaks. At one point Damien calls out to Oscar, and Oscar turns around, annoyed, and says: “Just kiss her already, man.”
To which Damien whimpers, “I can’t. She wants to go!” Which makes me sort of feel bad for him. Damien is far more handsome than his cousin Captain Hook, but it’s obvious that Oscar is the one calling the shots.
“It’s okay,” I say, then try to commiserate with Damien while looking out at the city. I want to feel inspired at that moment by the landscape, but instead I just feel blah.
Damien starts to speak Spanish, and I don’t understand what he is saying. When he realizes this, he looks at me with surprise and mild disgust. “You don’t speak Spanish?”
“Not too much,” I say. “A little bit.”
“But aren’t you proud of who you are?”
All my sympathy for Damien evaporates at that moment, replaced by something murky and grey.
You can’t understand how much I want the language, I want to tell him, how I love it maybe even more than you do, because you have the words, and I don’t.
Some version of that conversation has played out over and over again in my life.
I can remember being nine years old, wading with my little sister in the water at a beach in Puerto Rico. Our mother had sent us to live with our grandparents for the summer while she underwent surgery. We were obsessed with the water, the way that we could see the sand crumbling around our toes. There was nothing like this water in New York. So clear. So blue.
A group of kids surrounded us, wanting to play. One, with hair curling around her face, figured out quickly that we couldn’t speak Spanish.
¿Pero, de dónde eres tú?
The beach was loud with music and people.
“New York,” my sister and I shouted.
And then the kids surrounded us, splashing water in our faces. “Nueva York,” they shouted back, slapping the water with their tiny hands.
They circled around my sister and tried to dunk her, and I pushed them away. There were too many of them, though, and at one point I found myself pushed underneath the water, where their words were muted, unknowable, warped by the waves.
My mother and I argue over whether I can speak Spanish. It’s a common argument, and it goes something like this:
“Yes, you can,” she says. “You spoke Spanish till you were four.”
And then I say something like, “I’m pretty sure that I can’t.”
In another version of this argument, she says, “I always tried to teach you, but you never wanted to learn.”
Me: “I always wanted to learn.”
Who knows which one of us is telling the truth? Maybe my mother is lying, due to guilt or regret. For years, she was a bilingual special-needs preschool teacher. She loved Spanish – spoke it all day, in the classroom and at home. I know that she wishes I could speak the language as she does. Perhaps she feels guilty because I can’t.
I went away to graduate school. In the South I heard about some Latino immigrant families who intentionally do not teach their kids Spanish, so their children will assimilate more easily. That is an important story to tell, but I want to make it clear that it is not mine. When it comes to language and culture, my family has always been proud.
No, this is more of a story about disappearance.
Once an old boss asked me smugly, “How come all the Puerto Ricans I know can’t speak Spanish?”
I wanted to say, “What language do you speak, asshole?”
But I’ve thought about this question before. I can’t speak for anybody else, and I know quite a few Puerto Ricans fluent in Spanish who’d bristle at his comment. But I also know a lot of Puerto Rican kids like me who can’t speak the language, and I suspect it has something to do with the Island’s long history of being colonized, the sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the mid-twentieth century, the attempted Americanization of its schools, the bombings in Vieques, the way thousands of Puerto Rican men were shipped off to fight during World War I, the disintegration of the island’s economy. Perhaps this disappearance of language is just another fucked-up effect of colonialism. Just one more death.
Maybe my mother is telling the truth. Maybe I did begin with both Spanish and English. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a shopping cart in Puerto Rico and extending my hand towards a shelf, asking for chocolate in Spanish. And sometimes when I’m forced to speak the language at a party or to a parent, I am surprised at how much I can say. The words float to the surface, weirdly whole, from a deep, dark crevice in my brain.
Sometimes I can feel the language become more accessible to me, like a letter unfolding. I can recognize each syllable. All of a sudden, the meaning has bloomed. Other times, I am aware of exactly how much I do not know: the many mistakes I’ve made trying to speak. Perhaps there are even more mistakes that I haven’t yet noticed. I begin to fear there is this version of myself I’m projecting in Spanish that is all wrong, that is the opposite of how I feel inside. More often than not I am mortified at the stupid things that come out of my mouth.
But, more than shame, I feel an enormous sense of loss.
When I speak on the phone to my great-grandmother, who has dementia and has lost almost all of her English, I repeat the same things in Spanish over and over again: ¿Cómo te vas? Te extraño. ¿Que estas haciendo hoy?
Inside I know that these words are not enough.
I finished graduate school last year, and — like most writers — ended up scrambling for jobs. I tried at one point to get a gig at community center in Nashville that services Latino folks, but I knew I’d have to improve my Spanish.
These days I’ve been trying to become more fluent by talking to my mother and my friends in Spanish. It is humbling, having to stop every few seconds to figure out a word, knowing that I’ve butchered the grammar, asking somebody to repeat something, one more time. Otra vez. Again. Oh, dear, how could I have fucked up the gender? How could I have made such an obvious mistake, one that a native speaker would never make? Obviously I am not at home in the language of my own home. What does that even mean?
In English, I speak fast. I’m loud, perhaps even annoying, depending on who you ask. In Spanish, I feel like I am perpetually blushing: polite, apologetic, and scared.
I explain this to my Honduran buddy Jero on Gchat. He is fluent in Spanish and is learning Chinese. He says that he knows the feeling: “Whenever I have to write or talk in Chinese, I always remember my mother and all of the immigrants who live in this country and can’t speak English.”
Since then I’ve tried to force myself to speak Spanish with Latino folks with limited English, something I’ve always intentionally avoided because I was afraid of what they would think, how they would look at me, once they figured out how badly I spoke the language. But lately I have started to think: Why put the awkwardness on them? To speak English well in this country is its own privilege. Why not shift that discomfort onto myself?
“Solamente, necesitas practicar,”one woman explained to me. “Find as many teachers as you can.”
I have. My friends, my mother, my grandmother…I am grateful for them all.
I relate to this and many of the commenters so hard. I am constantly grappling with my Latina and White identities, and my poor Spanish skills are really strongly tied into that. My relationship with the Cuban side of my blood relatives ends at my mom and her sisters, because they hadn't been on good terms with their parents until very recently. I frequently feel unmoored and disconnected from that part of my identity, and I find it so difficult to explain – especially since I very much benefit from my Whiteness, and feel guilty that that particular pain of confused identity is pretty trivial in comparison to the struggles of many other Latinas.
On the other hand, my grandfather on my stepdad's side has been a poet all his life, and has always gently encouraged me to improve my Spanish, but it just never happened. I wish I could converse with him about his life, his poetry, and maybe even make a pass at some good translations (studied and wrote poetry in college), but it just always seems to fall to the bottom of my priorities list. I've said this before, but I've always wondered why there aren't more specialized language classes available for the many, many people who have some Spanish background but have, for whatever reasons, lost their former or potential fluency.
This was a fascinating article. Language is SO emotional.
I related to this article quite hard since my cousin's husband is Guatemalan-American, and for the longest time it was confusing to me & my family why they never seemed happy when we sent children's books in Spanish to them for their children, and why the cousin never spoke in Spanish with me or my ex-husband (a Spaniard). But then gradually we realized he must not actually speak Spanish — it must be what a friend calls "homey Spanish," some fragmented words, instead of fluency — and he also must not really want to just say that to others/admit it to himself for personal and family identity reasons, and that's why he didn't just tell us but let us guess. (We know how to edit out regionalisms from our speech because we are in North America all the time – we can speak "international Spanish" — so it's not that). It was the saddest realization!
Language ability goes in and out of dormancy, which is something I really struggle with because I try to keep 3-4 languages up to speed in my head (and am not able to do that with 2 others I once learned and could once communicate in, which makes me sad). But it's really important to remember that language skill comes back — usually about 2 weeks of immersion in a country where it is spoken will make a language come back into fluency. Little things like always listening to the radio in a language other than the one currently surrounding you make a big difference in keeping a language active. Also just think of all the people you deeply respect who speak English with an accent or small errors, and then channel that when you speak the other language — your language use, errors, accent, and all, is a representation of the complex path you have taken that lies between different cultures, and that is beautiful.
p.s. I think one of the reasons that language loss/gain/switching is so emotional is because we have to be a slightly new person in the other language, because it is a new cultural context. And the new language divides up concepts differently, has different etiquette, different expectations, etc. We do this all the time in our mother tongue — we switch diction and tone and even how we carry our bodies depending on if we are out with best friends or doing a job interview or speaking with a parent's business acquaintances or whatever — but we do it without thinking, and doing it in a new culture requires some awareness which throws people. People don't want to feel different from their usual selves. But once you accept that you're doing it — and that we were never stable selves in the first place anyway — and have some fun with it — everything goes much better!
That's probably why the transition is especially hard/painful to manage if you feel like the new cultural context is *already* supposed to be part of your essential identity and it becomes confusing to have to change, or adjust, or be someone new in a language that was supposed to be *yours*. But everybody does that — all bilingual people have to do that, and they feel more comfortable doing some things in the other language rather than others, have certain spheres of life associated with one language and some spheres associated with another, etc. It's such a shame the US is so ardently monoglot — that also makes it harder to see good models for living between languages, and gives unrealistic ideas — like the idea that it's going to feel the same living inside one language versus inside the other.
Clearly I have lots of feelings about this!!
I have a lot of friends who grew up bilingual in Chinese and English. One of the things they did, which they resented mightily at the time, was to go to Chinese School every Saturday. That is, they learned to write characters and formal grammar. However, it stuck with most of my friends (not all!) as adults.
I think one thing that's difficult for people who didn't acquire a language via immersion in childhood when your brain is more receptive to language acquisition is trying to learn grammar from immersion as an adult. Yes, repetition certainly helps, but vocab is easier to get via immersion. I think as an adult, knowing "the rules" actually helps make sense of the language structure, and then you can plug in the vocab as and when you acquire it.
What I'm trying to say in a long-winded way is that it may be worthwhile for people who have a language background that they're not fluent in to do formal language lessons. You learn grammar in a structured way, and there's no (little) judgement that you "should" know (as opposed to what your relatives might imply). Also, you get a proper feeling of progress. Naturally, you'll be able to practise with your friends/relatives, without getting so tangled up in verb forms, perhaps (for example).
You would probably be able to start at an "intermediate" level rather than an absolute beginner – or in a city like New York, there may well be specific community college courses targeted at people in this position.
Ugh I FEEL this. I come from one of those Jewish families where Yiddish was a trauma language so the later generations were intentionally kept from learning it. I studied Spanish in High School, and Hebrew in college, and it's deeply frustrating to me how well my Spanish has held up given that I never use it, whereas I'm fighting with Hebrew all the time. And for all of that, I don't speak a word of my actual mamaloshen.
I worked for a time as an ESL teacher at an elementary school, and this was something that came up often, the loss of the language, almost as if by accident. I really appreciated your perspective on the Puerto Rican experience too, something I'd not considered.
The thing I hated most was when teachers would tell me, as if scandalized, that the families still spoke [insert language, usually Spanish] at home. They would always be a bit bemused when I'd respond immediately with "Good!"
Great article! I'm currently restarting my Spanish grammar lessons for the 100th time, and would love to talk to some other heritage language learners.
"Un poco. Entiendo mas de lo que puedo hablar" – my best answer for those who would ask about how much Spanish I know, and I got it from a GIF about Orange Is The New Black!
My brother has been living on the island over 10 years now and despite being Nuyorican and going back and forth for a long while, he's still called a "gringo" sometimes.
This was an amazing, beautiful article and one I can identify with so much. I immigrated to the States when I was 8, and as I grew up, I started to favor English in usage in practically all aspects of my life to the point that my native language, Tagalog, became difficult to speak. I mean, it wasn't exactly easy to find someone other than my family, which spoke English to me as much as Tagalog, in school. So, as time passed it became harder and harder to iterate what I wanted to say – most times setting for Taglish or giving up and just saying it in English. I can understand it much better than I speak it, however, but it's not the same as being able to communicate the way I want – not having to stumble over words, making dumb mistakes, taking my sweet time to reply, forgetting the word to use, relying on the same phrases over and over again…. Language is more of an intimate subject than one would think, and this article shows how much. Thanks for writing it!
Thank you. This article hits home in a lot of ways.
(a Korean-American who feels a lot of shame over her language skills)