Holding Onto Spanish

    Back in elementary school we had an after school program called YMCA. The walls were a deep blue, covered in the most motivational posters it seemed they could find. It smelled like crayons and boredom. The counselors constantly smiling should have made me unsettled but instead I was simply irritated. It was meant to be a fun place to keep us entertained while learning for an extra 3 hours. I, of course, saw it as an opportunity to make friends with people from other classes just to impress them with me and my Spanish friends. Even though I was slowly distancing myself from Spanish, focusing on English, at the time I couldn’t just drop the fluency I had. I was even thinking of having a trade off at snack time since all my friends had special spicy candy as it’s our culture. During snack time the smell of Pulparindo would fill the air and I’d mediate ongoing trades, sharing my opinion on possible unfairness. None of this however went the way I had planned as one girl from the “gifted and talented”, Autumn, refused to let Spanish shine. Instead of wanting to hear every English sentence translated like the rest of the kids, she instead tried to convince everyone that being accelerated in her studies was much better and smarter than knowing two languages. Autumn and I quickly became the loudest two in the room, eyes on us, people chiming in with their “yea’s” and “she’s got a point”, it was all too much for me. When I turned to look around at my peers for their help they quickly put their heads down, avoiding eye contact to say “I can’t defend you” or maybe “Spanish isn’t worth defending”. My heart broke into two as Autumn nodded as if she won, as the topic of conversation slowly shifted. As I sat in silence I realized my friends weren’t abandoning Spanish, instead their eyes said “My English isn’t good enough to help you” and somehow that’s worse.

With everything pushing me away from Spanish at the time, the way I felt now was different, my face felt hot, suddenly the world was out of focus and all I could see was Autumn saying Spanish was “pointless”. At this very moment Autumn had singlehandedly restored my will to keep learning and know both languages. I held onto my family’s language to prove my intelligence, when originally I was forgetting it, excelling in English, to prove my intelligence. As I watched Autumn waving her hands as she spoke, no stutter, no slip of her words into another language, no pausing to think of the right words, just confidence in herself, I knew I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be American Angie, a confident girl, no accent, and no long pauses to think of what words would come next. Could this American Angie still hold onto the Spanish that made me who I was though? 

People often think speaking English perfectly and fluently means they are smarter, like my family, and like my peers at the time. But what we all failed to realize is that knowing two languages is even stronger and just as valuable. The pressure to learn English and then need your own native language less and less is how we lose connection to our roots and hurt us much later in life. What I learned from my experiences growing up is that by the time we realize what we have lost it’s often too late since it’s harder to absorb language as fast as when we were younger so even relearning your first language is difficult enough to be discouraging. And then I’ve seen the discouraged go on to teach their kids English and lose the native language altogether. But it’s not always too late, I wish someone had been pushing me to learn Spanish. I wish someone had stopped to tell me how much I’ll miss my connection to my family through my fluency.