I’m not bilingual, but I’m still Mexican

Latina_VoicesBy Veronica Rios, Latina Voices

As a fourth generation American to a Mexican family from Guadalajara, I guess I never really knew too much about my heritage. When I hit college, I realized I was proud of a background I was never raised to know. What hit even harder is that not knowing Spanish, would make me stand out like a sore thumb to people of my same heritage.

The question I hated answering the most throughout my undergraduate years at Indiana University-Bloomington was, “Why don’t you speak Spanish?”

I guess it always bothered me most when they automatically assumed I spoke it and started speaking Spanish. What annoyed me was the question, “Aren’t you Mexican?” It almost always followed as I looked at them with a quizzical look on my face because I had no clue what they were saying.

According to a study conducted by Pew Hispanic, more than 82 percent of Latino adults surveyed say they speak Spanish, and 95 percent say it is important for future generations to speak Spanish. I’m in the minority, or the other 18 percent that doesn’t speak Spanish. Does that mean that it should be assumed that I do speak it solely because I am a Latina?

Enter my fiancé. Richie comes from a very Mexican family. His grandparents don’t speak English except for a few phrases and words. Throughout our eight years together, I would never really spend time with his family for long periods of time because I felt uncomfortable not knowing what they were saying. I felt so rude. I mean he is the man that I love and I couldn’t be in the room with his grandparents because I had no clue what they were saying. If Richie, my human translator, would leave the room, I felt helpless.

Over the years, they have generally accepted me. I even briefly had a conversation with his grandma in Spanish, and I had never felt so proud of a three-sentence conversation. However, I still feel like an outsider. Even after he proposed, I would sit there with his family awkwardly while English conversations slowly switched over to Spanish. I would miss jokes when people suddenly burst into laughter. I would just have to keep looking at Richie and have him explain what was going on.

Before I met Richie, I never interacted much with Spanish-speakers because my family never spoke it to me. My own parents didn’t even speak Spanish. My grandparents were the last ones to speak it. But they would always use it like a secret language when they wanted to speak about things they didn’t want us to understand.

Now that wedding planning has commenced, Richie is starting to push for me to embrace the need for me to learn Spanish. We have countless arguments about whether our mass should be English or Spanish, or Spanglish, or even once in Spanish and repeated in English. That would be such a long mass, in addition to it already being a traditional Catholic mass. How can I recite an eternal love to someone in a language I don’t know?

I want to be considerate of his family, some of whom are coming from Mexico and don’t speak a word of English. In the end, it is his day too, and I am trying to be open to a bilingual mass.

These are the moments I wish I could kick my young self in the face and tell her butt to learn this language. It is so frustrating to me now that I didn’t push for my grandparents to teach me. I know now that any children I have will be taught to speak both English and Spanish. It may be awkward though if my own children will speak a language that I don’t understand. Or maybe we can learn together.

The moral of my story is that I am a fourth generation Mexican-American woman. I never learned Spanish and I can honestly admit, it is one of my biggest regrets.

This article was originally published in Latina Voices.

veronica riosVeronica Rios is a journalism graduate student at Columbia College Columbia. She grew up in Hammond, Ind. and now resides in downtown Chicago.

 

[Photo by Mr. Wright]

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