Searching for My Mother Tongue in My Late 20s
My “lucha de lenguas” from Spanish to English
For the first time in 21 years, I’m living in a Spanish-speaking country. I’m here to get to know myself better by getting to know where I come from. I’m here to experience living in the often great — sometimes difficult — city of Bogotá. I’m here to challenge everything that I know and unlearn the values that aren’t serving me well. I’m here to grow. I’m here to reconnect with my mother tongue.
I distinctly remember the days when I couldn’t really speak English. I was about 5 years old. I always understood English because my mom always spoke it to me but I remember it feeling foreign. It was a rougher language than Spanish and the sounds were difficult. I couldn’t quite replicate them.
But then, in 1998, we moved to the U.S. My mom, who is Cuban-American and grew up in bilingual Miami, was excited to be back. The plan was always to raise us in the U.S, where we would be educated in English and have access to American higher education opportunities.
As I cried and said goodbye to my cousins, grandparents, and to the life I knew in Colombia, I couldn’t have known what was ahead. 21 years of my lucha de lenguas, the internal battle between my languages that continues to this day.
On my first day of school in the U.S., I quickly understood the importance of speaking English to fit in. “Want to sit next to me?” said Michelle, a kind 7-year-old in Mrs. Burger’s second-grade class. I didn’t understand what she said so I said “No.” I thought she might be making fun of me. Luckily, Michelle was able to look past this initial miscommunication, becoming my first and only friend at Riverside Elementary School. It was through this first blunder that I learned:
If I wanted to blend in and make friends, I would have to speak their language.
My nascent understanding of language and power, though subconscious, fueled my edad de la kakita — the stubborn period in pre-adolescence when my bratty instincts and impulses took over. During la kakita, I wanted to evade Spanish, the language that made me different from my friends. High school brought more of the same, though with the added weight of what the future might bring.
By college, my slowly awakening sense of social justice was rearing its head, leading me to question my identity and reconsider my subconscious self-judgments. I started to understand that biculturalism and bilingualism are beautiful isms to embody. The idea of coming back to Colombia to deepen my relationship with those isms started to gain strength.
Now that I’m here — I wage a daily battle with my tongue.
I get to live this unique linguistic experience: the experience of returning to my mother tongue, after another tongue, a more dominant one, almost took over. Like a parasite, killing off competitors so that it could dominate me completely. But the parasitic English language wasn’t completely successful in killing off its Spanish predecessor.
Here in Colombia, I’m mining for a language that feels so familiar and yet so distant in the depths of my brain.
I get a lot of conflicting information at parties. Some young Colombians tell me I seem like I’ve spent way more time in Colombia. They tell me I don’t have an accent at all. Others are more honest with me; they tell me they can hear the slight accent and hesitation when I speak.
Ever the self-critic, I tend to agree with the second group. I put pressure on myself to speak well because I feel, deep down, that I should speak perfectly. I feel like, somehow, despite the 21 years that I spent outside of the country, I’m supposed to speak Spanish as if I had never left Colombia. Rationally, I know this is ludicrous but somehow, I still have unrealistic expectations for how my Spanish should sound. For how it should feel as it rolls off my tongue.
At 28, I’m doing a lot of relearning. I’m learning how to own rather than judge my hybridity. I’m learning how to express complex thoughts and opinions in Spanish so that I can better engage with people around me — especially now, during this historic national strike.
Four months into this journey of rediscovery, I think I’ve successfully shed my dad’s outdated 90’s slang and traded it in for a jerga more worthy of 2019. Before moving here, while visiting Bogotá for work, I never felt like I could say certain things.
I learned slang words because my cousins used them when talking to me, but I never felt like I could use them too. Using their slang felt like copying them or trying too hard. I tried it a couple of times. Sometimes it went unnoticed by them, though it always felt forced to me. Other times, my cousins noticed and laughed, making fun of my attempts to update my speech.
Though their laughs bothered me, I understood them.
I was also laughing at myself. It’s only by laughing at myself that I’ve been able to take more ownership over my languages. I recognize that having as much of a command of two languages the way that I do is huge. Actually, I speak a third language the best: Spanglish.
Claro, Spanglish. It’s my love language. Ilan Stavans, a Spanglish expert, describes it as “la jerga loca” and as a creativity-enabling hybrid. Spanglish gives speakers the freedom to mix words and expressions from two rich language lexicons. Stavans even goes so far as to compare the creativity and improvisational quality inherent in Spanglish to those same elements in jazz.
For someone like me, who grew up in a family of Latin jazz musicians, this analogy works well. Herby Hancock’s description of jazz, “something very hard to define but very easy to recognize,” is perfectly applicable to Spanglish.
But is Spanglish enough? Should my adoration for this mixing of language and culture replace my quest for un Español puro?
I’m leaning toward a vague answer that allows for both to be true. I can embrace my identity as a Spanglish-speaker and rediscover my maternal Spanish. I can forgive myself when I have to translate and when I slip in an English word. It’s only the beginning. Lo voy a lograr.
