Watch What You Say
One of the things I find of outmost importance is for everyone to find their voice. However, I’ve noticed that in my case, this seems to be very difficult.
I’m a 17-year-old Puerto Rican girl living in America. And as if being a teenager isn’t hard enough, I am also cursed with an accent. In my mind, I have a pretty clear idea on where I stand as a human being in my community, and I know what my beliefs are. It’s hard as it is to be taken seriously because of my age, but my accent makes it much worse. Because of how I speak, the whole world seems to have a vision of me that’s not at all who I am.
My freshman year of high school, which started only a month after I moved here from Puerto Rico, I had lots of ideas. I was excited to learn, and I wanted to make lots of friends. But the moment I noticed that I didn’t satisfy the people surrounding me because I didn’t pronounce words the way they did, I kept my mouth shut. They all knew what I meant when I said things, and I didn’t mind at all to be corrected if I said something wrong. But it was not correction — it was mockery. And to be mocked every day by other people your age in an environment where what others think of you means so much…well, that makes you shut up. People with similar roots as me would mock me as well. The only difference between us was the amount of time we had lived in America so I wondered why they would ridicule me. Fellow Hispanics who were probably made fun of for the exact same things mocked me, but why?
Still, to this day (three years later), I’m still made fun of sometimes when I say something incorrectly. I will never understand what the big deal is with correcting a mispronunciation. I don’t know if it makes that person feel superior to me for at least a couple seconds, or if they actually think it’s quite funny to mock someone who had to learn a whole new language on their own. No one ever sat down with me to teach me how to pronounce words properly, or how to write a proper sentence in English structure. All the English I knew I credit to Disney Channel and closed captioning, because no one else ever taught me why the letter ‘e’ was pronounced in “greeting,” but not pronounced in the word “rose.” Because no one ever taught me why people would say “O” instead of “zero.” I just had to learn it all on my own.
It might seem like no big deal to be mocked for mispronouncing words. But my words were my voice, my opinions, my power, and it was all being shut down by privileged people. Privileged Americans who knew the language naturally. Privileged Hispanics who had lived here longer than me. Privileged people who had the choice of whether or not to make fun of me. But from all of this, I have learned not to be spiteful. Even when some of my American friends ask how to say something in Spanish and they pronounce it so incorrectly that I can’t help but laugh, I stop. I don’t mock. Because I know they will never understand what it’s like to juggle around two languages in their head. Because I know they will never know what it’s like to translate every word you are going to say minutes before you say it. Because I know they will never understand.
