escaping colonization through Spanglish
Summer of 2013 was the first time I had ever taken a Gender Studies class in college. It was an upper division course and I didn’t really know what to expect out of the course. Little did my 18-year-old self know that this class would change my life forever.
This class was the first time I was introduced to Gloria Anzaldua’s “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” I was assigned to read chapter 7: “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness.” The first two lines of the chapter were in Spanish, and I was confused.
How am I reading Spanish in a college level course? In a Gender Studies course?
By the time I was done with the chapter, I was crying.
Never had I read something that reached out and touched my heart so deeply than the words Anzaldua had written on paper. She knew me. She has never met me but she knows and sees who I am: a Latino-American, a Salvadoran-American. She wrote down exactly what it is like to be raised in two different cultures, two different languages.
Here I am, 3 years later reading her work in another Gender Studies course, and her words still hold true today.
Throughout most of my life, I never felt like I had a cultural place to call home. I was not Latino, but I was not American. So what am I? Who am I?
I struggled throughout school because I kept pronouncing words incorrectly in English. I would pronounce the L in salmon, I would pronounce the H in herbs. Spanish would sneak up while I was speaking English with my friends.
My English was broken.
When I spoke to my family in Spanish, I would begin to forget some words or start combining them with English. Later I would stop putting emphasis on the accent and the R’s, until English butchered my accent.
My Spanish was broken.
No matter what language I choose, it would be imperfect. I was imperfect. My two languages were in constant battle, one fighting for the domination of the other.
I had no identity. Since I was not English or Spanish, I felt like I was something broken in between.
For the longest time I felt shame because people would point out how funny it was that I mispronounced words, or how I would speak to my mother in a different language outside of what they knew.
As I got older I realized that I was not broken, but rather creating a new place for myself in a world that wanted to control and categorize me so badly.
My experience is a direct attack to the multiple binaries that exist to identify you as a person.
Just like gender, those who do not identify as man or woman become a threat to the structures that already exist.
If you can be categorized, you can also be ranked and placed in a hierarchy. If you are something in between, the hierarchy cannot function. It fails to control your mind and body.
My Spanish is something that can provide a home and safety to those who feel like they do not belong, for those who are not “Latino enough” or “American enough.” This creation of a new language is for those hoping to escape the colonization of their identity, to be free from the violence of control.
