En Espanol? o Did I mean to speak English
Moving to the United States, I didn’t realized that my identity would be changed. I was the little kid in class who wanted to keep my first language, I remember teacher screaming at me to speak English. When I was in first grade and had barely been living in the United States for a month I would get frustrated because I didn’t know any English. When I was being told to speak English I didn’t understand why I couldn’t speak both in order for me to developed my languages. There was so many rules in what places and with who you could speak to in Spanish and English.
In school I was expected to speak English and barely any Spanish, unless it was in recess and I would be speaking to the other Mexican students where the teacher couldn’t hear us. Once stepping out of school, I was free to speak the language I choose to with my friends. But when I would get home, my parents expected us to only speak Spanish, so that they all knew what was being said, the only time it was okay to speak in English at home was when we needed to do our homework. As my siblings and I grew, we started to become the translator for our parents. Now at this point I would see the different reaction my parents would get because they didn’t speak English.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sam3deneMgk
ABC news decided to have a women in route 66 order in Spanish and have a man verbally discriminate her because she isn’t talking English and telling her to go back to her country if she can’t speak American. You see the video above how people tell him to shut up and how unnecessary his comments are. I remember something similar that happen to my family, this lady rudely told my mother to either learn English or to go back to her country. When I heard that my heart broke and I told her why don’t you mind your own business and just walked away from her, she didn’t deserve to be acknowledge.
After that in High School, when my Child Development teacher would tell me to speak English I would always respond with speak Spanish. I was tired of people telling me I couldn’t speak my native language. I had the same teacher for three years and at the end of my junior year, she realized I wasn’t going to change and stop speaking Spanish. I found her trying to learn to speak Spanish, she began asking me how to say somethings in Spanish.
I find it ironically because when I started to apply for jobs, being bilingual was always looked as a positive trait to have. But growing up I was told I had to choose between one or the other. And for the Spanish speakers I will always accent from having had learned English and for the English speaker they always talk about the Mexican accent I have.
