Before I was old enough to go to school, my parents would drop me off with my grandparents while they went to work. It was there, in their lime green house on a corner in East Los Angeles, that I began to learn Spanish. My Ama and Apa are immigrants from Mexico and know very little English. Whenever I was with them, we used Spanish to communicate. Ama was one of the only people who kept my connection with the culture alive. She would try her best to familiarize me with the language and began by teaching me numbers.
I always had a hard time with the teens; dieciséis, diecisiete, dieciocho, and diecinueve were particularly difficult for me to grasp. One time, at my Tía Concha’s house, Ama was testing me on my numbers and I got stuck at trece. I can recall looking at her and despite my desperate perseverance, I could not remember. She then looked back at me with a kind understanding and guided me to veinte. After a minute or two of practicing on my own, I returned to her, tried again, failed again, and repeated the process until I no longer needed so much guidance. Getting the hang of the teens was difficult but once I got it down, I felt accomplished in a way I have rarely felt since.
As I grew older and began kindergarten, the times I visited Ama grew increasingly distant. In school, I was taught the English language and thus, Spanish became more of a faint memory and less a part of my identity. I remember learning to count to 100. My paper was soon stapled to the wall along with every other kid who mastered the list. I was so proud of myself then. Knowing 100 numbers made me feel unstoppable. Yet, with school becoming such a prominent part of my life, English soon took over. Each day I learned something in English, it felt as if I forgot a word in Spanish. I knew less and less until I eventually found myself struggling to communicate with Ama. During our occasional phone calls before holidays and birthdays, she would speak in Spanish and I would respond in English. Both of us understood the other enough for simple conversation but anything else would require the use of Google Translate as a bridge to connect our two worlds.
Throughout elementary and middle school, I felt a growing disconnection. The weekly family parties that I grew up with became less common as my homework or my personal life consumed me and decreased my interactions with my Spanish-speaking family. The more I familiarized myself with English, the more uncomfortable I felt speaking in Spanish. At one point, I felt that without a shared language, there was no longer any way for me to connect or bond with them. My relationship with my extended family was dissipating and as a result, Spanish soon became a foreign language to me, a language I felt uncomfortable using.
It was not until high school that I began to restore my connections. During freshman year, I took Spanish 1 and among the first few lessons was numbers. Señora Clarke called on me and asked me to say my phone number out loud. With a trembling voice, I started with “Mi número de teléfono es…” and as best as a non-fluent person can speak, I read my number aloud to the class. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I could have a connection to Spanish. I was nowhere near perfect but the work was significantly easier for me in comparison to other students. From that, my confidence in speaking, writing, and listening in Spanish grew tremendously. Throughout highschool, as I advanced to higher classes, we were taught new vocabulary and grammar. I quickly realized how much I did not know I already knew in Spanish.
With some time, I understood that the only barrier that kept me from connecting with my family was my lack of confidence in trying. While I continue through my education in English, I hope to reconstruct my connection with Spanish and the family and belonging that comes with it. For the future, as Ama lives half the time in Aguascalientes and half the time in our house, I hope to improve my language skills, learning to count beyond 1000 this time. As for when I am surrounded by English, I hope that I hold on tight to Spanish and that I do not let go, no matter what.
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