As a child, you learn very quickly where you come from. You become the people around you - your town, culture and family shape you into the person you are going to be. Language is a huge part of culture. You have a voice and you spend your whole life listening to yourself speak, and many things change with you, but your voice is likely to sound the same to your own ears (unless you are forced to change it).

My grandma grew up in Bogota, Colombia, running through the town barefoot, yelling in a flurry of her first language: Spanish that I wouldn’t have understood. This was who she was, and had she been forced from America upon arrival due to her inability to speak our language - I would have never been born and the world would likely look different to a lot of people.

My grandma, who we called Mama, traveled here to lead a better life than was possible back there on the streets of Columbia. She, three sisters and one brother came here in hopes of finding themselves, not losing themselves, so when their feet touched American soil they didn’t abandon their language they did their best to immerse themselves in the culture here, find their place. Attempted to fit in as much as possible and still stay the four kids who ran around those streets in the culture they had known and loved. They didn’t leave Colombia in hopes of losing the Colombian parts of them -- they left to find opportunities to follow their dreams that their home could not offer them, especially the girls.

Mama and I often had talks about dreams. She loved listening to me tell the stories of my six-year-old imagination, but she didn’t often share her dreams back. When asked why, she told me that her dreams were always in Spanish. The only time her dreams were ever in English was when they starred us, so she’d share only those. It was easy to forget that there was a whole life that she had left behind in order to offer every single one of us grandchildren a life of things her Spanish dreams of a child in Columbia never even knew to wish for. She had been here a lifetime before these talks that I cherish to this day, surrounded by a language that was not her own that she became so fluent in that until a certain age, I never even noticed she spoke two. And somehow, despite the time she had spent speaking English, America didn’t taint her dreams because Spanish was still a huge part of her.

My grandfather was white. We called him Papa, and he was the exact opposite of Mama in every way possible: she was 4’9, barely a hundred pounds, and she was a spit fire. Nobody I had ever come in contact with dared to mess with my grandma, who was never quite tall enough to reach the top shelf in her house without using a step stool. My grandpa on the other hand was a big man: he was 6’4, weighed close to four hundred pounds, but was passive. He went with the flow and while he looked intimidating, I would have much rather run into him in an alley than her.

The biggest difference between the two wasn’t any of this -- it was that they met soon after she came to America at the young age of 17, and she spoke no English and he spoke no Spanish. So how they fell in love when I am barely able to communicate with boys who speak the same language as I do is far beyond me, but they seemed to have few problems amongst the two of them. Although society saw it differently, Papa’s own parents often told him he was marrying beneath him, that his life would be easier had he picked a wife who they could understand or get to know or who wasn’t an “inconvenience”.

So, no matter how much she loved her hometown and couldn’t change who she was, she came here to one day give herself and her kids a better life and in order to be accepted by Americans, many of whom believe that anyone who doesn’t learn the language of this land is an inconvenience to their own life. Her and my grandfather made the decision to raise their children as American as she could, much to the approval of Papa's parents. And somewhere in the same country, my grandparents on my dad's side made the same decision for the same reason. So she never taught them Spanish to give them what she believed would be an advantage, a way to fit in. But all of us believe it to be an injustice done to us by the society she was apart of back then, the one that caused her to believe her kids shouldn’t learn the language of their mother.

I am half Mexican, a quarter Columbian and a quarter white, but I am treated as though I am not Hispanic at all because I was raised white. I am too Hispanic to fully relate to my white friends who never get my jokes about “the chancla,” and I am too white to fully relate to all my Hispanic friends who lose me in a conversation as soon as they switch from English to Spanish. I don’t get to understand the culture that my ancestors grew up in or came from and as my distant cousins whose grandparents made the opposite choice of mine jabber on in a language I don’t understand. I get an itch to be a person I was never allowed to become. The one that the society around my grandma, who was unaware of its own ignorance, robbed me of. When Christmas rolled around as a child, and all of our Christmas presents were discussed openly in front of us in a language I didn’t understand, this itch got so much worse. I would beg my grandparents to teach me Spanish, but they never complied because they believed they were protecting us from what they had to go through.

To me, Spanish is a missed opportunity a part of myself I will never learn or understand. A side of my grandparents I never got to meet similar to my mother, who barely got to know her grandmother who spoke absolutely no English. These are factors of our life we missed out on because of a decision that was once deemed so necessary and common that both sets of my grandparents who lived on opposite ends of the country and agreed on very little through all of our lives, made identically and without hesitation.

The only piece of Columbian culture I was raised to know was my grandma herself, and while knowing her I was too young to compare her to other grandmas, I can see how recognizable her country was within her. She was the easiest grandma to lose and find in the grocery store because she was the only one who called “Mija” in order to find me. Her accent that I normally failed to notice made her culture known with every word she spoke, her feisty personality, the way her sisters and her shouted at each other in their own language, the look on her sisters faces when they accidentally started blabbering to us in Spanish that they quickly realized we didn’t understand. The food, the few words we picked up because she couldn’t break the habits of using them in front of us, these were the parts of the world within Mama I was robbed from the pleasure of meeting. And these bits of that world I will never know all of shaped my own character and could’ve altered my character even more had America given my roots the chance to.