Aprender el inglés ("Learning English") by Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Vida
Para entenderme
Tienes que saber español
Sentirlo en la sangre de tu alma.
Si hablo otro lenguaje
Y uso palabras distintas
Para expresar entimientos que nunca cambiarán
No sé
Si seguiré siendo
La misma persona

Life
To understand me
You have to know Spanish
Feel it in the blood of your soul
If I speak another language
And use different words
For feelings that will always stay the same
I don’t know
If I’ll continue being
The same person.

I was sitting at a coffee shop with my friend on Saturday afternoon. We were working on homework, but as often happens, there’s a lull in your tired brain in which your environment is more interesting than the open textbook in front of you.

Two men speaking in Spanish on the table next to ours caught my attention.

They were having an intelligent conversation about mariachi music, about co-workers and bosses. They were using articulate words in Spanish, and to my Spanish-deprived mind, they weren’t just two more customers in the coffee shop. With colloquialisms and jargon I'd grown up hearing in Guadalajara, Mexico, their table had become a rare island of familiarity woven by language, one of the most sacred things that could be shared by humans.

Maybe I was glorifying this experience because of how much it means to see my language occupying a niche in this town so freely. But I couldn’t help but wonder what these men talked about when they went back to work, how their conversations were different amongst their co-workers and bosses when compared to the haven of freely-exchanged ideas the Spanish language provided for them.

I thought of the adults I tutored at an ESL program in a Spanish-speaking church nearby, people over 60 years old who ran errands, worked longs shifts, and took the public transportation armed with a five-year-old’s storage of English words.

Language is power.

By the power of rhetoric, politicians became great heads of state in ancient Greece; orators gained the status of celebrities, narcissistic dictators with tiny mustaches unleashed national genocide, and street prophets shook empires. The people we follow, whether as religious leaders or political power-heads, have stocks on our headspace because of their words.

I glided into bilingualism like a swan into water, seamlessly, effortlessly, because I was born at the junction between Mexico and the U.S. But as I spend more time in the American culture, struggle to update my idioms and grammar, and eventually tutor students and adults in both English and Spanish, I realize that language is like drawing food out of the earth. It’s hard work, it takes lots of practice, and it takes resources. And when people don’t have the resources, time, or encouragement to learn, and they’re new to a country and foreign to the language, they’re stripped of power. Suddenly, the exuberant expressions that earned them appreciative laughter, the argumentative prowess that persuaded others, and the ability to safely express their feelings, is gone. They are reduced to the level of small children speaking in broken strings of words, gesturing for clarification. They’re asked to repeat themselves countless times, or worse, they’re abruptly stopped while they speak while the other person goes and fetches someone who speaks their language, if there’s anyone at all.

There’s something truly discouraging about having someone cut off all ties to you abruptly because they don’t want to take the time to cross the language barrier and reach you. You start feeling like you just might not be worth reaching after all.

After the two men had left the coffee shop, I told my friend about these thoughts. She’s studying to be an ESL teacher, and her eyes lit up as I told her about the dynamics of language and power. She turned her textbook over to me, and told me excitedly that she’d just been reading about that.

She was a teacher aide at an elementary school where 98% of the students have Latin American origins. These students are small children who already live in complex dichotomies that they might not understand, but that are still conditioning the dynamics of language and power in their minds without them knowing. To many of them, Spanish is the language of home. It’s the language of food and banter, it’s the language of scoldings and sadness. Sometimes it’s the language of violence. At school, English is the language of progress. It’s the measuring tape for how far-removed they’ve come from their parents’ roots like it's a positive thing. Speaking English full-time is an indicator of how successfully they get indoctrinated into American society. Because it's the language they speak at school, English is the language of science and poetry, the language they use to communicate with authority figures. There may come a day in which they’re convinced that English is the language for the better things in life, and they no longer want to speak Spanish at home.

My friend understood these power dynamics. She understood that the students’ language wasn’t just alphabets, but experiences, their very background, and that often the English they were being taught neglected those experiences. My friend doesn’t speak Spanish, but her roommate did, so during one of her lessons on poetry, she had her record some poems in Spanish and she played them for the kids.

It must have been a quiet collision in their brains when they heard the language of home in the classroom. Their eyes lit up, their mouths fell open, and they looked around wonderingly, trying to find where the sound was coming from. It was like a whole new world had been opened to them, a world where the language of home and the language of school didn’t have to compete, where they could coexist together. There were poems read in class about cars, and clowns, and cake. Simple, colorful, crisp words that were small and bite-sized, perfect for children. But it was in their language.

I thought of how people of color often grow up learning how to be chameleons. We learn the nuances of culture since we are children without knowing it. We learn not to speak Spanish in “serious” settings like we learn not to say four-letter words in public. Adult men go to coffee shops and slip into Spanish like adults coming home after work and and eagerly slipping into their PJs with relief. We learn to tone it down, to keep it under wraps, to leave it be until it’s time to get home, time to be ourselves again. We’re not taught that all our experiences, like English and Spanish in the classroom, can coexist together and make us who we are. Some people get to be themselves all the time because there’s nothing wrong with who they are. Others are told that who they are is fundamentally wrong, and they must assimilate in order to be a functioning member of society.

As they threw away their empty cups, the two men at the coffee shop slipped back into English before they even exited the building.

We seek many ways as a society to empower the disenfranchised. We build wells overseas, we make hashtag movements and protest at political rallies. But language is power, too. I learned a lot of historical and cultural facts about China by studying the individual strokes that make up each character. Language is rich with history, with entity, with heritage and with presence. So if language is this empowering, is it possible to disempower individuals when we insist they assimilate into our language without any regard to theirs? Perhaps we ourselves appreciate other languages, and we certainly show that by learning them or by travel. If I speak English fluently and I decide I want to learn French because I dream of going to Paris one day, that's a culture-conscious, privileged choice I make. But if I'm an immigrant child who doesn't speak English and my future in this country depends on how well I learn the language now, and if the education system doesn't teach me English in a way that validates my nationality and experience, I won't be likely to succeed in learning well.

I commend my friend for her compassion and insight in teaching children in their own language, for encouraging them to be fully themselves and for validating all of their experiences—at school and at home. There are countless creative ways to empower others, and I strongly believe each and every one of us has been given special gifts, abilities, and resources we can use to better love our neighbor. For my friend, one of those abilities was her teaching children’s poetry. What will it be for us?