The floor tile was a cold pinch against my skin; however, it was welcomed especially after the hot breeze swept over my body for the umpteenth time that day. I was sitting down in my grandma’s living room floor, the television on a low murmur as the adults talked behind me on the green couch. Growing up the television being barely audible never bothered me, it was nice to focus on the images instead of trying to maneuver my way through the English words that came crashing onto me. Usually, each word hit like a wave, one after the other, until they managed to drown me. The Spanish that was being spoken behind me, that was common, that was home and never did I see myself leaving it.
Fast forward to my senior year of high school, I’m walking down the hallway with my friends. They’re all Hispanic, yet we’re all speaking English, our Spanish accents long ago buried. At home we all speak Spanish to our parents, but even then, we catch ourselves forgetting it. Yelling at them in English when we’re too mad to focus on what the right Spanish word to say is. Laughing at ourselves, to keep from being embarrassed, when we get called out for saying something wrong. The feeling was isolating in my family, my brothers having upkept their Spanish to perfection, but understood amongst my friends. We all felt this sense of loss, the feeling that we were slowly losing who we once were. The feeling, as much as I tried to combat it, continued to haunt me all the way to my college years.
Now as a college junior, I continue to have the same feelings and once again the burden is felt among not only me but also my college friends. We’ve made pacts and promises of speaking Spanish to each other to upkeep our native language, but they all fizzle out within a week. As foolish as it might sound, once you’ve met someone in English you can’t meet them again in Spanish. It feels unnatural to talk to someone in your native tongue after having met them in a different one. You feel judged and extremely self-conscious when you try to. This is not to say that I do not like English, I just resent it for making me forget parts of my Spanish. Additionally, this is not the case with everybody, some have found a way to upkeep both languages in a mix of beautiful whirlwinds.
My struggle has caused me to fear new languages. Yes, knowing Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Italian sounds great but it has never interested me. Whenever I had to complete a language requirement, I always chose Spanish, partly in hopes of regaining a bit of what I lost and the other part because it seemed easy enough. It wasn’t until my recent study abroad experience in Paris, France that I felt the longing to learn another language. It was like something shifted inside me and suddenly I had an urge to know and a desire that had gone long unfed.
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Once again, the breeze was hot as it swept over my body like those summers day long ago when I was a child, but this time it was a Parisian breeze, and the body was that of a 21-year-old woman. I was walking to the metro station hoping that line B would not be delayed as I was already running late to class. At this point, I had been in Paris for a week and my ears had grown accustomed to the shifting of languages and the constant strain of trying to understand what people were saying. Once I arrived at the API building, the place where class was held, I greeted the API staff with a proper Parisian bonjour. Having only been there a week I wasn’t close to any of them, so I did not know that Leo spoke six different languages, or that Laure had studied abroad in America, or that Cyprien had been forced to learn a second language in school as a young boy. I didn’t know and hadn’t yet been inspired by their work towards learning multiple languages. In America, we have established English as our norm and have done nothing to strive toward exceeding that standard. In France, almost everyone is bilingual if not trilingual. The comparison, when experienced firsthand, is shocking. It was the API staff, the strangers I interviewed, and the friendships I formed that made me realize I too wanted to be like them. I wanted to know multiple languages and no longer did it cause me fear of becoming disconnected from my roots.
As I return to my regular life, I find myself taking French placement exams and looking for introductory French courses. My focus right now is French but next I want it to be Portuguese and after that Italian. English was my starting point, not my breaking point for it is in other languages that we find our own.
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Giselle is a rising senior at St. Edward’s University. She is an Environmental Science and policy major and a political science minor.
