Tag Archives: Spanish

School has been the legally and socially enforced structure of my life for the better part of my sixteen years. At age twelve, as part of my academic experience, I was required to select a language from a list of four printed on lime green copy paper and learn it for two to six years in a concrete tupperware of a classroom with thirty other students who decidedly didn’t want to be there. I chose Spanish, the language my mother taught when I was little, not out of interest or passion, but because I didn’t know anything about French, didn’t like going to church where they sang in Latin, and didn’t feel dextrous enough for American Sign Language. In sophomore year of high school I made the radical decision to choose a new language in addition to my prescribed two-to-six-year Romance language: the ever mischaracterized Irish. Irish, the romantic non-Romance language with little practical purpose – and yet I’ve fallen head over heels for this dying language overflowing with life. The one class I am not required to take and where my work is not graded, the one class I chose solely because I love it, the one class that the pressures of school can’t spoil.

In seventh grade, my family drove the west coast of Ireland from house to house visiting our extended family. The culture immediately transfixed me, with the landscape and the foreign logainmneacha, place names that sounded like they were straight out of Star Wars and looked like someone had spilled a bowl of alphabet soup on the sign posts. While at my cousins’ house, we all decided to play hide and seek. My siblings and I were clearly winning, so my cousin decided that to level the playing field he would count in Irish so that us American kids couldn’t tell how much time we had left to hide. I lost that round, not because I couldn’t hide fast enough, but because I was so transfixed by the numbers. They were rounded and guttural but still flowed smoothly. It sounded like a nursery rhyme I had forgotten. There was something so familiar about it that I just couldn’t put my finger on. When I inevitably lost that round and had to seek, I counted in Spanish, knowing that only my siblings and I would understand.

I was raised in a house surrounded by fields and a stand of trees that seemed to stretch to infinity behind it. Grass was my native tongue; since birth I had run and rolled and played in the expanse of green with my family. It was predictable and safe, there were never surprises when you could see far across the field. But the woods were always there on the periphery. My mother had led me to the edge of the forest often when I was a young child to give me a taste of what was in them, mysterious as they were. She was a Spanish teacher, and always had bilingual books and learning toys around us. She never tried to teach us how to speak, but when I started Spanish class in seventh grade it didn’t seem totally foreign to me. Initially, I was voracious in learning Spanish. I wanted to get as far as I could into the forest as fast as possible. I didn’t perceive strange new creatures as threats but as learning opportunities, but as school progressed and pressure increased, the once friendly animals seemed frightening. I didn’t want to enjoy the forest anymore, I just wanted to get to the other side. As I stumbled deeper, I came to a crossroads: leave the forest, run for the field, and abandon language learning all together, or choose the road less traveled and pursue Irish, the great unknown. I had a real choice for the first time in my academic career, and I chose Irish. I haven’t made it far down the road, but it has allowed me to gain a better perspective and understanding of both English and Spanish.

On one hand, Spanish classes gave me the tools to learn Irish. I learned the basic structures of language and the best ways to memorize vocabulary – all the skills I needed for reading and writing. But when it came to speaking, Irish gave me the tools to speak Spanish. Throwing yourself into an environment without a conjugation sheet or vocabulary list and just speaking what you know and letting conversation flow is terrifying, but that’s how I started learning Irish. In Irish class I am constantly encouraged to speak, regardless of how I trip and fumble over my words, because the more I try, the more I’ll be able to regain my footing. I don’t have grades to maintain or people to please. I’m only speaking for myself and for the beauty of the language. Irish is by nature a spoken language, to the point where to say that someone is fluent in Irish is to say they have the gift of the blas, or the tongue. Language isn’t a multiple choice test, it’s rolling words around on your tongue until they become songs and poems and lamentations that resonate somewhere deep within another person.

My Irish is a motley of dialects and borrowed words, a child’s art project made with ripped pages from textbooks and foreign postage stamps held together by over-chewed gum. It’s delicate and far from elegant, but I love it. I love the hints of a Bostún accent; I love the stories behind each piece of vocabulary; I love that it can keep growing into a more polished work of art. I keep it by my bedside, admiring it and building on it on my own time. My Spanish is kept far away, in the bottom drawer of my desk, sandwiched between aging biology notes. It’s neatly stacked and stapled, its colorful pages faded and worn. You can still see doodles and notes from my friends written in the margins, though time has left them smudged. Someday when I can finally bring myself to cut those doodles out and start from scratch I’ll be proud of my Spanish again and it will sit with Irish on my bedside table. I have so much hope for their future; I hope that I continue to help them grow with me into full, functioning languages, and that someday they won’t be confined to a page or a child’s art project. They’ll be an inseparable part of me.

Emma Fallon is a student at Northampton High School who takes classes at Smith and Elms College for fun. She is passionate about literature, her study of the Irish language, robotics, and the environment and hopes to continue her studies with Smith in the future.

Summer 2020 Issue XVI: Language Stories

“Is Spanish or Arabic an easier language to learn?”

August 20, 2020 Jaimie Mayor

As a linguist, I find this question frustrating, and as a student of both languages, I hear it far too often and can never answer it. English is my first language and the language spoken in my home, but I have been exposed to Spanish for nearly as long. I have been learning Spanish from the moment my grandparents cooed to me in their native language a few hours after I was born. Filled with constant ups and downs from changes in linguistic exposure and practice, my proficiency in Spanish is a rollercoaster I’ve been building for 21 years, from my grandparents to the Spanish lessons I received in school to my visit to Spain two years ago. In comparison, my acquisition of Arabic is a mountain I’ve only just begun to climb. I picked up a bit of spoken dialect while living in Morocco in 2018, and I began to formally learn the language a few months later during college. My experiences learning these languages could not be more different; my motivations towards learning as well as the barriers to acquisition are different. My future in each is different. I’ve learned from studies in linguistic theory that assigning arbitrary labels like ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ to any language undermines its complexity and its speakers, but I’ve learned from my experience that every acquisition is a journey; it is easy and hard and every adjective in between.

While many of my relatives are bilingual, having a monolingual, English-speaking mother means I’ve nearly always been able to see language barriers. Even families that speak the same language can have problems with miscommunication, but when family members are trying to convey important messages across language, what gets “lost in translation” becomes even more important. From the time I was a baby, both my immediate and extended family have had miscommunication issues with things like arranging childcare, communicating health information, and giving instructions. Because of these language barriers, I’ve always felt a pressure from my mother to learn Spanish so that I could help my father fill the gap between her and her Spanish-speaking in-laws. However, once I became a bit older, that pressure turned into a desire to form that bridge between languages, to communicate with my grandparents more effectively and deeply, to help the stressed traveler at Penn Station who needs directions, and to converse with hundreds of millions of people across language and culture.

While many similar desires fueled my study of Arabic, I never felt that same need to learn the language; it was just something that I wanted to do. At first, my interest in Arabic revolved around an interest in Middle Eastern politics. While my interests have shifted over the past few years, after living in Morocco for a few months and planning to live in the Arab world for many, many more, I remain deeply invested in the culture. Overall, the reason I continue to study Arabic is because I enjoy it, something that is more difficult for me to say about my study of Spanish. While my need to continue learning Spanish comes from my environment and the people around me, my need to learn more and more Arabic comes from within me: it’s a thirst that I can’t satiate.

As my interests in each language differ, so do the barriers to learning them. Acquiring a new language is always challenging, but I’ve had many more resources and opportunities to help me learn Spanish than Arabic. I have received formal Spanish lessons through the public school system since I was six years old, whereas my first year of college was the first time I was able to enroll in an Arabic course. There are also many more websites, apps, and media designed for Spanish language learning than the Arabic equivalent. I also have more exposure to the Spanish language in my day-to-day life: beyond my relatives, growing up in Northern New Jersey, I’ve met countless Spanish speakers, but only a handful of Arabic speakers. Before going abroad or starting college, I had very little exposure to Arabic conversation, and even since beginning college, I have had hardly any experience conversing for anything more than educational purposes. In contrast to my time spent in Spain, while I was in Morocco, I had no formal training in Arabic, and while I picked up some conversational Arabic, I was not able to practice any language that I’d actually studied. I hope to study abroad in an Arabic-speaking country, but, as of right now, I have much more real-life experience using Spanish than Arabic.

Nonetheless, one of the biggest barriers to my Spanish learning is barely applicable to my Arabic learning: my insecurity. While not being able to recall something in Arabic can be frustrating, when I am practicing Spanish, I find myself disappointed in how little I truly know how to express, despite learning the language for so many years. I find myself reluctant to practice at all, knowing how difficult it will be and feeling like I don’t actually know Spanish at all. While my Arabic skills are lightyears away from flawless, I don’t expect myself to know things the way that I do with Spanish, regardless of how unrealistic those expectations may be. A conversation in Spanish often leaves me frustrated and ashamed of how little I was able to express, whereas a conversation in Arabic leaves me excited over how much my conversational skills have improved from a year or two ago.

This past semester, when confronted with an overbooked schedule, I made an important decision: to drop my Spanish class. Before then, I’d been struggling to figure out how both Spanish and Arabic fit into the academic plan for the rest of my undergraduate education. However, I realized that my interest in Spanish was much more recreational: I wanted to chat with my grandparents and listen to Latin American alt rock music and watch La casa de papel with the captions off. While my interest in Arabic is also recreational, it’s academic as well. It’s the language I plan to translate from and, because of the many differences from English, it’s the language I enjoy analyzing syntactically and semantically in my linguistics classes.

Overall, I am in very different places with each of my language acquisitions. While I could attempt to choose which language was easier for me to learn, the truth is that my linguistic journeys in both languages will never be the same. My Spanish skills feel like an innate ability that I have been gradually building since birth, a roller coaster that has been under construction for over two decades. While it is fully operational and well trafficked, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, perhaps an extra loop or some repainting. Meanwhile, my Arabic skills feel more like a mountain, a large land mass full of flora and fauna, of which I have only explored a small section. While I’ve acquired the basics of hiking a mountain and I’ve cataloged a few flowers, much of its beauty is still slightly out of reach, waiting to be discovered.

Jaimie is a junior at Smith college and a linguistics major and Arabic minor planning to continue their language studies abroad as soon as it safe to do so. Jaimie hopes to help bridge gaps in linguistic and cultural understanding between communities in the US and the Middle East.

Summer 2020 Issue XVI: Language Stories

CABAL: A Linguistic Autobiography

August 17, 2020 Isabel Ruiz Cano

CABAL (kah-bahl)

Means exactly. Used when you agree with someone or if you try a pair of shoes that fit perfectly. If used as cabalito, it’s even more exact.

Ex.: The stock market will suffer its biggest downgrade this year.

Gregory: Cabal! That’s what I told Aubrey yesterday.

@Guanaco2English. “Guanaco to English Dictionary Entry.” Twitter, 1 April 2019, 8:20 a.m.

I did not know how much I said cabal until a Mexican classmate asked what it meant during a discussion in our tenth grade Spanish Literature class. I did not know how much of an accent I had until the others in that classroom stared at me blankly after the end of an oral presentation. I did not know how different my vocabulary was until I received an essay back marked with red circles and question marks beside the words my Cuban teacher did not understand. I did not know that pisto in Mexico meant alcohol and not money (like it did back home) until I arrived at a party with fifty pesos in my hand instead of a six-pack, much to the disappointment of my new friends. I did not know how wrong my Spanish was until I moved to Mexico, and I did not know how right it felt until I left for the United States.

In El Salvador, we do not pronounce our s’s—instead, they turn into hard h-sounds (or soft j’s in Romance languages) whenever paired with another consonant. We conjugate differently: puedes, for example, becomes podés. Both mean you can. Small tweaks: change the stress of the word to the last syllable, simplify diphthongs. Instead of tú for the informal you we use vos (anyone in a position of authority, any elder relative must be addressed with the formal usted). And there are so, so many words with ch: chucho (dog), colocha (curly-haired), chicharra (cicada), cachimbón (cool), evidence of Náhuatl latching on to a strange new tongue.

This is the Spanish I was born into. It’s expressive and cacophonous, intended for efficiency and wordplay. In first grade, when our teacher insisted we pronounce the z as they do in Spain—like a th—we laughed and retorted that this was Centroamérica. At six years old we had marched in enough Independence Day parades to color our classroom jokes with postcoloniality. Throughout elementary school, even though I drudged over conjugation tables as outlined by the Royal Spanish Academy (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) and mastered the art of tildes, my everyday lexicon remained intact.

My Spanish was fun and fast—but also became increasingly secret. I attended the international school where my half-Californian, U.S.-educated mother taught. As my schooling progressed, so did the expectation that we would speak English the majority of the time. The hours I spent under my Irish-American grandmother’s wings meant that this was not an especially difficult transition for me. After all, we celebrated the Fourth of July and watched Peter Pan in English and in Spanish. English was for convincing people, for singing The Mamas & the Papas, for telling fantastical stories about fairies. Now English was also for being serious, for communicating needs, for analyzing. English promised that the stories I wanted to tell would reach the most people. And especially that it would reach the people that mattered, like my expat teachers, the President of the United States, the editors of the Good Housekeeping magazine subscription my grandmother kept. If I spoke English, I could become like one of those girls I saw on the Disney Channel, who biked to school with their perfectly straight hair and didn’t have to wear a uniform. To become a citizen of America—and not just Central America—you spoke English with mastery, as if the world owed you an explanation, as if you could explain the world.

And so I spoke in English with my mom and grandmother—at first, to keep secrets from my sister before she learned the language fluently in school, and then just out of habit. My friends and I splattered our conversations with English phrases and slang. I devoured novel after novel set in Regency England, nineteenth-century Canada, a fragmented, futuristic United States. This felt like more of a merging than a bifurcation of the self, or at least a revelation of the possibility that I could be someone more.

We moved to Monterrey, Mexico, in 2014 and I was forced to second-guess my first language once more. Now, it was not enough to translate from Spanish to English; I had to translate my Spanish as well. In private, my sister and I made fun of the overly pronounced Norteño accent, where our classmates spoke in a sing-song, either with a “potato stuck in their throats” (a little nasally) or as if they were recovering from a coughing fit (low, husky rumbles). But in public, we learned when to say neta (“no kidding?!”) and that the j is thrown towards the roof of your mouth and that the s is always, always an s. To make my story heard I had to adapt, assimilate, relearn. Over the three years that I spent in Mexico, I came up with a softer Spanish, precise in its pronunciation yet tauntingly cacophonous in its vocabulary. If I had to adapt to be understood, those around me could deal with learning a few new expressions. My true accent was a sign of intimacy and trust reserved for a few, but I refused to let go of the words of my youth.

Now, in the United States, my entire life is in English. Spanish has become both respite and resistance. I ride a bike around my college campus (but let my hair be curly) and joke with friends that the American Dream is disappointingly underwhelming. I realize that I crave the specificity of emotion that Spanish declensions enable and reach for my first language’s poetry regardless of the author’s national origin. I take Spanish courses and challenge myself to view Spanish as an academic language, because the topics I want to dive into should be honored in their original form, not just in translation. Always with a critic’s eye, I take advantage of English’s universality to keep sharing and keep learning. I find little pockets of immigrant communities and delight in sharing, comparing, and never changing how we speak: an unspoken agreement with my Dominican neighbor that we would never complain about how loud we were during late-night phone calls; an animated dining-hall line exchange with a treasured Honduran friend; a TA meeting in Spanglish. Cabal: this is the tongue I was supposed to speak with. A tongue that may trip over itself when ordering tea, but a tongue that is always sure of where it came from.

Isabel was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. Since 2014, she and her immediate family have called Monterrey, México, home. At Smith, she is an Art History major with a Museums concentration, interested in the political aesthetics of the Americas. She will go anywhere to find a bag of maseca in the Pioneer Valley.

Fall 2016 Issue VIII: Notes from the Field

A New World in the Ordinary

October 27, 2016 cbradley

I had dreamed of traveling abroad since I was in the sixth grade. That year, I began to learn Spanish. As I went to class every Tuesday and Thursday, it became much more than a new language. While I saw photos of fantastic cathedrals and monuments projected onto our blackboard, researched holidays and traditions for homework, and sang along to popular songs at class fiestas, I began to fantasize about what the world looked like outside of my small corner of suburban New York. I decided that if I were to ever travel abroad, Spain would be the first place I would visit.

Eight years later, my middle school ambitions were finally realized as I touched down at Madrid-Barajas airport for a semester abroad. My first few days in the country were a complete whirlwind, five cities in ten days, and hardly enough time to absorb my new reality. Life behind the postcard-perfect sights seemed irrelevant, even nonexistent.

Catherine Bradley But when I finally arrived in Córdoba, where I was to live for the next four months, I began to realize that Spain was more than a giant tourist destination. As my host mom showed me her apartment, as I ate dinner every night with her and her son, as I walked through town center into clothing stores and supermarkets, a jarring thought entered my mind, one that I hadn’t considered before.

People actually live here.

One afternoon, on my way to grab a pre-lunch coffee, I noticed a crowd gathered in the central Plaza de Tendillas. I stepped closer to see a circle of dancers, all dressed in traditional flamenco skirts, large flowers clipped in their hair. At first, I was mesmerized by the movement of their feet, furiously tapping out complicated patterns on the hard concrete. But as I watched for a little while longer, I began to focus on their faces, wrought with concentration. Their intensity belied the fact that many of these dancers were no more than 15 or 16 years old. How many years of practice did that take, to memorize those steps until they were mere reflex?

When the performance was over, many of the girls were embraced by beaming relatives. In many ways, it reminded me of scenes after dance recitals back home. But in other ways, the warm hugs and back pats felt distinctly foreign. The flamenco dances the girls had performed were rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, a celebration born out of the pain of the Romani people as they were exiled from Spanish society in the 18th century. Dancers now make careers out of flamenco in Spain, with some performers enormously popular. Were these girls inspired to dance by a famous artist? Was it a tradition passed down through their family? What was it like to literally be performing years of history with every stamp of your foot?

As I walked back from Tendillas, I thought about how, in many ways, Spanish life was very similar to mine back home in Connecticut. Spaniards go to department stores. They go out to lunch. They watch dance recitals and hug their children tight after the show. But somehow there is always a sense of the foreign. Watching that performance, I felt tradition grip me tightly. I wondered what it was like to grow up in a culture steeped in centuries of history, and to face that history almost daily. I wondered how that affects someone’s childhood and the way they view the world.

Perhaps they are so accustomed to it that they don’t even notice it at all.

I went home. My host mom served lunch. My host brother’s friend came over. We all watched the afternoon news. We made fun of politicians. We cheered at the sports report. We groaned at the weather forecast.

Maybe we weren’t so different. Or maybe we were. But for now, I was content to serve myself another helping of pisto, reach down to pet the family dog as she scratched at my chair, and remind myself once more:

People actually live here.

And right now, so do I.

Catherine Bradley is a senior history major and education minor originally from Ridgefield, Connecticut. She studied abroad in Córdoba, Spain through the PRESHCO program in Spring 2016 and hopes to return soon. In her spare time, Catherine enjoys writing, cooking, and watching baseball.

Fall 2016 Issue VIII: Notes from the Field

On the Tip of My Tongue

October 27, 2016 sbsmith

In order to illustrate my relationship with Portuguese as a Spanish speaker, I have developed a metaphor. Imagine Spanish and Portuguese were identical twins. You have been best friends with Spanish for many years, without ever having met their twin. You can anticipate Spanish’s every word; you recognize the rhythm of their voice, the lines of their palms, and the shape of their teeth. One day you are introduced to Portuguese. As they stand side-by-side with Spanish, you are able to decipher small differences between the two. Portuguese might have more moles on their left cheek, their laughter is huskier, and their hair shorter. But, from a distance, they are near identical. It is then that Spanish departs hastily, and you are left alone with Portuguese. You make the wrongful assumption that those physical similarities will and should be reflected in the contours of their personality, such as tastes in music or political leanings. But alas, you are mistaken and left with nothing to talk about. Silence permeates the room, while across the table from you perches the appearance of intense familiarity, an intimate outline. Upon opening your mouth, everything rapidly becomes foreign and stilted, each question and response lingering on the tip of the tongue.

The weight of the nuanced differences between these two, between these “twins,” fully occurred to me when I read the yellow table above in my Portuguese textbook, which illustrates how prepositions and definite articles in Portuguese are often orthographically combined. I was forced to reconsider my earlier inclinations, wherein I chalked Portuguese up to be nothing more than a bizarre-sounding, formalized dialect of Spanish, the gawkier twin (perhaps it is, but that’s aside the point). I was confronted with the wholeness of Portuguese’s individual identity, its structural identity. As such, I want to propose the perhaps unpopular notion that there exists no real “comfort zone” in language. Within the context of the metaphor, many friendships are deceptive in their intimacy. I am naïve to assume Spanish has never kept secrets from me, or that their existence is contingent upon my own. Regardless of your perceived familiarity with a language, Language as a larger theoretical entity is fluid and reluctant. They, languages, do not reveal themselves to you in their entirety, nor could they if they wanted to, because much like people, they are constantly in a state of evolution.

I have been forced to abandon the notion that I can simply speak Spanish with an altered “Portuguese-y” accent and get by. I mean, yes, most of the Portuguese professors also have in-depth knowledge of Spanish and can certainly understand me when I falter or rely on one to compensate for the other. What I mean to say is that I have been forced to abandon the notion that language is a simply a tool of convenience, that it yields itself to you, that it is a means. My stumbling in Portuguese has taught me that despite the academic and necessary practice of outlining linguistic similarities between languages, to classify linguistic families wherein perhaps some of its members are rendered “twins,” languages have a tendency of asserting their distinctiveness, an assertion that is uncomfortable for the learner. But, to deprive a language of this distinctiveness for simplicity’s sake is akin to depriving the twin at the other end of the table of their personhood.

Sawnie Smith is currently a senior at Smith College. She originally hails from Dallas, Texas and is pursuing a major in Spanish, a minor in Philosophy, and a certificate in the Translation Studies Concentration. It is her eventual professional aspiration to become a linguist.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Spanish Flowers in German Soil

April 13, 2016 nmartinez

I tend to be a little nervous when I’m meeting a native Spanish speaker. I get flustered and stutter over my Spanish—even with the words I’ve said so many times that they’re second nature to me. Depending on the evening or my amount of carefree disregard, complete thoughts and sentences unfurl with the ease of my English fluency. It’s a feeling I want more of in my life, and theoretically I know how to achieve it. I need to speak more Spanish, listen, and engage with the language despite its difficulties. It’s about improvement as opposed to a flawless performance; I just need to start small and close to the earth. I want my language to flourish with the vibrancy of the rural Honduran countryside that my mother came from, and the musical energy of my father’s small town not too far from hers. I would tend to my Spanish like delicate seedlings in my greenhouse, awaiting the seasonal shifts of blooming fluency.

martinez_2016-04-05-essay-image I asked for a tutor in my Spanish literature course in Hamburg because I wanted to improve. It was frighteningly difficult and embarrassing to ask for help with Spanish; I didn’t want to reveal the gaps of language that were allowed to go unbridged in my upbringing. But I had spent too many years feeling embarrassed, and my German had a structure that my Spanish sorely lacked. I wanted them to be even.

I was to meet my tutor at the library; I didn’t know what she looked like. She was from Venezuela, a native speaker of Spanish, educated in the language and capable of cultivating articulate thoughts with a delicacy I could only imagine. I wondered how I would greet her. Would I approach her in English, for ease? In German, for practicality? Or in Spanish—for what, I couldn’t really say.

I don’t really remember how I picked her out among the other people at the library’s cafe; there was simply a moment of recognition for a mutual purpose. I stumbled into an energetic greeting in Spanish, and she stopped me. She asked me where I was from.

I told her that I was from the United States, but my family was Honduran. There was such kindness in her at my response; she heard the accent when I spoke. It was evident.

I eased very happily into my conversation with her then. Occasionally I felt silly and clumsy; I recalled that I didn’t know how to say whatever I wanted, and that I couldn’t arrange my sentences into neat rows like beautifully planted gardens. It’s a skill my mother has; her ease with Spanish came naturally to her because it was the native language she cared for and cultivated all her life. Spanish was my native language, too; it merely shared space with an invasive species I couldn’t tame.

My tutor helped me cut down the weeds and organize my thoughts. It was lovely to remember that Spanish was as rightfully mine as it was hers. It was the beginning of a place of confidence for me. I planted my Spanish flowers in German soil and watered them with German water. I never expected it would be just the thing I needed.

Nancy Martinez speaks at least three languages (the fourth is debatable): English, Spanish, German (and Italian). She studies literature in a desire to draw out the human experience in the structure of narratives, and couples that with her language studies to access the structures of thought in different literary traditions. She looks forward to translating her memories into different languages and perhaps working with the publication of scholarly texts after graduation.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

In the Guest House

March 21, 2016 aacosta

When you live in Florida, you don’t need to look very far to find Spanish speakers. For three years in high school, I attended the annual Florida State Spanish Conference (Conferencia) in Orlando, Florida and I was surrounded by the sights and sounds of Florida’s vibrant Latino culture. As a member of a 16-person competition team, I practiced impromptu speeches and rehearsed a play called “La Casa de Huéspedes” (“The Guest House”).

Angela Acosta (first row, second from left) and her Conferencia team

For four days, Spanish was the only language that I spoke and heard, and I found myself quite literally front and center of it all as narrator of the play. I encountered many unfamiliar words in the script and I practiced carefully pronouncing my lines with my teammates. During our practice sessions, my funny teammates transformed into a sassy lady knitting in an armchair and a sick elderly woman. Even though it was intimidating to introduce the play in front of a panel of judges, I knew that my teammates were right behind me ready to get into character at a moment’s notice.

While the Sunshine State may seem to be an extension of Latin America, growing up in Gainesville, Florida didn’t offer me many experiences to learn Spanish and connect with my Mexican roots until I tried out for Conferencia. I knew plenty of Spanish vocabulary prior to joining the team, but it all finally came together during those long hours practicing the speech topics. Instead of working on grammar exercises, I was able to tell people what I thought about my favorite books or my opinion on American fashion. When we weren’t practicing, we talked about a myriad of topics ranging from soccer teams to popular Latin songs. During those memorable spring days in Orlando, I immersed myself not in a country, but in a community brought together by our shared appreciation for the Spanish language. My heritage and culture came alive during our lively play practice sessions. The family that my teammates and teachers created is something that I still carry with me as a proud Latina finally able to speak Spanish fluently.

Fast forward to my first semester at Smith College when I attended my first Nosotr@s general body meeting. I discovered a supportive community of strong Latin@s who remind me of my beloved Conferencia teammates and I have immersed myself in everything that Nosotr@s has to offer. Thanks to Nosotr@s, I began to speak Spanish in and outside the classroom and learn more about the Latino community in New England. I took upon the challenge of planning the Seven Sisters Latin@ Conference as a way of connecting with Latinos engaged in the arts, activism, and everything in between. While the conference ultimately did not take place, it helped me become aware of the great work that Latinos are doing to celebrate their culture and solve issues facing the Latino community.

Until I joined the Conferencia team, I didn’t realize how far I could get learning Spanish as a non-native speaker. Thanks to my Conferencia teammates and friends in Nosotr@s, I discovered my passion for Spanish and, more specifically, Spanish literature. Now that I better understand the diverse experiences of Latinas and Spanish Americans, I feel more connected to the history and culture that created the literature that I admire. I now realize just how diverse our community is since it’s made up of monolingual Spanish and English speakers, bilingual Latinos, and speakers of indigenous languages. Speaking Spanish does not define being a Latina for me, but it has helped me find other people who share the same language and similar life experiences.

Even though I didn’t stay very long in the “guest house” at Conferencia, the memories I made with my teammates have left a lasting impression on my academic and personal journeys. I no longer feel an awkward distance towards Spanish because I can interact with other native speakers and learn expressions specific to certain countries. With a language that has more than 400 million speakers in 31 different countries, my stay in the “guest house” helped me discover who I am as one of those Spanish speakers.

Angela Acosta is a junior English and Spanish major pursing the Translation Studies Concentration. She is a Mellon Mays fellow working on a research project translating and analyzing poems from Vicente Aleixandre’s book Sombra del paraíso (Shadow of Paradise). You will likely find her making pottery in the ceramics studio or inline skating around the quad on a nice day.

Global Impressions