Being Boricua
"You can't just ask people why they're white!"
I was with my gay friends at brunch (where else?), and they asked me a question I've been itching to answer for someone. My mom's Puerto Rican, right? So where's my accent? People are very often surprised to hear I was raised bilingual, if not primarily speaking Spanish. This was up until I started going to pre-K at a public school, where I remember not liking my teachers very much. Maybe you can help me figure out why this was, but one time they tried teaching us how to count on our fingers, something I already knew—except they were teaching us to use our thumb when counting to three, and they were frustrated that I insisted that you use your three middlemost fingers. Anyway, I refused to talk to my teachers, and the racist speech therapists at the school pathologized me about it. Mentally 'slow'? Nope. Autistic? Nope. Okay, it must be the Spanish at home. No more Spanish.
Despite my mom catching me speaking English to my baby brother (and in fact, if anyone cared to check, I had friends at that pre-K and at the toddler daycare at church; I remember a church caretaker asking me what kind of friends I had, and I said, "I have girl friends and boy friends!", much to her horror), I was made to stop speaking Spanish at home. What was that like? Distressing, I think. I remember visiting my mom's family on Puerto Rico, which we often did, and reflexively asking my aunt for water. "Yo quiero agua." I covered my mouth like I did something wrong. Probably not healthy, right? Lacan characterizes James Joyce as psychotic, forced to speak and write in a language not his own, this alienation yielding strange formulations of English. I don't think I'm psychotic—being comfortably hysterical—but I relate to that particular relationship to the English language.
I already spoke English, so most of the work of ESL was just making sure I didn't speak Spanish. This lasted well beyond me having spoken any Spanish. I remember having some trouble. In first grade, they had me read a story and then asked me questions about it: "How did the people in the other cars feel when the narrator's grandparents drove really slowly?" Well, look at the illustration, I said; they're obviously upset like the story says. Wrong answer. I was notoriously good at reading and writing but, since I didn't speak Spanish anymore, I didn't realize except in hindsight that that was an English proficiency test, and didn't know at the time that images didn't count as textual evidence. I wised up in third grade, and when I moved schools I started taking proficiency tests on the computer. A multiple-choice question asked: "What kind of dessert is most refreshing on a hot day?" I picked what I thought was obvious, a cold dessert, but the correct answer was a spicy dessert. The program explained that the spice makes you sweat, which (of course) refreshes you. I was 80% sure then that ESL was mostly about playing in our faces.
What did I get out of all of that? A stupid t-shirt? I have a mental block against speaking Spanish. I can still understand plenty just fine, about as well as a three year-old, and I remember getting mad at my mom for talking about me in Spanish on the phone when I could perfectly understand her even though I couldn't say anything. My thought-patterns are wonky, sometimes useful for thinking outside the box, but never intuitive for others. I find myself constantly thinking about the proverbial spicy dessert for a particular situation. I became alienated from my mom's family. Before I was born, my abuelo used to drunkenly rant at my white dad about the occupation of Puerto Rico by the US military. Although things chilled out when my mom started having us mutts, I've always been hyperaware that I was an alien in my own family. My brother (raised speaking only English) was able to learn Spanish and get closer to them, whereas I grew farther apart from them. When I developed my five-year plan for college and adulthood, I figured that I'd have to drop contact altogether because I knew what they went through when my mom left for the US and married a white evangelical. I didn't want to be another wedge in my family. My mom asked me a few years ago to call my abuela for Mother's Day, and I did so trying not to cry—but afterwards, my mom told me never to worry about it ever again because then my abuela called her, frustrated, asking why she got a woman to impersonate me on the phone.
So, I'm in a weird position. I was raised to be proud of being Puerto Rican, of our culture, of our historical struggle, and it's not like I'm ashamed. Rather, I felt like the connection I had was already tenuous, and it was worn down gradually up to the point where I felt like it was best for them if I let it go. I didn't want to test the the already-stretched limits of love. But I'm far from disaffected. I care so much about my family and what I hesitate to call my own culture even though I was raised in it as a baby. Just a diaspora moment? Am I indulging in self-pity? Maybe. I miss my family, and I miss the island. Don't know if I'll see either again. Oh well. I just wanted to contextualize the Bad Bunny post, my stake in the game.
This is a lovely and important article that I think reflects a lot of the experience of mixed kids. Any mixed culture situation often winds up feeling never enough for either side. For some the racism is very overt. For others, it's a more insidious and linguistic sort of problem; the whiter you are or appear, the more easily you are expected to assimilate away from your culture. You said it very well when you discussed the dessert especially; where your internal logic doesn't match up to the unspoken cultural assumptions of the speaker - who varies day to day, scenario to scenario, often telling you that you're wrong in front of a crowd. I felt that part and the way you wrote it felt like yesterday for me.
ReplyDeleteAs a kid I spoke Quebecois French, Italian, and primarily English. I had a weird accent on some words & said stuff dumb ("close the lights"). Teachers said "no" to me a lot in Language Arts/English classes when I was young, around the same age as what you mention, but I never suffered racist speech pathologists or an edict of No More Language. I can't imagine how frustrating it is to be cut off not just by the institutions but by your family like that. For me, it was the mockery of children I was not equipped to handle. I was a kid and my brain was not mature enough to resist it any way but by anger or by assimilation. Kids mocked me so I became very careful at English, and I voluntarily stopped speaking French with my dying grandfather. I stopped using Italian words for things at home. spent all of 6th grade with my hands in my pocket because I was tired of being mocked for talking with my hands. I even accidentally changed my name in the 1st grade because of jokes about it, which actually became a problem decades later when I emigrated to the US and they thought I was concealing a pseudonym because I literally never used the full version of my name on a government form again.
Im white as hell. I speak Italian and French like a grade school child on a good day and have to Google search for grammar structures and conjugation in Italian nearly every time I use it. I have to really think about simple things like counting with numbers I learned when I was a kid constantly and now I live around Mexicans so their Spanish numbers, close to Italian ones, confuse me sometimes. I'm half the polyglot I might have been, I lost the last days of my Belgian grandfather's life in his language, I am missing letters and sounds in my name, but I became very good at English class.
Lovely article.