Juan of Words

Translating For My Parents

¡Ay, Ay, Ay!

At times I didn’t want to translate.  It was embarrassing to be the interpreter.  To not understand what that person was saying or how exactly it was my parents wanted me to convey their message.  It was unnerving, uncomfortable, even shameful.  The way people would look at me sometimes.  The tone they’d use.  The frustration in their voices.  In my own parents body language.  We knew the English language and we were supposed to be able to express their emotion and context all of the time!

But in all honesty, it was hard.  It still is.  I’d flutter around in half English words, half made up Spanish vocabulary, trying my best to dialogue in conversations far beyond my comprehension level, not to mention my age.  There was a lack of sophistication in my vocabulary.  I didn’t understand technical terms, industry specific terminology and much less indirectas or habladas.  My mother would finally just end up getting frustrated and either muster up as much of the English language as she could or resort to telling off the cashier at the grocery store in a very fast paced, pissed off Spanish.

This variety was always much harder to understand because it was all emotion, and most of it pure anger and frustration.  We’d storm out of the store, leaving all of the groceries behind, either in the cart as we had collected them, or on the register in bags and on the conveyor belt, my mom going on and on about how the cashier had tried to overcharge us and act like she didn’t know what we were saying.  I can’t tell you how many times we played out this same scenario, in multiple stores, over the years, but to my mother’s credit, it did take a hell of a lot to infuriate her to the point of leaving everything behind.  Especially since she was shopping for the entire household and didn’t have the time to go back through and pick everything out all over again one by one.  Though, to this day, she’s not above cursing someone out in Spanish and walking out on them if she feels she’s being wronged.

You can understand why as soon as I turned into a teenager I tried my hardest to avoid these confrontations.  With much more reason when one of my parents weren’t the ones requesting the interpretation.  If they had an appointment I’d run to the restroom right when they were about to get called in, I’d play dumb, like I didn’t understand what was being said, or I’d just plain refuse to be the official translator.  It’s a little embarrassing to admit now, but I did.  A few times I even allowed us to walk away with our heads bowed down in shame after somebody humiliated us for not being able to communicate “properly” in the English language.

If I felt degraded I can’t imagine what my parents were feeling.

It wasn’t until complete strangers began asking me, more often than not, if I spoke English, that it hit me: to a lot of people, not everyone, we Mexicans were all the same.  It didn’t matter if my parents had come to the United States as adults and I had been born and raised in this country, we were all Mexicans, Latinos, Hispanics… whatever they wanted to call us – a docile people who could be reproached, directed, reprimanded, and insulted, especially if we didn’t know the official language of the nation.  I decided to stop stepping down and stepping back.

Now I’m the first one to tell anybody to stick up for themselves however they can.  In English, Spanish, Spanglish, or whatever other vocabulary they can muster.  I guess being a pelionero runs in the family!

El Chavo, La India… And Now, Maybe Even La Muñequita Lala

Immersion, and the road to growing up bilingual

La Muñequita Lala

We grew up on El Chavo del Ocho, Chespirito, La Guereja, La Chilindrina, Doña Florinda, El Botija, Ñoño, even La India Maria and Cantinflas, at times.  There was something about those characters that connected to our reality.  Living in los estados unidos with very Mexican parents, traveling every summer to Mexico in whatever car or truck we had at the time that could make it all the way there and back, celebrating quinceañeras and not Sweet 16’s, and just living in two cultures and two languages, going back and forth constantly between one and the other.

Where Little House on the Prairie shared some of our values most of the time, we understood completely everything our Spanish-speaking characters were feeling and living all of the time.  When La India Maria would run around discovering new things, everything from ordering a cheese hamburger to accidentally ending up in an English only night club and being forced onto the dance floor, we identified with her initial shock, curiosity and subsequent inevitable mishaps.  It was like she was validating all of our stupid mistakes and adventures like nobody else in the mainstream media was doing at the time.  The apartment complex El Chavo and Chespirito lived in was our apartment complex.  We knew the nosy neighbor, the snotty kid, the spoiled one, the chubby one – I think that was me – and all the rest of this lovable, and very colorful, cast of characters.

We’d gone so far as to cast our own fantasy vecindad from the real characters we lived with in our 27-unit little apartment complex.  It was fun, and it was something we could all enjoy as a family, watching those all Spanish-language sitcoms and movies.  Which got me thinking… maybe that’s why it was so easy for us to maintain so much of the Spanish-language over the years despite never having taken any ESL classes?  I mean, while we were being entertained, we were also being immersed in the nuances, the subtleties of the language, and our culture.  We learned the humoristic timing, the colloquial references, the slang words, and so many other things that I probably still can’t even point out today.

In a way it created a deeper bond between all of us.  These shows were something that were ours.  That even though we never had cable television, we could embrace as something unique and cool we actually did have access to.

Where now shows like Dora the Explorer and Maya and Miguel embrace bilingualism almost exclusively, I think there is a lot to be said for full Spanish-language shows that immerse our children not only in the language, but also in the culture.  I’m sure there are some studies out there somewhere that can speak more scientifically on the matter, but I’m just going on my own personal experience.  My testimony, LOL!  So while you can still catch Chespirito and El Chavo reruns every once in a while on TV, or always on the internet, I was pretty excited to learn about two new characters created by a personal friend of mine who were now coincidentally calling Marcelo Gomez Bolaños as a joke.  I’m talking about La Muñequita Lala and El Abuelito Nicolas, both of who are aiming to become YouTube stars, or at the very least teach a little bit more of the Spanish-language and culture to our kids.

Muñequita Lala sings children’s songs in Spanish on her YouTube channel, most of which you’ll probably remember from your own childhood – I did kind of abruptly after I started watching a couple of the videos – and can also be found on Facebook….  El Abuelito Nicolas, meanwhile, tells classic stories like “The Three Little Pigs in Spanish,” and what do you know, he’s also got a space on Facebook for viewers to connect with him.  I’m telling you, Chespirito would have been huge on YouTube, LOL!  Now that we’ve all accepted the fact that being bilingual in any two languages is a positive, if you choose for that other language learned, besides English, to be Spanish, I say give immersion a chance… and what better way to do that than with a little twist on something our parents generation did so well, entertainment!

The producers of Muñequita Lala and El Abuelito Nicolas, while good friends, did not provide any compensation for this write up.  These are all my personal opinions.

Lessons From My Mother

Mi Madre

My mother has always been a strong woman.  Much stronger than any of us could have ever imagined, I think.  She was the one who crossed the Rio Bravo with a child on each arm, my brother Chuy in one, me on the other, sitting on nothing more than a rubber tube as she made her way into this, the nation of opportunities. The one who less than 24 hours after being deported and separated from us for the first time at the Texas- Mexico border for not having legal documentation – leaving us all, her children, sobbing uncontrollably with her departure – called from a public phone to let us know she had once again crossed illegally into the United States.  The one who in her time scolded an immigration judge so severely, for not wanting to grant her a legal status under the 1986 amnesty, that she made her change her mind and allow her a permanent residence.

Aside from all her strength and courage, however, to me, my mother has always been the woman who’s taught me more about life than anyone else.  We never had much in our home, but thanks to her, we never really felt like we were missing anything.  If there wasn’t enough to eat she’d sit us all at the table to eat before she did, if we didn’t have enough money to make ends meet she’d go clean houses, iron clothes, make tortillas, gorditas or tamales to sell, and when, on more than one occasion, we felt that we had lost all hope, mamá would pray for and with us.  She is and has always been the strongest part of our family.  The one who never failed us, the one who never gave up, the one who’s always tried her best to find a way to help us, and the one who’s always proved to us, time and time again, that for any one of us, her seven children, she would do anything.

Through her love I learned that humility is worth much more than gold, that the only thing pride is good for is to make one miserable, that one should always have dignity, regardless of what we’re doing, that we are never more, or less, than the next person, that helping others is the same thing as helping oneself, and most importantly, that family is sacred.  That no matter how mad we get or how severely we fight, we’re still family.  The same body.  The same blood.

My mother has been many things in her life.  A daughter who was given away.  An abandoned teenager.  A young woman in love.  A wife.  A maid.  Even a “recogida”.  The one who cleaned my teachers’ homes.  The one who cleaned executive offices.  The one who as a young woman confronted her family in order to come to el Norte.  The one who never denied helping any of our family members once she was here, taking in as many of them as needed it.  The one who took care of my grandmother in her final years.  And the one who at our side, in her role of mother, has shed an infinite amount of tears in our happiest, saddest and most bitter moments.

It’s difficult for me to express just how much my mother has always meant to us.  There aren’t sufficient words to show her how important she is to me.  That even though sometimes it might feel like we’re growing farther apart, every day that passes I feel closer to her.  With time, and the weight of my years, I’ve come to understand so many things, and it’s with great pride that I do scream at the top of my lungs that “I am my mother’s son!”

Without you we would be nothing mamá.  I love you!

This is the English translation of the original blog post entry, ‘Las Lecciones De Mi Madre’, published in the Houston Chronicle’s Spanish-language publication La Voz de Houston.  To read the original post in Spanish Click Here.

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