Spanglish! It’s a love-hate relationship I’ve had with the language. Growing up it was Spanish at home, English at school. In truth, I don’t even remember talking in Spanish with my siblings… and even now it still feels a little awkward to do so – like it is unnatural between us or something. That’s probably because as soon as we all started speaking English we just began communicating with each other almost exclusively in that language.
In college I thought my skills in Spanish were above average until I took the Spanish assessment for credit by exam. They told me I was mediocre and I was shocked. It wasn’t until I started that first class – Spanish for Native Speakers – that I realized just how bad my Spanish actually was. All my life pos, esque, troca, parkear, and so many others had been perfectly normal. Now all of a sudden they were grammatically incorrect! ¿Cómo qué? Even worse, I had never even noticed all of those accents over letters and couldn’t have cared less what they meant. My parents taught us the alfabeto and we knew there was an ll, an ñ, a ch, but that was about it. I could read, write and speak Spanish. I just couldn’t tell you where the malditos acentos belonged.
Somehow I managed to learn the basics.
Then, working as a full time Spanish-language print reporter it became perfectly clear to me just how detested Spanglish was among some native español speakers. There was cringing, head shaking, laughter, even utter shock at some of the words that would come out of my mouth. I learned what coloquialismos and anglicismos were pretty fast. Apparently the way I wrote and talked. A pesar de todo, I decided to persevere and learn as much Spanish as I could… to improve my own skills in the language for myself. I did and before I knew it I was correcting my own parents in their usage of their own first language. La camioneta. Estacionamiento. Lo que pasa es que…. Yup, it’s safe to say I was full of myself! Now, thinking about that just makes me feel ashamed. Who the hell was I to tell them their usage of Spanish was wrong?
¡Pinche mocoso! I drank the Kool-Aid and was pretty much a language snob.
Después de eso, going back to work in the English market with my newly honed Spanish skills – not thinking, talking and sleeping in Spanish all of the time – I began to miss my coloquialismos and anglicismos. I loved my Spanglish dammit! It felt like home. Like being in the Valley with my cousins, like hanging with the eses in my neighborhood, like all of the people that I had grown up around who were like me, cómo dice la India María “ni de aquí ni de allá”. That’s what we were. Part Mexican. Part American. And finally I realized that was okay! I’ll probably never be as good at Spanish as the native speakers. I’ll never fully grasp all of the rules about Spanish accents… but you know what, I can maneuver Spanglish like nobody’s business!
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