Archive for July, 2019

English and Spanish

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

All around the world, people speak more than one language, but in the U.S., increasingly, speaking Spanish or anything besides English feels like a political act. We live in California, where my Guatemalan-born children frequently are assumed to speak Spanish. My daughter Olivia, who speaks quite well, describes this assumption as “triggering.” The other day, Olivia and I were chatting to each other in English while waiting to make a purchase at Macy’s. The cashier, a bilingual speaker, addressed Olivia directly and asked, “Hablas español?”

Olivia responded in Spanish, “Yes, a little,” and engaged in a short conversation to prove her cred. But the exchange bothered her. Later Olivia said, “The cashier wanted to see if I was one of ‘you’ or one of them ‘them.’ Why can’t I be both?” This happens to Olivia all the time: At her new large public high school, where teachers and students assume she’s fluent; in restaurants, where staff will speak to her in Spanish and me in English; in the aisles of the grocery store and Target, where strangers approach and ask her questions in Spanish. (“Do I look like I work here?” Olivia sometimes wonders.) For our kids from Guatemala, as for the politicians and other Latinos profiled in this excellent Washington Post article, Why Don’t You Speak Spanish?: For Julian Castro and Millions of Latinos, the Answer Is Not So Simple, speaking Spanish is considered a litmus test, a mark of authenticity. At the same time, in the United States, being bilingual often is viewed with suspicion and contempt.
Witness these sentences: “You’re in America. Speak English.”

ShareThis

Gemma Givens

Friday, July 12th, 2019

 

I’m posting a link to an excellent profile of 28-year-old Gemma Givens in UCBerkeley News, Staffer’s search for birth mom reveals dark history of Guatemalan adoption. Adopted in 1990 at four months of age, Gemma Givens is founder of Next Generation Guatemala, an international community of people adopted from Guatemala.

So much of what Givens says in the article resonates, especially this: “I felt like I was foundationless, or that I was floating, or I was a ghost, or I was a genetic isolate, which, in a way, I was… Whose face do I have? Why am I so short? Why is my hair so thick? … On good days, I felt super proud and entitled and arrogant about that, like, ‘There’s no one like me.’ And on the worst days, I felt crippling depressed because I’m all alone in the world. Of course, I’m surrounded by love and family and friends, but in a really existential way, I’m completely alone.”

For more information on Gemma Givens or Next Generation Guatemala, see FB, the Next Generation webpage, or contact nextgenguate@gmail.com.

Photo credit: UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

ShareThis