Growing up, I moved around several times. Location has never been a problem, but my language always seemed to define me, becoming the curse I couldn’t escape.
The first nine years of my life I lived in the Houston suburb of Katy. I was in second grade, had moved schools once and graduated from a bilingual program. Until then, knowing English and Spanish had been a blessing. After one year, I was comfortable in my new English classes, then my parents decided to move again. Only this time, we would move 492 miles south to Allende, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. I went from an all-English class to an all-Spanish school.
I arrived to my first day of school with no worries about my Spanish, because I had graduated from a bilingual program. However, I was made fun of for mispronouncing simple words and for having an “American accent.”
One student even created a rhyme with all the words I had mispronounced. It wasn’t a big deal until it made teachers laugh. My bad pronunciation had begun to define me and being bilingual became a curse.
In sophomore year of high school, I had the next five years of my life planned out; I knew which school I wanted to attend and the career I was going to pursue. I was placed in a bilingual program of Spanish-French. I was becoming trilingual! I still struggled with Spanish, but I had come to terms with it.
Then, just when I was comfortable, my parents decided to move 193 miles north, to Edinburg. This move has been the most difficult one I have experienced.
I was ready to start my junior year of high school, but my records said I had just moved from Mexico. This led to my placement in a freshman English-learning classroom. This meant that for three hours a day, two times a week, I was going to learn the essential words of the English language.
There was one teacher, “the one who taught me English,” who made it clear to me and my classmates how I thought too much of my abilities, and if I were to leave his program, I would be back in less than a week. After telling my parents what had happened, they went in to speak to my counselor and successfully got me into regular junior-level classes. By this time, the teacher had gotten into my head and scared me into speaking English.
Since my speaking self-esteem was so low, I decided to take easy classes and focus on getting out of high school. I never saw myself being in an advanced English class. I heard that college was all about writing, and all I could think about was how my “bad” English was going to set me back. After two years of thinking I wasn’t good enough, I got accepted to UTRGV and thought to myself, “I must be doing something right.”
Two English classes and a writing class later, I found a love for writing in both languages. Being a bilingual writer is a blessing, but it becomes a curse when there is no exact English version of the words ajeno, compadre or estrenar, etc., but that’s a story for another time.
