Vaquero Voice

“I’m actually trilingual. I speak English, Spanish and French and one of the biggest benefits is being able to help people who are confused as to what’s being said. Like, when I cross the bridge sometimes, I see immigrants coming from, like, Africa and that’s a francophone country. So, I help them out and I helped immigration kind of understand what was going on with what they were saying. And also, well, speaking Spanish really helps. My mom is a journalist, and she was a journalist in Mexico, so she really taught me how to speak the correct way in Spanish. And it really helps. I, like, write in Spanish and everything, and it’s really good.”

“As artsy-fartsies as it sounds, it’s a steppingstone into other cultures. It’s a way of broadening one’s horizons and I recently found out that it takes a bit of a high IQ to speak multiple languages, so bragging rights to an extent.”

“Well, it helps you in your job. It helps you in college, it helps you to communicate and understand other people. Like, in my job, there is a lot of people that talk English, so I can talk English. But, there is also a lot of people who talk Spanish and if there’s, like, difficulties, it’s difficult because I have a friend who doesn’t talk English and some customers do and he’s always like, ‘Eh, come help me. ¿Qué ’ta diciendo?’ Y qué no se qué. So, I’m like, ‘Oh, el quiere eso.’ ‘Ah, ok.’ It helps you a lot to communicate with other people.”

“The benefit of being multilingual is being able to communicate with different students from other countries and, being in the [Rio Grande] Valley, you will have a lot of people speaking Spanish. So, being able to communicate in Spanish or another language, like Italian, is good. You are able to communicate and express your thoughts and share ideas. They can understand better since they are able to communicate in the same language.”