U.S. Hispanics and the "funny" Spanish we speak.
“The accent of one's birthplace persists in the mind and heart as much as in speech.” Duc de La Rochefoucauld
“Damn,” I muttered as I paced back and forth in my hotel room.
I flipped my notes and re-started my presentation.
“Hola estimados, como estan?”
We were less than two hours away from the official launch of Waze Ads in Mexico. A few floors below, dozens of media buyers and marketers would gather to hear about the ad platform and ‘location-based” advertising at-large. As the Business Lead for LatAm, it would be my job to give the introductory keynote and set the stage for the rest of the agenda.
My room at the W Hotel in Mexico City served as a stand-in audience. I would glance at the espresso machine as I rolled through the introduction of my presentation before glancing towards the snack bar as I transitioned into the history of Waze.
“Waze, más que una aplicación...es un movimiento…”
My hands gestured to emphasize the points our PR team wanted me to highlight, namely the growing Waze user base in the country and our commitment to localizing the product (both of which are attractive to the litany of brand representatives in attendance.)
I just had to make sure I could get through my first professional presentation in Spanish.
As I shuffled my notes to the last page, a familiar sensation began to bubble up. I could feel my throat tighten, and my tongue curl towards the roof of my mouth.
Ï drew a deep breath and tried to say “Mexico” again...but I couldn’t get past the “M” sound. I began to stutter in the isolation of my hotel room.
“AHHHHHH” I blurted out. I could not have this happening during my presentation. I relaxed and tried to say “Mexico” once more. This time, I forced it out. I sounded like one of the ad-libs on a Rick Ross track.
“MMMMMMMMMexico.”
Flipping back to the first page of my notes, I scribbled down a reminder. I crossed out the word “Mexico” and wrote “Este pais”...this country. If I was going to stutter with another M word, I wouldn’t say it.
I glanced at my phone. It was now 7:41am. I had about 40 minutes before I had to head down. Let’s run this back.
“Hola estimados, como estan?”
I started traveling to and from Mexico City in 2013. At the time, my new role at Waze covered Latin America. I would also travel extensively to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. It was a whirlwind, to say the least. I was living out what I had studied and dreamt about in my younger years. I used to fantasize about this back in Modesto.
As I began to rack up frequent flyer miles, I noticed I felt somewhat off in Mexico. In countries like Argentina and Chile, I felt an immediate connection based on language and culture. In other words, I was primed to search out commonalities with the folks I was working with and interacting with.
Yet from the moment I touched down in Mexico City, I felt uneasy, spotting differences from the get-go. The people looked like me but weren’t like me. They spoke Spanish the way I thought I spoke Spanish but did not. Then there was the secondary factor of background. Had my parents stayed in Mexico, the likelihood of me making it out of a tiny village in Central Mexico would have been slim to none. Thus I wouldn’t even be in a position to meet with executives from the country’s largest companies.
I was caught between two worlds and two homes. Junot Diaz, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao writes:
...after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong...
Oscar is both American and Dominican—and this, of course, makes visiting the Dominican Republic uncomfortable. Does he belong? Or is he a foreigner?
The whisper...it followed me on meetings with Mexican executives, coworkers, and prospects. Most of this was in my head. I was the one actively searching out differences with the people around me. But there was a conflict between who I thought I was (Mexican) and who I really was (someone from a small town in Northern California with Mexican parents.)
This inner conflict was most evident in the Spanish I spoke. Though I grew up in a household where Spanish was the predominant language, and though the Modesto of my youth was basically Little Michoacan, I simply did not speak in the same way Mexicans in Mexico spoke. And this made me more self-conscious than Kanye in 2004.
My favorite scene in the 1997 biopic Selena involves the titular character (played by a young Jennifer Lopez) trying to convince her father to let her band play in Monterrey, Mexico. The "Queen of Tejano Music," Selena has been growing in popularity, and this is her first opportunity to reach a new audience.
Her father, played by Edward James Olmos, isn't so sure it is a good idea. He turns to A.B. Quintanilla, his oldest child and Selena's brother, and tells him, "they don't accept us over there."
Selena interrupts, replying like any younger sister would.
"Helloooo," she begins sarcastically, "we're Mexican!"
Her father wastes no time in correcting her.
"No, we're Mexican-American. And they don't like Mexican-Americans. They can be mean and tear us apart... Selena's Spanish is…"
Selena interjects, demanding to know what's wrong with her Spanish. She reminds her father she's been singing in Spanish for more than ten years.
"Singing yes. But when you speak it...you speak it a little funny. "
A.B. laughs at his dad's comment. But the senior Quintanilla is not joking. As a member of Los Dinos, a Tejano music group he was a part of in the 1960s and 1970s, Quintanilla faced discrimination from both American and Mexican audiences. Once, Los Dinos were booed off stage for singing in English. The predominantly Mexican and Spanish-speaking audience called the band members "queers." They criticized them for not knowing any Spanish language songs.
On the other hand, they were also heavily discriminated against for being of Mexican descent. One club owner thought Los Dinos were Italian and hired them to perform. But once he discovered they were Mexican-American, the owner refused to pay the band.
The elder Quintanilla must have had these experiences in mind as he pushed back on his children's insistence of playing in Mexico.
"Being Mexican-American is tough. Anglos jump on you if you don't speak English perfectly. Mexicans jump on you if you don't speak Spanish perfectly. We have to be twice as perfect as anybody else!"
A.B. and Selena clearly think their dad is overreacting, and they giggle as he continues his diatribe.
"German-Americans, Italian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, their homeland is across the ocean. Ours is right over there," he says, pointing towards the nearby Texas border with Mexico. "And we have to prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are, and we have to prove to the Americans how American we are. We got to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans...both at the same time. And it's exhausting."
Quintanilla seems to have finally got something off his chest and closes his rant by saying, "...no one knows how tough it is to be a Mexican-American."
The scene, one of the most poignant and honest interpretations of the Mexican-American experience, closes with Quintanilla tabling the discussion, saying they'll assess after Selena finishes the California leg of her tour.
According to the PEW Research Center, there will be 40MM Spanish Speakers in the US by the time 2020 comes to a close. Second and third-generation speakers, like yours truly, make up a large percentage of this number. But here's a little secret, one thing these statistics do not reflect.
Most of these Spanish speakers do not speak it well. To echo Edward James Olmos's character in Selena, we “speak it funny.”
To understand the stunted growth of American Spanish, let's flesh out a thought experiment. Imagine a lower middle class/ working class (whatever your party's preferred demonym) family from rural Texas moves to the south of France.
Let's assume this is a family of a husband, wife, and two small children. In their new home, say in the outskirts of Marseille or Toulouse, they speak their Texas twang version of English. Because the children have two adults with whom to practice, their native tongue develops at a reasonable pace. But once they reach school age, two things begin to happen.
D’abord, the English this hypothetical Texan family speaks, will become the reference point for their French neighbors, classmates, and colleagues. The French populace that surrounds this Texan family will begin to think that all Americans speak this type of English.
This is why Americans have a stereotype of how all Mexicans speak.
Take California as an example. Since a large percentage of Mexican immigrants to California come from the countryside of Michoacan, Zacatecas, Jalisco, and other rural Mexican states, then the Spanish you hear across the state is reflective of said Mexican areas. Stated another way, Californians are rarely exposed to Spanish from other parts of Mexico.
We have to keep in mind most speech and slang is local. People from Michoacan speak a bit differently than people from Zacatecas the same way Californian slang differs from New York's.
When I started traveling to Mexico City for work, I could not understand their slang and they could not understand some of the terms I used as I learned my slang and matter of speech from Michoacan parents and relatives. Once, an immigration officer in the Mexico City airport asked me what brought to the city/ country. I replied with "para el jale."
"Jale" comes from "jalar" which in Spanish means to pull. Yet when used as a verb, it's slang for "work."
The immigration officer raised her eyebrows as she finished processing my documents. "One rarely hears that word in the city."
Ensuite, because the two children in our thought experiment have never taken English grammar classes in France (as is the case with most children of Mexican parents in the USA), their English will lag in development.
Let's say a relative from Texas one day decides to visit this family in France. The said relative will notice the two children, now young teenagers, make grammar and pronunciation mistakes when speaking English. Not only are they not taking courses to help their native tongue develop, but they have no one outside of their two parents with whom to practice. All this time, their French is accelerating at the standard rate and will eventually supplant English as the language they dream in.
This thought exercise is the reality for children of Mexican immigrants. Though now there are bilingual schools near or in Modesto—like the Riverbank Language Academy— there were fewer options when I was growing up. Furthermore, primary and secondary schools that offer Spanish classes are typically private institutions.
Ironically, there is a cost barrier preventing children of native Spanish speakers from improving their language skills. The consequence is a whole generation grows up with the Spanish skills of an eight year old.
Language is the first bond of identity. It ties you to your family and a larger tribe, giving you commonalities with the world at large. In the Basque Country of Spain, it's people call themselves the euskaldunak—singular euskaldun—which literally means “a Basque speaker.”
That would be like us Americans calling ourselves a word that roughly means "americanenglish speakers." Maybe Murican can fill that void.
There are two schools of thought regarding language and identity within the Mexican-American community. The first I discovered by accident decades ago when I overheard one of my mom's friends telling my mother about how strict her husband was with their kids.
"He tells them they are not allowed to speak English once they step through the front door."
My mother's friend and her husband were concerned their children would lose their grasp on Spanish if they weren't forced to speak it. More so than cultural artifacts like tortillas, tamales, quinceaneras, or hiding in your own house when someone knocks, language is the most crucial component of culture. Thus it makes sense that my mother's friend would set about a framework to keep her kids tied to the culture.
On the other end of the Spanish Spectrum, I had friends whose parents either never practiced Spanish with them or, in more extreme cases, forbade them from speaking it at home. The thought process was to assimilate as quickly as possible, one had to learn English as soon as possible. Parents in this camp felt Spanish would be an unnecessary delay in the process of assimilation. An old friend told me his folks didn't want him to face discrimination like they did, so they never spoke Spanish to him.
Both schools of thought have good intentions in mind. They are aiming at the same end-goal: help their children prepare for the real world by giving them the advantages judged to be most valuable. Of course, time (and research) has revealed the importance of being fluent in more than one language.
Luck and circumstance would shape my early abilities in Spanish. I would go from "pocho" speaker to getting paid handsome amounts of money to work in Latin America and communicate primarily in Spanish...and eventually Portuguese.
My parents were strict on several things. But never in language. Sure, I had to be polite and respectful regardless of language. My siblings and I had to saludar (greet) everyone in a room, and say mande (excuse me) instead of the more brute que (what) to express you didn't understand something. But as far as what languages we spoke, they couldn't be bothered either way.
But it is not like I had much choice in the matter. As the oldest of my siblings and of twelve cousins living in the Modesto area, I had no one to speak English with. Not only did my mother not speak a word of English, but my aunts and uncles had been U.S. Residents for less than 15 years. I had no choice but to ONLY speak Spanish. Furthermore, we only had Spanish language television. In fact, I wouldn’t discover MTV, rap music, or other American media gems until I was in 6th grade. I thought for sure the pop singers Brandy and Monica were members of Nine Inch Nails.
By the time the cousins started coming along, they had other older cousins who were already in school and thus were already speaking English. It was similar to my brother and sister. I was an ESL (English as a Second Language) student in 1st and 2nd grade. But my brother and sister, then around 4 and 2 respectively, were already communicating with my cousins and me in English. So sure, they grasped English much earlier than I did, but also never had a chance or an impetus for speaking Spanish and developing that muscle.
Those early years gave me reps in Spanish, and I could communicate in either language quite well. But the story would change by the time I got to middle school.
Riverbank is literally a street away from Modesto. In fact, I would bet most residents today could not tell you where one city ended, and the other began. But the school systems of both cities were worlds apart. Though I was living in Riverbank at the time, my parents did not want me to go to Riverbank Schools. No offense to my cousins or to other graduates of the RBKRAY (the colloquial name for Riverbank’s residents and/or graduates), but my mother did not think their institutions were up to par with the ones down Oakdale Road in Modesto.
She was right. My elementary, middle, and high-school were at one point recognized as California Distinguished Schools. My mother believed in the Modesto City Schools District so much, she faked our address for her three children to attend Stockard Coffee Elementary and Ustach Middle School. By my freshman year of High School, we finally moved to the only part of Riverbank that fell under the Modesto School district. My mother literally faked it until she made it.
Besides her belief in the superiority of the schools, there was another reason my mother wanted us in Modesto schools.
“If you stayed in Riverbank, you would have never learned English.”
Riverbank's 25,000 residents are mostly Mexican immigrants and their children. The first time my then-girlfriend (now wife) visited my childhood home, she remarked, "I have been here for three days, and you are the only person with whom I have spoken English."
My mother and several relatives are proof one could spend decades in pockets of California and never have the need to learn English. She also believed that Modesto Schools would expose us to more people and more ways of thinking. My graduating class at Modesto's Beyer High was 666 students. That same year, Riverbank High School had 800 students enrolled in the entire school. Modesto was like New York City compared to the rural Riverbank.
This decision would have lasting consequences for how my siblings and I developed Spanish. Because we didn't. While my cousins and other Riverbank students continued practicing Spanish in a small community, my siblings and I lost practice in a larger school system. I might have had a broader, more diverse experience at Ustach Middle School and at Beyer High School. But the cost of such an experience was stunted development in my native tongue.
Beyer High offered two types of Spanish courses. The first was your typical 101 course, the kind that introduces you to the basics like “dónde está la Biblioteca” and “yo soy fiesta.”
The other class was Spanish for Spanish Speakers. This was a grammar and syntax course, like the English Grammar courses we took in high school. I could have opted for the latter course. But instead, I took French.
I thought my Spanish was perfect, seeing as I spoke it at home. At school, teachers and classmates had no way of knowing my Spanish was lagging in development since I had no formal training, and they didn’t know any better. Plus, most of the Mexican-Americans I knew at Beyer didn’t speak Spanish, or I could tell they were not very good at it. There was no one with a better grasp on Spanish to tell me I needed work.
But my trilingual hopes would burst one summer afternoon when my cousin Chelly visited Riverbank.
As noted a few paragraphs above, I had twelve cousins that lived within a 2-mile radius of my childhood home. We were a close-knit group, and most social functions and afternoons were spent at each other's houses. We never called ahead or knocked. We just showed up.
Only my dad's sister Griselda did not live near us. She, my uncle, and my three cousins lived in Oxnard, CA. Tia Griselda's oldest daughter, Chelly—and the oldest cousin on my dad's side—is an accomplished nurse practitioner and a budding real estate investor. She was also the first in our family to go to college and grad school. In short, Chelly set the pace for the cousins (love you!)
I was bitter at Chelly for some time. I must have been a sophomore or junior in high school when she said something that shattered my burgeoning sense of identity and self. We were hanging out at some family party. One of our older relatives came up to our table and said hi.
We made pleasant conversation in Spanish and continued on with our afternoon. I caught Chelly staring at me from the other side of the picnic table.
"Martin. Your Spanish is bad."
The hell? Where did that come from?
"What? No, it's not. I can speak it...fine," I replied.
"You speak it. But it's broken. You don't speak grammatically correct, and you mispronounce words,"
I felt attacked. Maybe I didn't speak it as well as Chelly. But then again, she took classes in Spanish and hangs around mostly Mexicans. I have friends named Kyle and Randy!
As I protested further, I could feel the insecurity begin to envelop me. My first instinct was to fight back. I could have argued I knew how to communicate in Spanish, that in and of itself was a huge asset, especially in California. I wanted to make excuses and change the subject of how my focus was on picking up a third language.
I was becoming defensive. And if I was becoming defensive, it was because I cared about how Spanish helped define my sense of belonging.
Over time, my anger and denial made way for acceptance. She was right, my Spanish was no bueno. The environment I was in prevented me from understanding my language gap. Either no one cared to tell me or, more likely, my aunts and uncles didn't need to worry since I spoke English. It took someone from the outside, a foreign dictator from Oxnard in this case, to point out the truth.
For the first time in my life, I was aware of how funny my Spanish sounded. Yet I wouldn't do anything about it for some time. A few years later, at Modesto Junior College, I made the same mistake of not taking Spanish classes. These missed opportunities could have set me back if it weren't for my impending transfer to San Diego State University.
After two years at Modesto Junior College, I transferred to SDSU in the fall of 2007 to major in International Business. The program was a dual degree in business and the language of your choice. Part of the degree requirements made it mandatory to study abroad in a country based on your area of concentration.
Between submitting my application in mid-2006 and receiving my acceptance letter in January 2007, I expected to continue studying French. I was looking forward to a study-abroad program in Paris.
But along the way I started reading about Barcelona, studying its history and of course, its soccer team.
If I wanted to study in Barcelona, I would have to change my language concentration to Spanish. Thus, for the first time in my life, I would take Spanish literature, Spanish grammar, and Spanish/ Latin American history classes. The classes and the experience of living in Spain helped close the gap between where I was and where I should have been in regards to the development of my native tongue.
Realizing I had to improve my Spanish was a much-needed blessing. But it bubbled up the feelings of inadequacy familiar to all children of immigrants. If Spanish was so crucial to my sense of "Mexican-ness" and I didn't speak the language as I thought I should, then how "Mexican" was I?
I first noticed the stutter in San Diego State. Still, the impediment would visit me most frequently during my study abroad time in Barcelona. Whenever I spoke to one of the numerous Mexican nationals in Barcelona, I would become self-aware, afraid my accent would betray my "pocho" roots and let the other person know I wasn't exactly one of them. It was vital for me to fit in, as I still identified heavily with my Mexican roots. I wanted badly to be accepted by other Mexicans as a Mexican. But the more I tried to copy their slang or speech patterns, the more inauthentic I appeared.
I wasn't self-conscious, nor did I notice a stutter when I spoke to native Spanish speakers from other countries.
I recall a dinner conversation at a classmate's flat, where I met a trio of students from the Tec de Monterrey, one of the most renowned schools in Mexico. One of my flatmates, the one who invited me to the dinner, grabbed me and introduced me to the three students.
"Guys, this is my flatmate I was telling you about, Eric. He's also Mexican!"
I introduced myself and shook their hands. One of the three, the more hipster looking one, asked me what part of Mexico I was from.
"Well, I was born in California. But my parents are from Michoacan," I replied in Spanish.
The three of them looked at each other, unsure of what to say next. The momentary silence was killed when one finally replied, "well, then you are not Mexican. You are American."
It sounds worse than it actually was since we had distinct definitions of what "Mexican" meant. To him, it meant nationality, a word used to describe the passport you bring with you on your travels. To me, it meant a culture or heritage. It's a subtle nuance and a reminder that even when you use the same word, you may not be referencing the same thing.
Interestingly enough, the exact opposite happened a few weeks afterward.
I was coming back from a weekend trip from London. On the way back in, I greeted the Spanish immigration officer with my usual exuberance and enthusiasm.
“Hola! Buenos dias!”
The woman at passport control was probably not expecting so much energy at 6:37 a.m.
She tried to hide her grin and surprise as she leafed through my passport. She glanced at me, then glanced back at the visas in the back of my passport.
“Tu...de dónde eres?” Where are you from?
“Oh, I am from the U.S. I was born in California.”
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy her curiosity. And she dug deeper.
“But...how do you speak Spanish?”
It’s a question I get everywhere I travel. I told her my parents were born in Mexico but I was born in California.
“No, no, no,” she said. “You are Mexican. Americans are cold and impersonal. You are warm and Latin.” She smiled and handed me back my documents.
Well, that was the first time I was told I “wasn’t American.” Interesting.
The pacing and practice in the hotel room paid off as the presentation went off without a hitch or stutters. Most importantly, I conquered, even momentarily, one of my deepest insecurities. That I didn’t fit in.
I have been traveling to Mexico for six years. I've made lasting friendships, trusting business relationships, and beautiful memories. Most importantly, I have reconciled my immigrant background. I found something poetic in how the son of Mexican immigrants was flying first class to Mexico City to meet with heads of the largest telecom companies.
Identity is contextual. Where you are matters as much as where you are from. Like the old adage goes. "In London, I am from the West End. In Manchester, I am from London. In Spain, I am from Britain." Intuitively, I think I know this. And I was able to understand this in different domains. It took me a while to transfer those same learnings to my time in Mexico. Years of insecurities, cultural changes, and the context of the immigrant mentality meant I had to untangle these questions as I lived through them.
Even my own definition of what it meant to be "culturally" Mexican changed. When I started going to the Google office in Mexico I would try to relate to the Googlers there with the Mexican touchstones I grew up with. But those touchstones were referent to a specific type of Mexican—the rural, often impoverished Mexico my parents are from. I was surprised to find these Mexican Googlers didn't listen to banda (regional Mexican music popular amongst Mexican-Americans) or didn't use the slang I did.
Most came from well to do families and listened to Top 40 radio. In other words, I was surprised to find out these Mexican Googlers resembled Googlers in different offices across the globe. It makes sense since they went to similar schools, read similar books, and had similar upbringings.
Nassim Taleb said in The Black Swan, "…a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru." The similarities are horizontal. Class, age, gender, and interests are more indicative of personality than nationality or ethnicity.
Mexican Googlers and I didn't have the same "Mexican" touchstones. But we had a multitude of others like the books we read, the music we listened to, or the people we spent time with. Once I realized this, I stopped leaning in heavily on the Mexican angle. It was liberating. I could once again remove the focus on one of my identities and work on being a whole person.
The hotel staff at the Four Seasons, Mexican businesspeople in Fortune 50 companies, they always have the same questions when I first meet them. Where are you from? What they really want to ask is, "your accent is familiar, yet it isn't." If they weren't polite or didn't know me well enough, they would say it's a funny accent.
I used to freeze at this question because I didn't know what "from" they were referring to. The "from" of a Mexican culture surrounded by Central Valley acreage? Is "from" the city I am living in at the moment they ask? Is it "El Rancho" where my parents met and where I spent the first few years of my life?
No, it's simpler. I was born in Modesto, California. If they want to know more, I'm happy to share more details. But it'll have to wait until after the presentation.