This was a challenge because I wanted for people to like me and be my friend in high school, but this was the time to establish I was a certain person. At first, I would reveal my ethnicity of Guatemalan and El Salvadorean and people would respond, “ Isn’t that in Mexico?” or “It is the same thing as Mexican.” This actually disturbed me because I had travelled to both Guatemala and El Salvador and as to Mexico, but Mexico lacked something that the other countries had and that was family. I kept my emotions within me, half nodded, dropped my eyes to the ground, and agreed with them. I recall on one time when I was instructed to read aloud a whole section of writing in my freshman Spanish class in high school. As I read, I would often drop endings and say words in the spanish that I was raised with. After I was done reading I was told was that my style of speaking was different. The way I expressed myself through words and phrases were different than those of Mexican descent, but expressing myself this way was the most comfortable for me. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, she voices that “Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor english.” Similarly to how I was initially feeling at the beginning of my Spanish class freshmen year since my Spanish was not the “norm”. The first half of freshmen year, I felt as if I was wearing a facade that was becoming too heavy to sustain. I remember during lunch sitting in a table full of hispanic students eating cafeteria lunch and being like a fifth wheel on a car, not spinning in unison with the other wheels, but motionless and
This was a challenge because I wanted for people to like me and be my friend in high school, but this was the time to establish I was a certain person. At first, I would reveal my ethnicity of Guatemalan and El Salvadorean and people would respond, “ Isn’t that in Mexico?” or “It is the same thing as Mexican.” This actually disturbed me because I had travelled to both Guatemala and El Salvador and as to Mexico, but Mexico lacked something that the other countries had and that was family. I kept my emotions within me, half nodded, dropped my eyes to the ground, and agreed with them. I recall on one time when I was instructed to read aloud a whole section of writing in my freshman Spanish class in high school. As I read, I would often drop endings and say words in the spanish that I was raised with. After I was done reading I was told was that my style of speaking was different. The way I expressed myself through words and phrases were different than those of Mexican descent, but expressing myself this way was the most comfortable for me. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, she voices that “Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor english.” Similarly to how I was initially feeling at the beginning of my Spanish class freshmen year since my Spanish was not the “norm”. The first half of freshmen year, I felt as if I was wearing a facade that was becoming too heavy to sustain. I remember during lunch sitting in a table full of hispanic students eating cafeteria lunch and being like a fifth wheel on a car, not spinning in unison with the other wheels, but motionless and