I remember the day when my mother dropped me off at the front door of my pre-school class- the welcoming teachers who were extra tender, the vibrant wall decorations, and the clueless children who were dominantly from Mexican heritage, but the image that strikes me most is of me hugging my Guatemalan mother’s leg, telling me “Todo ba estar bien mijio.”(“everything will be fine, son.” “Ba” is informal spanish for “va”) In Thompson's web article “Five Reasons Why People Code Switch”, He elucidates how individuals code-switch in different ways and in many states of mind to assimilate with those around them. Code-switching often seems forced and unnatural, I know it did for me in my childhood. I am the first-generation American born child in my
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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