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Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Do you speak Castellano?

Growing up along the border of the U.S. and Mexico, noticing the languages people use, and when and where they use them has always interested me.

As a young child I would hear my sister and brothers converse with each other in English, then turn to speak to our mother in Spanish. The lunch table conversations bounced back and forth between languages. It was natural for us and no one minded, except Mom, when she sometimes couldn't follow the English line of ideas, and we would bring her up to speed in a quick translation. I'm not sure she was always happy with the arrangement of languages around the house, but neither am I sure she wanted to know every word of what we kids were talking about. Maybe she found some peace, if not quiet, in purposely not tuning into our chatter.

Her English improved tremendously over the years, some from adult education classes that were a part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but mostly from the 1 hour or so of soaps she watched on TV while resting after getting our lunch together.

This gliding back and forth between languages was frowned on at school, mostly because girls from Nuevo Laredo were dominant Spanish speakers, and needed to catch up to the English required in our classes. On the playground we dominant English speakers mainly stuck to English, and the girls from Nuevo Laredo to Spanish.

In my neighborhood it was strictly English, and that bent, along with media's influence, must have affected our ideas about what was better or worse in languages as in life, and, as it turns out death. We kids watched tons of TV, some local commercials included. Funeral homes competed for business with commercials, and we kids mimicked the TV spots making fun of the scary subject of death. "Would you rather be buried by Pulido or Jackson?" I once asked Aida and Carol, my neighborhood pals. I recall we thought Jackson to be the better of the two. Based on what? That question, and others like it that cast a light on language and power, have consumed me for decades.

When the occasional person from Mexico would stop me on the streets of Laredo to ask help with directions or in need of a translation, they might ask, "Hablas Castellano?" I remember always responding icily, "Si, hablo Espanol." I somehow took offense at everything when I was eleven, and this case of Castellano was no exception. Why not call Spanish Spanish, what was this Castillian thing anyway? And was there a chance it could be better than my Spanish, grr-grr hiss-hiss, and more pre-teen angst.

Travel in Spain this year has served to help to at least partially solve this lifelong riddle. There is it turns out, Little Linda, a really good reason to ask if someone speaks Castellano instead of Spanish.

There are four official languages in Spain, as revealed on the back of the orange juice container on the table set for us by our generous and creative AirBnb host, Xevi (pronounced Chevy) Badosa:

Zumo de naranja = Castellano
Laranja zukua = Basque
Suc de toronja = Catalan
Zume de laranxa = Gallego

None of these are Spanish.

There are other languages, Chevy tells me, including Calo, spoken by the Gitanos, and Bable, spoken by 5000 or so in Asturias.

To fully solve the riddle, I would need to travel back in time to know exactly why we kids unanimously chose Jackson over Pulido for a funeral home to bury us in some nondescript and very, very distant future.

My best guess today, sitting in Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Temple in Barcelona writing this blog, is that choosing Jackson over Pulido was a decision based in part on our rapidly forming ideas about power, seen both in language and culture. The primary reason, though, would have to be not having enough information at hand about our rich cultures from both Mexico and Spain.

Thinking of it now, isn't that lack of awareness amongst Mexican Americans Aida, Carol and myself, in itself, a demonstration of how power is exerted?
I wish I knew then what I know now. But naturally, that's not the way we learn and grow.

1 comment:

  1. Linda, when I learned to speak Spanish in high school, it was Castillian, from a teacher who had learned in Spain, but had also taught at university in Mexico City. She was always giving us different words for the same meanings, careful to preface the difference with "if you are in Mexico" or "Puerto Rico". To this day, I cannot answer gracias with de nada, It is always no hay de que instead. Mary Ann

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