My dad has a story he loves to tell about how I came home on the first day of kindergarten
and he was speaking to me in Spanish and I said: "Don't speak to me in Spanish any more".
(speaking in Spanish)
There was a time in my early teens when I didn't want to be identified as Hispanic.
The only person that I spoke Spanish with was my mother, and when she passed away that
was it, I didn't speak.
(speaking in Spanish)
When I was in college, I had all these classmates and because my
last name is Moreno they all assumed that I spoke perfect Spanish so they were like:
"What are you doing here? Why are you learning Spanish? Don't you know Spanish?"
I was born in San Antonio, Texas and I'm Mexican-American
but I didn't grow up speaking Spanish.
My grandparents spoke predominantly Spanish but when it came to us, my parents actually decided
to speak to us in English.
(speaking in Spanish)
They didn't want us to have accents. They wanted us to be acculturated. They wanted us to fit in.
The wanted us to be successful, and to them being successful meant English.
You just talk to any latino who went to elementary
school or high school in their 30s or 40s or 50s, and one thing that you'll encounter
is that many will tell you that when they spoke Spanish in school, they were punished
for speaking Spanish. Often we're getting messages like "Speak English because it's
important", and "be American". Of course, the 1960s changes all of that and we're in
a much different period today.
I never considered what my identity was as a Mexican-American
but then when I went to university they had all these amazing classes like Chicano literature
classes and Spanish classes and that's when I decided that I really wanted to really discover
my heritage and really reclaim it for myself and that's when I started studying in Spanish.
Robyn had this urge to communicate. She has full command of the
language in English and she wanted to do that in Spanish but she couldn't.
Teaching latinos is a little bit more challenging because we have to deal with the feeling that they should
already speak the language and they don't know it. There is a lot of emotional stuff
going on when they learn the language and that could be a little bit detrimental to
their learning.
I was raised speaking Spanish until I started kindergarten. I saw the other
kids speaking English, there were no other kids speaking Spanish and I didn't want to
be a different person.
(speaking in Spanish)
Even among English-speaking latinos, more than 90 per cent say that it's
important that future generations of latinos speak Spanish. I think that this emphasis
on pride and heritage, and Spanish is an important part of that heritage, is something that's going
to keep Spanish alive in a way that maybe for previous immigrant groups just wasn't possible.
It's really important to me that my kids speak Spanish because I want them
to know their latina culture.
Oso (bear)! He's cute! Hi oso!
I feel like as you get more and more Americanised
you start to want some of that nostalgia. I even miss my mum's weird accent
or the fact that she loves cheesy novellas. I want them to know that they are proudly latina,
they're proudly Mexican-American, and know who their grandparents were,
who their great-grandparents were, who their family is. Spanish is a part of that.