I was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, but my first language is Spanish. We moved to the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago when I was about two years old. We only spoke Spanish at home. All our visitors spoke Spanish. As I recall, even my childhood playmates spoke Spanish. When we went to mass at our neighborhood church, the priest said mass in Spanish. I believe everyone around me always spoke Spanish until I started school. When I watched television, it was in English. Occasionally, I would go shopping with my parents where I heard languages other than Spanish. However, the only language I understood was Spanish.
Since I grew up in the neighborhood called the Back of the Yards, I heard many different foreign languages along with English. When I played outside with the other children, I never understood what they said if they spoke a language other than Spanish. Although I often heard English, I did not learn to speak any English until I entered Kindergarten. It was the sudden immersion method since I had never spoken more than a few words of English at a time. Suddenly, for hours at a time, I only heard English, and the teacher expected me to respond in English. We learned nursery rhymes and songs that used archaic English words. When I attempted to use some of the new English words that I learned from the nursery rhymes or songs outside of school, other children would laugh at me. For example, I was ridiculed when I called a female classmate a lassie. I learned “lassie” from the song, “Have you ever seen a lassie go this way and that way?”
I attended a Lithuanian Catholic grade school called Holy Cross Grade School in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. All of the priests and most of the nuns spoke Lithuanian and English. We were always conscious of the fact that our neighborhood was the setting for the Lithuanian family in the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. During school hours, the nuns stressed the importance of learning English and we were not allowed to speak our native tongue whether it was Spanish, Polish, or Lithuanian. We had to master English if we were to function in a Catholic and American society.
What helped me learn English was the constant repetition of songs and prayers. Rote memorization was the norm. I improved my English vocabulary by writing down important words several times. This constant repetition helped me learn English. Every morning we went to church to attend mass in Latin before school. We prayed a “Hail Mary” before class in the morning. In the afternoon, we prayed the “Our Father” and the recited the “Pledge of Allegiance” before class. I often did not understand the lessons taught at school. When the teachers instructed the students to complete a task, I was usually the last one to comply because I didn’t understand the command in English and would belatedly obey it by watching what the other students did. Sometimes, my classmates made fun of me because I was slow to follow the instructions. Occasionally, the teacher would correct my English and students would make fun of me after class.
At home, my parents insisted that I speak English so that they could also learn English. The more English I spoke, the more Spanish I forgot. In the end, my parents realized how difficult it was to learn English, so they never really learned it well enough to become fluent. We ended up speaking these bilingual conversations where I spoke English to my parents and they spoke Spanish to me. Of course, certain terms were not translated from their original language. We often spoke in a mixture of English and Spanish: Spanglish. Once I knew how to speak English well enough to get by, I became the official family translator at age eight; I had to translate whenever we went out, and we needed directions or my parents had to conduct some sort of business. I was always self-conscious about the way in which I spoke English because of my Spanish accent.
When I was in the fourth grade, I felt embarrassed by the way I spoke English. I wanted to improve my fluency, so I read books to feel more comfortable with English. When I got my first library card, I spent a lot of time at the library reading books. I also borrowed a lot of books to read at home. I really loved the joke books because I learned the multiple meanings of many words. For example, “What did the ocean say to the beach? Nothing, it just waved.” These jokes and riddles helped realize that words had multiple meanings. This helped me to increase my English vocabulary while I also learned to enjoy the humor of the English language.
Unfortunately, I still had trouble comprehending the classroom lessons in the fourth grade. When we went to Mexico for two months during that school year, I had lost the little English fluency I had. In Mexico, I realized that I did not speak Spanish as effortlessly as my relatives in Mexico. When I played with my cousins, they made fun of my speaking that was part English, part Spanish. When I returned to Chicago, I realized that my classmates still made fun of my English. I did not speak either language very well. I also learned that I would fail the fourth grade because I missed two months of school due to our extended Mexican vacation. Since the teacher said that I failed in part because of my problems with English, I have always felt self-conscious about my English.
As I grew older, I wanted to be bilingual in English and Spanish and speak both languages fluently, like a native speaker. I often tried to read, write, and speak English and Spanish whenever possible. When I was in the Marine Corps, I studied English grammar books extensively. I read in Spanish whenever I came across something written in Spanish. However, it was not until I attended the University of Illinois Chicago that I felt that I really learned English and Spanish. To this day, I feel that I speak English with a Spanish accent and Spanish with an English accent.
Chicago USA 