Spanglish

“Ma quiero comer” Yo dijé

“¿Qué?” said my mother

“Yo steven go downstairs and tell mom I’m hungry” I said

“No you go downstairs and tell her” Steven responded

“Mira puto vas a ir downstairs y de le que quiero comer” I angrily said

Steven quietly said “Okay”

Ever since I started speaking spanish which was when I was about 6-7 years old. Me and my sister Tania would speak to each other in english, however halfway through our sentences we would speak in spanish then switch back to english to finish off the sentence. When my younger brother started to speak, me and tania would get him to adapt to the way we spoke because we are bilingual. My mother Sonia and my father Jose got frustrated because this became a habit. He liked that we were getting comfortable speaking yet he was disappointed because he didn’t want us speaking like this. One day me and my family went grocery shopping and Steven, Tania, and I would speak the way we did at home. We would speak wherever we went. These kids who looked to be about our age gave us sideways looks because we would switch languages every so often and one of them would get mad. He approached us and said angrily, “Shut the fuck up you fucking spanish speaking hicks”. The real definition of the word hick is a person who lives in the country, regarded as being unintelligent or provincial. The word hick in my opinion means a really loud hispanic person. At that moment, Steven, Tania, and I replied with, “We’re not hicks”, we just switch languages halfway through the sentence because we’re used to it. The guy left, and we continued our conversation. This got me quite mad because he was judging us by the way we spoke instead of getting to know us. This is my accent or my way of speaking,

“How was it at the escuela?” Steven asked

“Todo went fine”, replied tania

I replied with,

“Can we try to stop doing this language swap halfway through the sentence because it’s kind of bothering people, even our own parents.”

The next day, was the first day of us trying to stop speaking the way we did. This is how it went...

“B-bu-go-bue this is hard”, I angrily said

“Yo know”, steven said shyly

“Me heads hurts”, Tania replied

Eventually we all took speech class during elementary school to help us stop, however things may have gotten even worse. There were other hispanics just like Steven, Tania, and I, but they knew how to maintain one language while speaking. However they knew more curse words than we did. We only knew puto, so we eavesdropped on their conversation while they were spoke spanish.

“Mira cabron necesitas a se mi tarde”, said one guy

The guy turned around and noticed us,

“And I don’t like your fucking language you fucking hicks.” He left angrily. When we heard that we ran so we wouldn’t get in trouble. After a while, we came together and discussed what we heard.

“Are we hicks?”, asked Steven

“I don’t think we are”, me and tania responded.

Later that day we went home and asked our parents

“Are we hicks?” I asked

“No it’s that people just assume and label us just because they see one person be a hick then assume we are as well”, said Sonia

“We aren’t hicks, but let me find out you guys are becoming hicks”,

said Jose angrily. We went straight to my room and talked about the way we spoke. We realized we didn’t want to continue switching languages in the middle of our sentences, so we did our best to stop. The next morning we woke up and greeted each other.

“Good morning Steven and Tania”, I said

They both replied with

“Good morning Jonathan”.

We were happy that we stop speaking the way we used to, little did we know it came back. We hated the fact that we spoke like this and this is why we were in speech class for the rest of elementary school. We never got the chance to improve our english because our english was awful due to our tongues. By tongues I mean the way we speak is from our tongues. So our tongues are bilingual and used to either using accents or not using accents. I remember I couldn't pronounce certain words because of the way vowels were said. I’ll also extend a letter or so.  At the end of the day Tania, Steven, and I got the hang of staying in one language and we at times tend to do it just to joke around. However we still struggle to say some words but we take step by step.