Precerpt from My 20th Language: L3 Spanish

San Juan Bautista

When I first moved to SJB, I was clearly in Spanglish territory. We initially moved into a duplex, and the couple on the other side spoke mainly Spanish, especially when it was about important, shared matters. I quickly turned to a Spanish teacher at work, where I was administrator of a number of language programs. The teacher, wanting to impress, showed up with a nice binder and traditional lessons in hand. Oops!

“Oh,” I told her. “I can read most of those things, and I can talk about academic stuff without much trouble, but what I really need is to understand when I am being asked if I have electrical tape or to be able to ask for help with plunging a plugged toilet.” Those are not the topics of textbooks, but they are the topics of life in SJB.

The teacher quickly adapted, and I started learning how to live abroad at home, so to speak. In return, as payment for her kindness, I would attend her classes when she needed an interactive audience or non-student participant (e.g., she would have students present a news program and take questions from the audience; sometimes I made up half the audience!). Good for me, good for her, good for them.

Later, we bought a house which needed a lot of work. Jaime, our handyman, practically lived with us, for quite a while. He remade our bathrooms, fixed all the fixer-up stuff, repaired whatever broke. My husband and he struck up a strong friendship—in broken English. However, when he got sick and needed to explain the problem, he spoke to me in Spanish. When he was excited about his cooking skills, he described to me in Spanish his ceviche recipe—which my husband understood in full when Jaime started bringing us ceviche for breakfast. Yum! His recipe was good.

Jaime would bring his intellectually impaired teenage son, who would translate for my husband. When my husband noticed that the son would once an hour go to our book inventory shed and stand outside for a few minutes, he figured out that he was listening to the cuckoo clock striking the hour and singing its song. He bought the son his own cuckoo clock.

When there were events in Jaime’s families, like baptisms, we were always invited—usually the only Anglos, but I could manage both Spanish and Spanglish and translate for my husband. And when Jaime died unexpectedly, we attended the funeral. More than 500 people filled the church in Salinas, where Jaime lived. We joined in the pre-funeral rosary, which I do know in Spanish. After the rosary, the priest arrived for the funeral, noticed the only two white faces in the crowd, came over, and said, “The funeral Mass will be in Spanish.”

“That is okay,” I responded. “We live in San Juan Bautista.”

“Oh,” he noted. Enough said. We come from Spangland.

About a decade ago, Padre Julie entered my life—and will likely be a part of my life eternally. He was the priest for the Spanish Masses, which I sometimes attended. He was involved in a project, Por Amor a Los Ninos de Colombia (Colombia being his home country), which would provide a sustainable farm and establish a school for local children in his hometown, which was miles on horseback from civilization. My husband (computer graphics specialist), my son (web designer), and I (linguistic), along with a recruited friend from Colombia, now living in the USA, put together a website for the project. When my daughter needed brain surgery at Stanford, Padre Julio managed to find his way there to lead prayers before the surgery. At that time, he asked where he could learn English fast because the bishop wanted him to start celebrating some English Masses, and he still did not know much of any English. His interactions with me and my family were always in Spanish. (Good for my language development, not for his.)

“Well, Padre,” I told (in Spanish). “You are not going to be able to get what you need at a traditional school or university, but I can design an appropriate program for you. You will need to come to my house several times a week until you are on solid English ground.” He came every day for weeks, then several times a week for months. He became very proficient. My teaching tools were La Vida y Fe, the topics wherein we discussed in English, the Santa Biblia and the Holy Bible, which read side by side, and which served for grammar practice (“Jesus met the woman at the well; Jesus was meeting the woman at the well; Jesus meets the woman at the well; Jesus had met the woman at the well, etc. – absolutely nothing like what he would have gotten in a traditional classroom), and homilies online, which he could use to shape his own homilies. He learned fast, and now he teaches English in the school he founded in Colombia (and also teaches theology at the seminary). He scooped me up into his in-home prayer services (always the only Anglo). He blessed our house when we first bought it. And when his mother came to visit, we found immediate rapport. She did ask me why I married a gringo! I replied, “Soy gringa, mama!” That surprised her, but she did not hold it against me. She told one of the parishioners that I was the daughter that she, as a mother of six sons, never had. After Padre Julio returned to Colombia, he would call me occasionally from his mother’s house, and I would get to talk to “mama.” I never knew her name. I never asked. Padre Julio introduced her as mama, and I just started calling her that because it felt right. She mentioned, with some pleasure, to the parishioner to whom she said I was the daughter she never had, “She even calls me ‘mama’.”

Now, I have Mexican Spanish and Spanglish floating around my house daily. In exchange for housing for herself and her four children, a second-generation Mexican-American (she considers herself American only) helps with my disabled children. Now I sometimes hear my son saying to one of her kids, “Vente, papa!” He thinks he is speaking English!

I have learned a bit of Spanglish from my larger community. Most everyone speaks Spanish, and certainly the market, hair cutter, and restaurants do. I have learned to say olives for olives, instead of aceitunas (influence from English), and other sorts of things of this ilk though many of the standard Spanish words (if there is any such thing as standard Spanish) are used here. And then there are the words that come from native languages of indigenous regions in Mexico—and there I throw up my hands. Maybe one day…

You would think after all that that I would be quite fluent and erudite in Spanish. No way! I can say quite fairly that my Spanish sucks. People give me far more credit than I deserve. I have never been pulled toward Spanish in integrative ways as I have with many other languages. Never been fascinated by the linguistic system. Or the culture (well, too many cultures out there to say the culture!) I learned Spanish, used it, and continue to use I because I need it for daily life. And so somehow I always remain on the “get by” level in speaking though certainly I can read just about anything. Reading, though, does not count nowadays. I don’t need reading. I need speaking and listening. So, I do what I can to get by.