Precerpt from My 20th Language: L3 Spanish - Salinas, California
Salinas, California
After my years with the Army and the State Department, I
accepted a position at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
For a linguist, the peninsula was paradise — so many languages, so many chances
to practice.
But I couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Thirteen years
earlier, as a military Russian student, I had managed just fine. Now, housing
costs had soared beyond reach. The nearest realistic place to live was Salinas.
Salinas is well known to readers of Steinbeck. He was born
here, and his childhood home still stands, along with a museum honoring his
legacy. Yet, the Salinas of Steinbeck’s novels is not the Salinas of today —
layered, complex, and deeply human.
The modern Salinas has a high proportion of Spanish
speakers, including our landlord at the time, whose wife and I communicated in
what could only be called Spanglish. Anna would begin in English, slip
into Spanish at the first unknown word, and soon we were tossing Spanish words
back and forth until the conversation was entirely in Spanish. She was a
wonderful neighbor and even better cook, and the entire cul-de-sac looked
forward to her annual Christmas gift: tamales for the whole neighborhood.
Manuel, our landlord, would try to get her to study English
seriously as he had. “You really should learn better English,” he would say.
“My English is fine,” she’d reply. “Betty understands me.”
“Betty doesn’t count,” he’d respond, raising an eyebrow.
He was right. I didn’t count. I could follow her from
Spanish to English and back again. Most English speakers couldn’t. But in
Salinas, one didn’t always need English. One did, however, need Spanish—not
just for coffee shops and neighbors, but even for formal settings like schools.
School notices often arrived printed in Spanish (literate
enough) on one side and in English (often fractured) on the other. When my
youngest son’s special education paperwork arrived only in Spanish after several
ignored request for English-language forms, I filled out most of the forms in
Spanish, but I drew the line at medical issues.
My son couldn’t tolerate air conditioning; he would stop
breathing after only a short time in cooled air. The school needed to
understand that precisely. When the medical forms arrived in Spanish, I
returned them with a note: “This is an English-speaking family.” Back
they came—still in Spanish. So, I filled them out in English and wrote across
the top in large letters: TRADUCCIÓN, POR FAVOR!
Someone did translate them. I knew because, on hot days, I’d
drive past the school and see my son’s desk placed just outside the classroom
door, in the natural air. It looked odd, but he was safe—and learning.
That was Salinas: a place where languages intertwined, where
understanding was sometimes improvised, and where care found its way through
translation. For someone learning Spanish, it was much better than a classroom.
For more precerpts from My 20th Language, click HERE.
For more posts about language learning, click HERE.
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