MSI Press Blog

    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 to...

Puerto Rico The first time I got a chance to experience Spanish in its native environment was when my Army reserve unit was sent to Puerto Rico to fill in for a group of soldiers who had been shot in separatist activity (this was the 1980s, and there was some friction there). I was able to use Spanish everywhere I went, and my proficiency shot way up. What had been latent – quite a lot—quickly became active. Most places I went did not expect me to speak English even though Puerto Rico is completely bilingual. My skin tanned up nicely since I was working night shift and spending days in the sun where the dollop of Native American blood in my body took over and protected me from burning. Whenever I went somewhere to eat with my unit, most of the soldiers being white as white can be, the reaction from the wait staff was pretty funny. “What would you like?” they would ask my buddies. “Que quiere?” they would ask me, assuming that I was a Spanish speaker, given my browning-up-nicel...

  University Spanish Classes After the 7 th grade self-taught experience, it was quite some time before I would take actual classes. In the interim, my Latin and French classes kept my Spanish going in a way, given their being members of the same language family: similar grammatical structure, similar lexical derivation. It was only at the university that I picked up courses in Spanish. Since I had a full plate of French, German, and Russian, Spanish did not fit easily into my schedule, so I asked one of the Spanish instructors if I could officially audit her class, and she agreed. Because I already knew some Spanish, it was decided that I should audit intermediate Spanish. I did two courses this way, which, had I taken them for credit, I would have finished the two-year language requirement (a requirement I quite overfulfilled in my college days). The teacher liked having me in class, let me participate with everyone else, take the test, and do the assignments. She was as met...

  To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, we suggest you dip into one of our books in Spanish: Día de Muertos (Sula, Gata parroquial) El Día de Muertos es una celebración muy importante, popular y solemne en San Juan Bautista, California, y en la Antigua Misión de San Juan Bautista, una de las misiones establecidas por los frailes franciscanos cuando se fundó California, y hogar de la gata parroquial, Sula. La comida, la oración y el recuerdo son parte de la celebración, al igual que las procesiones al cementerio. Sula es la gata muy querida de la Antigua Misión de San Juan Bautista, California, donde ministra a los feligreses y visitantes diariamente, una labor divina. Este libro es su sexto. El Poder de lo Transpersonal (Nelson Fernando Ustman) En lo Transpersonal todas las cosas se conectan y nada está suelto ni es independiente, igual las palabras de este libro están unidas las unas a las otras como los hechos de nuestra vida para poder lograr una alianza entre la razón y la emoción, ent...