When I was growing up, my daily life looked like any other American family on the surface. Culture wasn’t something we talked about a lot, but it was woven into little parts of my life. 

My heritage shows up the most during holidays and family get-togethers. For example on Christmas, we mix Hispanic and American traditions. 

My direct and extended family all meet at my grandparents’ house for the Novena on Christmas Eve. The Novena is a Catholic nine-day pre Christmas tradition that symbolizes the countdown of the birth of Jesus Christ.

But with my family, we don’t do all nine days. We simply all meet on Christmas Eve, and we sing and each of us take a turn reading a prayer in Spanish from the Spanish bible. Once all of us finish reading, everyone goes into my grandparents dining room where we eat as a family. Then my family and I all go into the living room to open some presents from my grandparents, aunts and uncles.

Within those specific hispanic traditions, we also sing the well known Christmas carols and host a family secret santa where all the adults and children are involved. This provides a good mix of both American and Hispanic culture and traditions. 

We celebrate most holidays the same way–like Thanksgiving when we all come together to eat that big turkey dinner.

Then there’s the whole language part of growing up in a mixed language family and learning environment.

For Hispanic parents raising their children in an American school system, watching English slowly become your main language can cause some panic. 

When I was younger, my first language was Spanish, and as I started going to school I had to work very hard to figure out how to speak English. The effort once placed on learning English has switched to keeping my native language. 

After spending around eight hours speaking English, joking with friends in English, and learning things in English, stepping through the door comes with the expectation to just immediately switch gears back into Spanish. Switching back to Spanish after a long day of purely English has never been automatic and stumbling over words just makes me feel guilty and aggravated. 

You want to make your parents proud and preserve your culture, but when everything and everyone that’s around you for most of the day operates in English, keeping up with your language starts to feel like you’re trying to swim against a strong and constant current.

The pressure comes mostly from my father, with him constantly cutting me off mid story to say “Habla en español”, which means “speak in spanish”. Which absolutely never fails to make me livid because I simply want to finish my story quickly without the inconvenience of trying to figure out how to translate my brain speedrunning everything in English to Spanish.

I know it comes from a place of love, but it just ends up making me feel like I’m stupid because I start to stutter and mess up words. I start to feel insecure when I speak Spanish because sometimes my accent doesn’t really sound native.

There’s also the constant comparison between siblings and cousins with the language. My sister has always been able to retain Spanish more than I. Standing next to an older sibling who speaks the language fluently makes every one of my hiccups or stumbles twice as loud.

When extended family come over or when we go to visit them, my sister has always been able to simply flip that spanish switch right on. Meanwhile, I always find myself pausing to translate my thoughts, figure out the proper verb tenses, and fight the constant urge to slip into Spanglish. 

Constantly hearing extended family telling my parents how well my sister speaks the language, with nothing good to say about me always stings. I always feel like I’m an outsider in my own family and in my culture. My family loves to call me a “no sabo”, which is another way of saying I don’t speak spanish well.

But rather than discouraging me, I use those little comments as motivation to work even harder. Even if it makes me feel stupid along the way, I absolutely refuse to lose something that makes me unique and connects me to my family.

Within recent years I have started to see just how much being bilingual can help me in the long run, which adds to the motivation. 

Growing up in two different worlds has its ups and downs, but I also wouldn’t give it up for the world. I love being able to connect to both sides of myself to my culture whether that’s through language, traditions, or practices.