Speaking Spanish Is Important to My Identity

Opinion for The Latino Newsletter

Last year, in a personal WhatsApp group of fellow Venezuelans, one friend shared an Instagram carousel post from The Washington Post. The carousel narrates how a Latina mother in the States chose not to pass Spanish to her son with high-functioning autism after a speech therapist recommended she only teach him one language, for “learning two languages while going to speech therapy was not feasible.”

She ends her story by saying, "There can be myriad reasons someone can’t speak Spanish, but it will never take away their heritage and culture. It’s in our blood.” As many did in the comments, my friends thought the article was alienating.

Months later, I felt it needed a response. I understand why any parent would do whatever she or he believes is best for their child.

The number of comments this post received, both positive and negative, still has me thinking.

I want to make a point about culture, which is perhaps not obvious to Latines in the States but surely so for people who live or grew up in Latin America. 

Just like the United States, Central American, South American, and Caribbean countries have had episodes of slavery and progressive waves of immigration. Our societies are multiracial; there is plenty of variety in our people's physical traits. What we know as mestizaje has led us to define ourselves as a group not according to biology but to ethnicity. 

In recent decades, scholars have criticized mestizaje as a myth. Some Latin American governments have spearheaded race admixture as a policy to whiten the population; many people invoke it today to conceal episodes of racial discrimination in the region. But mestizaje began in the early colonial period, and despite the racialized intentions, its results are telling: most Latin Americans consider themselves mixed. On average, Latinos in the U.S. “carry 18.0% Native American ancestry, 65.1% European ancestry, and 6.2% African ancestry.”

Of course, there is racism in Latin America. It has always been there and continues to be. Still, it is far-fetched to claim that latinidad (or hispanidad) belongs to one strict racial group or matters of blood.

Becoming Hispanic

I echo Simone de Beauvoir, then, in saying you’re not merely born Hispanic. You become Hispanic.

Hispanidad is learned. It’s inherited from your environment and education, by manners and metaphors. For instance, the son of two Lebanese parents in Colombia isn’t a second-generation Arab Colombian. He’s a Colombian of Lebanese descent.

The artist Gego, who just had a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim, fled Nazi Germany to Venezuela in her late twenties. People back home consider Gego to be a full-on Venezuelan artist born in Hamburg, not a German based in Caracas. To become Hispanic, to access the many artifacts, stories, and expressions that compose hispanidad, you need an understanding of the Spanish language.

As the fifth country with the most Spanish speakers on the planet, the United States should be a place where this is possible and encouraged. 

In the United States, it’s true that groups with shared cultural and ethnic backgrounds have often been racialized—a pattern that has been a consistent part of American history.

Specifically, Hispanics in the U.S. have been depicted as an inferior and overly uniform group. However, just because an ethnic group is categorized and racialized doesn’t mean that bloodlines alone should define it. Adopting that mindset is to accept the oppressor's logic, falling into the paradox of white assimilation: you must become like us, yet you will never truly be one of us.

Our Heritage Language

How does this all connect to The Washington Post’s Instagram carousel from last year? One commenter who supported the author wrote that “technically, our heritage language is not Spanish. Spanish is the colonizers (sic) language.”

If the conversation were about Yanomami or Mapuche identity, I’d understand the perspective, but the Spanish language was not “forced” onto us Hispanics. (Or, let’s say, the Portuguese onto today’s Brazilians.) Colonialism was undoubtedly violent and cruel, but we are its children, not its direct victims. To place the substance of hispanidad or latinidad before the ideas of Hispanic or Latin America came to be is simply ahistorical. 

In fact, while Hispanics from all over the continent can find common ancestry in Spain and other parts of Europe, the variety of Indigenous peoples that exist in Latin America is immense: there is no one universal Indigenous culture. And most of these Indigenous communities did not interact with each other.

As Yásnaya Aguilar illustrates in the podcast Seminario Gatopardo: Farsi and Spanish have more in common than Zapotec and Mixe.

If that happens with Indigenous languages within the same country, imagine the entirety of North and South America. It is much more likely for a Cuban and a Chilean to find a shared family member within the ranks of colonizers than among the originary peoples of the Americas. 

Don’t get me wrong: Indigenous cultures are very important to the identities of the many nations and sub-regions of Latin America. I firmly believe that the similarities among the accents and habits of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela stem from a shared Arawak and Carib past.

No one can deny how important Indigenous identity is in countries like Bolivia and Guatemala. However, it is one of the aspects that constitute the fluidity of hispanidad, and the ties each Hispanic nation has with the Indigenous cultures of their territories vary greatly. Addressing the erasure that originary communities have faced and still face is a moral imperative. Nevertheless, framing it as a conflict over who truly incarnates Latin American culture is a bit deceptive and misplaced.

Embracing Our Complexities

There is no such thing as speaking “perfect” Spanish. There are so many dialects of the language that it is naive to think there’s a standard, ideal, and universally correct Spanish. But mutual intelligibility is a must.

Just as Peruvians borrow words from Quechua and Argentinians borrow words from Italian in everyday speech, I applaud Spanglish as a way to communicate with others and express our inheritance. If the ancient inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula made the language of Roman occupiers their own, why can’t we, Latin Americans in and out of the U.S., do the same? 

All in all, hispanidad is not about phenotypes or genetic ties to a land, as claims to race or indigeneity are. Hispanidad is about shared customs, traditions, and artistic expressions. It's about practices. And the base practice that allows for communication and exchange, that binds the many Hispanic communities of the world, is the Spanish language.

It allows Ecuadorians to watch Colombian telenovelas during the day, rock out to Mexican music at night, and feel both expressions as their own.

We cannot ignore the ways of speech that sustain our culture and fuel our collective identity.

We cannot allow for their erasure.

As descendants of Latin American immigrants, if you and your family yearn to be in touch with your roots, at least understand that speaking Spanish defines many of those who share the same heritage you celebrate.

About the Author

Carlos Egaña is a Venezuelan writer and modern languages teacher based in New York.

_{The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. You can email them to our publisher, Julio Ricardo Varela. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet.}