Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
•••
I was 3 years old the first time I mixed up Spanish and English. It would not be the last.
It was 1975, and my family had recently migrated from Peru to Northern California. Shortly after our arrival, according to Lozada lore, I asked my parents and older sisters, “¿Vamos a tener todo lo sinisario?,” meaning, “Will we have everything we need?”
Except I garbled the word “necesario,” coming up with the nonsense word “sinisario.” Everyone chuckled, so I tried to defend myself. “Es que yo no sé inglés,” I said. (“It’s that I don’t know English.”) That made everyone laugh harder, because, of course, my mistake had been in Spanish.
It was a preview of what the next five decades would bring, as the two languages jostled for primacy in my mind. Our moves back and forth between the United States and Peru during my childhood compelled me to latch on to whichever language I needed most at different times, even while striving to retain the other. Sometimes my English was stronger, sometimes my Spanish. No one had to tell me which language mattered when, or whether one or the other was “official.” Wherever I was, I knew.
In his March 1 executive order designating English as the official language of the United States, President Donald Trump asserts that a single shared language is “at the core of a unified, cohesive society,” that it serves to “streamline communication,” promote efficiency and “empower new citizens to achieve the American Dream.”
On these points, I have little disagreement. Just about every immigrant I’ve ever known in the United States — starting with my father — has sought to learn English for just those reasons. It was relatively easy for my sisters and me to pick it up as kids, and my mother had learned it well from the beloved American nuns who taught her in Peru. But my dad, coming to it later in life, always had to work at it.