You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Marielle.
I was at this event one time when an acquaintance said to me, you're puerto rican, right?
Do you speak Spanish?
And I said something like, I mean, I do, but I never feel like I'm fluent.
The truth is, Estoya Prendiendo, I'm learning poco a poco little by little.
What was jarring about that interaction, though?
The guy who asked me, who wasn't a spanish speaker, by the way, responded, I'm disappointed in you.
It's kind of a wild thing to say.
Condescending, judgmental, but common, right?
When people know that your parents, or in my case, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins speak another language, they have expectations that you'll speak it too.
Many of my uncles would call me the khareji, which means the foreigner in Persian.
When I speak with my mom, it's a bit embarrassing because I know she's not judging me, but I feel that she might be or she might be a little embarrassed for me as well.
And then we go out in broader society where there's assumptions about where we speak Spanish and how we speak Spanish, and we don't live up to those assumptions.
We have all this baggage.
What I wish I had said in that moment is there's a reason that I don't speak Spanish fluently.
And it's true for a lot of Latinos and immigrants in the US.
The pressure to assimilate.
At some point in the family tree, somebody is told you're american, speak English, don't speak Spanish or Chinese or Polish or farsi.
And with that, your heritage language starts to disappear.