I grew up in a Spanish-speaking household. Kinda ironic how the speaking part was never my strong suit. Yea my mom spoke to me in Spanish growing up, but I would always respond to her in English. Naturally, I became a fluent Spanish listener as opposed to a fluent Spanish speaker. Even when I tried to start answering her in Spanish, I only kept it up for maybe a day at most because it was always just awkward and uncomfortable. I’ve always felt like my Spanish wasn’t good enough and it’s was even difficult for me to speak it at times, especially around my native-speaking family.

My twin brother and I spent the summer of my sophomore year in high school back home in la capital. Off the rip, it did feel like home. I got to spend time with my little brothers, my cousins, my grandmother; it felt amazing. At the same time, we both felt like outsiders. Obviously, our Spanish wasn’t as good as everyone else’s. Translation: we felt like complete gringos that whole summer, and we were reminded of our gringo statuses regularly. One night we were out in the downtown area of the city having dinner with my family and some friends. I was enjoying myself that night up to that point, and I was just ready to eat. As usual, everyone else was chopping it up and then it’s me and my brother just eating our food and being relatively quiet. Some of them noticed this and started to ask why we were being so quiet. My stepmom just laughed and told them that we didn’t speak Spanish, and then everyone else just laughed too. Obviously, this was very embarrassing and it got me heated because in my head I knew I was capable of speaking Spanish. I just wasn’t comfortable enough to speak it with confidence. I looked over at my twin brother and I sensed that he was feeling the same way I was. The rest of the night the both of us shared similar feelings of anger and embarrassment as we sat there finishing our food without saying another word.

The fact that I couldn’t even properly communicate and speak up made me feel disconnected and ostracized. Back in the states, I was seen as a Dominican. Back “home” in the Dominican Republic, I was seen as a gringo; I wasn’t Dominican enough. It felt like I couldn’t fit in with either group. I don’t remember much else of that night. What I do remember is me and my brother talking to each other about the situation later that night, about how we did speak Spanish, we just “didn’t want to talk to them”. I guess you could say we were in denial. A little time after, though, I came to accept that the fact was we were just too awkward and timid to even try to speak and become more comfortable. 

 Situations like this one became a main theme in the few months we stayed in dr. It was frustrating and annoying. On the other hand, It made me want to become more comfortable and fluent in Spanish. The moments I had that summer made me appreciate my language and culture even more. I didn’t want to continue to feel disconnected to my roots. It always felt like a tug of war battle to hold on to my background, because growing up in the u.s. it’s easy for us to lose what our families came here with.

After that night (and a number of other experiences like it), I started to communicate more with my family. Instead of giving basic responses when they asked me something, I tried to use more words and express myself better. I guess a big reason was that I wanted to prove to them that I could, in fact, speak Spanish, but at the same time I wanted to improve my Spanish by speaking it more. I grew a lot as a person that summer, but I think the main thing I learned was that being uncomfortable isn’t always a bad thing. If you think about it, a lot of the experiences that improve us as people are actually “uncomfortable”, and I think it’s what makes us adapt and evolve every day.