Bicultural Vida

Language transfer, when someone applies knowledge from their native language to a second language, is typical in budding bilinguals like my daughter. Although in her case, she really does a lot of the transferring the other way around, from what I like to think as her second language (English) into her native one (Spanish). Of course, it could be argued that in a case like hers, where she has been exposed to both languages pretty much since birth, it’s hardRead More ...

They’re much milder now, but my boys’ speech delays were so very pervasive for the longest time. We went from no speech to echolalia (our own speech parroted back to us) to practicing simple requests over and over and over.  I was always somewhat amazed by other children their age when I heard them speaking on the playground, stringing together such complex thoughts so effortlessly. A friend of mine, whose daughter is two years younger than my sons, once askedRead More ...

My husband, the only Latino in the group of prospective parents, stood next to the only African-American in the group, a mother. They watched a group of adorable elementary school students sing a song in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. As the lyrics, “we shall overcome” sang through the air, my husband realized that all of the students were either Anglo or Asian. He stayed through the rest of the tour and information session at the amazing schoolRead More ...

Raising bilingual children in the United States can be challenging, but having a plan in place, significantly increases your chance for success. If you are not lucky enough to have a bilingual school to support you, creativity and effort are necessary to help your child acquire Spanish. In my head there was always an informal idea on how I would raise my children to speak Spanish, but now that they are in preschool, I am re-evaluating my action plan. ToRead More ...

Last week we had lots of fun asking the SpanglishBaby Familia on Facebook to share with us their favorite dichos. You know, those proverbial and poetic phrases full of wisdom you heard again and again from your abuela, tías, mamá y papá and now you find yourself repeating (and preaching!) to your kids at any given moment. You suddenly realize you inherited more from your mami than only her good skin and laugh. The other beauty about dichos is thatRead More ...

Every time I think about it, I can’t stop laughing. Not the “making-fun-of” kind of laughter, more like the “that’s unbelievable” one. A couple of days ago, a colleague of mine told me our office assistant was going to make an order for office supplies and she wanted to know what we all needed. He said, “So, if you need any supplies like staples, tape, file folders o tal vez unos biromes, just let her know.” — ¿Unos qué?, I blurtedRead More ...

Will my children be as passionate about Spanish as I am? I sure hope so… I know it’s crazy for me to even think about this right now considering my kids are only 5 and 2, but it’s something I often wonder. In fact, I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but then I got the February issue of Latina magazine which has an article titled Are we losing our Language? on the cover and I decidedRead More ...

You might remember how worried I was about teaching Vanessa to read and write in Spanish before she entered kindergarten last fall. In the end, I opted not to go that route and instead she’s been learning to read and write at school in English first. When I made my decision, I figured it’d be easier – for both of us – to transfer the skills she learned in English to Spanish and all would be merry. Little did IRead More ...